Bigger Lies, Bigger Shovels

     My sainted father, may he rest in peace, was the source of many a sad wisdom. He wasn’t an educated man – he’d dropped out of high school after tenth grade – but he was an intelligent and observant one. He saw clearly, remembered what he’d seen, and drew the appropriate inferences from the patterns. One of those patterns, which he conveyed to me during one particularly memorable conversation, was in the lies we’re told by persons with a shameful agenda.

     A shameful agenda – i.e., one designed to defraud – requires lies. It requires a lot of them. And they must be driven home with blows. They who reject the lies must be made to suffer. The suffering must be painful, prolonged, and highly visible to others.

     The bigger the lies, the bigger, more prolonged, and more visible the suffering they’ll require for “reinforcement.”

     People are pain-averse. (Say, I’ll bet you didn’t know that.) If a man can’t somehow avert suffering, and is incapable of fighting it off, he’ll seek an analgesic. The Left’s intent is that the only analgesic available to us is meek submission to its agenda. So its mouthpieces lie continuously, voluminously, at a pain-threshold volume, and from every corner of the informational environment. As we are told repeatedly by the media that these...persons are of high status and stainless reputations, this maximizes the pain from the intense, sustained cognitive dissonance their lies produce. Escape is deterred by the threat of punishment: ostracism, condemnation, loss of income, and violence.

     Submission excepted, there are only two routes out of the agony. One of them would require mass bloodshed.

     The above is only the logic of a dead man whose name you’ve never heard, except that I bear it as well. Feel free to dismiss it if you please.

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     Dystopic / Thales’s brief essay is ultimately a sermon about the use of cognitive dissonance to induce submission. The people wielding that whip are evil, not stupid. They are not honestly mistaken individuals who mean well; they are deceivers in the pattern of Satan Mekratrig himself.

     Their end is power. This is their means. And it works if not resisted.

     The only escapes are submission and revolt. Submission is unpalatable to the great majority of Americans. Revolt involves not merely resistance but going on the attack. As we’re in the majority, the prospects for a counterattack, using the same conduits the Left uses to spread its lies and the same deterrents it uses to enforce compliance, are favorable. In this, the age of the Internet, there’s really nothing to impede us. Why, then, do we sit here idle?

     The answer varies from person to person and community to community. Some feel too vulnerable. Others are too comfortable. Others yet are already too beaten down. Still others deem themselves secure against the tide, whether correctly or mistakenly. Very few take up their cudgels and stride forward to do battle.

     It’s not in me to condemn those who abstain from the battle. But more of us must take up arms if we’re to have a fighting chance of retaining not just our country but our sanity. No one is strong enough to withstand an unceasing, undiluted, unopposed barrage of lies and come out whole.

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     It’s been said that political correctness is fascism with a smiley face. It calls to mind the cover of Jonah Goldberg’s blockbuster:

     Smiley face or no, political correctness – the insistence that certain indisputable truths must never be spoken and when spoken must be punished with maximum harshness – is the point of the Left’s spear. Here is where the counterattack must begin. Those “unspeakable truths” must be spoken at maximum volume, and damn the torpedoes. Here are a few that deserve trumpeting:

• There is an American culture. It is infinitely superior to all the other cultures of the world, past or present. No other land produces anything remotely comparable to our general standard of decency, justice, generosity, or good humor.
• The races, as conventionally defined, differ in various ways, including:
  • general intelligence,
  • family feeling,
  • willingness to break the law,
  • and propensity toward aggression.
  The importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
• The sexes differ in various ways, including:
  • individual versus consensus decision making,
  • capacity for abstract thought,
  • and propensity toward aggression.
  As with racial differences, the importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
• Homosexual sodomy is self-destructive, but in certain cases, sexual orientation can be changed.
• There is such a thing as general intelligence, it is at least partly inherited, and it varies widely.
• There is such a thing as an innate propensity to aggression, it is at least partly inherited, and it varies widely.
• There is such a thing as an innate respect for the law, it is at least partly inherited, and it varies widely.
• The diseased, disabled, disordered, and disadvantaged should receive our sympathy and compassion as individuals toward other individuals, but they are not entitled to more as a matter of right. This principle covers any difficulties anyone might ever experience, whether physical, mental, emotional, financial, or social. (Pace Jackson Browne, “nobody owes ya nothin’.”)

     And we must stand our ground when assailed on them.

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     I could go on. Sometimes I do. But if the point isn’t established by now, it can’t be established by any means known to me. Besides, there are other things on today’s agenda:

It’s Time To Stand And Fight.

     There is no middle ground. Indeed, between truth and lies, there never was.

Quickies: Policing For Profit

     Do you ever travel with a substantial amount of cash on you, or with valuable articles in your possession? Beware.

     Alex at Ammo.com has alerted me to yet another compendious, almost definitive article: Civil Asset Forfeiture: Policing For Profit. And once again, it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to keep what’s rightfully his out of the clutches of Bad Blue.

     The incentive structure erected around civil asset forfeiture guarantees that police departments at every level of government will be in on the action, and determined to stay there. As John Ross alluded in his blockbuster novel Unintended Consequences, such seizures can touch any item of value – and are often “engineered” at the moment of impact. In the following, gun expert Henry Bowman is invoking a favor from FBI agent Mike Garland, to aid a friend in getting a “contraband” gun into the United States:

     “[It’s] an elephant gun, made in England seventy years ago that Ray bought in a Boston sporting goods store in 1959. Customs guy’s not asking for duty. He's trying to steal the whole gun because of the front sight. It’s a piece of elephant ivory about the size of half a grain of rice....
     “Mike, I know the way this works. I’m trying to save everyone some time here....If the guy at the airport wants to be a prick and make Ray miss his plane and have to get a hotel, fine, but he’ll eventually get all his guns back.^[1] If you tell him to let him go now, your guy can keep Ray’s .38 as consideration for expediting his clearance, okay?
     “But Mike? As we speak, Ray is watching his guns. There is no way that any drugs are going to miraculously appear inside any of them, as can happen sometimes with vehicles. Particularly expensive, fast, German vehicles.^[2] Okay?”

     Note 1: Ray does have the documentation attesting to when and where he bought that “elephant gun,” but he doesn’t have it with him – and if the gun should leave his possession, it could easily “get lost:” i.e., wind up in some Customs agent’s private gun safe.

     Note 2: An earlier scene involving Mike Garland shows him boasting, oh so delicately, about his acquisition of a high-end BMW through “snowflaking.”

     Draw the moral. Never, ever carry anything with you that might tempt an act of “policing for profit.” Ship it instead.

     UPDATE: Apparently I rely too much on my memory. John Ross has just informed me that Mike Garland was a Customs agent rather than FBI, and the "snowflaked" car was a Porsche. Apologies. (Hey, at least I got the nationality of the car right!)

Attacks And Defenses

     First, a brief citation from another blogger that expresses the sentiments of many on the Right today:

     I am exhausted of having to campaign or every red c**t hair’s breadth of my civil rights.

     I am so ready to stack bodies of black bloc and the pussyhat #Resistance on the National Mall like firewood, grab microphone and shout into the night:

     “I am tired of these radicals setting the tone of the national debate. I am tired of having to fight constantly to preserve even the basic semblances of the rights guaranteed to me in the Constitution. Go argue over tax rates and spending cuts and those kinds of things that normal Americans care about. Stop being beholden to the insane Radicals. If you do not understand that, I’ll stack up another 10,000 in black masks and pink hats until you do get the message that we don’t want Socialism and we don’t want to give up our civil rights. It’s the economy you stupid fucks, fix that and leave the Bill of Rights fucking alone.”

     Have you been feeling like that, Gentle Reader?

