#43: Persuasion and Justification

The psychology of titling is such, I think, that when one constructs a conjunctive title, one tends to put the “more important” conjunct first. Thus you might expect that I would have entitled this piece rather “Justification and persuasion.” But that would be because you begin with an automatic bias in favor of justification inherited from an ancient invidious comparison between the two.

The rot began among the Socratic Greeks, and probably within the writings of Plato himself, who distinguished between philosophers, the good guys, and the sophists, the bad guys. The sophists were itinerant teachers and lecturers who taught the skills of rhetoric for pay. “Real” philosophers contemptuously dismissed them for teaching not “the Truth,” but the skill of “making the worse argument appear the better.” Nonetheless, some of the sophists were very sophisticated indeed and commanded even Plato’s attention and respect. The distinction between “mere cleverness” and “truth” has persisted, however, through the millennia, as has the distinction between persuasion and justification.

Since justification plays such an important role in science, both in the form of induction and deduction, and since science was extended to social, political, and moral issues in the exuberant “scientistic” enthusiasm of the 18^th century, we have come to expect justification in arenas where it simply does not apply.

Conservatives have foolishly accepted the justification challenge in the form laid down by progressives, a challenge they were doomed to lose from the outset. Progressives, on the other hand, derived an equally foolish consequence from the conservative inability to justify. Progressives believed (and still believe) that the inability to justify entails an absence of a “right” to defend!

They reason in this way: You have a right to defend your values or way of life only if you can justify your “belief” that it is better than your opponents. Of course, there is shrewd calculation in this foolishness, since it is the intention of the progressives to paralyze the conservative.

The tacit assumption of both sides is the same as that of the 18^th century “enlightenment” scientism, namely that all of human issues are susceptible of “rational” determination.

As I have written earlier, this is simply false. Values are no more than personal preferences, no different in kind from culinary preferences. They are not susceptible to rational determination because they are not strictly speaking beliefs at all. They are rather emotive and behavioral dispositions. In ordinary language, we call these dispositions “preferences,” and that is how I will refer to them. Any attempt to derive either a general principle or a particular prediction is always subject to rejection.

The progressive would like to be able to generalize from individual human judgments, beliefs, and actions, and then to force regularity on people by means of those generalizations. The problem is that the respondent is clearly entitled to say no. Perhaps the case in question is slightly different or perhaps he has just changed his inclination. He doesn't have to defend his response! De gustibus non est disputandum. I’ll adapt this to read: “there’s no disputing preferences.”

This is truly a Solomonic resolution of the impasse between conservatives and progressives: they both gain something and both lose something. The conservative loses the claim that his preferences have absolute justification (say “divine”), which is welcomed by the progressive; the progressive, on the other hand, loses any basis for demanding it of him, which is welcomed by the conservative.

There are three basic reasons why the demand for justification continues to be so readily tolerated where it does not belong.

The first reason is the one already mentioned, namely that our enlightenment tradition has promoted “reason” (in some counterfeit of “science”) as the self-evident panacea for all human ailments. We still suffer the side effects of this panacea, which belongs rather in the pharmacopeia of the naturopath, than in the resources of a genuine social physician.

The second reason is justification does have a legitimate role within the context of purely legal decision making, this being so because the context supplies the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one outcome is “right” and another “wrong.” In this respect, justification, like law and like logic, have game-like qualities. Progression towards a destination in each of these is governed by rules accepted by the participants.

The third reason brings the discussion to full circle. The third reason is that both induction and deduction are frequently used within the context of persuasion.

If I wish to move you over to my side of an issue, there seem to be at least two ways in which I can approach the process. I call the first one the utopian one, and in its finest form (say the Spinozistic one), it attempts to take you from utterly unassailable axioms through deductive steps to an unavoidable conclusion. This is axiomatic wisdom and ethics. It doesn’t work as persuasion, if only because it is always possible for the respondent to have recourse to Moore’s device if he doesn’t like the theorem reached by this method.

The other, and most common method, is that of seeking assumptions, beliefs, and preferences in the respondent’s warehouse of attitudes, not even necessarily ones that one shares, which have the salutary effect of either indicating inductively or entailing deductively the proposition one is marketing. This the pragmatic approach to persuasion which is not inherently rational, but which might use rational as well as non-rational devices for a strictly causal objective: giving a person a disposition to go our way. In the utopian method, an error of inference disqualifies the result; in the pragmatic method, errors of inference are easily dismissed.

But more to the point, persuasion is the real-world method of managing human relations, not Socratic dialectic. In the real world, when faced with counter-intuitive argumentation, non-brainwashed respondents dismiss the results whether or not they can see clearly where the fallacy lies. Intuition trumps argumentation. As Hume put it so beautifully in his footnote on Berkeley, “all his arguments, … admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause … momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion…”.

