Indicting The Ism

     I had no idea that Vlad is still blogging. Here’s the Sunday punch from his comments on the recent Netflix production about Stalin’s Holodomor, Mr. Jones:

     The Ukrainian genocide, you would think from the film, was not the fault of communism. No of course not. It was the fault of a hedonistic, corrupt, megalomaniac, sex fiend, white-male, American who worked for the New York Times and perhaps Stalin who was not doing things right. ‘Imperfect’ let’s say.

     What they do not tell you, is that it is Communism that did this Genocide.

     That Stalin was a good communist in the way that Mohammad was a good Muslim and Dr. Mengele was a good Nazi. They were all excellent representations of the ideology they believed in and acted on.

     Contemporary socialists and communists will froth at the mouth upon reading or hearing such statements. They’re determined to protect their favored ism against logical or moral assaults. The mere suggestion that socialism requires a Stalin – that it elevates a Stalin to power as surely as the Sun will rise in the east this morning – is enough to provoke them to violence. So they bellow “That wasn’t real socialism!” or “Socialism works, it was the fault of the men in power!” Absolutely anything rather than admit that their ism brings about the same consequences each and every time it’s tried.

     All that having been said, there is a problem with trying to indict a system of belief in isolation from the conduct of the men who will govern it. For there is no scheme of government that eliminates the requirement for men – fallible men, men with individual drives, interests, and agendas – to impose and administer it upon the rest of us.

     Indeed, that’s the Joker in the deck of government itself.

---

     I know, I know: the above sounds like a brief for anarchism. And in truth, I was once inclined to look favorably, even longingly upon anarchism. Governmental terrors and predations constitute a pretty good argument that the whole idea of government – i.e., that some men should wield power over others – is inherently faulty. Quoth Allan Sherman:

     Every government is a geejy bird.
     The geejy bird is a strange creature; it flies only once in its lifetime, but that flight is a spectacle to behold. The geejy bird appears suddenly, standing on a limb, young, elegant, proud, and respectable. Surveying the horizon, it spreads its majestic wings and swoops upward in a wide graceful curve, with magnificent wing flappings, and loud glory whoops. When it reaches maximum altitude, it begins its elegant descent, an ever narrowing spiral. It makes smaller and smaller circles in the sky until, suddenly and mysteriously, it vanishes through its own asshole.
     No one knows where geejy birds go—probably back where they came from. Unfortunately, when they go, they take us along. We are all subjects of one geejy bird or another; we are born and live and die during one of these mad flights. To be born early in the flight is, at least, exciting; the air sparkles with hopes and dreams, and there are worthwhile things to be done. To board the flight in the soaring stage is next best; there is a fresh wind and a feel of strong wings and a dizzying view of the world.
     But what about those of us who are born near the end of the flight? We can’t jump off; the fall would be fatal. In vain we scream, “Turn around, great geejy bird! Turn back in thy flight!” Too late. There is nothing to do but make the best of it. We snap to attention, salute, and begin to sing our stirring anthem. “God Bless Our Geejy Bird!” Together we bravely enter the turd tunnel to oblivion.
     Even the friendliest geejy birds share certain boorish instincts with the disgusting ones. The species is fundamentally predatory. Thus, over a 200-year period the American geejy bird slowly gobbled up all the power it could eat, until it began to look suspiciously like the Louis XIV geejy bird.
     Sometimes I get so mad at government, I could almost become an anarchist—but not quite. In my opinion, anarchy is nothing more than the embryo of government—an inadvertent way to hatch another geejy bird, and there are enough geejy birds already.

     Yes. Despite my quondam flirtation with anarchism, it’s as flawed as any other scheme of social organization. Its instability gives birth to governments, and as Allan Sherman has said, there are enough governments already.

     But my larger point is about the isms promulgated by theorists of all sorts. None of them can be rendered immune to the dynamic of power. Friedrich Hayek’s analysis of this phenomenon in The Road to Serfdom remains unrefuted – probably irrefutable on this side of the Second Coming.

     Joh Gall, in his neglected book Systemantics, made a powerful case that systems of all sorts operate in failure mode most of the time. But why would men avid for power want to preside over a failing system? The key to harmonizing this insight with Hayek’s is the realization that the standards of the rulers are not those of the ruled.

     By the standards of the ruler, the system might be working fabulously. After all, it gives him what he wants: power, pelf, prestige, and perquisites. That those things are taken from others by force needn’t trouble him, as long as he remains in power. As for what would come next, he prefers to leave future problems to future solvers and solutions.

     By the standards of the ruled, the system has defaulted on its promises to him. Perhaps it promised him freedom. Yet laws and regulations strangle him even in his most private affairs. Perhaps it promised him economic security. Yet the State’s consumption of his earnings bites more deeply with every passing year, to say nothing of the instability of his income in a regime where the very meanings of the words in which the laws are written can be reversed by men in black robes. Or perhaps it promised him safety. Yet the police are limp in the face of ever-increasing, ever-escalating street crime, and the nation’s borders are colander-porous.

     No matter what ism supposedly animates those in the corridors of power, over time the system will be perverted toward the satisfaction of the private interests of the rulers, and be damned to what they may have promised the ruled. Yes, Gentle Reader: constitutionalism as well. The sole difference among them is how long it will take for tyrants to rise to the levers of power.

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     God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all and always well-informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon, and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Smith, shortly after Shay’s Rebellion in New England.

     The ism is inseparable from the men who preside over it – and men cannot be trusted with power. But when an ism is founded on the use of power to fetter and dispossess some to slake the grievances of others, it starts life perverse and evil. That automatically refutes every collectivism ever proposed: fascism, socialism, communism, every variety of theocracy, and every other scheme put forth by some utopian theorist who’s had a vision in his cave. They are evil ab initio.

     The cure is revolution...yet as has been observed all too frequently, the typical revolution doesn’t make matters better, but worse:

     Those who have seized power, even for the noblest of motives soon persuade themselves that there are good reasons for not relinquishing it. This is particularly likely to happen if they believe themselves to represent some immensely important cause. They will feel that their opponents are ignorant and perverse; before long they will come to hate them...The important thing is to keep their power, not to use it as a means to an eventual paradise. And so what were means become ends, and the original ends are forgotten except on Sundays. – Bertrand Russell

     Feel free to argue with me. But don’t imagine that I’ll allow you to avoid defining your terms and your standards. I’m funny that way.

Serious People

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. Welcome to another Monday in the Land of the Free. If your prospects don’t exactly fill you with enthusiasm for the day, perhaps this tirade will help you along, though I shan’t promise in which direction.

     This will be a screed of parts. Yet it will display a curious, compelling unity: a cohesion around a theme of overriding importance. Its cumulative impact will widen your vision, allowing you to see more of the world, and more of its details, than your previous mundanities would support. After you have read it, you can never again be what you were beforehand.

     Of course, that last statement is true of a trip to the W.C., as well. Read your Heraclitus.

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     In every place and time there have been persons whose most ardent desire is to regard themselves as superior to others. I have no doubt that this will be the case for as long as Mankind is permitted to exist. Indeed, the tendency is so pervasive that it touches every man who has ever lived or ever will: that terrible, irresistible need to measure oneself against others near or far.

     I can’t condemn it in its entirety. The desire to be better tomorrow than today is linked to it. It expresses itself in many forms, including the adoption of role models and the desire to equal or exceed their accomplishments. I’ve ventured in that direction myself, as I noted in this piece. It’s an ingredient of hope, a necessary counterweight to the impulses to surrender and despair.