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     The period between the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and the blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France in May of 1940 is often called “the Phony War.” It didn’t look like there was a war in progress. There were no maneuvering armies, no shooting, and no casualties being reported among the major combatants. Things were happening at sea, but they seemed largely irrelevant to the people of Britain and Western Europe. Nazi Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway, and the Soviets had attacked Finland, but those contests, like the sea engagements, were largely ignored by the citizens of the Allied Powers.

     Yet a war was in progress. It would prove to be the largest war ever fought on Earth. Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would host its battles. Many millions would die. The geopolitics of the world would be completely rewritten.

     America is currently in a “phony” phase of its domestic war: i.e., the war over who (and what ideas) shall dominate our nation’s governments. There’s a lot of angry rhetoric, but very little actual violence. Indeed, much of the fighting is explicitly over the meanings of words:

     One of the key lessons of the 2018 elections is that the Left is waging – and winning – a linguistic war. The Left claims and occupies more and more linguistic ground with each new fight.

• Defense of the Founding Fathers becomes defense of white, racist, slaveowners.
• Defense of American identity becomes an act of white male domination.

     ....Wanting to obey the law in counting votes becomes an effort to suppress votes and disenfranchise poor people, minorities, and immigrants.

     The presumption of Democrats winning is so great that Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown said, “[I]f Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, they stole it, it's clear.”

     Every day, we are watching Democrats break and stretch the law for the sole purpose of winning, while they attack Republicans for wanting an honest count of legal voters.

     Democrats and their liberal media allies know that if they repeat something often enough it begins to be accepted as truth.

     Newt Gingrich’s column goes on to argue that these verbal attacks on the Right are a kind of battlespace preparation: the creation of conditions in which mob violence against conservatives, whether public servants or private citizens, seems morally justified. He could well be right.

     There a war on, and it’s no phony.

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     I’ve wanted to believe that the electorate would come home to traditional American values: individual freedom, the free market, Constitutionally limited government, and national sovereignty. At various points over the previous three decades it looked as if we might be making progress. At other points we appeared to be backsliding toward socialism, globalism, and authoritarian government. All the while, the Left strove to change the meanings of words essential to political discourse.

     How long has it been since you first heard the ominous phrase our truth? I recall seeing it in print more than twenty years ago, during the height of the Sturm und Drang over government funding for AIDS research. The implication that truth itself could be “privatized,” such that what’s true for Smith might not be true for Jones, is terrifying. If we don’t face a common reality with objectively perceptible facts, how could we manage to communicate or cooperate to any worthwhile end?

     The answer isn’t hard to find; it’s just hard to face. Yet the Left has assailed the concept of objective truth – an accurate statement of fact independent of anyone’s feelings or opinions – for decades, promoting in its place a quasi-solipsistic notion that “my truth” need not have any relation to “your truth.” That’s the entering wedge for the replacement of evidence and reason by propaganda.

     The only defense is infinite stubbornness about the meanings of words: an absolute refusal to grant an iota of respect to persons who misuse them. Such persons might think they’re on the side of the angels. Indeed, the Left rhetorical machinations are designed to get them to think so. But they aren’t – and under no circumstances should we accord them the presumption of integrity, for they have enlisted in the effort to make communication and cooperation impossible.

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     Columnist Maggie Gallagher once observed that if there is no such thing as objective truth, our communications amount to nothing more than attempts to manipulate one another, a constant struggle to use and not be used. The battle over the reliability of words we use and the statements we construct from them will only remain nonviolent for a little while. After that, our ability to trust one another will be gone, perhaps forever. Then the lead will start to fly.

     I wish I could end this on a hopeful note. I can’t.

Now That The Preliminaries Are Over...

     ...the Left can get down to what it’s held in reserve ever since Donald Trump denied Hillary Clinton the presidency. Make no mistake: it’s coming:

     We are now learning that left-wing domestic terrorism groups are openly discussing “kill team” tactics on Twitter and Facebook, discussing methods of carrying SBRs (short-barreled rifles) under their clothing, blending in with crowds, then popping out of the crowds to assassinate prominent conservatives such as U.S. Senators, Supreme Court justices and prominent conservative radio personalities. All this was first reported by PJ Media.

     Fair use rules limit what I can excerpt from the linked article, which is relatively short but rich in links to other sources. Please read it all, and follow as many of the embedded links as you can stomach.

     The truly horrifying thing about this is that it started with the abuse of language: more specifically, the conflation of “conservative” with “Nazi” and the hurling of wholly fictional accusations at innocent men – who, when they became angry and defended themselves, were then castigated as monsters for daring to do so.

     Bookworm has some thoughts for us:

     The Kavanaugh defamation is a terrorist tactic leading to real violence. So far today, three people have sent me a link to James Simpsons’ article The Kavanaugh Allegations Are Psychological Terrorism, And It’s Time They End. The article is long, but well worth reading because it talks about the way the Left uses these tactics both to drive good people out of the public square and to incite the masses to actual violence:

     The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.

     This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.

     Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence. How many people, for example, never used Donald Trump yard signs or bumper stickers out of fear of ostracism, or even property destruction?

     Indeed. Fear is the dominant characteristic of a low-trust society – and ours has been descending into that abyss for some time.

     Consider also this incisive observation from Laird Wilcox:

     In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a manner which distorts it to the point where it appears at its most extreme. For example, a victim who is defamed as a "subversive" will be identified with the worst images of subversion, such as espionage, terrorism or treason. A victim defamed as a "pervert" will be identified with the worst images of perversion, including child molestation and rape. A victim defamed as a "racist" or "anti-Semitic" will be identified with the worst images of racism or anti-Semitism, such as lynchings or gas chambers.

     That has been the core rhetorical tactic of the Left for several decades. A peek at the Left’s hysteria over Susan Collins’s decision to support Brett Kavanaugh should be enough to confirm that.

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     Thanks to Bookworm’s piece, I was reminded of something I wrote four years ago:

     Confusion can only benefit him who seeks to prevent accurate perception and thought. The Left must confuse its targets for a simple reason: the Leftist agenda, to the extent that it's persistent in character, is wholly at odds with human nature and the laws of reality. In practice it conduces to misery and destruction. No hyper-charismatic leader and no amount of tinkering can "make it work," the representations of Leftist mouthpieces notwithstanding. Moreover, this could never be concealed from a person of ordinary rational capacity...if he were equipped with accurate symbols for the key components of the socio-economic-political tableau and were permitted to employ them in thought unobstructed by cant about "inequality," "exploitation," "racism," "patriarchy," "institutionalized bigotry," and the like.

     Add to the trigger-words listed above the words “rape” and “survivor,” both of which have been added to the Left’s arsenal. What do those words mean? What constitutes a “rape?” What does it mean to call someone a “survivor” – and is it not the case that the great majority of rape victims survive the experience, at least physically?

     Without publicly-agreed meanings for the words we use in our discourse, we cannot have a stable conception of truth. Have a snippet from an even earlier, equally apposite piece:

     Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as "partisan" and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification -- in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true -- their argument over X will never end.

     An interest group that has "put its back against the wall" as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can't be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

     Add this, from an Eternity Road essay I wrote in 2003:

     In commenting on the importance of objective truth, columnist Maggie Gallagher once noted that if truth does not exist, then the exchanges of statements among men amount to nothing but assertions of power, attempts to use one another. The same observation applies with equal force to those who hold that there is no absolute right or wrong. It licenses them to do anything they please to whomever might be made to serve their ends:

• They may use force whenever it would be favorable to them.
• They may lie, defraud, and break promises whenever it would be to their advantage.
• They may excoriate others in the vilest possible terms for daring to obstruct them.
• They may demand that different standards apply to those that agree with them and to those that disagree with them.