The so-called progressive hopes to change the population in such a way that this survival adaptive mechanism in the human animal is neutralized and he becomes easy prey for the specious argument and counter-intuitive conclusions. The progressive wants to create a world in which “justification” determines belief, not persuasion.

Let’s reverse the nasty trend that originated in that much over-rated and mis-named century, the “Enlightenment,” and encourage those around us to return to their natural and spontaneous preferences, letting them know that these need no defense.

#42: "Natural" Rights, Again

What are Natural Rights?

I

This is a subject I have not researched at all, though it must have an enormous literature. Not knowing this literature, however, may actually be an advantage, since so much of that literature must inevitably consist of self-important bafflegab. The reason I say this lies in my “naturalism.” The familiar meaning of “naturalist” is that of a person devoted to the scientific study of nature. I’m clearly not one of those. The second, rarer, use of the term is for a philosopher who believes that there exists nothing beyond nature. I am one of those. So, what, in particular, does this metaphysical view entail.

The first and obvious entailment is that there are no “super”-natural entities, and this, sadly, includes God. I’m not sure, though, that faith in the form of non-rational belief does not still allow God to be non-rationally believed in. This is a difficult question and requires much time and reflection. The genuine benefits of civilized God-belief to an evolved culture make me wish quite fervently that room can be made within the modern “first” world for a benevolent God (which, to make my biases clear, I take the Judaeo-Christian one to be). Is it possible that only bad faith can allow both rational and non-rational belief to exist within the same person? I suppose so, but in all honesty I’m simply not sure. Thus, following the Cartesian principle, I choose to suspend both rational and non-rational belief on this question, at least for the moment.

The second, and possibly more important, entailment is that there are no non-natural moral properties!

That there are such properties has been held by philosophers as eminent as G.E. Moore and the German Nicolai Hartmann. The view is usually called “Moral Intuitionism” because it necessarily holds that since there are “non-natural” properties, human beings must be endowed with a special faculty (“Moral Intuition”) for perceiving them. On this doctrine, human actions have characteristics or properties not accessible to our commonly agreed-upon sense-organs, but do, however, possess, in addition to those sense-organs, the ability to perceive the (non-natural) properties of “goodness” and “badness.”

Our ordinary language seems to support such a view. We do, for example, speak of a “sense” of humor and it is true that like color or smell it is impossible to explain to a person without the requisite sense what the property in question is like. It isn’t a long reach to making a similar argument for special moral qualities (and special associated “sense”) or aesthetic qualities or, for that matter, religious ones.

Notwithstanding, I’m not convinced that these facts force us to conclude that there are “qualities” in actions which are not a part of nature. What, you might well ask, does it take to be a “natural” quality?

I suggest that that it means that a quality is causally linked to the entire system of objects and properties a large part of which human beings share perceptually. Perceived “redness,” for example, is a “natural” property because it has a physically definable correlate in the form of wavelengths of light between 5000 and 7000 angstroms, and those wavelengths of lights are capable of being affected by other physical existents. “Redness,” thus, is a member in good standing of the community of causally linked natural existents. “Goodness,” in contrast, has no physically definable correlate, and is thus not a “natural” property.

We can conclude from this one of two things: either 1) there are more things in heaven and earth (or at least earth) than we literally perceive, or 2) that while we speak as if there are, this is at most metaphorical speech. I lean to the latter option, thinking that what is actually occurring here is no more than an expression of some common human psychological traits rooted within a tiny disposition towards benevolence. I follow Hume on this matter. It is in this sense that I am a “naturalist.”

II

It also follows from this position that there are no “natural rights.”

The reason is that “rights” are not matters of fact, they pertain to the world of obligations. We usually express this in classes on ethical theory as a distinction between “is” (fact) and “ought” (obligation). Facts are said to be “objective,” i.e. they “hold” independently of human perception or judgment, while obligations are, at the very least, undecided as to status. Being a “naturalist,” I hold that they are not objective in the above sense, that they are fictions, often useful fictions, but fictions nonetheless. They are objective, of course, as fact about what human do in their societies, but this does not make them objective as facts that contain our obligations (outside the scope of a society).

So, what is a right?

To the best of my ability to define, a right seems to be no more than a contractually based promise of service from a society to individuals, whether citizens or others. It resembles, to some extent, the promise that is made by an Insurance company when, for example, one purchases automobile insurance. The company pledges to do something specified in the contract should something else specified in the contract happen to one’s car. Insurance is a promise to perform under certain circumstances; rights are promises to perform under certain circumstances. Understood as promises, rights necessarily involve a promissor and a promissee.

“Rights” are conferred on individuals, the promissees, by a state, the promissor. While the State is not a person and there might be a cavil about a non-person making a promise, we need only remember Louis XIV’s famous remark, l’etat c’est moi. In at least that case, the state was personified in a single person, and it would appear there was no problem with the State promising.