     But there can be no ignoring its dark side. To want to be better than you were is understandable and laudable. To want to be better than Smith over there, as an explicit statement of intent, is dubious. To make beating Smith your central aim, unless it’s confined to the context of a sporting event, is deplorable. Yea verily, even if it should never eventuate in any harm to Smith whatsoever.

     One of the greatest contributions of Christian moral teaching is its emphasis on humility: not self-denigration nor self-disparagement, but the acceptance of others as children of God no less valuable than oneself. We are all limited, fallible human beings – all sinners. We owe the greater part of what we are and have to others. Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientific genius our race has produced, wrote that “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” If he could say so un-ironically, how true must it be for the rest of us?

     That tendency to want to be better than the other guy is humility’s mortal enemy.

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Kuato: What do you want, Mr. Quaid?
Douglas Quaid: The same as you; to remember.
Kuato: But why?
Douglas Quaid: To be myself again.
Kuato: You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.

[From Total Recall.]

     While ever so slightly off-target, Kuato’s assessment is far more right than not. It accounts for a phenomenon widely acknowledged but seldom discussed: the tendency of those who have been shorn of their occupations, whether by retirement or involuntary action, to dwindle and die for lack of purpose. Their lives cease to have meaning for them. Without meaning, we cannot continue on.

     Ponder that connection for a moment. Why should “meaning” proceed from “what you do” — ? Why is a living man, whole and healthy, not “enough” in some absolute sense? Is it not enough to enjoy existence, to glory in the beauties and pleasures of the world, without troubling oneself to contribute something to it of one’s own contriving?

     The only answer we have is an empirical one, founded on what we have observed: Apparently not. Moreover, we are all but unanimous in regarding the idler as a worthless creature no matter how riotous a revel his life appears to be. Whether rich or poor, we look upon him with disdain. We might even call him “unserious:” “Why doesn’t he do something with his life?”

     I feel that this is connected to another subject. I’ve written about that subject several times. But as it’s early in the morning, I suppose I should leave that possibility for exploration after a second pot of coffee.

---

     There are many skills pertinent to living an agreeable life. One that has been badly neglected in recent decades is the skill of the mandatory disaggregation. Those who lack it are made conspicuous by their denunciations of groups when individuals are their proper targets: the offense all too often called “racism” when the proper term is collectivism.

     A few examples of when a disaggregation is mandatory:

• Yes, many Jews have been socialists, and contributed to the erection of socialism in the old Soviet Union. Many Jews still believe in and advocate socialism today. That does not mean that all Jews are socialists.
• Yes, Negroes, particularly young Negro males, commit a disproportionate share of our nation’s violent crimes and crimes against property. That does not mean that all Negroes are criminals.
• Yes, many Muslims – approximately 15% of the total –advocate the violent overthrow of all systems of government and society that do not recognize Islam as the supreme law. That does not mean that all Muslims are Islamists or would willingly collaborate in the subversion of the United States.
• Yes, a substantial fraction of “the rich,” however one might choose to define that status, regard themselves as superior to those not so blessed and would gladly accept the power to rearrange every aspect of our lives. That does not mean that all “the rich” are aspiring dictators.
• Yes, a goodly number of homosexuals actively encourage the young to try homosexuality for themselves, or to identify themselves as homosexual. That does not mean that all homosexuals are evangelists for their condition.
• Yes, many atheists regard theists as “stupid” for our belief in a Supreme Being who decreed the laws of this universe and of human nature. That does not mean that all atheists are supercilious and self-important.
• And yes, many Christians even today are intolerant of persons who deviate from the Christian ethos. That does not mean that all Christians are bigots.

     I believe that covers the currently most important cases.

     The recognition of the facts cited above can – in some cases, “should” – give rise to personal policies concerning the avoidance of situations in which particular demographic cohorts have concentrated. But when individuals interact, the strengths, weaknesses, and personal ethics of those individuals are what count. The source of those characteristics is unimportant. Nor is one’s assessment of Smith a valid reason to generalize about others in his cohort.

     The relevant technical term is the “Undistributed Middle.”

---

     I suppose I should round this off and present a summation.

     What lit my boiler this fine morning was a piece from another writer, who shall go unnamed, in which appeared the assertion – paraphrased, to defeat search engines – that “the libertarians I know don’t care about morality....If they’re against [specified obscenity] they should condemn it and help us put an end to it.” I’ve been seeing a lot of such slander in recent months, and I’ve had enough of it. Hence this essay.

     It is possible that the statement quoted above is correct, but take careful note of the phrasing: “The libertarians I know.” If the writer is inclined to generalize from his / her / its own sample space, that writer is doing an injustice. Here is the proof:

I am a libertarian.
I care deeply about the morality of our nation.
Therefore, not all libertarians are unconcerned about the morality of our nation.

     Similarly, with application to a slander evoked by a different sociocultural phenomenon:

I am a libertarian.
I have absolutely no interest in “recreational drugs.”
Therefore, not all libertarians “just want to get high.”

     [As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.]

     This could hardly be clearer. Indeed, I am reasonably certain that what propels the opposite, false conclusion is the desire for devils to blame for what the writer deplores. That desire can be strong enough to warp anyone’s thinking, especially one deeply anguished over a social or cultural malady.

     But anguish is not a justification for slander, especially slander of a philosophical-political conception championed by persons who – very much like myself – just want to be left alone in the enjoyment of what is rightfully ours. Especially as John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman are our beloved brothers. If the writer whose sentiments I paraphrased would condemn them, he / she / it is a contemptible fool – especially as it can be demonstrated that the massive overexpansion of the public sphere, in consequence of which so many institutions are owned and operated by a government and an even greater number of others are closely “regulated” by governments, is closely correlated with most social maladies.

     Serious people think seriously. They admit to their own fallibility. They learn how to recognize patterns of pseudo-reasoning that lead to false and dangerous conclusions. They resist premature generalizations and they perform mandatory disaggregations. They strive to remain aware that all sample spaces are partial, and may not accurately represent the larger whole.

     And they restrain themselves when writing for a general audience: some members of which, were they not slandered as contemptible enemies, might well become valuable allies.

     Have a nice day.

Quickies: Trends In Collectivism

     Collectivism – broadly speaking, the doctrine that the group is prior and superior to the individual – is the root of all political evil. However, its form can change over time, according to the strategic vision of the collectivists. Ace of Spades notes this in a swift but massively illuminating comment:

     Bernie Sanders is the conventional class-warfare socialist while Elizabeth Warren is the new breed of identity-politics socialist. Elizabeth Warren has run on little except identity politics.

     Hell, she owes her entire career to identity politics, pretending to be a Native American, but only when searching for a job or angling for a promotion.

     So, in response to Sanders' dismissal of her as yet another rich bored leftwing woman with a White Savior complex, Elizabeth Warren did the only thing Elizabeth Warren knows how to do -- she played the Identity Politics Victim card.

     Sanders’s collectivism follows the Marxian model of economic class warfare. Warren’s collectivism is about “oppressed” and “marginalized” groups. In both cases, these...persons seek to get susceptible voters to see their interests as indistinguishable from those of a group – and to have “rights” associated with that group, rather than with any individual member. That way, anyone who is superficially a member of one such group, but who differs with the collectivist’s assertion of its interests, can be denounced as a traitor to his class, his race, his sex, his orientation, his ethnic heritage, or his delusion.

     And there are millions who are seduced by it.

Sexism, Or Sex?