     ...for, if there is no wrong, then these things cannot be wrong. All that matters are the practical questions:

• Will it get me what I want?
• Can I get away with it?

     I see it all coming together now. Can you see it, Gentle Reader?

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     It’s time for serious preparation. If there is to be politically motivated violence, it will be impossible to “play defense.” The attacker can come out of nowhere at any time or place, and his target cannot look in every direction at once. Should there be any such assaults, and should there be reasonable evidence of Leftist coordination in such events, it will be time for decent Americans to go on offense: to hunt down AntiFa, BlackBloc, and similar miscreants and hurt them badly, possibly even mortally.

     Yes, I’m talking about a shooting war, with other (supposed) Americans as the enemy. If there is such a war – and the indications are that we’re teetering at the edge of one – I’m determined to win it.

     Are you appalled by the prospect? I am. But that doesn’t alter the calculus of survival.

     Think it over.

What Becomes The Thinker Part 2: History Is A Mystery

     This brief essay of a few days ago has drawn some feedback of a sort I didn’t expect. As it appears I left a few people wondering “what are you driving at, Fran?” I’ve decided to extend and amplify it.

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     The great quest of the serious thinker is for reliable knowledge, specifically about why things happen. One who focuses on social, economic, and political systems will be especially concerned with the causal mechanisms that govern them. There are innumerable pockets of history that seem to bear on those mechanisms. Some of them offer insights of importance. However, it’s important to keep mindful of the Bertrand Russell quote from the previous piece, and never be perfectly sure about one’s inferences.

     I recall, in high school, being taught that the French Revolution of 1789 was a reaction to the tyranny of the French aristocracy, which was supported by the nation’s Catholic clergy. My world history textbook said so in black and white. It was only many years later that I encountered divergent assessments of that time and place, and so began to wonder “what was really going on” in pre-revolutionary France.

     It didn’t take long for me to conclude that I would never know.

     Historians who’ve written about the French Revolution and its genesis are all over the motivational map about it. There are some who maintain the aristocratic-tyranny thesis. There are others who attribute the rising to “a peak in the satisfactions curve:” i.e., that the conditions of the common Frenchman had been getting steadily better, but then ceased to do so, causing “a revolution of rising expectations.” There are still others who believe that a proletarian reaction against the Church’s grip on French education – at that time, wholly a Churchly undertaking – was the main reason. The Marxist historians have their thesis that the Revolution was the product of “the contradictions of capitalism.” No doubt there are still others.

     The interested Gentle Reader can find all of these notions on the shelves at his local library. He’s welcome to do his own research and form his own conclusions. What he can’t do is fire up his Acme Industries Time Machine (beep beep), go back to pre-Revolutionary France, and assess the ground state conditions and the motives of the French people for himself. Neither can I nor anyone else alive today.

     All we have are the records written in that era, which are inherently partial and of varying quality, and the histories that have been written about it. None of these things are inherently 100% trustworthy; the biases, blinders, and incomplete knowledge of those who composed them guarantee that.

     Events past and gone become shrouded in mystery. Did it really happen? is a question that has no hard-and-fast answer unless you witnessed it with your own eyes and ears...and even then, there’s the possibility of illusion, hallucination, and misremembrance. It follows – at least, it should – that if what happened is somewhat uncertain, then why it happened is at least as uncertain.

     And there is absolutely no help for it.

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     I dislike this subject. Indeed, I resent it. I have a need to know that shatters the measuring instruments. The inability to be perfectly certain of anything past and gone frustrates me greatly.

     An example: Some years ago there was a great foofaurauw over the emissions of two historians – David Irving, an Englishman, and Robert Faurisson, a Frenchman – who disputed the most common accounts and records of the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry, a.k.a. the Holocaust. Those men cast doubt on the official accounts, despite their volume and overall consistency. Both suffered legal penalties because of it.

     I do not share Irving’s and Faurisson’s beliefs about the Holocaust. But I dislike the idea that a man can be punished by the force of law for holding a dissident opinion. even about something as horrific as the Holocaust. Indeed, it might be the only time I’ve ever agreed with Noam Chomsky, who argued, along with others, that Faurisson’s civil rights entitled him to speak and write what he believed.

     To grant credence to Holocaust denialism requires that one entertain doubts about a lot of the evidence. It’s a mighty stretch to doubt all the concentration camp survivors, the physical relics of the camps themselves, the Third Reich’s meticulous records of the exterminations, and so forth. But Irving and Faurisson did express such doubts. Were they sincere in doing so? Who knows? My Acme Industries Mind Reading Machine is on the fritz, if you’ll pardon the choice of words.

     Moreover, the further back in history the Holocaust recedes, the easier it will be for some dissident to doubt the evidence that remains. Only they who witnessed the events of the time can be at all certain what occurred...and they, too, are disappearing into history. Those of us who have “derived certainty” by virtue of the testimonies and accounts contemporaneous with the Holocaust will never be as authoritative as those who witnessed it, or in some cases experienced it.

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     The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. – L. P. Hartley

     The clinching argument for not allowing oneself to be cocksure about anything is, of course, how easy it is to be wrong yet certain, and how many great thinkers have been so.

     Strictly speaking, even personal witness is subject to a modicum of uncertainty. Memories shift and fade; they suffer admixture from the “if onlies” and the “might have beens.” To be absolutely, unalterably certain is, if not an error, a point of vulnerability. All of us make mistakes, even in remembrance. When the subject is something that occurred long ago, it’s the part of a reasonable man, no matter how certain he might be that his version is the correct one, to allow that “it might have been otherwise.”

What Becomes The Thinker

     The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. – Bertrand Russell, Mortals And Others

     The famous allegory of “Plato’s Cave,” while its aim is fanciful and unattainable, does tell us something of importance:

     To do anything of consequence, thinking included, we must make certain assumptions. The first of these is the assumption that the evidence of our senses is trustworthy. Thinking – the use of data to formulate abstractions and reach further conclusions from the use of those abstractions – requires data. Moreover, the data must be reliable: an accurate report on some aspects of the objective state of reality.

     But our sense organs aren’t our only source of data, and a good thing, too. We include in our data stores:

• What we’ve been told by others;
• What we’ve read, or heard on some medium that conveys information;
• Earlier conclusions we’ve drawn, or that trusted sources have drawn and conveyed to us.

     To the extent that we employ data provided by those sources in our thinking, we tend to treat them as essentially equivalent to our sense impressions. But there’s a problem there: the statements and conclusions of others might not be reliable. It can take quite a lot of work to determine whether those others have conveyed accurate information to us...and whether they intended to do so in the first place.

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     Men believe in the professions as they believe in ghosts: because they want to believe in them. Fact-blindness – the most common sort of blindness – and the resolute lying of respectable men – keep up the illusion. – George Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays

     “There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are to be avoided, and so many present gratifications obtained, by craft and delusion, that very few of those who are much entangled in life have spirit and constancy sufficient to support them in the steady practice of open veracity.” – Samuel Johnson

     The gulf between accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation is infinitely deep. It’s carved by motive: the desire of the person on the other end to inform or to deceive. Determining which of those motives is at work can be difficult approaching impossible.

     Many are the good-hearted and well-intentioned who innocently propagate falsehoods: usually, falsehoods originally pressed upon them by others. But the not-good-hearted and not-well-intentioned are out there as well. This makes it critically important that we create a division, in our minds at least, between what we’ve personally witnessed and what others have reported to us. We deem data from the former sources trustworthy ab initio, though illusions and hallucinations are possible. We must not grant 100% credence to the latter group.