In the most common cases, rights are conferred only on adult citizens, but there is no reason in principle why a state should not confer rights on non-adults or non-citizens as well. Not long ago, children were extended the right to sue and, indeed, Left-wing loons have been recently suggested that rights be conferred on non-humans as well as humans. The animal rights people have been suggesting that animals also be given the right to sue. I don’t know whether they intend the right to extend to insects and/or microbes. Time will tell.

Rights as such seem to emerge directly from social contract theory, the idea that societies gain their cohesion and legitimacy from a contract made within a long forgotten “state of nature” in which every man’s hand was against every man, and “the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The original “deal” is thought as having been an agreement to give up individual clubs and pointy sticks in exchange for centralized protection. I guess that’s where the cosa nostra got the idea of selling protection.

Most people are pretty sure that that fabled meeting never actually took place, though I do imagine it vividly as happening in a sun-dappled, wooded clearing, with neanderthally looking people emerging slowly and suspiciously from the surrounding shadows, clutching their pointy sticks. If it didn’t happen, it sure should have. It would make a great movie, and I have some great suggestions for the casting (for another time).

The point, however, is that that protection deal (whether it happened or not) is, as it were, the first right: You have a right not to be poked with a sharp stick or bludgeoned by another. WE, the State, promise you this!

But in that beginning there was another promise made as well, more important than the non-poking promise, and that was the promise that promises would be kept: You have a right to receive whatever another promises to deliver to you. WE, the State, promise you this. Without this promise, no one would have had a reason to believe the protection promise.

The more perceptive among you will notice a bit of circularity here, but fortunately for history, the original assembly of founders in the forest did not include a logician and the deal still went through. The circularity is that the State's guarantee of promises is only as good as the State's own promise.

Now, in marketing the rights that were initially granted someone thought it important to claim on their behalf that they “really existed,” that they were there in the woods the whole time, and that they just needed a deal, a social contract, in order to be “activated.” The PR advisor of the time seemed to think that it would be harder to sell the whole thing if all that could be said for the initial rights was that they were the best that the lawyers could think of. So they claimed that those rights were “natural,” which entailed that they had been “discovered,” not invented.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What could be meant by claiming that these are rights that would exist even in the state of nature?

When Oooog jabs his pointy stick into Mooog and kills him, taking LaaLa for his very own, was Mooog’s natural right to life violated (not to mention his natural right to LaaLa)? Perhaps, but no more so than his right to be a lot handsomer than he was, a homo sapiens rather than a Neanderthal, and to be living on a yacht moored off Corfu with a Swiss account of 800 million euros at his disposal.

III

In conclusion, one can say that just about anything exists, but, as we used to say in the East Bronx, just saying so, don’t make it so.

#41: The Fantasy of "Natural" Rights

The battle for personal freedom is often stated to be a battle for individual rights. This, it seems to me, is as misleading as the Left’s cry for “social justice.” In neither case are we dealing with anything objective in any sense. “Social justice” is just another name for the socialist enterprise of stealing money from the well-off to pad the pockets of the apparatchiks and to distribute for votes among the poor. But, at the same time, there really aren’t any individual “rights” either. Neither are there any “natural” rights.

The most that “rights” can be are legislated abstract entitlements. This means that “rights” are legal fictions whose only existence is within some existing social and legal framework. Thus, we can, on the one hand, demand new “rights,” or, on the other, we can demand that ones already ours be respected. The arguments for new rights, however, are extremely difficult to make, since (and here’s the point) there is no such thing as a “right” to a right. Such a special “right” would have to be a “super-right” or a “meta-right,” a right that exists independently of social-cultural entities.

What I mean is that an argument for a new right would require appeal to a reason why a state ought to confer a new entitlement on its population or part of its population. But “oughts” only make sense in terms of “rights”, and thus an argument for a new right has to appeal to a such a “super-right” whose function it is to justify demands for ordinary, garden-variety rights.

For example, as a member of minority group X, I demand a new right: the right to preferential treatment in government hiring.

Why should we confer this new right on your group, ask the legislators.

Because, say the representatives of X, we have a right to this new right.

When this kind of argument is made, the super-right appealed to is “super” because it is actually treated as a right that would exist even if there were no societies or nations: it is a right embedded in nature. It is a “natural” right.

But quite apart from the fantasy worlds of philosophers and academic scribblers, where are such “rights” to be found in nature? Can our chemists find them? Can our physicists find them? These rights are no more than the hallucinations of over-wrought philosophers and so-called political “scientists.”

Ultimately, these rights come into existence within societies not because they are “discovered,” but because they are invented by sub-populations large enough to work their will on the whole.

When gays acquire more rights, it will not be because these rights will have been discovered, it will not be because this will have been found to be “just,” it will not be because gays have been found to “deserve” them; it will be because there will be enough people in the society who want them to have these entitlements. Period.