     'Zeb...I think I understand you at last. You are...an atheist. Aren't you?'
     Zeb looked at me bleakly. 'Don't call me an atheist,' he said slowly, 'unless you are really looking for trouble.'
     'Then you aren't one?' I felt a wave of relief, although I still didn't understand him.
     'No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions...for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone-not the Lodge Master nor the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.'
     'But you do believe in God?'
     'I told you so, didn't I? Not that you had any business asking me.'
     'Then you must believe in other things?'
     'Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak...patient with the stupid...generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do.'
     I let out my breath. 'I'm satisfied, Zeb.'
     Instead of looking pleased he answered, 'That's mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry-I shouldn't be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me-accidentally, I'm sure-into discussing matters that I never intended to discuss.'

     [Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On”, in Revolt In 2100]

     No doubt most of my Gentle Readers are puzzling over that citation, especially how it relates to the equally quirky title of this piece, and what could possibly follow the two of them. That’s quite all right; in fact, it’s what I was hoping for.

     Today’s broadside is about unnecessary concepts.

     There are a lot of folks who regard God – specifically, a Supreme Being responsible for Creation and its laws – as an unnecessary concept. They aren’t as numerous as are we who consider Him indispensable, of course, but still, there’s an ample supply. A goodly number of atheists manage to live decent, honorable lives without ever “needing” God to do so. Evangelistic atheists often cite this as “proof” that He doesn’t exist. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but it does lend substance to their contention that God is “unnecessary”...at least, for them.

     Many Americans now consider religious beliefs a battlefield to be avoided in general conversation. But even more of us are coming to loathe any mention of certain other concepts:

• Racism;
• Sexism;
• Homophobia;
• Xenophobia;
• “Trans”-phobia;

     ...and so on. The subjectivity of these things is enough to drive a man to drink, and not from the top shelf. They’ve ruined many human relationships and have made our national discourse far more painful than it’s ever been before.

     So I’ve decided to do away with them.

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     Unnecessary concepts attached to imputations about human attitudes are the principal pollutants of civil discourse today. I listed the worst of them above. There are surely others that currently command less attention, but the five in the list above will do for a start.

     I contend that those “isms” and “phobias” are phantasms: chimeric notions that have never existed, do not exist today, and will never exist at any future time. They have no reality except when employed as rhetorical bludgeons by evil-minded demagogues. We in the Right must immediately take that as our working premise, and alter both our rhetoric and our conduct to match.

     Compare and contrast the following two isms: sexism and Marxism. What do you see when you put them side by side?

• Sexism denotes an attitude by one sex toward the other; or maybe an attitude by each sex toward itself; or maybe an attitude by each sex toward the other.
• Marxism is an economic conception that demands that the means of production, as generally understood, should belong to those who labor in them.
• The sexist is inclined to treat persons of the opposite sex differently from his own, or maybe to treat his own sex as superior or inferior, or maybe both or neither.
• The Marxist votes for nationalizations and redistributive measures.
• There is no standard by which to determine whether an individual is a sexist.
• Marxists can be easily distinguished from non-Marxists by their political conduct.

     A concept that cannot predict is an unnecessary concept. An allegation of sexism cannot predict sufficiently well in any venue to be useful for anything. Therefore, sexism is an unnecessary concept. Quod erat demonstrandum.

     While there are two biological sexes, and statistical differences between them that are essentially inarguable, the concept of sexism cannot be relied upon for anything. I maintain that the same is true for racism, homophobia, et cetera.

     From that position, many good things might flow.

---

     I’m looking forward to an exchange such as the following:

     Woman: Sexist!
     FWP: (snorts) Do you deny that you’re female?
     Woman: Huh? Well, of course not! But—
     FWP: (imperiously) Are you displeased that I recognize you as female?
     Woman: No, but—
     FWP: Stop right there. You admit to being female, and I recognize you as such. That’s all that’s going on here, so take your mentalist act and skedaddle along. I have nothing more to say to you.

     Many have orated about the Left’s attempt to claim the “moral high ground” with its accusations that conservatives are racists, sexists, et cetera. The point of the exchange above is to suggest that there’s a higher “high ground” that conservatives can claim: that of objective reality itself. The key is to refuse to allow any pretense of validity to the unnecessary concepts of racism, sexism, and so forth, and to insist solely upon what’s real and observable.

     The virtue of this approach is that it treats each individual as an individual. It refuses to see any group or its claims as relevant to relations between individuals. If practiced consistently by enough Americans, it could sweep the Left’s moral pretenses into the ashcan of forgotten rhetoric.

     It would require awareness of context and interlocutor, and more than a little determination. It would demand an absolute refusal to discuss groups or attitudes toward them. It might occasion a few bellows. But it would badly upset the Left’s applecart, because its entire strategy relies upon group affiliation and the “isms,” “phobias,” and other phantasms associated with them.

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     Note that what I’ve called “unnecessary concepts” are collectivist concepts. Collectivism is the denial of individual autonomy: the denial of the individual’s rights and responsibilities as a moral agent. It subsumes him into a group that supposedly possesses those things. Strangely, that group is never around to change the oil or take out the garbage when those chores impend.

     Group identification has been promoted as a route toward effectiveness for the weak: “In union there is strength.” But we know, from many decades of experience, that “in union” there is political power, and that power and its benefits will find their way into the hands of the least ethical and most ruthless pursuers. “The little guy” gets only crumbs and promises, if he gets anything at all.

     The dissolution of group-identity politics and claims can begin only with individuals determined to see and relate only to individuals, never to the groups to which they profess allegiance. It rejects groups as obstacles to seeing the individual, in whom all rights and responsibilities really reside. Today it’s the road less traveled by. Taking it, refusing the course of groups and their claims, could make a huge difference.

The Individualist Collectivist

     Once in a great while, someone asks me a question that deserves its own article. It happened fairly recently, and I’ve been chewing over the appropriate treatment ever since.

     The question, as best I can recall it, ran thus:

     “You’ve embraced all these ugly collectivist labels: racist, sexist, Islamophobe, and so on, but you also call yourself an individualist. How does that work?”

     That question, asked with no trace of the “Hah! Gotcha!” attitude that it would carry from the lips of an adversary, brought a broad smile to my face. The recognition of the apparent contradiction involved indicated that the asker is open to the possibility of new knowledge. However, rather than answer it at once in the compressed fashion that a conversation-on-the-run would demand, I asked my interlocutor to be patient with me: “I’ll get back to you.”

     And here I am to do that very thing.

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     In discussions over politics and related subjects, it’s supremely important never, ever to assume any shred of the responsibility for other people’s preconceptions. I made use of that notion in a different context in Polymath:

     Presently Todd said “You think I talk too much, don’t you?”
     Redmond, caught in mid-bite, gave himself a few seconds to chew and swallow. He set his slice of pizza down carefully and caught Todd’s eyes with his own.
     “I can see why you might think so, but no, not really.” The engineer’s expression grew pained. He appeared to be casting about for words. “It’s more...well, forgive me, Todd, but every now and then you say something that would be better lived than said.”
     Todd peered at Redmond in confusion. “I don’t follow you.”
     Redmond’s look of chagrin deepened. “Todd, these days there are very few people who really can do all they say they can do. That includes most of the most capable people alive today. There’s a notion going around that self-promotion is expected, even demanded of us. That it’s not enough to be good, that we have to constantly talk ourselves up so that everyone will know we’re good, and so people who already know it can’t possibly forget it. You know what comes of that when your ordinary human fallibility gets its vote in?”
     Todd bit his lip. “I can guess.”
     “I’m sure you can.” Redmond shook his head bemusedly. “So why can’t anyone else? Reticence about your abilities is a better policy no matter how confident you are about them for precisely that reason. Don’t trumpet them; simply use them. Others will notice, and they’ll notice your taciturnity as well. They’ll start to speculate about what you can do that they haven’t seen yet, always in your favor. It’ll do more for your reputation than any amount of bragging or any number of PR agents.”
     Todd mused over it in silence for a few seconds before a realization struck him. He opened his eyes wide and jabbed an index finger at Redmond. The engineer’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Hah! Gotcha!”
     “What? What do you—”
     “That gets people thinking that you can do anything, that you have no limitations at all. But everyone has limitations. So what happens when his legions of admirers discover that Louis Redmond can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound?”
     A delighted grin spread across Redmond’s face for the second time that day. “That’s the fun part, Todd. You don’t say a word. You just give them this look. You make it say ‘Where on Earth did you get such a crazy notion?’ You shake your head a little, and you walk away. And your reputation gets better still.”
     Todd’s mouth dropped open. “You’re a manipulator.”
     “Absolutely not. I just prefer to let other people reach their own conclusions.”
     “And their own illusions, too.”
     “Especially those. Why would I want to be responsible for them?”