     This is much on my mind because of an exchange I had just yesterday with someone I like and admire. I mentioned a historical figure, relatively minor as such figures are reckoned but nevertheless a player in an important event, who seemed to me to be an example of high character in a dark place and time. My interlocutor differed on the basis of sources he did not name. When I said that my own reading seemed to differ from his, he replied rather snippily that I should “contemplate the word ‘whitewash.’” I was somewhat taken aback, but in the interests of amity I pursued the subject no further.

     Now, this is an unimportant matter in the grand scheme of things. However, I consider myself extremely well read; at least, the 13,000 volumes steadily forcing me out of my own home should count for something. But my interlocutor has a good claim to that status too – and we differ on a point of historical interest to both of us. We have different sources for that point. Whose sources are closer to the objective facts?

     That question, not its answer, is the point of this essay.

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     Historians are human. They have their own biases and their own axes to grind. Some have the unholy habit of dismissing and discarding sources, including first-hand witnesses, whose accounts clash with their own preconceptions. Now and then, as with Michael Bellesiles, one such is discovered and discredited, but not always.

     It’s likely that some, at least, of what I’ve read and taken to be accurate history is false-to-fact. I do try to remember that when one reads a history, he’s not really looking and listening to the past, but rather absorbing an account written by another – quite possibly someone who has himself been misinformed or deceived. It would be well if everyone who writes op-ed for others’ consumption would keep that in mind.

     The Bertrand Russell quote at the head of this essay strikes me as transcendently important, even vital to the serious thinker. We must retain a measure of doubt about anything we have not personally witnessed. It’s an ethical obligation. Not to do so is to join the “cocksure,” and perhaps to take part in “the resolute lying of respectable men.” That’s a role I don’t want to play.

     Anyone can be wrong – and when he’s been misinformed or deceived, he surely will be, at least for a time. Keeping that firmly in mind is a great aid to the maintenance of modesty.

     Allow me to recommend yet again Jean-Francois Revel's masterpiece The Flight From Truth, one of the most important works of the Twentieth Century.

What Is Truth? A Kinda-Sorta Ruminaton

     Sunday is a special day for any Catholic, as anyone conversant with Catholic practices will know. Yes, we’re supposed to attend Mass, but the significance of the day doesn’t end there...even if many Catholics follow their Mass observance with entirely secular pursuits.

     Sunday is a day well suited to reflecting on what the late Russell Kirk called “the permanent things:” that which stands apart from human manipulation, perception, and opinion. Henry Grady Weaver laid a delicate but definite emphasis on this role for the day in his 1953 book The Mainspring of Human Progress. It’s a concept long overdue for resuscitation, no matter what the panjandrums of the National Football League might have to say about it.

     I spend a fair fraction of each Sunday on “the permanent things.” Prominent among them are the great questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and heuristics. The title of this piece is one of them, perhaps the most important of all. That it should have been asked most memorably by the man who sentenced Jesus of Nazareth to death is singularly appropriate.

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     During my years in academia, I came in contact with some remarkable minds. One of those was astrophysicist Steven Strom, a uniquely capable educator with a delightful sense of humor. One of the points he made in the course of his lectures on the properties of the Sun was that a useful mathematical analysis of its surface must treat it as flat. A student asked him, somewhat sarcastically, “But it’s not flat, is it?” To which Professor Strom replied “Oh, it is...except at the edges.”

     Yes, it got a good laugh, but there was an important point buried in it as well:

There’s a difference between fact and truth.

     That difference makes all the difference in any attempt by men to grapple with the cause of some observable phenomenon. A fact is an element of objective reality, indifferent to our preferences and opinions. Truth, by contrast, is a listener’s evaluation of some statement about reality: specifically, that the statement conforms to his perceptions and convictions about reality.

     Facts are the Holy Grail of all sincere quests for knowledge. However, we can never know them to an absolute degree of precision – i.e., with a zero margin for error. We must make do with measurements determined by instruments with a known degree of imprecision. Whether we accept those measurements is our verdict upon their “truth.”

     Truth, like meaning, is a matter subject to interpretation.

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     One of the most pernicious developments of the past few decades is the oft-heard statement that “truth is relative.” This is actually a palmed card: he who maintains it usually seeks to invalidate the perceptions and inferences of an opponent. What he wants to say (but can’t quite) is that the facts of some subject are a matter of opinion: a statement any five year old could refute without ever having heard of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

     In the determination to know the facts as precisely as possible lies the critical distinction between destructive and constructive varieties of skepticism. The destructive skeptic, calloused against all representations of this or that as “truth,” descends toward nihilism: the position that nothing can “really” be known. The constructive skeptic, wary of the limits on his own perceptions and intelligence, pokes mercilessly at every generalization, seeking qualifications, exceptions, and most important of all its domain of proper application. While dubious about the notion of absolute truth, he remains faithful to the concept of sufficient truths, which possess useful properties applicable to particular circumstances.

     Thomas Sowell, in The Vision of the Anointed, presents a striking and important illustration:

     Despite attempts to dismiss unpalatable conclusions on the grounds that they are “oversimplified,” nothing is oversimplified unless it is wrong—and wrong specifically for the purpose at hand. The ancient Ptolemaic conception of the universe has long since been rejected in favor of the more sophisticated Copernican system, but the Ptolemaic system continues to be used by modern astronomers to compute the times and durations of eclipses—and it does so with accuracy down to fractions of a second. the points on which the Ptolemaic system is wrong simply do not affect these kinds of calculations. Since its assumptions are simpler than those of the Copernican system, it is easier to use for calculation, without sacrificing accuracy. For other purposes, such as sending a spacecraft to Mars or Venus, the Ptolemaic conception of the universe must give way to the Copernican conception—because the latter gives more accurate information for that purpose.

     In Sowell’s observation lies the seed from which all sincere quests for truth, for whatever purpose, must sprout: All assertions of knowledge must be confirmed by repeated successful predictions, within a previously established margin of error. Only such assertions can lay a just claim to the title of “sufficiently true.”

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     In the light of the above, let’s examine one of the most contentious of all issues in social policy: that of the necessity, size, and scope of the welfare state.

     A liberal would say that:

• The welfare state is necessary, because otherwise people would starve in the streets.
• There is no upper bound on its size, for there is no limit to how many persons might be in need.
• Rather than have it ignore one truly needy person, we must be willing to accept that the not-truly-needy will sometimes be served by it.

     A conservative will normally dismiss those claims as the “simplistic” emissions of a “bleeding heart.” In contrast, he would say that:

• Human need can and should be addressed by private action.
• If there is to be a welfare system, it must be restricted to providing the necessities of life to the truly needy.
• Therefore, a welfare system must incorporate a test for true need: if he is not physically or mentally incapable, or otherwise helpless before events, the mendicant must be required to work for his benefits.

     These propositions, the liberal will dismiss as “uncompassionate,” or perhaps “heartless.”

     Full disclosure: I lean heavily toward the conservative position. Yet I must allow that with certain provisos, both sets of propositions are sufficiently true:

• Both private and governmental action, however well intentioned and thorough, will irrationally include some unworthy and exclude some worthy persons. Of these, the latter will get more attention, for no civilized society will tolerate a significant number of deaths by starvation or exposure.
• There will always be a gray zone around the concepts of “necessities” and “the truly needy.”
• Work imposed as a requirement for the receipt of welfare benefits tends either to be pointless “makework,” or to have undesirable effects upon those who practice that occupation for their daily bread.