We can see this if we compare the social situation of gays with, say, the social situation of necrophiles. There aren’t many necrophiles, as far as I know, but, then, we didn’t really know how many gays there were until they started coming out of the closet. Right now, most people in the West would really prefer not having a necrophile living next door. If asked why, they would probably say that it “creeps them out.” Some might even say that they find it “disgusting.” But what if hundreds of thousands of necrophiles began to emerge from the closet like endless clowns out of a volkswagen?

It would take a few years, but ultimately we would begin to be taught that necrophiles are “just like us” and entitled to all the same benefits offered by the society to people who prefer their boinking partners to be alive.

The same would hold true for the polygamists, but also for the coprophiles, the people who prefer sheep, and so forth.

It’s just a matter of numbers.

And the rights derive from the preferences of the largest, noisiest group.

The implications of this are both broad and deep.

One implication is that most of the “arguments” for “rights” are beside the point; the point is only 1) how many of them are there, and 2) do they have enough votes?

Another is that our own preferences do not need “justification” (except in a court of law, where societal/cultures rules are made explicit).

Many might take this to be an argument in favor of Leftist-style moral relativism, but the argument is neutral, I think, in this respect.

While a person preferring a Judaeo-Christian society can no longer claim to “defend” his position by appeal to absolute values embedded in the very matter of the universe, it is equally true that he no longer needs this or any other defense of his preference. The same applies to the person on the Left.

And so, the bottom line is this: does each one of us have a “natural right” to what they have earned or made? No. Does anyone else have a “natural right” to it? No. But the good news is that societies can enshrine certain rights in their laws that reflect the preferences of their populations.

My own preference is to live in a society in which the powers of government are quite limited, in which the government must respect personal property, where the government’s ability to tax is controlled by law, where size of government is limited by law, where the personal finances of elected officials are subject to regular independent scrutiny, and where elected officials can be booted out of office by a democratic consensus. I have more preferences on these matters, but these will do for the moment.

I don’t claim that my preferences are given by God or by Nature, the most that I do is ask if there are others who share them and that they, like me, continue to speak and vote for a society like that.

#40 Bad Faith and the Decline of the West

I

Sartre discusses a psychological phenomenon he calls “bad faith” in his 1943 Being and Nothingness. Bad faith is similar to what we sometimes call “self-deception,” but Sartre needs a new name in order to make his point that strictly speaking (on his theory) it is impossible for one to literally “deceive oneself.” After all, he argues, there is only one “self” and deception requires two selves, the one who is deceiving and the one who is deceived.

The significance of this discussion in his work is that he is intent on closing all loopholes on personal responsibility, and “self-deception,” if it were possible, would be such a loophole: we can’t blame so-and-so, he didn’t know the truth of the situation; yes, of course he had access to all relevant information, but he was deceiving himself.

Rubbish, says Sartre, if he had all the relevant information, he knew, and he was therefore responsible for his act and its consequences!

Yet, at the same time, there is a puzzle about the peculiar state of mind we call self-deception. It may be true, as Sartre says, that the “self-deceived” is not really deceived at all and knows the truth, but the degree of self-awareness seems very different from the case in which a person is willfully lying to others. The willful liar seems to know the truth in a way different from the way in which the self-deceived person knows it.

Sartre gives the example of a woman who accepts an invitation for an evening out from a man whose every action and utterance makes totally clear what his intentions are. The woman, in her self representation, sees herself as “not that sort at all,” and understand his interest in her as completely proper and focused entirely on her “personality.” As the evening progresses, it would be clear to any objective observer that his intended destination for the two of them is his bed, but she seems totally unaware of all of his signals. Her mental set becomes obvious when he takes her hand, the first physical contact of the evening. He is looking for information from this contact. If she takes her hand away, he will take this as a signal that his intentions are not hers. If she returns the pressure of his hand, he will take this as a signal to proceed. She does neither, she allows her hand to remain in his, but without the slightest sign of life. The hand is like an inanimate object detached from her body. She continues to chat as if it weren’t there at all. Of course, she does wind up in the bed. But in the morning, and in time to come, it will always seem to her as if the whole thing had happened to someone, or something, else. For her psychological comfort, she dis-associates herself from the body that was engaged in the unacceptable behavior. That wasn’t the real me, she thinks, it was only my body.

Sartre gives this as an instance of bad faith. He has a theory of how this is possible and why we do it, but for my purposes it suffices to focus on the phenomenon, which is I think is quite real and which I think most people will readily recognize. And rather than get involved in the fancy language so loved by continental philosophers, I’ll just describe this as a partially successful refusal to know.