     Preconceptions can be murder. If you assume anything about your conversational partner (or if he assumes anything about you), it had better be accurate. The terrible damage that’s been done to our language, especially the terms we use in discussing politics and the things relevant to it, has made conversations about them, even conversations with good friends begun in total innocence, into a minefield, largely because of the preconceptions associated with those terms.

     Consider the terms racist and sexist. What do they really mean? Some time ago I allowed that under the current [ab]usage, I qualify as a racist and a sexist. But note the specifics – originally set forth in this essay — and ask yourself whether you would use those terms in that fashion:

     Before we proceed, allow me to state a few things very, very plainly.

1. I am a Caucasian of Irish and Italian descent, whose parents were immigrants from those lands.
2. My loyalties are to my family and the United States of America. I would defend either or both to the death. Apart from a mortgage and a car loan, I owe nothing else to anyone.
3. What matters most to me about others is their character: their willingness to respect the rights of others and to discharge their proper responsibilities, without whining about any of it.
4. I believe that there is an American culture, and that it is infinitely superior to all the other cultures of the world, past or present. More, I believe that Americans are the finest people in the world -- that no other land produces anything remotely comparable to our general standard of decency, justice, generosity, or good humor.
5. I believe that the races, as conventionally defined, differ in various ways. The importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
6. I believe that the sexes differ in various ways. As with racial differences, the importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
7. I believe that homosexual sodomy is self-destructive, but that, at least in certain cases, sexual orientation can be changed.
8. I believe that there is such a thing as general intelligence, that it is at least partly inherited, and that it varies widely.
9. I believe that the handicapped should receive our sympathy and compassion as individuals to other individuals, but that they are not entitled to more as a matter of right.
10. I believe that laws that mandate preferred treatment for the members of any group, however defined, are both unConstitutional and destructive.
11. I hold these convictions not because anyone else holds them, but because the evidence of my senses and my own powers of reasoning have led me to them.

     According to the major taboos of our time, this makes me a racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic chauvinist abuser of the physically challenged. By copping to all this, I've violated all the major, politically correct taboos of our time: about race, gender, sexual orientation, the handicapped, and multiculturalism. Needless to say, the enforcers of those taboos would like to see me boiled in oil.

     They can dip their outrage in beaten eggs, roll it in crushed walnuts, and shove it up their asses.

     See Items #5 and #6 specifically: I believe there are statistical differences among the races and between the sexes. Actually, I don’t merely believe it; I know it. Those differences have manifested themselves in various observable patterns. The patterns are available for anyone to study and contemplate. But under current conditions, merely to note the existence of the patterns, much less to suggest that race and sex might have a causal connection to them, will get you called racist and sexist more often than not. Don’t take my word for it; ask John Derbyshire or Charles Murray.

     John Derbyshire’s treatment of the matter as it pertains to race is characteristically well considered and well phrased:

     (4) The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship. In some unusual circumstances, however—e.g., paragraph (10h) below—this default principle should be overridden by considerations of personal safety.

     (5) As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths. In a population of forty million, you will find almost any human type. Only at the far, far extremes of certain traits are there absences. There are, for example, no black Fields Medal winners. While this is civilizationally consequential, it will not likely ever be important to you personally. Most people live and die without ever meeting (or wishing to meet) a Fields Medal winner.

     (6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.

     Derbyshire, a serious student of mathematics, is scrupulous about his uses of statistics, knowing how easily they can be put toward a sinister agenda. Moreover, he writes right up front that in individual encounters, the default principle of normal courtesy and respect supersedes all statistical considerations. Treat individuals as entitled to the presumption of dignity and respect until they demonstrate otherwise, but when dealing with an aggregate, be guided by the patterns known to prevail among them! What could be more evenhanded – more respectful of the norms that must be observed in a free society that operates under a Rule of Law?

     The same logic applies to the sexes, to the followers of Islam, to self-segregating ethnic groups, and so forth -- as statistical aggregates. But to say so in public is currently an act of considerable daring.

---

     The great Walter Williams once discoursed on racism in a refreshing fashion. His take on it was that whatever one might believe about differences between the races, the sole important aspect of such a belief arises in one’s attitude toward rights. Dr. Williams proposed that the charge of “racism” should be reserved for the conviction that one race should have more or higher rights than others. He argued that only that conviction could give rise to true sociopolitical conflict. So long as every recognizably human individual is conceded the same rights as any other, dangerous conflicts can be averted.

     How refreshing! How wise. To concede that aggregates, however defined, need not be identical under all measures, but to insist that individuals, who are all equal before God, must be treated that way by the mechanisms of politics and government! That whatever we may learn about any particular aggregate, we must never deny an individual the natural human rights to his life, his liberty, or his honestly acquired property because of his skin color, his sex, his ethnicity, his creed, or his membership in any other aggregate!

     The simplicity and power of Williams’s approach are astonishing. We wouldn’t have to have quotas for black concert cellists or Jewish NBA forwards. We could let people find their ways to what they do best without interference – and without feeling guilt that there aren’t “enough” female coal miners or male midwives. But the Left, which is responsible for essentially all the brutalities inflicted upon our lexicon, refuses to allow it.

---

     Rather than let this drag on interminably, I’ll state my position plainly:

I’m an individualist when I deal with individuals;
I’m a collectivist when I discuss collectives.
I’m a believer in individual liberty and justice for all.

     If there’s a more rational way to cope with the dizzying variety of challenges to intellect, ability, courtesy, and safety contemporary American life presents us, I can’t imagine what it might be.

     Food for thought.

Groupiness And The Imperative Of Formality

     I avoid crowds. I detest large cities. I refuse to join groups. None of that will be news to the typical Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. What might surprise him is the question I recently received from a woman who was baffled by those preferences:

“Then who are you?”

     Ponder that for a moment: specifically, what it tells us about the assumptions of the asker. It’s been on my mind since 4:30 AM.

---

     Collectivism, every version of which privileges groups according to some scheme of valuation, is responsible for virtually all the evil in the First World. Yet the assignment of others into categories – groups – is an ineradicable trait. We all do it...because we must.

     About two years ago, I wrote:

     Collectivism – the doctrine that rights and responsibilities adhere not to individuals, but to groups – is a gospel of unending strife. But the ordinary man cannot be moved to take part in such strife without having something to blame on “the Other.” So Negroes must imagine Caucasians to be the source of their problems with crime and lack of economic advancement; women must conceive of men as their oppressors; “the young” must blame “the old” for their struggles at getting employment; and so forth.

Note that just as Anthony Bryan states that “white people and black people are different,” so also are men and women different. So also are the young and the old different. So also are urbanites and suburbanites different, Northerners and Southerners different, Christians and Jews different, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam. Indeed, every individual differs from every other, in innumerable ways. It’s the factual soil in which individualism is rooted: You are unique, with a unique and irreplaceable soul; therefore, only you are responsible for your destiny.

