#64: What Does it Take to Change One's Mind?

I recently sent a list of Obama’s failures in the 18 months he has been in office to a friend. Here’s the list I sent:

1) We are 13 trillion dollars in debt;

2) We have 9.7% unemployment;

3) The Iranians are gonna have a bomb and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

4) Obama asks the Russians to help with Iran and they regularly tell Obama to get lost;

5) The Brazilians and the Turks just recently made a nuclear deal with the Iranians and told Obama to get lost;

6) Obama asks the Chinese to help with Korea and they regularly tell Obama to get lost;

7) The Koreans are about to start WW III and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

8) The Europeans are about to collapse financially and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

9) We have a completely open border on the south through which illegals, drug smugglers, and Islamic scum come walzing through;

10)We have a gigantic oil spill in the gulf that continues every day to pollute the waters.

This list has been edited for safe family viewing. Even as I read it now, I realize that I could add more items to it, but that isn’t necessary. The point isn’t to compile a complete list, but only to show that the Affirmative Action Experimental President (AAEP) has, at this point, a catastrophically bad record. The only “achievement” he has had is that of pushing through the health care monstrosity over the objections of the majority of citizens. But even from the point of view of politics and power, it is hard to see how this accrues to his credit. First, the bill hardly resembles what he set out to pass, second, it barely passed even though he has a majority in both houses, and third, it may well be the cause of a Republican resurgence in November and his serving (thank God!) only one term. Some victory.

What remains interesting in this grisly spectacle of a once mighty nation being led into implosion by a feckless incompetent completely out of his depth is that the his polls have remained around 47% positive with a fair bit of stability. This indicates the existence of a large population that is immune to facts. Now we know that blacks voted for him virtually unanimously, but they are only 20% of the electorate. This means that there are still around 27% who are undeterred by his failures. How come?

I think it is helpful in trying to understand political phenomena to find parallel phenomena in non-political arenas. In this case, I am reminded of the decision issues that have faced people at times of scientific revolution and of W.V.O. Quine’s epistemic metaphor of the “web of belief.”

Quine likened our collected beliefs to a web. Each knot in the web counted as a single belief and the strings between the knots were the logical connections that tie our beliefs together. For simplicity’s sake, let us assume that when a belief (knot) is given up, all the beliefs from it to the periphery must also be given up. Therefore, on this metaphor, the beliefs that are closer to the web’s periphery are less essential to web’s integrity than those close to the center. This is clearly an overly simple model, but it serves the purpose of emphasizing the interconnectedness of beliefs and that it is rarely the case that a belief can be given up without giving up a lot of others.

This is the fact, for example, that underlies the standing objection to historical counterfactuals. People sometimes ask such questions as “What would have happened had Hitler not opened a second front on the East?”. The well trained historian will usually respond that this is an unanswerable question, though he will also often be unable to explain why. It is unanswerable because we do not, and cannot, know what other facts of Hitlerian and pre-Hitlerian history would also have to be changed by the assumption that he did not attack Russia. In order to answer this question, we would have to be able to construct a complete alternate world set of beliefs in which the past was such as to lead to an alternate Hitler who decided to not attack Russia. This we cannot do, except as in the form of fiction. But in an alternate possible world, there are no truths to be discovered, and thus there are no beliefs to be rationally forged.

Now when great thinkers propose revolutionary ideas to their established world, they are often resisted. The sages of Copernicus’ time resisted and denied the doctrine that the sun lies at the center of what we now call the solar system. It is easy to malign them as stupid reactionaries defending their turf, and while this contains an element of truth, it is also the case that everyone always must make a cost-benefit calculation when they face an assault on one of their beliefs.

The sages had the Aristotelian method of calculating the positions of the moving celestial bodies. It was as accurate as their instruments were capable of confirming. While there were advantages to going the Copernican route, there was also the huge disadvantage of having to relinquish an immense amount of their theological belief, if not the whole. And while we might scoff at this now, the actual people having to make this decision considered their theology as much a part of their knowledge system as their science. From a cost-benefit point of view, it could easily be argued that the rational person would have resisted the Copernican thesis. Exactly when to give up a belief is not as simple a question as one might think.