     Moreover, the focus of charitably inclined citizen Smith, whether he inclines toward private or public action, should not be limited to the relief of “need,” however defined. He must be aware of “moral hazards” and the great desirability of preventing need before it arises – the conservative argument against government interference in the economy, particularly the labor market. While it’s admirable to jump into the river to rescue those being helplessly propelled toward the falls, if it should be determined that someone upstream is throwing people in, Smith should give some thought (at least) to stopping him.

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     There are several tests of a claim of truth by an advocate for some cause:

• “Have you confirmed this by experiment?”
• “What are the required initial conditions?”
• “How long must you wait for the results?”
• “Have others replicated those results?”
• “What’s the margin for error?”

     These are questions the dogmatist refuses to face. He has “the truth,” and he won’t brook any quibbling from you. We see here also the reason that religious propositions – i.e., propositions that can neither be verified nor falsified – must always be matters of individual conscience. There’s no experiment that could possibly apply to them. In the absence of experiment, all that remains is faith: a personal decision to believe or disbelieve, either of which is intellectually defensible, neither of which can be justly imposed on another.

     The relativist, though his focus differs from that of the dogmatist, is just as pernicious. He’ll dismiss claims that have been adequately confirmed as “your truth.” Often he’ll do that tactically, as a way of maintaining his convictions in the face of adverse evidence. Consider in this light the absolute predictability of declines in employment when a legally mandated minimum wage is introduced or increased. Liberals have denied that multiply confirmed, never contradicted observation for decades. On the other side of the ledger, many conservatives remain intransigent about the War on Drugs despite the observed fact that supply will always rise to meet demand, so contrary legislation can only create outlaws and enrich organized crime.

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     All the above having been said, it is inherent in human psychology that we should wish to know absolutely about those matters of greatest importance to us. We seek “truth” almost as ardently as food and water. Those “truths” we embrace become foundation stones for our lives. Many have maintained such convictions at the price of their lives, as the roster of men martyred for their faiths will attest.

     Nevertheless, the possession of absolute truth, absolutely reliable in all circumstances and beyond the possibility of contradiction, is denied to us. This is one of the drivers of Man’s search for a standard above human frailty and imprecision. However, if such a standard exists, it must necessarily lie beyond the limits imposed by human nature.

     In this we glimpse the desirability of faith. More, we confront the immense importance of finding the discriminants that distinguish acceptable faiths, which provide hope and comfort to the adherent without inflicting injury on the non-adherent, from unacceptable faiths, which seek the subjugation or extinction of those who disagree.

     God sees the truth, but waits. – Leo Tolstoy

     Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things. And he that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him.
     As he spake these words, many believed on him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. [John 8:28-32]

     May God bless and keep you all.

The Mark Of The Villain

     If there’s any ability more critical to one’s safety and happiness than the ability to distinguish the evil man from the good, I can’t imagine what it might be.

     I’m treading on theologically uncertain ground in this. It’s Christian doctrine that no individual is irredeemably evil. I subscribe to that doctrine. Nevertheless, there are those who consciously embrace evil during part or all of their lifetimes. The greatest of these are long remembered; their crimes remain prominent in the histories for decades, even centuries. Of course there are preferable paths to greatness, yet great evil has a peculiar glamor of its own.

     But most of us don’t come into direct contact with the great monsters of history. For one thing, there aren’t enough of them. For another, it isn’t guaranteed that they’ll be recognizable as villains during their lifetimes. A great deal of seeming good has been done by thoroughly evil men, and much destruction has been wrought by well-intentioned men who thought they were doing good.

     The prerequisite for recognizing the villain is the ability to recognize evil.

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     The beginning of the journey starts with the recognition that there is such a thing as truth: statements that accord with objective reality. Truth is fundamental to human understanding, and therefore to all questions of morals and ethics. The following comes from an essay I posted at the late, much lamented Eternity Road on September 20, 2010:

     For reasons that would require a large history to delineate, Americans have been led away from the understanding of absolute truth. We've been treated to elaborate, amphigorical explanations of why "the cat sat on the mat" should not be taken as a statement of unchallengeable fact, even if we can see Kitty sitting on the damned thing with our own eyes. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the rest of their tribe literally made careers out of the campaign to destroy even the possibility that language, our vehicle for thought and for interaction with one another, can express truth. But without a trustworthy, serviceable conception of truth, there can be no knowledge, including knowledge of Man's nature. Since the understanding of Man's nature is the key to reasoning about right and wrong, without truth we can make no approach to moral and ethical standards.

     Without truth, evil becomes not merely undefined, but undefinable.

     It should follow that a conscious attempt to persuade others to accept an untruth – a falsehood or a dangerously inaccurate statement – is evil. It’s possible to harm others in other ways, of course, but as I said above, much harm is done by the well-meaning. Also, the infliction of harm is sometimes necessary to effect justice. However, with the exception of games in which no one’s rights are at stake, conscious deception, whether crude or artful, is always evil.

     Consider, if you will, the oft-repeated lie that many thousands of Iraqi civilians – the fictions given have varied between 100,000 and 300,000 – were killed by American forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some of those – the already deceived – purvey this lie unknowingly. But others do so knowing perfectly well that it’s false. In the usual case, those liars proceed thence to lies about the theft of Iraq’s oil by American corporations. Their purpose is evil: to paint the American liberation of Iraq from the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein as itself evil.

     Other large-scale lies of recent vintage include claims that the federal government distributes heroin and cocaine in black communities; that AIDS was invented in a government lab as a weapon of war; and that a third of American children routinely and involuntarily “go hungry.” Those who promulgate such falsehoods have an agenda. They believe getting others to accept their deceits will serve that agenda. The truth – that heroin and cocaine, the “recreational drugs” of choice for an unfortunate number of persons, are mostly produced and sold by private criminal organizations; that the source of the AIDS virus was most probably West African chimpanzees; that food is so available in the U.S. that the most common health problem the poorest Americans face is obesity – doesn’t serve that agenda.

     These lies, in other words, are tools villains use to twist the minds of the ignorant and insufficiently skeptical. Their purveyors seek to make you into a tool: to use you for their own ends.

     The conscious intention to use others for one’s own ends and against their interests is the defining characteristic of the villain.

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     A healthful skepticism about bombastic claims is a survival necessity in our time. Not all hyper-dramatic claims are strokes in support of an evil enterprise, of course, but even those are worth a cocked eyebrow and some desultory fact-checking. No one’s email has ever been chosen to win a vast sum of money in some European lottery. There are no African heiresses looking to share their good fortune with you, if only you’ll oblige by sending them your bank account number and routing information by return mail. And sorry, lonely gents, beautiful Russian ladies aren’t gaspingly eager to meet and mate with you.

     No, he who asks you to accept such claims isn’t necessarily a villain...but if I were you, in my future interactions with him I’d keep one hand on my wallet and the other on my gun. Be prepared with the sharpest of sharp questions: “Who? By when? How do you know? Who else have you serviced? Can you provide references?” Count evasive answers against them.

     But soft! What email through yonder server breaks? Well, looky here! Intergalactic Representations Ltd. has read this blog and is certain they can make me a world-famous author! All I have to do is send them a copy of my most recent story and a check for $2500, and they’ll be on it faster than you can say “Eschew Rebarbative Anfractuosities And Obfuscatory Vermiculations!” Now where did I leave my checkbook...

     (Recommended: M. Scott Peck’s The People Of The Lie)

Competence And Commitment: A Personal Reflection

     This earlier piece has stimulated some memories, not all of which are pleasant ones...but which I feel I should recount even so. In part, that’s because the subject – competence – is important, but in equal measure it’s because I want my Gentle Readers to know the relevant stuff about the guy who writes these sententious, often contentious pieces.