Some differences matter more than others. Some are contextual and mutable, while others are innate and permanent. Some can be accommodated and harmonized; others are immiscible, requiring separation. They exist beyond our opinions and despite our preferences; indeed, they can be critical to the survival of both individuals and nations. But as long as we cleave to the individualist premise that each of us is alone responsible for himself, we can navigate among our differences, making use of the useful ones, coping with the ones that cause difficulties, and avoiding the ones that cause friction.

The substitution of the collectivist premise permits evil minded persons to create discord. If we can be induced to see John Passerby not as an arbitrary individual with his own priorities and obligations, but as black, or female, or Jewish, we can be trained to fear him...and to hate him.

     I stand by every word of the above. It’s beyond refutation. Yet I, too, am impelled to assign people to groups, to expect them to conform to the norms of those groups, and thereafter, to be surprised when they deviate from what I expect. Everybody does it.

     But that’s not the sting in the tail. We do it for a compelling reason: It works often enough, and positively enough, to be worth doing. In somewhat more loaded words:

     So we’re not going to stop. The question of the hour is how the tendency can be detoxified...tamed...rendered less likely to bring bad consequences.

     It can be done, of course. Indeed, it’s not complex or difficult: it merely requires that we see the individual first, allow him the right to differ from any and every group, and judge him on his own merits. But quite a lot of people don’t or won’t do it. Some refuse to do it, and exhort others not to do it, for – drum roll, please – political reasons.

     They who desire strife – who see disharmony, friction, and conflict as paths toward power or profit – are inherently favorable toward the crudest sort of collectivism.

---

     The above might seem a bit off-axis from me, inasmuch as I’ve been vocal, and quite recently so, about the desirability of formalizing the relations between the races. As it happens, I feel the same way about relations between the sexes, between the generations, between the religions, between the nations, between the [insert your meta-collectivity here]. We appear to do much better, socially, when we practice a high degree of formality toward those who differ with us in recognized ways.

     The undiscussed virtue of formality is that it incorporates respect: specifically, respect for the other person’s prerogatives. The patterns it prescribes are designed for exactly that purpose.

     For example, what does it mean when an unaccompanied woman, approached by a man she doesn’t know, smiles formally and says “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced” – ? It’s shorthand for a longer, more explicit statement likely to wound feelings:

     “Excuse me, but I don’t know you, and circumstances are either conducive to fear, conducive to inconvenience, or inappropriate for us to make one another’s acquaintance. Please allow me to go my way. If at some future time we should encounter one another again and discover that we have friends in common, perhaps the outcome will be different.”

     Even the simplest of formal politenesses – “Excuse me,” “Pardon me,” “Please,” “Thank you,” “May I,” “So sorry” – promote and facilitate the maintenance of respect, especially respect between strangers.

     In circumstances of enforced crowding, where there’s nothing to be done about the throng that presses upon one, formalities are far more difficult to implement, which is among the reasons I avoid crowds. Among other things, ammunition has become far more expensive in recent years...to say nothing of the services of a good criminal-defense lawyer.

     I expect I’ll return to this.

The Game Plan

     Is what follows a realistic summary of a major part of the strategy of our political elite, or merely a conspiratorialist’s fantasy?

     “The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed....So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed....

     “Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests....

     “The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas....

     “They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home....

     “Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State....

     “Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must known their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit....

     “The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion....

     “All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits., and experiment with any man who catches their fancy....And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there....

     “In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels....

     “It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure. It’s not in their nature.”

     The above excerpt from Hans G. Schantz’s The Hidden Truth struck me so powerfully that I feel a moral obligation to pass it along. Ponder it, please.

A Few Words On The Status Quo

     “Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in’.” – Ronald Reagan

     For some reason, the sort of public policy pontificator we see on television or who rants in the newspapers’ op-ed sections is frequently concerned with stability, or the maintenance of the status quo in various manifestations. Such a commentator seldom faces the question “Why is it right and necessary to maintain the status quo? And why is it America’s responsibility to see to it? Be specific.”

     Now, the generic answer to such a “why” question would be that the status quo is preferable to the alternatives – at least, to the alternatives that would most probably result from disturbing it. But that, of course, raises other questions: “Preferable to whom? And why? And once more with feeling, is it really our problem?”

     That’s why specificity is so important...and why the windy types mentioned above would gladly sacrifice a finger rather than be forced to provide it.

---

     Granted that there are identifiable conditions, local, regional, and global, that seem worth preserving, at least prima facie. But even the most desirable of such are desirable to specific persons, for specific reasons, and not unanimously so. For example, there are several local businesses I patronize regularly and would hate to see go bankrupt. Regionally, were all of Long Island’s throughways to be closed, there’d be some dislocations. As for global conditions, I’d be greatly vexed if the planet were to stop rotating. (I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t be the only one.) However:

1. Those businesses’ competitors might have a different opinion;
2. Islamic terrorists would count it a “win;”
3. There’s this marauding fleet of genocidal aliens from Antares that...oh, never mind.

     Moreover, the responsibility for protecting those conditions from perturbation is not uniformly distributed over the affected populations. At least, were the Earth to threaten to stop rotating, I’d have a hard time blaming some illiterate starving aborigine in Papua New Guinea for not “doing his share.”

     There is no moral or rational way to assign responsibility without assessing the distribution of the relevant authority -- and on that subject, a better known voice than mine has spoken:

     “Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.” – Robert A. Heinlein

     In the great majority of cases, the persons responsible for protecting some supposedly desirable condition – e.g., by correcting a problem that threatens it – are those who benefit from that condition, not some gaggle of outsiders. Yet this is seldom admitted by those aforementioned windy types.

---

     The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig

     The collectivization of responsibility – most often in order to load the responsibility onto the shoulders of a government – is the reverse of the coin of the worship of stability. The Reagan quote at the top of this piece implies that, albeit indirectly.

     “The mess we’re in.” As Tonto might have said to the Lone Ranger on many an occasion, “What do you mean we, paleface?” “We” did not create many of the conditions in the world, nor are “we” the beneficiaries thereof. Indeed, just as some well-meant American interventions have actually worsened matters, some conditions the U.S. has intervened to “stabilize” ought to have been left to topple.

     Stop! Stop! Danger, Will Robinson! Return to the previous paragraph. Read the last sentence aloud. Analyze it carefully. What implicit collectivizations can you find in what I wrote? There are four; find and unpack them all for full credit. See how easy it is to “slip one over” on your audience?

     Look at any nominally well-meant government intervention, in a matter that seemed to call for it. Ponder the collectivizing assumptions hidden in it and how they might fail under scrutiny. Here’s an example that will prove fruitful to the careful analyst: the intervention by the federal government in a coastal community’s recovery from a destructive hurricane. There’ve been several such these past sixteen years; any such will yield treasures of understanding to the determined student.