I think it is very much this kind of thing that underlies liberal progressive apparent immunity to fact. If the liberal is to give up the belief that the AAEP is the country’s savior, he must also question the AAEP’s platform of big government solutions, of re-distribution of income, of peace through appeasement, and of American capitalist badness. But when a person gives up this much in a single blow, he is left quite adrift and feeling helpless. He doesn't like this experience, shrinks from it, and searches for ways to avoid it.

The play of evidence and counter-evidence is always a fluid and complex matter in which many considerations play a part, and some of them purely pragmatic. When facing adverse evidence, a person always has choices. Denying the truth of the putative evidence; introducing an alternate hypothesis for the evidence; or denying that the evidence actually counts against the belief under attack.

Most of our opinions and our decisions have a trained, conditioned quality about them, and we rely on those conditioned responses not only forming our responses to new issues, but even in such matters as choosing our friends. Giving up a belief close to the center of our web of belief involves turning over our world, and no one does that lightly.

But these reflections must serve to increase our admiration of the various intellectuals who actually began as commie true believers and came to see the light. We can only hope that more and more of such intellectually courageous people begin to surface.

#63: What's So Wrong About Nationalism, Eh?

In at least one earlier post, I mentioned a common error, though I don’t think I gave it a name then. The error is that of assuming that a phenomenon has only a single cause. This usually happens when two possible causes are being considered and an argument develops because people assume that the cause they favour is somehow threatened by also allowing the other. In nature, most phenomena actually have multiple converging causes. This error is common enough to warrant its own name, so, by the powers vested in me, I hereby baptize it the “single cause fallacy”.

Now, I’ve argued in the past that the Democrat resistance to controlling the national borders and booting the illegals out was due to the Democrat impulse to increase its own voting base. Hell, if the democrats could, they’d include the dead among the voting citizenry! Oh, wait, they did do that during the ill fated Obama election! Sigh. There's been quite a lot of interest in Zombie movies lately and even weird Zombie romantic novels, so I can see the time right for an Obama and the Zombies movie featuring waves of the Living Dead lumbering towards the voting booths. Whoops, too late again. Wasn't that what happened during the last election?

But, lest I commit the Single Cause Fallacy, let me admit here that there are more motives than one driving most Democrat Progressive stupidities. I add below, therefore, another motive to the increasing voter population one.

I’ve argued in many posts now that one of the things that Progressives hate more than their vegetables is nationalism. Yes, yes, I know that the Nazis were nationalists (gee whiz, it’s right there in their name), but that’s not why the Progs hate it. The fact that the Nazis were nationalists was just a very convenient talking point against the nationalism they had inveighed against since Woody Wilson promoted progressivism from seedy Harvard faculty common rooms to the international stage. But why? you ask anxiously. There is a reason that is rooted in the Progressive’s most fundamental conviction.

The Progressive begins with the doctrine known as “humanism.”

Arguably, this doctrine had its most powerful expression in the mistaken but hugely influential ethical theory of Immanuel Kant, specifically in the version of his “categorical imperative” that demands one treat each individual as an end in itself, never as a means. What this means is simply, never use a person like an instrument.

But, whatever its historical origin, the doctrine known as Humanism has at least this thesis implicit in it:

People are important in themselves, property is not. Where human rights come into conflict with property rights, the former automatically trump the latter.

But this very general conviction carries with it an implication that is even more far reaching, going from morals into very radical political theory. The reason is that the nation state is itself conceived by Humanists as no more than a kind of larger property. For the Humanist, national boundaries are indistinguishable from the boundaries of private property, and all property boundaries imply a restrictions on the needs of those who have no property at all.

Thus, Marxist Socialism simply supplies a large pseudo scientific narrative to the very visceral convictions of those who love humanity and therefore hate private property. That much is already obvious, but what I want to stress here is that the same Humanism that implies the hatred of private property ALSO implies a hatred of nationalism, since nationalism is nothing more to these people than an indecent and disgusting pleasure in a property one is immorally withholding from those who have none.