II

Yes, it is possible to refuse to know, though that sounds counter-intuitive at first glance. The refusal usually occurs in a context that requires drawing a conclusion from a set of indications, where that conclusion is too frightening or objectionable to accept. The simplest example is that of the stock horror movie scene where the beautiful young heroine finds herself (as she always does) in a darkened environment and hears a noise behind her. Is it the monster? Of course it is. But does she run? No, she either ignores it or gives it a benevolent interpretation. Why? Because she has no recourse for the awful truth. She chooses to believe an unlikely narrative because the likely one is too horrible for her to tolerate.

So, does she know the truth? Yes, but does she choose to think it? No. We have a choice in what we focus our thoughts on just as we have choice in what we look at. Metaphorically, the person in bad faith chooses to look at the story most acceptable rather than the story most likely.

III

I began with remarks on bad faith because I think we live in a time when our politics, whether in academe or in the centers of power or in the minds of the voters, is governed by bad faith. This is a theme I have been returning to again and again in writing about the modern Left, namely its insistence on the denial of the obvious. While the reasons for the Left’s insistence on marketing the counter-intuitive as the truth vary, I suspect that the machinery of bad faith is responsible for there being such a large population willing to buy their nonsense.

Obama and his surrogates tell us that we shouldn’t “jump to any conclusions” respecting Nadir Hasan’s murders, by which they mean, don’t conclude that that loathsome piece of crap is a muslim terrorist. And a lot of people nod sagely and say, yes, that makes sense, let’s not ‘rush to judgment.’ Perhaps they are just made uncomfortable with the possible mass response, a rational and appropriate one, to our population of “peaceful Muslim neighbors” (whose mosques are recruiting stations for terrorists and sources of funding for acts of terror). All of them? you ask. I don’t know, but it sure seems someone ought be asking in a pretty aggressive way by now. But .. but … but … Yeah, I know – But, but, but.

None of this is new. There was the pacifist movement in the West before and during World War II. Had we listened to the pacifists, we’d probably all be speaking German (or Japanese) and eating decaying sauerkraut or moldy rice in our slave labor camps. Examples of refusal to know can be multiplied endlessly, it seems to be the mind-set of an increasingly weak West, a West whose source of strength, its inherited culture and religion has been systematically attacked and undermined. Culture and religion are the will to survive of a people; once those are gone, the will to defend a way of life goes with them.

The bad, bad news is that we don’t live in a civilized world in which differences are resolved successfully by means of rule-governed talk. The world has never been that way and will likely never become that way.

There are cultures and leaderships that will use force against us.

We can’t buy them off permanently, they just use the time to strengthen themselves.

We can’t threaten them with destruction because most of them don’t either believe it or don’t care.

We can’t starve them into submission because there are others who will feed them (the South Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese).

We can’t pretend that they’re not there like the girls in the horror movie.

This is indeed bad news, but it will be even worse news if we refuse to know it.

#39: Don't Jump to Any Conclusions

Hard as it is to believe, there is a big discussion going on concerning whether Nidal Hasan is an Islamic Terrorist or not. Obama, the fearless leader, tells us “not to jump to conclusions,” as do other lesser mortals like G. Stephanopoulos. As far as the actual question is concerned, I have nothing to add to the excellent and voluminous coverage it has already had. I do want to remind my readers, however, of one of my earlier themes, namely the propensity of the Left to deny the obvious, often in evidence of how much smarter they are than everyone else. This seems to be an “obvious” instance of that phenomenon.

We see a man with a radical Islamist history, with documented Islamist anti-American rants, who carefully plans and executes a massacre while shouting “Allah Akbar!” Given the history of Islamic terrorism against the U.S., a good amount of it actually on American soil, one would think the conclusion “hmm, this is an Islamic terrorist” would leap to the mind and the lip. And it does, for many. Yet, at the same time, we hear frequent cautions that we should not “leap” to a conclusion. After all, this could be a case of post-traumatic shock, it could be a case of a psychotic break, it could be just a criminal act, hell, for that matter, he could have been possessed by a Venusian extra-terrestrial bent on destroying the earth! Hell, it could have been anything, anything at all, anything, that is, except … the most obvious … the rat-bastard was an Islamic terrorist.

Pray tell, how much of a leap is involved, given the already available data? Is this a leap of Olympic proportions? Is it an Evel Knievel Grand Canyon leap gap? How great is the gap between the data and the conclusion? Apparently MUCH greater than the ordinary man in the street recognizes. HE thinks the conclusion is obvious, but the talkers and scribblers of the Left see too many nuances in the situation to draw that conclusion. But why is this? Are they just stupid, as they are always claiming that conservatives are?

I don’t think so. I do believe that Leftist ideology will ultimately cause brain damage, but I think there is more at work here. The reason is that the fatuous politically correct platitudes being exuded now were also exuded by G.W. Bush and his administration. “Don’t leap to a conclusion” about Hasan is of a piece with the flatulent “the vast majority of Muslims are just like you and me, just trying to get through the day, take care of their families.” Yeah, right. There’s a LOT of evidence in favor of this view.