---

     This is on my mind this morning because of Michael Snyder’s citation of this paper on “possible global catastrophes.” I’ll cite a single passage, the brief Foreword, which is magnificently exemplary of the syndrome discussed above:

     Nearly four years ago when the Global Challenges Foundation was established, we decided on a direction with two parallel strategies. The first is increasing the knowledge about Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs), which with our terminology means threats that can eliminate at least 10% of the global population. This knowledge is an important prerequisite for the Foundation’s second strategy: to encourage debates and proposals as to how we can effectively and fairly reduce – and preferably eliminate – these catastrophic risks.
     This publication, the Foundation’s Annual Report for 2016, is the result of a collaboration between the Foundation and the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Global Priorities Project at Oxford University in the U.K., which has now lasted for over two years. A big group of researchers at the FHI, commissioned by the Foundation, summarized where research, focused on charting some of the greatest global risks, currently stands.
     In addition to describing the risks, their effects and their likelihood of occurring, this year’s Annual Report takes one step further and try’s to show how different risks relate to one another, what can be done to combat the risks and who can and should do this. In addition to the risks involved in the Annual Report for 2016, the Foundation actively works with environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, population growth (that exacerbates several risks), and political violence which is behind many of the world’s current problems.
     Political violence comes in many forms. Various kinds of weapons of mass destruction represent potentially devastating weaponry. Further, political violence creates uncontrolled migration and we receive repeated reminders that there is also “digital violence” in the form of cyber-attacks. Together, this takes up a significant amount of space on the political agenda, thus stealing attention from other important risks. And above all, the defense against various forms of political violence requires a grotesquely large share of public resources. Each day, the world spends over SEK 40 billion on defence expenditure – money that would be needed to fight poverty and prevent catastrophic risks.
     My personal opinion is that in order to drastically minimize GCRs we must develop a model where a majority of the world’s nations, with strong support from leading nations, can make binding decisions which can be enforced in an effective and fair way. This would imply that individual nations waive their sovereignty in favor of one or more organizations that have a mandate to decide on how to mitigate GCRs.
     Would this be possible? My counter question is whether there are any alternatives? To continue relying on multilateral negotiations increases the probability that decisions and actions are insufficient and executed too late. This means that the likelihood of GCRs continues to escalate.
     I hope that this publication can deepen the understanding of GCRs and that these insights provide a fertile ground for both debates and proposals on how we can develop a better way of managing and addressing these risks.

     The above is an absolute masterpiece of implicit collectivization...and multi-level collectivization at that. Moreover, as you proceed into the document, it will become clear that several of the “risks” the authors cite are either illusory or are merely challenges to a status quo from which some benefit and others suffer.

     The publication is an irritating, remorselessly self-righteous and tendentious document written mainly by Scandinavian socialists. You might not want to read it in its entirety. I could hardly blame you. But those who steel themselves to the task will learn many things about the Left’s tactics, to say nothing of the reasons for them.

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     A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Leftists’ manipulation of language as one of their principal tactics. To save you some wear and tear on your mouse, here’s the central thesis of that essay:

     [I]f the perversion of language is directed toward rendering particular concepts immoral, it sanctifies the use of violence to suppress those who would dare to speak of them, much less act on them. And as we have seen in recent years, leftists are growing ever more ready to use violence to prevent the discussion of concepts unfriendly to their aims.

     Exactly the same could be said about the manipulation of language to imply collective responsibility for various matters. When that collectivization is aimed at the protection of some status quo, sharp questions demand to be asked:

• Who benefits and who suffers from the “problem?”
• Who has authority over the conditions described and why has he not acted?
• Are there “passive victims” who ought to have taken a hand in redressing it?
• Concerning the proposed intervention, who would profit and who would be mulcted – and why should the latter group willingly assent?

     These are questions the Left, and the great majority of those at the levers of power, would prefer not to face. Collectivization is the source of their power, prestige, and perquisites...and collectivization is the essence of any status quo.

     Yes, the title of this piece is “a few words.” For this enormous subject, the above are very few words. Think about it, especially in the light of our current political cycle.

The Engine Of Contemporary Collectivism

     The brilliant and indispensable Chris Muir provides the ignition for today’s tirade:

     He’s right, you know. White, heterosexual men are now the officially despised class of the Western world. even though we are the builders and defenders of the Christian-Enlightenment order and all that flourishes within it. Members of all other blocs feel either entitled to disparage and demean us, or obliged not to speak in our defense. Ironically, even some of us participate, in acts of self-denunciation.

     Yes, it’s bad. Worse than bad, as one of the consequences has been the adoption of a “tolerance” that urges us to tolerate the intolerable. What else do the preponderant reactions to the atrocious behavior of Muslims in Europe signify? What else could it mean when high government officials react to Muslims’ brutalization of European women not by encouraging European men to rise to their defense, but by advising women to cover up, travel in groups, and stay away from public places?

     Anyone with three functioning brain cells can see that this is insupportable. The marginalization and demonization of the defenders of Western civilization will doom that civilization. Progress will be displaced by riot and destruction. Public order will be smashed to flinders. Indeed, these things are already taking place. How, then, did it get to this point?

     Perhaps you already know.

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     Some time ago, a dear friend penned a series of essays condemning broadcast journalism. Among his most powerful points was that that industry is a creature of the government. Without the intrusion into journalism of the Federal Communications Commission, the powers of broadcast journalism – indeed, the broadcast networks as a whole – would never have come to exist.

     Among my habitual points is that bigness gravitates to bigness: that huge organizations will tend to cluster, and more often than not to ally with one another, despite a superficial appearance of competition. In the case of the broadcast networks, the matter is more than obvious, as the networks must please the federal government to retain their licenses. That naturally results in promoting the ideas and viewpoints Washington likes and suppressing those it dislikes.

     Every government on Earth, no matter how constituted, is a collectivizing force. Thus, its creatures will tend to be collectivizing forces as well, for their parent will not tolerate a great divergence from its will.

---

     It is in the nature of any centrally controlled entity with a broad scope, whether broad geographically, economically, or demographically, that it will promulgate and promote a kind of uniformity among those it affects. Japan provides an extreme example: the huge zaibatsu corporations exert enormous influence over the thinking and behavior of the near-uniform Japanese people. When some idea or practice gains a foothold among them, it spreads at great speed to become a universal fad. Though Westerners are more diverse in many ways than the Japanese, our own large conglomerates, especially those in the business of spreading news and ideas, have comparable influence over what’s commonly called “conventional wisdom.”

     The idea-propagating industry in all its manifestations has been a principal target of the Left:

• The broadcast networks;
• The newspapers;
• The publishing industry;
• The visual media;

     ...have all fallen under the sway of “liberal” / “progressive” assumptions and thought. As that mindset is inherently collectivist, the ideas thus propagated have swerved a hundred eighty degrees from the individualist propositions at the foundation of Christian-Enlightenment civilization to a Marxism not of economic classes but of oppressed and oppressor groups.

     (The attempt to spread “classic,” economics-based Marxism in the West has been indifferently successful; Europe bought partway into it, but America never did. Here, the entering wedges were racism and the early exclusion of women from the vote. The emphasis on oppression and groups derived for it, followed naturally.)

     If you’ve ever wondered about the hostility the major media players have demonstrated toward individualist thought expressed on the World Wide Web, right-leaning talk radio, or upstart Fox News, you have your answer.

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     The inescapable conclusion is that American collectivism, manifest through the Left’s various gospels of:

• Race;
• Ethnicity;
• Sex;
• Sexual orientation;

     ...is almost entirely the product of the Left-dominated idea propagating industries. Recent flare-ups in the ideological battle between individualism and collectivism, for example in the “Sad Puppies” contretemps over the Hugo Awards, only illustrate the ferocity with which the Left defends what it sees as both its bastion and its indispensable tool.

     There are lessons to be drawn here:

• The broadcast networks’ products are far more likely than not to grate against the sensibilities of an individualist-minded American.
• The products of major media companies, whether in print or electronic form, will continue to be collectivist in their assumptions, whether or not those assumptions are made explicit.
• The government-controlled educational “system” has as its first priority the inculcation of collectivism (and subordination of the individual to the State) in minds under its sway.
• The recent attack on video gaming for emphasizing enjoyment over “social justice” ideas, is no accident and will intensify over the near term.
• Government at all levels will side with the “social-justice warriors,” albeit not necessarily overtly, regardless of whether under the dominance of Democrats or Republicans.