What is, however, equally disgusting is that many of those who have strong Humanist impulses in the abstract, tend to get quite aggressive when their own property borders are threatened. Streisand, for example, one of the more vulgar and obnoxious of the Progressives waged a legal battle over a photographer’s taking aerial photographs of the California coast where her large and expensive mansion sits. And the late, great Humanist Ted Kennedy fought an ongoing battle with the new wind farm industry that wished to put up their wind turbines in the distant waters visible from his Cape Cod “family compound.” Teddy lost the battle only after he passed on. And, oh, Al Gore has just purchased an 9 million dollar ocean-view villa in southern California. Now, none of these properties have open borders, they have "security perimeters" complete with armed guards and scary big dogs. But these progressive Humanists don't feel that their country should have the same security they insist on for themselves.

Many, therefore, of the Progressives blocking all efforts to stem the tide of illegals across the Arizona border are doing what they do because they see the national boundary as a kind of metaphysically indefensible “occupation” of humanity’s common land. The only ownership they respect is all of human kind’s (and, of course, their own ownership of their own lands!).

In their fevered imaginations, the U.S. insisting on its borders is very much like the cliché of the old western dramas of the rich landowner keeping all the water on his land for his own use. Damn that rich landowner! Who cares whether he bought it! Who cares whether he fought the Indians for it! Who cares whether he worked the land! We need it, we want it, and, goddam it, we have a right to it! Laws? We don’ need no stinkin’ laws! Laws are just artificial devices contrived by the rich and the powerful to keep the pretty orchards and the pretty buildings and the lovely barns to themselves. Well, that’s how the Mexicans feel about it, and that’s how their supporters among the enlightened Progressives feel about it.

But what must not be forgotten is that that is exactly how Attila and his boys felt when looking down on that pretty, pretty Rome before they descended, like Sennacherib, like wolves on the fold, to sack, to pillage, to rape, and to burn.

#62: From Mr. Smith to Rod Blagojevitch

I want to introduce you to a new political principle, at least one that I’ve never come across in my reading. In order to do so, it’ll be convenient to begin with introducing a new technical term, the term “political unit,” defined as follows:

P is a “political unit” (“p.u.”) if and only if p is able to intentionally affect events in some social context.

This means that fire plugs and furniture are not p.u’s, while every individual is a p.u., but also every cohesive assembly of individuals. In particular, families can be p.u’s, cities, states, congregations, family businesses, nationally based businesses, multi-national corporations can be p.u’s, and so forth.

So, here’s the principle:

P.u’s only respect the interests of themselves and of other p.u’s capable of affecting their interests.

I think this principle is prima facie intuitively strong and may even seem so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. After all, the schoolyard bully is very unlikely to take the complaints of his weaker schoolmates seriously, but she’ll certainly listen to anyone stronger than she is. This is hardly a shocking insight, but it has an interesting implication for representative democracy. The implication is this:

Individuals have little hope of having their interests qua individuals respected by either the individuals they elect or the institutions they create to serve them.

The reason is that as soon as a person becomes a representative of a group, she becomes by that token alone a p.u. of a higher order and will now respond only other p.u’s at her level or above. She will ignore, distract, lie to, or placate the individuals whose representative she is.

What this means, first, is that women are not represented in any genuine way by, say, NOW, the aged are not represented by AARP, workers not represented by their unions, the faithful not represented by their churches, citizens are not represented by their governments, and shareholders not represented by their boards. These p.u’s certainly have interests and they certainly negotiate for them, but the interests of their “flock,” as it were, are not their ultimate objectives. Their objectives are their own, and those objectives are the objectives always of their respective leaderships, the objectives of their own power.

What it means, second, is that the way in which modern politics is parsed is quite wrong. Popular political mythology casts the modern contest as one between “business,” on the one hand, and “individual workers,” on the other. This mythology is conveniently supported by the historical fact of worker exploitation during the industrial revolution. And in that setting of worker exploitation, the government played many ambiguous roles, though it has emerged in most western nations as the protector of the weak and powerless, a role it has actually chosen for itself.