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     First, a brief vignette from the early Nineties. It was December, the day before our Christmas break, an interval of paid holidays that spanned Christmas and New Year’s Day. My employer was wise enough to realize that nothing much gets done over that period, and preferred to close its buildings rather than pay to keep them pointlessly open. Most of us looked forward to that interval...most of the time.

     I was straining to find a problem in one of the most difficult pieces of work I’d ever undertaken. Without going into gory detail, let it suffice to say that no one else in the company was equal to the task. As our story begins, I wasn’t sure that I was, either.

     Closing time was approaching, and there was little work and general jubilation. I wasn’t part of that. The problem I was focused on occupied the whole of my attention. It became obvious as time passed that I wouldn’t crack it that day. Unhappily but resolutely, about half an hour before we were all supposed to vamoose, I informed my supervisor that I’d need building access over the Christmas break.

     He was stunned. He called his supervisor, who was equally stunned. That worthy called Security to arrange to have the building kept heated, lighted, and guarded – yes, it was a defense contractor – and the Security people were stunned...and very unhappy, as that meant that one of them would have to be there with me. They called my supervisor to quarrel with my request.

     My supervisor put his phone aside and asked me, very gently, whether it was really necessary for me to continue through the break.

     “I have to,” I said. “If I don’t crack this now, I’ll lose the thread. That might mean missing the deadline.”

     “Can’t you leave yourself notes?” he pleaded. “Security wants this place cold and dark by five.”

     I just stared at him. He wilted, picked up the phone, and told Security in his don’t-test-me voice that there was no option, it was vital that I be there the following day. (I have a very effective stare.)

     All’s well that ends well. I was able to crack the problem the next day before noon, thus sending an only slightly disgruntled Security officer back to his family and freeing us both to enjoy the rest of the break.

     Yes, I was competent enough to solve the problem, but more important yet, I was committed to solving it, in time and within budget. Everyone else in my chain of command would have let the matter slide – missed deadlines in defense contracting are more common than the ones met – but I wouldn’t have it. I’d committed myself, which put my reputation for always being on time on the line. I was determined to make it come Hell or high water.

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     This second, less pleasant memory comes from just a few years ago.

     A program developed a few years prior to my involvement with it had gained favor with projects other than the one for which it had originally been developed. My supervisor asked me to see if it could be adapted for more general uses than its original, narrow focus. I agreed to do so. Unfortunately and most unwisely, he took that as a commitment to making it so, and told those other projects to expect a version for their use Real Soon Now.

     The program under discussion:

• Was in a language I didn’t know;
• Required a toolchain I’d never used;
• Used third-party libraries I didn’t know;
• Was undocumented and completely uncommented;
• And all the original developers had left the company.

     I couldn’t even get the BLEEP!ing thing to run, much less begin to probe its structure and what bound it so tightly to its original focus. After a few weeks’ struggle, I went back to my superior and reported my inability to get anywhere with it. He was stunned – and well he might be, as I’d never before admitted to defeat by anything. Then he proceeded to stun me:

     “You have to make it work,” he said. “[Another project] is expecting it by the end of March.”

     I restrained my temper by a very narrow margin. “I didn’t commit to solving this for you,” I said. “I said I would look at it. I have, and I can’t get anywhere with it. There’s just too much I don’t know.”

     “Well,” he said, “what do you need?”

     “Someone who knows the language and the toolchain, at least,” I said.

     “I don’t have anybody I can give you,” he replied. (He had sixty software engineers reporting to him at that time, yet I was sure that was true. We were very tightly scheduled.)

     I summoned my reserves of resolve, which were rather low at the time, and said, “Then I can’t commit to this. You’ll have to tell [the other project] that it’s a research problem.”

     (“A research problem” is what we call any ball-of-yarn undertaking where we have no idea whether it can be done, much less how soon or for what budget.)

     I felt bad about saying that. For one thing, I was the company’s top software guy, and I’d never failed at anything before that. For another, the desirability of the endeavor was very high; we could milk a lot of revenue from it. And for a third, I genuinely liked my supervisor and hated to tell him no.

     But I couldn’t commit to a project with a fixed delivery date when I was so completely incompetent in so many of the required areas of knowledge.

     Once again, it ended well. My reputation was sufficient to move the immovable: my supervisor “shook the tree,” found in another department someone familiar with the language and toolchain who could assist me, and together we cracked the mysteries of the program and found ways to generalize it sufficiently. However, the larger point here is what matters. Knowing that I wasn’t competent to solve the problem alone forced me to withhold any commitment to it. My chain of command, realizing that I was only reporting the facts of the matter, acquiesced to my needs.

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     It’s impossible to squeeze blood from a stone. If you can’t, you can’t, and there’s no honest, responsible way to avert the admission. You have to be willing to say “I can’t,” and / or “I need help,” and stand your ground. Yes, it’s about appropriate humility, but not entirely so. It’s part and parcel of your personal integrity: your commitment to the truth.

     For there are higher and lower commitments in life, and the acceptance of that fact is essential to anyone who puts himself at the service of others. You must be ready to recognize and bow to a higher commitment even at the cost of admitting to the limits of your competence. If you’ve never been there before, it can be an occasion for personal embarrassment.

     In a commercial context, the highest of all commitments is to an old maxim of conduct: “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” But truth, including the truth about oneself, matters just as much in any other interaction with other people. You must never, ever never, ever say “I can and will” if there’s an appreciable chance that you can’t or won’t.

     The admission of one’s limitations is essential to the concept of competence. Yet far too many persons in far too many walks of life are unwilling to do so. It’s too great a blow to their “self-esteem.”

     “Vanity. Definitely my favorite sin.” – Al Pacino, as Satan, in The Devil’s Advocate.

Ultimate Quickies: Dana Deals It!

     Yes, yes, I said I wouldn’t be posting today...but you simply must see this:

     A magnificent rant from a magnificent woman!

Reality And The State

     The following is in part an extension of the thoughts in “Mimes” and in part an addendum to Dystopic’s superb essay “Good is Evil.” I hope you’ve read them both.

     The great majority of psychiatrists purvey an expensive, jargon-heavy pseudo-science for which little to no objective basis exists. The consequences of investing one’s trust in one can be severe, especially if the psychiatrist is hooked on some au courant mental-health snake-oil nostrum. However, there are a few who will tell you, unabashedly and in simple language, what you need to know to “get well”...which almost invariably amounts to: Cowboy the fuck up and face reality.

     The late M. Scott Peck was one:

     What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively, that I call discipline? They are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools whose application demands extensive training. To the contrary, they are simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of ten. Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them.

     Here’s another:

     Why, after all, is the truth said to be sacred? Why can’t we indulge the parts of ourselves and our culture that suggest we can slip the bindings of reality and use our imaginations to pretend we have more friends than we do, or that we aren’t facing mortal enemies abroad, or that our leaders need not be authentic, so long as they are entertaining, or that our companies need not prove their value, assuming they can assert it, convincingly?

     The answer is this: Human beings suffer in exact proportion to the extent that they depart from the truth. This is a structural beam of the individual and collective human mind and soul, perhaps literally encoded in our DNA, and it defines our place in the universe. Human beings need the truth as much as we need food. Jesus and Gandhi both proved it by fasting, when necessary, until certain truths became known to them and others. And, for the sake of this argument, it matters not at all to me whether you believe that this elemental need is woven into us by God or by science. It just is.

     Dr. Ablow’s last three words are the one and only key to emotional health: What is, is. Deny it at your peril.

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     Mimes was about the deliberate destruction of the objective meanings of words in service to an overt agenda that contradicts reality. Good is Evil reviews the Orwellian use of the deliberate contradiction of verifiable realities to induce passivity and submission in one’s targets. Reality, of course, is “the point:” the point the destroyers want to obscure, and the point you must see despite all the obstacles to it. But here’s the Ace kicker: the destroyers know the truth; they simply don’t want you to know it.