     Consider that a checklist of things to be avoided by the prudent adult, and as far as possible deflected in favor of wholesome alternatives by the parents of minor children.

A Grand And Evil Experiment Part 2: Tolerating The Intolerable

From the most excellent Crusader Rabbit:

AT first glance the connection between Sony last week pulling the comedy The Interview from our screens and the murders in Martin Place is not obvious. Yet both are explained by tolerating the intolerant, a deadly virus that has long infected the West....

This man [the Martin Place killer] was known for his anti-West hatred. He told us about it. He was on our radar. He was known to our security services, federal police and NSW police. On November 17, less than a month before he took 17 innocent people hostage, he posted online his hatred of the West, he wrote about his allegiance to ¬Islamic State. Still, we allowed Monis to roam free among us.

Tony Abbott is right to call Islamic State a death cult, but the question must be asked: is the West’s tolerance of the intolerant a death wish? And when many on the Left blindly refuse to identify terrorism, isn’t that furthering the death wish?

Clearly, the virus of collectivism isn’t confined to these shores.

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It seems as if every imaginable group is being collectivized. No conceivable group is allowed internal heterogeneity; no individual is permitted to have individual characteristics. Worse yet, the collectivism virus is being interbred with another evil creature, to produce a still larger and more fearsome threat. The other monstrosity was developed from one of the least well understood of the West’s catalogue of virtues: tolerance.

Tolerance is so badly misunderstood today that even the brightest among us have difficulty separating out the kernel of validity from the chaff that’s obscured it. It’s not about accepting any and every sort of deviance from the norm. It certainly doesn’t mean reading news about murders committed by Muslim terrorists or black thugs and saying, “Well, their ways are their own, and we have to tolerate them.”

True tolerance is inseparably bound to the enforcement of a tolerable social order: i.e., to the universal and absolute intolerance of violence and unredressed injustice. Only within such a framework can true tolerance be practiced.

The prevalent incomprehension of tolerance is intertwined with the prevalent incomprehension of peace. In this regard I cherish a famous, highly penetrating statement from fantasy author Jo Walton:

“Peace means something different from ‘not fighting’. Those aren’t peace advocates, they’re ‘stop fighting’ advocates. Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.”

You cannot have true peace without the “active and complex thing” we call justice. Perhaps Ann Barnhardt has put it best:

PEACE IS THE PERFECT APPLICATION OF GOD’S JUSTICE. Think about it. If “peace” is defined as merely the absence of war, or as “superficial societal quietude”, then North Korea is a bastion of peace.

(This is one of the rare times when you shouldn’t read the whole thing, as Miss Barnhardt, who is a valuable voice on many subjects, makes some idiotic statements that undermine her gemlike definition of peace. Well, no one is perfect.)

Reflect, if you will, on the impossibility of peace and tolerance in an order where there is no justice.

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You might be asking yourself how the above segments bear on collectivism. Well, it’s very early in the morning, so perhaps I can be excused for a longer than usual circumnavigation of my subject.

Collectivism denies individuals their individual identities and characteristics. This is as true of collectivist rhetoric as it is of any collectivist ideology. When we speak of “Negroes,” or “Muslims,” or “the police,” we implicitly occlude the individual characteristics and behaviors of those whom we have subsumed under the label. We cannot speak of a group without doing so, at least transiently. And quite obviously, we cannot discuss group beliefs, opinions, or behavior without suppressing individual deviations from whatever norm we’ve attributed to the group.

Consider the two recent incidents being used to fan the flames of racialist hatred: Officer Darren Wilson’s self-defense shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the fatal outcome of the arrest of Eric Garner in New York. When we abstain from speaking of “Negroes” and “the police” as groups, is it not clear that:

• Not all police are paragons of justice;
• Not all police are demons of oppression or racism;
• Not all Negroes are good and virtuous citizens;
• Not all Negroes are thugs or drug-addled deviants.

I should certainly hope so. While police nationwide have a fairly good, well earned reputation for upholding the law without abusing the public, there have been, and will continue to be, police responsible for conduct of another sort. While the overwhelming majority of American Negroes are law-abiding citizens, there is a percentage that deliberately lives outside the law.

The same could be said for any group one cares to qualify, regardless of the defining characteristic. As I wrote some time ago:

[R]eality is filled with rough surfaces and jagged protrusions. Among the most distressing of these is the simple fact that collectivities, no matter how defined, exist mainly in one's mind. Internally, they can display upsetting variations and divergences...and they usually do.

How, then, shall we discuss the attainment of tolerance and peace, or the acceptability of various groups?

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The late, great Clarence Carson, in his masterwork The American Tradition, wrote forcefully about the consequences of collectivism in law and public attitudes:

    [I]n many instances law enforcement officers have looked the other way while unions employed coercion and violence. Politicians have practiced a policy of divide and conquer on the American people. The Democratic Party has been most adept at this, though the Republicans have often attempted to compete. They have forged a party out of numerous minority groups, making promises and presumably providing favors for them. Many of these groups have become vested interests, legally and extra-legally.
    Since the above was written, the disorders have intensified and spread. Most recently, they have been extended to colleges, courtrooms, and in the streets surrounding political conventions. The pattern is repeating itself. The birds are coming home to roost. If the restraints are removed from group behavior by the grant of special privilege, if groups are empowered by law, if direct action is advanced because the end is “good,” if the means for the civilizing of groups are abandoned, compulsion and authoritarianism must be used to preserve order.

[From the 1970 edition.]

Clearly, the justice that makes peace possible and tolerance practicable requires that we refuse to tolerate the intolerable: i.e., that which contravenes justice. As I wrote in the previous piece, that is wholly incompatible with collectivism...and therefore wholly incompatible with any and every program emanating from the political Left.

How, you may ask, is this to be done?

As urgent as the subject is, I must set it aside for Friday at the earliest, for I’ve spotted a star in the East:

Merry Christmas, Gentle Reader. May the joy of Christ’s Nativity be yours throughout the Christmas season and the coming year.

A Grand And Evil Experiment

In the era of sailing ships, the New World was difficult to reach. Those who desired to participate in the American experiment had to face weeks, sometimes months of hard living and a significant possibility of death at sea. The hardships and hazards diminished slowly as the Nineteenth Century progressed, by stages bringing us the steam engine, the steel-hulled ocean-going vessel, and ever more reliable methods of navigation and reference.

The involuntary human cargoes some of the sailing ships brought to these shores initiated a second, sociological experiment: a biracial society, at first composed of free white men and black slaves; later, of freed black slaves and the white free born.

That experiment, which looked hopeful up to recently (by historical measures), is looking rather grim today. But it doesn’t stand alone; it’s part of a larger pattern with even more ominous implications.

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Earlier today I stumbled upon this bit of opinion from Anthony Bryan:

The black/white experiment has failed.

For almost 150 years the United States has been conducting an experiment. The subjects of the experiment: black people and working-class whites. The hypothesis to be tested: Can a people taken from the jungles of Africa and forced into slavery be fully integrated as citizens in a majority white population?

The whites were descendants of Europeans who had created a majestic civilization. The former slaves had been tribal peoples with no written language and virtually no intellectual achievements. Acting on a policy that was not fair to either group, the government released newly freed black people into a white society that saw them as inferiors. America has struggled with racial discord ever since.