Just as no one with a still functioning frontal lobe will not conclude that Hasan is an Islamic terrorist, no one who still thinks will believe that “the vast majority of muslims …” What is fascinating about the latter nonsense is that it is repeated again and again with a tone of absolute certainty when there is actually not a shred of evidence to support it and much to make it dubious. It is not an empirical generalization, it is much more an article of faith, a presupposition. The way it is said suggests that the sayer is thinking: Oh God, it has to be true, it just has to be.

But why? Why do apparently adult apparently functioning people utter these transparently silly feel good platitudes?

I suspect it is because they are very much afraid of what would happen if they told the truth as our intelligence services know it.

If it were made public that the vast majority of Muslims hate, loathe, detest the West, want all Jews dead, want all Christians dead, want everyone dead except themselves, this would generate, among other things, a lot of hatred of Muslims within the West. Indeed, more than there is now. The Left is very much afraid of public passion, whether it is love or hate. An impassioned public is a public difficult to control and manipulate. But, further, as I argued in an earlier post, the Left has its origins in the rationalism of the so-called Enlightenment, and this rationalism is itself very hostile to passion of any kind (unless it be purely sexual and transient). It is for this reason that it has fought again and again for purely “rational” (and by this read “utilitarian”) accounts of justice, of religion, of relationships. It is for this reason that government no longer encourages the kind of hatred of the enemy that existed in the armed forces (and in the public) during the two great wars of the 20^th C. There was no censoring then of racially colored propaganda in the Pacific theatre, nor were our soldiers penalized for calling the German soldiers the “boche” or “Heinie,” “Jerry,” or “Fritz.” Indeed, in those days, it was almost compulsory to hate the foe. According to Leftist “intellectuals” it is simply “beneath” us now to hate the enemy, and hating the enemy would “make us just like them.”

Perhaps, however, for some of these talkers, there is something that motivates them even beyond this. Leftists the world over have always tended to be pacifists. Of course, some of them are simply ideologically driven. But for others, I cannot help but think, it has to do with money. The way that third-way socialists gain power and maintain power is through the delivery of entitlement benefits, and this is very expensive. War, in effect, makes the delivery of entitlement benefits far more difficult to accomplish, and therefore to do what third-way socialists do for the sake of power. In the decision between guns and butter, your third-way socialist is “all about” butter (and let other people pay for the guns).

Now, if a population begins to hate the enemy, as could well happen with Nidal Hasan and his fellows in America, that population begins to demand aggressive military action, whether at home or abroad, but any such action that is not quickly completed with victory and low costs in both human and material terms is a political disaster. Obama and his Chicago Socialist cabal do not want a political disaster.

Socialists want to stick to what they do best: give away other people’s money; they do not want to get involved in expensive external campaigns. Chamberlain and the third-way socialists, as well as tribal leaders in Africa and the middle east, prefer to take tolerable losses in human life as the cost of doing business, rather than retaliate and engage the enemy. For many leaders, the way to deal with harassment, even murderous harassment, is to either ignore it or attempt to buy it off.

So, it might just be the case that Obama doesn’t want us to “leap to any conclusions” on Nidal Hasan because he just doesn’t want to “go there.”

He really doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what to do with any of the problems facing the U.S.A., and he certainly doesn’t want the bulk of Americans demanding more aggressive action against Muslims in general. What would he do if they did? What could he do? He doesn’t know. But he does know that his special constituencies expect him to continue to expand their entitlements, and military activity is costly, too costly for his tastes and needs.

#38: The Blood-Cow and the Behemoth

As a reasonably sized democratic government transforms itself by imperceptible increments into a socialist Behemoth, it also increasingly transforms the culture into one more and more sympathetic to socialism. In particular, it teaches previously independent people to think of themselves as victims whose only possible defense against predation lies in the existence of a socialist Behemoth. The socialist Behemoth wants the self-image of the average citizen to be changed from one in which pride is taken in autonomy to one in which autonomy is no longer even considered possible. The citizen is taught to think of himself as always under attack by the forces of “big money” and that his only defense lies in “big government.” Obviously, this change is very useful to a behemoth seeking to grow yet larger in size and power.

But even as the Behemoth works to alter the way in which the citizen thinks of himself, the submerged self-image that exists latently within every democratic government surfaces slowly and also by imperceptible degrees. Slowly, the Behemoth becomes itself.

Originally understood by the citizenry and by itself as an instrument, a servant, of the productive people of a country, providing essential large-scale services such as roads and national defense, it comes to a new understanding of itself as it grows. In this new conception, it is no longer a servant and certainly not of the productive citizenry. The population is divided in this new conception into an ever larger supplicant population and an ever more concentrated wealth producing one. The Behemoth is no longer a servant to either one of these populations, it is a master with respect to both. With the former, it is a benevolent and paternal master; with respect to the latter, it is a harsh, vigilant, suspicious, and punitive master. The former population is understood as helpless, pathetic, and childlike. Just like children, the people of this population are never held accountable for anything they do; just like children, they need to be tended to; just like children, they are the ones for whom everything is done.