Seeing politics through the lens of this one quite short phase in our historical development obscures the more fundamental conflict that should compel our attention. The threat to the individual is not essentially business per se; rather, the threat to the individual is in the large. The individual is threatened by any p.u. that is above him. This is a very big lesson to learn, and we can see just how big by considering the ease with which Hitler absorbed the German industries. While Hitler was indeed a Socialist of the nationalist stripe, he understood that it was politically far more effective to suborn big capital than to dismantle it. In effect, Hitler went into partnership with giant industries like Krupp, who put their massive productive power into the service of the state. And Hitler's willing corporate partners were not limited to Germany, see, for example, Edwin Black's study: IBM and the Holocaust.

Hitler’s insight has been well learned by subsequent Socialist wannabes, not least by Obama and his little Socialist rented brains.

It is in vain that ordinary Americans wait for big American business to stand up for capitalism against the gigantic power grab coming from Socialist Obama.

They do not understand that Big Business has more in common with Big Government than with the common man. Both Big Business and Big Government strive for total control, the former through monopoly, the latter through force and conditioned dependency. Until each believes that they can completely dominate, they will do exactly what criminal gangs have always done: they agree to divide the spoils.

The pattern for the relationship between big American business and the Obama administration has become quite clear, it is a two-step. Obama plays the rhetorical populist card, complete with Democrat congressional show trials, during which he demonizes the businesses and distracts public attention from congressional culpability that is largely at home in his party; at the same time, he forms enormous partnerships with the same businesses, suborning their leaderships with sweetheart deals that will benefit the same “miscreants” he publicly excoriates. He’s done this with the auto companies, the banks, and the pharmaceuticals. But he also did it with the A.M.A. and with AARP.

This is not new with Obama, it is just the scale on which he is doing it that staggers the imagination. One must only remember “the Great Society’s” investment in post-secondary education. Prior to Johnson, there were still many private independent universities in the U.S., now there are very few. The reason is very simple, government money. The universities’ were, to put it bluntly, simply bought by the government, and we see the result in the conversion of the Universities into Socialist madrassahs.

This modus operandi is so deeply embedded in the Socialist play-book on the take-over of nations that it trumps all other ideological considerations. One must remember that the only imperative that drives the Socialist ideologue is that of the acquisition of total political power. And this means that individual Socialist commandments are quite easily abandoned when an increase in power is at stake. What this means in practice, is that real apparatchiks will not even blink at the idea of sleeping with capitalists, if the end of total power is furthered by doing so.

Which leads me to the conclusion of this post. The Obama administration is currently implementing a policy of partnership with the American churches. The churches will work at furthering the Obama “green agenda” under the rubric of “ecological justice,” and, in exchange, the churches will receive government “grants” towards various “ecological” religious objectives.

The Socialists and Leftists everywhere have made it abundantly clear that they hate Christianity (no, not “religion,” because religion includes, for example, Islam, and Islam is too ethnic to be criticized). But, if the churches can be suborned, if they can be turned to the Socialist cause, well, then, even Christianity becomes tolerable.

Reagan was right: Government is not the solution, Government is the problem.

But I think his point is not quite general enough: the problem is any representative person or body whose misbehaviour is not immediately and severely punishable.

Sure, you can send Mr. Smith to Washington, but when he gets there, he’ll be reborn as Rod Blagojevitch.

#61: Reason, Progressives, and RINOs

In recent times, I have frequently heard Conservatives maintaining that Socialism and Progressivism are identical. While there is a definite relationship, it is both a historical and a conceptual mistake to merge the two notions.

Progressivism is the broader and older approach to social, moral, and political issues. Progressivism is the child of the European Enlightenment, the 18^th c. that has been revealingly known as “the Age of Reason.” While the word “reason” has positive connotations today, this is because it is the modern habit to contrast “reason” with stupid irrationality in the general run of life. In the history of Western ideas, however, from the 18^th c. back, Reason (capitalized) was discussed always as the competitor of Faith. In pre-Enlightenment times, Faith generally emerged as the victor, with Reason being forced into a subordinate role. In both the realms of religion and a slowly growing empirical science, Reason was building up a head of steam under the Church repression, a head of steam that began to manifest itself visibly in the early 1600s. This was the time of Galileo, Deascartes, and Gassendi, but the stage had already been set by a large number of other thinkers and experimenters.