     Smith who knows the truth has a tremendous advantage over Jones who doesn’t. If Smith is a man of good will, he will attempt to “clue Jones in,” so the two of them will see the same reality and can cooperate in coping with it. But if Smith is morally deficient – a destroyer – he will attempt to profit from Jones’s misconceptions.

     One of the things the destroyers know is that government – the institution that is allowed to use force against others – cannot produce anything but deprivation, destruction, and death. The bedrock political deceit is the notion that the use of force against peaceable others is justifiable – perhaps even mandatory – if it can “solve” some “problem” or achieve some “desirable end.”

     Government is not “just another word for the things we do together.” As George Washington apparently did not say, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

     The destroyers know that, too.

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     Remus’s essay “Frankly My Dear” is one of the most popular ever to grace this site. Why? The reason is simple: It tells the truth about a subject on which our eyes have been averted from the facts to make room for pretty lies. Other Liberty’s Torch essays that have proved popular share that central virtue: truth about a subject dominated by attractive fictions.

     Dr. Ablow was more right than even he might know: People hunger for the truth. They know, in their heart of hearts, that they’ve been deceived, that the grand, ever-expanding campaign of public deception rolls on, gathering force from second to second. They suspect that they know why. But misbegotten notions about “politeness” and “political correctness” have inhibited the great majority of them from speaking out.

     Schematic: A politician lies to you. You smell it and accuse him of trying to deceive you for his own advancement. How does he respond? With manufactured outrage. Perhaps he’ll accuse you of “racism,” or “sexism,” or “lacking compassion,” or of “questioning his patriotism.” If you’re typical, the accusations will either silence you or disgust you into abandoning the field.

     Have a few truths:

• The biggest racists and sexists in America are politicians, as studies of politicians’ staffs have confirmed.
• Politicians are completely uncompassionate; they merely seek more of your money with which to buy votes, regardless of the havoc that results.
• To go into politics in this year of Our Lord 2015 is virtually a Certificate of Un-Patriotism. A true patriot would have no truck with the lying, thieving, murdering apparatus government in these United States has become. Rather, he would seek to empty the halls of power completely, perhaps as an overture to demolishing them once and for all.

     How many of us are willing to say any of that into a live microphone, perhaps at a politician’s “town hall” meeting?

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     A final thought for this morning: Along with the many words whose meanings are being undermined or utterly destroyed, there are words and phrases whose utility is for nothing but deception. Their destructive power screams to have them excised from our political discourse. Today, one eclipses all others for cogency: public service.

     “Who is the public? What does it hold as its good?” cried Hank Rearden at his “trial” for an “illegal” sale of Rearden Metal to Ken Danagger. Do you have an answer, Gentle Reader?

     I have never held elective nor appointive office. I have never worked in government. Yet I am a public servant, and have been all my life. I produce products that are voluntarily purchased by my customers, to their material profit or non-material benefit. In all probability, this is also true of you.

     What of the individuals to whom the title “public servant” is normally applied? How do these richly compensated, perquisite-heavy barons of the “public good,” to whom nothing but more power and prestige really seems to matter, actually “serve” the public?

     I’d love to see one of them compelled to mime it.

What my forefathers said...

I don’t ask this of myself often enough, “What am I doing to show that I deserve to live in a country so many have sacrificed so much for?”

How about you?

Off The Mishnory Road: Absolutes

I’ve long held the belief that any man who’s willing to assert the absolute truth of even one statement must eventually accept that every well-formed statement – i.e., a statement that either posits a fact or a causal mechanism -- is either absolutely true or absolutely false, men’s contrary opinions notwithstanding. The concept behind that assertion is, of course, that there is such a thing as absolute truth – objective reality itself – which makes my notion quasi-tautological. For all that, note how few persons are willing to contradict the anti-objectivity propagandists of our time. That latter sort is permitted to gambol about screaming that “There are no absolutes!” virtually without contradiction – not even a murmur of “Including that one?”

Note how this applies to argument. This significant episode related by Mike Adams:

When I asked another feminist to debate me on abortion she said that she didn’t discuss such personal topics publicly. But then I read her biography. After talking about losing her virginity (including details about how she cleaned the blood off the couch afterwards) she dedicated countless pages to the issue of abortion and how a “lack of choice” adversely affects young women. After reading on, I realized why she didn’t tell me the truth. She revealed that she was a postmodernist who didn’t like to use the word “truth.”

The next time I got into an argument with a feminist – over whether a female student who lied about a rape to get out of a test should be expelled – I understood the postmodern feminist position better. Feminists just can’t help but lie because there really is no such thing as the truth.

Since so many feminists cannot tell the truth - because it doesn’t even really exist - I simply cannot take them seriously.

Columnist Maggie Gallagher once wrote that if there is no such thing as objective, absolute truth, then all our statements to one another are merely instruments of manipulation, attempts to use one another, or to avoid being used. Apply that insight to Mike Adams’s encounter related above, and ponder the implications.

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A couple of recent political polls have presented the reader with an intriguing question: “Among the following issues in current political discourse, which would be your ‘hill to die on?’” To select any of the subsequent choices – or an issue not listed – would imply that the reader holds that position as “a matter of principle,” not to be compromised at any price. But given how few persons grasp the meaning of principle, we might prefer a clearer statement: “My position on this issue is absolutely right; therefore, I cannot be persuaded to retreat from it.”

In that connection, have a favorite quote from Herbert Spencer:

I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong of the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal.

...and a snippet from 1984:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If Spencer and Orwell were correct, then our adversaries’ entire campaign consists of the assertion that two plus two can be made not to make four by political decree. Ponder the implications of that.

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There is an underlying objective reality. All the froth and gas about the irremediable uncertainty of human knowledge is merely an attempt to confuse the issue: to substitute human limitations for that metaphysical postulate. While we can never achieve absolute precision in our knowledge of reality, we can approach it asymptotically. The Principle of Correspondence, the very heart of theoretical physics, expresses that postulate as well as it can be expressed.

Consider also the Aristotelian approach to definition: the assignment of objects to categories on the basis of their shared properties. No other approach to definition makes abstraction, and therefore reasoning, possible – and it rests immovably upon the assumption that an object’s properties are objectively real rather than mere matters of opinion.

It is possible that objective reality has a dynamic aspect – i.e., that some or all of the laws of nature change over time, albeit very slowly. Indeed, modern cosmology is founded on that conjecture. However, whatever reality is at a given instant is what it is. Quoth Star in Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road:

"May it please milord hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be. Either way, it is what it is. Le voila! Behold it, self-demonstrating. Das Ding an Sich. Bite it. It is. Ai-je raison? Do I speak truly?"

Either that truism is true beyond the possibility of refutation, or there’s no point in saying anything at all.

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One point of these “Off The Mishnory Road” pieces is to deflect current conversation from politics, a realm in which “everybody’s got a right to an opinion,” to the bedrock upon which all argument must be based, political argument most emphatically included. Given that, this essay should be considered the prerequisite to all the others. It’s rather a pity that that didn’t occur to me up front, but here we are.

In effect, I want us to be equipped to make the following statement to a political opponent:

“Regardless of how passionately attached we are to our respective positions, we can’t evade this: one of us is right and the other is wrong. We have to have some criteria to determine which is which, if our politics is to be beneficial rather than harmful. What criteria should we use? In other words, what evidence would persuade you to reconsider your position, and what evidence would persuade me to reconsider mine?”

Evidence – facts – data from objective reality – is the only means by which any position can be verified or falsified. He who is not prepared to accept the possibility that data might exist that contradict his position has elevated it to an article of faith...and you know it’s useless to argue matters of faith.