The productive members of the population, on the other hand, are seen very differently.

On the original socialist notion, all the forces of production were to be owned by the state as whole and managed by the state. This political-economic model proved to be a catastrophic failure in its Stalinist, Maoist, and Hitlerian manifestations. It has further proved a massive failure in its current North Korean manifestation. The Europeans could not bring themselves to abandon socialism, but they recognized reluctantly that socialism simply led to famine and waste. Thus, they conceived of a “third way,” a way that lay between free market capitalism and centrally controlled socialism. But what has to be seen is the peculiar understanding that the Behemoth has of the free-market sector whose existence it is tolerating.

In effect, it is treated not the way in which a free market government treats its citizenry, that is, as public servant who respects the goals and objectives of its masters, the people; in effect, it is treated as a “cash cow.”

I don’t know the origin of that phrase, but it could better be altered in this context to “blood cow,” since the productive sector of a “third way” economy is understood in much the same way that the Masai tribesmen understand the cattle they keep for their blood. The Masai regularly bleed their cattle without killing them – they want them to continue producing their blood, which the Masai drink. The Masai do not think of themselves as their cattle’s servants, they do not exist for the sake of the cattle – rather, the cattle exist for the sake of the Masai.

Similarly, the Behemoth is also a blood-sucker; it tolerates business and market activity so that something at least in its purview is producing and not merely consuming. Yet, the Behemoth both privately and publicly loathes the private sector and uses propaganda on the mass media and in the schools and universities to disseminate negative narratives of successful enterprise. Every effort is made to make the general public think of business, particularly Big business, as evil, rather than as the engine that makes government largesse possible. In particular, the official narratives find ways to “explain” how the wealthier citizens and businesses “owe” their wealth to the failed cultures and sub-cultures. The narratives “explain” how their failures were and are “not their fault,” but the fault of the evil, evil, evil predators. Often the predators are given an ethnic or religious identity, since the failures easily segue into that kind of hatred. Jews have historically been the evil doers responsible for the failures of endangered social species, but not always. Business is given much the same kind of treatment as the Indian sub-culture had within Idi Amin’s Uganda. Of course, it has not fully matured yet to the Hitler or Amin degree, but that is the direction in which the Behemoth attempts to move the population. Jews have always been a bit puzzled why socialists of all people would constantly be killing them. They don’t understand that what it is that socialists hate in Jews is the characteristic that has kept them alive as people for all these centuries: the fact that they have a culture that they won’t relinquish. The Behemoth hates a culture.

There is, however, a dangerous and unpredictable additional process that should be marked. While the Behemoth demonizes business, Big Business protects itself by becoming a virtual national entity, by becoming a multi-national corporation. A multi-national corporation has little stake in the citizenries of countries other than in their role as consumers. Multi-national corporations are fictitious countries that have no real national locations, that, in a sense, “float” above actual, geographically based national entities. Because of their special status, these new entries into the community of nations really don’t give a damn whether the Behemoth demonizes them or not. The same is not true, however, of the far more important “small business” sector that does not have the luxury of floating above the fray. Small business within the Behemoth world is treated not unlike the way that Korean grocery store owners are treated within “African-American” neighborhoods. Though they supply a need that the locals do not or cannot supply themselves, that the locals are happy to use, the owners are despised, bullied, harassed, and mugged. That is how the Behemoth treats small business.

The socialist Behemoth thus "keeps" two herds, one a large, grazing, consuming herd whose existence is seen as an end in itself, and another, a busy, creative, productive herd whose existence is tolerated for its utility.

For those who still have a lingering nostalgia for personal autonomy, I can only say: beware the Behemoth!

#37: Size, Socialism, and the Behemoth

There are many, many forces underlying the phenomenon we see only as a single continuing growth of government. Perhaps it’s best to think of government as a great living thing along Hobbes’s lines when he dubbed it the “Leviathan.” Hobbes was thinking of the state as a whole, so we shouldn’t use his term. Let’s rather call government the “Behemoth.” Since the Behemoth is a living thing, we can treat its continuing expansion as a natural part of its development and ignore for the moment any serious effort to disentangle the underlying growth forces at play. We can pretend, if pretense it is, that the Behemoth has been naturally designed to continually become larger and more powerful through the play of evolutionary forces. Nature has dictated that it grow until … what? Until, let’s say, it is simply too large to fail. Evolution is a system that chooses for survival, and anything that has become “too large to fail” has achieved evolution’s ultimate prized objective.