This is not perfectly accurate. Racial discord is actually a modern development. It first became significant in the 1960s, tragically (and most ironically) after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Johnsonian “Great Society” programs nominally intended to help American Negroes rise to social and economic parity with American Caucasians. The surge of conscience-powered compassion among whites presented black race hustlers with an exploitable opportunity. They hastened to make full use of it.

Nevertheless, social and economic division along racial lines has been a constant feature of American society since Emancipation. American society has confronted the resulting challenges for a century and a half. Bryan summarizes his conclusions about this experiment rather starkly:

The experiment has failed. Not because of culture, or white privilege, or racism. The fundamental problem is that white people and black people are different. They differ intellectually and temperamentally. These differences result in permanent social incompatibility.

Bryan’s dismissal of “culture, or white privilege, or racism” as the causes for contemporary racial discord is difficult to refute. Indeed, the problems are rooted in a Grand and Evil Experiment: the stealthy substitution of a vicious, inherently divisive dogma in place of American individualism in the Christian tradition.

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In commenting on several recent fabrications of racist incidents and similar expressions of bigotry, John Hayward discourses thus:

What all of these stories, and so many others, have in common is the assumption of bad faith by liberals, who claim they can read the minds of everyone from dinner-party guests to society at large and detect the dark secret impulses seething beneath every word and deed. The worst bad motives are assumed for every action, including something as harmless as a short woman asking a taller department-store patron to grab a box of detergent off the top shelf for her. If events that cannot be construed as social-justice crimes are not ready to hand, the liberal will simply invent them, transforming lies into Deeper Truth with the magical power of leftist ideology. We’re even presumed guilty of crimes no one actually committed, most notably the horrible “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually happens after Muslim terrorists commit atrocities.

This presumption of guilt is absolutely crucial to collectivism. The Left must teach its subjects to think of themselves as criminals. That’s the only way law-abiding people will endure levels of coercive power that would normally require specific accusations, a fair trial, and the possibility of appeals. Social-justice “crimes” can be prosecuted without any of those things. There is no appeal from the sentence, and no statute of limitations on the crimes, as any left-winger who thinks today’s American citizens need to suffer for the historical offense of slavery will be happy to explain to you. There’s no evidence you can present in your defense, for the Left has read your mind, and knows better than you what demons lurk in its recesses.

Gentle Reader, it cannot be put better than that.

Collectivism – the doctrine that rights and responsibilities adhere not to individuals, but to groups – is a gospel of unending strife. But the ordinary man cannot be moved to take part in such strife without having something to blame on “the Other.” So Negroes must imagine Caucasians to be the source of their problems with crime and lack of economic advancement; women must conceive of men as their oppressors; “the young” must blame “the old” for their struggles at getting employment; and so forth.

Note that just as Anthony Bryan states that “white people and black people are different,” so also are men and women different. So also are the young and the old different. So also are urbanites and suburbanites different, Northerners and Southerners different, Christians and Jews different, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam. Indeed, every individual differs from every other, in innumerable ways. It’s the factual soil in which individualism is rooted: You are unique, with a unique and irreplaceable soul; therefore, only you are responsible for your destiny.

Some differences matter more than others. Some are contextual and mutable, while others are innate and permanent. Some can be accommodated and harmonized; others are immiscible, requiring separation. They exist beyond our opinions and despite our preferences; indeed, they can be critical to the survival of both individuals and nations. But as long as we cleave to the individualist premise that each of us is alone responsible for himself, we can navigate among our differences, making use of the useful ones, coping with the ones that cause difficulties, and avoiding the ones that cause friction.

The substitution of the collectivist premise permits evil minded persons to create discord. If we can be induced to see John Passerby not as an arbitrary individual with his own priorities and obligations, but as black, or female, or Jewish, we can be trained to fear him...and to hate him.

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Collectivist hustlers don’t just strive to herd the rest of us into mutually hostile groups. They also tend to congregate with one another:

Just check out Rev. Al’s involvement in the incident at Freddy’s Fashion Mart: 7 dead, and the Crown Heights Riots: 2 dead. Video Tale of Al Sharpton

Obama’s had “Sharpy” to the White House more than 60 times. Recently Al was seated right next to Vice President Joe Biden. The VP, once widely quoted as saying paying taxes was “patriotic” had no problem sitting next to, and having his picture taken, with a guy who owes $4.5 million to “Uncle Joe’s” precious government.

When tensions and violence were reaching dangerous levels Barack was equally at ease having this proven racial provocateur, and fellow community organizer, acting very publicly as his advisor. Sharpton’s actions fit right in with the president’s own history of provocatively thrusting himself into incidents that were within the purview of local law enforcement. Cambridge police acted “stupidly”. If he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon” Martin.

And now Obama joins with Attorney Eric Holder in calling into question the fairness of America’s long standing Grand Jury System. Holder, the same fellow, who refused to pursue a case against 3 members of the New Black Panthers caught on video tape wielding a club outside a polling place in Philadelphia, is openly critical of the Staten Island jury, despite the fact he has virtually no access to 60 pieces of evidence and the testimony of 50 witnesses.

Is it because no one else will tolerate them? Perhaps, but it seems more likely that they need to consult and coordinate with one another to make their experimental techniques effective. Note also that collectivists willingly congregate across group lines. The Left makes room for every sort of collectivism. Its activists get along quite well with one another...until the moment one group starts to prosper at the expense of another, of course.

If you’re having bloody fantasies about throwing grenades into certain tightly packed convention halls, you’re not alone.

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The collectivist premise has completely permeated American society. Hardly a day goes by when the news media lack all indication of its effects upon us. Indeed, the media are instrumental in the promotion of the collectivist premise. Its barons eagerly promote stories that exacerbate inter-group tensions, for a simple reason: strife sells newspapers and advertising.

A return to the individualist premise wouldn’t automatically solve all our society’s problems. It isn’t sufficient, though it is necessary. As I said earlier, some of the differences among us are immiscible. They will eventually require certain groups to be separated from the main mass. But individualism as the central principle of law and social order is an absolute necessity.

It wasn’t “white racism” that killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
It isn’t “patriarchal oppression” that denies women the fulfillment of their have-it-all ambitions.
It isn’t a bunch of evil old folks determined to control everything that’s caused the plague of youth unemployment.

It’s time to end the Grand and Evil Experiment.

Plain Speaking Dept.

Sometimes, there’s simply nothing for me to add:

I didn't do one of these today, but in light of the murder of two NYPD officers, Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, I thought I'd bring up one quick concept that too many people tend to forget or understandably shy away from.

This is what they do.

The political left in this country is comprised primarily of people who have a background as, or the mindset of, "community organizers". The job of a community organizer is to make things worse. They are the ones throwing gasoline on the fire and rubbing salt in the wounds. Their job is to sew turmoil, discord and hate. They work to prevent accord from being reached, to end cooperation between peoples and to head off agreement. They are professional shit stirrers.

Why?

Ideologically, their reason is to destroy western civilization so that it can be replaced with a collectivist Utopia. That's great and all, but it's kind of fuzzy. Personally, however, their motivation is pure personal profit. There's not a single one of these sons of bitches that doesn't get rich ripping the scabs off of wounds, and in that lies the ultimate irony. They decry the capitalist and free marketeer as promoting a system based upon the assumption that people act from in own self interest, while at the same time demonstrating all of the traits that they condemn, proving that the capitalist was right in the first place. Human nature is human nature. None of this should surprise anyone who is a student of history, yet somehow it always does.

A peaceful, prosperous community or nation does not need community organizers. Community organizers, on the other hand, can't function in a peaceful, prosperous nation, so they are always, ALWAYS, striving to destroy it.

None of this is new, or surprising. We just need to remember who these people are.

Word.