More anon.

A Crisis Of Meaning

“The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis.” – Piers Anthony, Macroscope

Political persuasion specialist Michael Emerling has said that the meaning of a communication inheres in the reaction of the receiver. Unless you have a considerable grounding in epistemology and semantics, that statement can be somewhat difficult to decode. Yet it’s one of the most important statements ever made about political outreach. Recent developments in the strategies and tactics of the Left have made it essential for freedom lovers to grasp it and internalize it.

For openers, consider the following episode:

The Obama Administration, following in the footsteps of another noteworthy Democrat liar (“It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”), has decided to defend the indefensible by arbitrarily redefining the terms of discussion. That this has been viewed – so far, at least – as merely one more outrage to add to the Obamunist ledger suggests that in political discourse words shall no longer be permitted to have enduring meanings. If this is the case, our political degeneracy has reached a terminal stage.

But pause for a moment and reflect upon:

• What Administration spokesdroid Eric Schultz said;
• The meaning drawn from it by those who have heard his words.

No one with three functioning brain cells could imagine that the Taliban, whose operational tactics are indistinguishable from those of other Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, is anything but a terrorist organization. It differs from the others only in once having had control of a nation-state. Calling it an “armed insurgency” cannot change the objective facts of its behavior; it can only provide a tissue-thin rhetorical cover for the Obama Administration’s actions toward it.

So what Schultz said amounted to “Don’t probe us on this or we’ll take some sort of vengeance for it later.” That’s almost certainly the meaning he wanted his audience to derive from it. However, the meaning they drew from it might have included that, but surely also included: “The Obama Administration will do what it damned well pleases when it damned well pleases, without regard for the prior policies of this or any other Administration.”

Ponder the difference for a moment before continuing on.

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Man’s rational capacity requires the use of symbols. The reason is embedded in the nature of reason itself:

• To reason is to make use of abstractions – generalizations from specific cases to general patterns – to deduce effects from causes applied to adequately specified contexts.
• One cannot conceive an abstraction without inserting symbols – each one a placeholder for a generic member of some defined class – into one’s conception.
• Thus, symbols with stable meanings are essential to the conception and employment of abstractions.

(A little deep for a Thursday morning? Blame my snowblower, which weighs twice what I do and was massively disinclined to deal with the load Mother Nature dropped on my driveway Monday night and Tuesday morning.)

This is so fundamental to human mentation that even mathematicians tend to be unaware of it until it’s been proposed to them explicitly. It’s too automatic – too integral to Man’s pursuit of knowledge about the world and the creatures in it. Compelling oneself to think about it involves deliberately inserting oneself into a “strange loop” of the sort Douglas Hofstadter wrote about in Godel, Escher, Bach. Such a loop has no exit point upon which we can rely.

By corollary, if one is forbidden to attribute stable meanings to certain symbols – for example, the words used in political discourse – one cannot make sense of the statements that employ them. A barrier rises between our minds and the truths of reality with which we must grapple.

This is immensely appealing to those who seek to evade the consequences appropriate to their actions.

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I wrote some time ago:

In the ideological clashes of today, the attention of the greater mass of Americans is focused on secondary matters. Arguments over national defense, tax rates, social policy directions, regulatory structures, and so forth continue to rage, but with less prospect of being satisfactorily settled than ever before...because a critical pinion for all argument of any sort has been undermined near to collapse.

The pinion of which I speak is the concept of objective truth.

It's hard for most people to grasp that objective truth is a conception, rather than something self-evident. Yet furious philosophical battles have been fought over it. The negative side has never conceded defeat. They've advanced reason after reason to doubt the existence of objective reality. As each one is destroyed, they shift to another. In a sense, their proposition is its own strongest weapon, for they respond rather frequently to even the most obvious points by saying, "No, that's your truth" -- an implicit claim that it's the not the observation but the observer's willingness to accept it that really matters.

John Q. Public has heard little of this, of course; it's mostly fought in the ivory towers, and in the publications that cater to professional intellectuals. All the same, it matters to him more than he's able to appreciate.

Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as "partisan" and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification -- in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true -- their argument over X will never end.

An interest group that has "put its back against the wall" as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can't be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

As the years have flowed past, I’ve come to consider that particular essay the most important of all my emissions onto the Web. Indeed, the importance of its core thesis has risen to the point that no political statement can be assessed without evaluating whether the words it uses are being employed according to their public meanings: i.e., the meanings private persons routinely attribute to them. In other words, we must determine whether the speaker respects the truths those words are used by us common folk to express.

The effort involved in even listening to political gabble has risen proportionately to politicians’ self-defensive reinterpretations of key words and phrases. Such reinterpretations are inherently attempts to evade the facts.

If you’ve wondered why it is that no politician ever answers a yes-or-no question with a yes-or-no answer, wonder no longer. It’s utterly impossible to reinterpret “yes” and “no.” That makes them quicksand for the politician determined to retain the option to “adjust” his positions for subsequent needs.

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Yesterday afternoon, the esteemed Glenn Reynolds wrote thus:

IN JOHN CARTER’S WORDS, I STILL LIVE: Andrew Sullivan is going to stop blogging. No, blogging isn’t dead. And InstaPundit gets more pageviews than pretty much everyone who’s calling blogging dead. But I can understand Andrew quitting. For me, the real strain isn’t the blogging, but having to pay close attention to the news all the time. The news is usually depressing, when it’s not angering, and that’s doubly true for the Obama years. But I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

I’m pleased that our beloved InstaPundit has resolved to soldier on, but ponder for a moment why “The news is usually depressing, when it’s not angering.” There’s always been a large percentage of bad news in the news; after all, the major maxim of journalism has always been “if it bleeds, it leads.” In earlier decades, we were far more confident that bad news with political import – i.e., negative developments the response to which would appropriately come from an American government – would be confronted squarely and coped with properly. Public confidence in such a response ain’t what she used to be. (If that comes as news to you, congratulations on a really long nap.)

The reason is the increasing – today near to absolute – unwillingness of our political class to confront reality when doing so might make it look bad.

When reality slaps you across the face with a wet mackerel, the only imaginable evasion is rhetorical: “No, no! While it did look like a mackerel, it wasn’t an authentic mackerel, as these variances along the lateral fins and the belly scales should make obvious. Besides, I turned forty-five degrees in the instant of the first impact, so it didn’t get my right cheek, so I wasn’t really slapped across the face. Anyway, we’re still good friends.” Dealing with the evasions and their implications is what I find most wearying and most angering. I’d be surprised if that weren’t so for Reynolds and many other commentators who’ve been tempted to lay down their keyboards.

Politicians’ methods for evading reality increasingly employ redefinitions of common words and phrases, distortions of their meanings, and a refusal to use those terms whose meanings are so strongly established that they cannot be so treated. The marvel of political journalism in our time is that anyone still bothers to ask a politician a question, when we all know that the answer will be self-serving rather than honestly responsive. Why, indeed, should a reporter bother to report on political statements and orations, which are inevitably more deceitful than informative? The temptation must be strong to eschew such wastes of ink and pixels, and merely report on politicians’ deeds as recorded by cameras and microphones.

Our political destroyers – and by that term, I mean our entire political class, regardless of party affiliation – have embroiled us in a meaning-crisis whose consequence is a truth-crisis. They are resolved that we shall never be able to hold them to the least of their statements. (Their promises? Forget it, Jake.) If we can be battered out of our reliance on the meanings of common words and phrases, our yearning for truth, and our belief in objective reality, their paths to absolute power over us will be completely unobstructed at long last.

Food for thought.