While evolution is quite good at encouraging the characteristics that support survival, it does not at all have a mandate for the happiness of the parts of the Behemoth and those that live around it, namely us. The Behemoth can become huge and invulnerable, while we, on the other hand, become desperate and depressed. What I will be arguing is that Marx was right, there is indeed law like machinery in history, that that machinery does lead inexorably to socialism, but it is not for the reasons he gave. The reason it leads to socialism lies in the ways in which it is compelled to reach for growth.

On that assumption, let’s focus on some characteristic ways in which this creature, the Behemoth, expresses this part of its nature. We’ll ask this simple question:

How does the Behemoth grow?

There are really only two basic ways for it to do this: increase the number of agencies or increase the staff and budget of an existing agency.

The Behemoth has gone about increasing the number of its agencies throughout history with a ferocious determination. There are again only two ways in which this can be done: the first is to simply invent something for a new agency to do that no private entities have ever done. I suppose that NASA might qualify as an agency of this kind, since, as far as I know, there were no private companies attempting to explore high space and beyond, before the Behemoth got into the business. The second is to appropriate a function that had always belonged to the private sector. THIS has been an extremely fecund area of Behemoth growth. The most recent example, of course, is the current attempted Behemoth take-over of the healthcare industry. Whatever the health and cost consequences to American citizens, by far the greater consequence is that the Behemoth will be enormously enlarged; it will be enlarged in the number of people working for it, in the number of agencies it hosts, and it will be enlarged in the size of its budget.

This kind of take-over has, of course, occurred before. Social security is a prime example. What was previously done by means of private insurance and individual family effort, was from that time forward to be done by the Behemoth, which, of course, was simply forced to create appropriate agencies and hire appropriate staff for this new task. Arguably, this creation of the FDR era had the unanticipated consequence of undermining the nuclear family by taking away the responsibility of a family for its elders. Is it by coincidence that socialism is actually quite hostile to family? We can only speculate, but family ties are an impediment to centralized power and authority. Hitler and Mao and all their ilk all sought to undermine family loyalties, and modern socialism is no different.

In education, we found the Behemoth growing an ever more visible presence at every stage. While the U.S. originally had only private Universities, for example, state Behemoths soon established state universities. And while those universities officially enjoyed freedom of speech and curricula, it soon turned out that the Behemoths actually had a great deal to say about what occurred in those hallowed halls. How could the Behemoth enforce its will? It could withdraw the funds on which the institutions depended. Some, the state universities, were ab initio dependent on public money, and the private ones had simply become addicted to public money that was at the outset given freely without strings attached. The strings appeared once the addiction had set in or, to change the metaphor, once the hook had been set.

But the take-over that seems to me to be the very best exemplar of the type is the Behemoth function we have come to know and love as Welfare.

As Orwell saw so clearly, things are not what they are, they are what we call them. That, at least, is the understanding that the Behemoth has of metaphysics and of language. When the Behemoth wants to change the nature of a thing, it simply changes the name of that thing.

I mention this because before welfare was welfare, welfare was … charity.

And, lest we forget, charity is personal money freely given by private individuals out of their generosity to agencies or individuals of their choice. AND, lest further we forget: the recipients of charity have no RIGHT or ENTITLEMENT of any kind whatsoever to charity. A person who fails to receive charity has no cause for complaint, since he never had, not in nature and not in law, a right to money not his own. The owner of money has exclusively the rights of ownership over his own money and can choose to give or not give it to whomever he chooses. Similar remarks apply, by the way, to the custom of “tipping.”

When the Behemoth took over the burden of charitable giving from the private citizens of the state, however, it decided that charity would no longer be charity and, since the name defines the thing, it decided that henceforth charity would be known as “welfare.” Once charity had a new name, it also became possible to give it new properties.

Most notable among the changes in charity were these: 1) while charity had been dependent on the good will and generosity of a person who actually owned the money, welfare was not dependent on any human attitudes whatsoever. There was no generosity involved; 2) The recipient of welfare now had a right to this money, it was a Behemoth entitlement; and 3), the original owner of the money had had it forcibly appropriated from him, stolen, in effect, and had no say whatsoever in to whom it would be given.

Welfare increased the size of the Behemoth, to be sure, but it had other political advantages as well. It increased the Behemoth’s client population in two ways: it had a huge new and additional set of salaried dependents (the bureaucrats and social workers who manned the new machine), and it had the entire welfare class who was now an officially sanctioned population of parasites for whom living on welfare and breeding on welfare was a permanent way of life.

Welfare transformed charity from the private sector to the public by stealing money from those who earned it and distributing it among those who did not.

You can see now why it is that I think of the exemplar of welfare as the most instructive case of state appropriation of a private citizen action.

The transformation of charity into welfare is a perfect model of the transformation of a free-enterprise limited government state into a centrally controlled socialist one. Examine this transformation and shudder for the future.