Thus, the direction of this historical stream was against Faith and in favour of Reason. The importance of this movement cannot be over-emphasized because it involved not only the rejection of judgment based on authority (rather than reason), but it rejected the value of tradition and culture. In effect, man’s reliance was shifted during this period from church and God to Man’s reason: man became increasingly self-reliant. No matter what the issue or the problem, the Enlightenment man said: I’ll figure it out for myself, thank you very much!

While I haven’t seen it represented in this way, one can plausibly argue that Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which is considered emblematic of our transition from Faith to Science, is also a model of our contemporary Progressive’s self-image. The revolutionary point of the Discourse is that human reason, when properly applied, is equal to the task of acquiring knowledge and using that knowledge for the betterment of human life. But, even more important, is the enormous methodological principle that each human being is responsible for validating his own beliefs. The individual human being is the final arbiter of his own beliefs, and not an external authority or tradition or culture. As they say these days, this was a very “empowering” doctrine. Yet it carried with it the assumption that a world based on its radical application would be a “better” world than the one that preceded, something that has not always proven to be the case, as terrible as the Middle Ages were at times.

Like the Cartesianism of the Discourse, Progressivism rejects tradition and rejects inherited culture; in place of these, it relies on pseudo-scientific social experimentation and social engineering. As a consequence, the history of progressivism is a grim historical case study in the Law of Unintended Consequences. To put it in figurative terms, the Progressive hates a city like Istanbul, with its small winding corridors and unsystematic sprawl, but he loves a borough like Manhattan, laid out, as it is, like a grid. Unfortunately for the Progressive, planned constructions have turned out most often like the ones built in the reign of Marshall Tito, giant, ugly, block-shaped human warehouses built in rows, rather than like Manhattan. The Progressive distrusts and dislikes natural development, and he trusts and loves a “rational” plan.

But the Progressive is not necessarily a Socialist. Socialism has been the preferred plan for Progressives because Socialism also, for distinct reasons of its own, has always rejected the traditions and culture of the country in which it created a revolution. Further, Socialism has always represented itself as a “scientific” plan for the betterment of mankind. These factors have made Socialism an obvious and ready-to-wear choice for the Progressive on the go. Yet, I can think of at least one contender for Progressive clientele who had some modest success in the past and may yet resurface.

The early 20^th c Eugenics movement attracted a substantial following. Eugenics is unquestionably a Progressive movement, even though most contemporary Progressives would reject it. The contemporary Progressive associates Eugenics with the practices of Hitler’s Third Reich, and thus immediately rejects it for that reason alone. While Progressives make a mantra of Reason (“Science,” today), they actually do not think very much; ironically, they actually make judgments the same way that the Medievals did, the way that Descartes rejected, by appeal to authority. What has changed is the identity of the authority. While the Medieval appealed to what the Priests said, the Progressives appeal to what the Academics say.

And while the modern Progressive rejects Eugenics with revulsion, no less an eminent Socialist like Bernard Shaw was an enthusiastic exponent of the doctrine. And notice this: while Eugenics can co-exist harmoniously with Socialism, it doesn’t have to; a person could well argue that Socialism is actually not necessary if a thoroughgoing Eugenics policy is applied. A Eugenicist can well argue that if we breed carefully for the needed abilities and at the highest levels, the issues of distributive justice would simply never arise.

I mention the Eugenics movement simply to reinforce the point that Progressivism does not entail Socialism.

Finally, while I have argued that Progressivism is the child of the Enlightenment faith in Reason, it must be remembered, as I suggest above, that 1) a faith in reason is not necessarily the same as being rational, and 2) that children do not always inherit the abilities or dispositions of their parents.

While the French thinkers of the 18^th c called the philosophes thought of themselves as the apostles of Reason, they were neither always as rational or as scientific as they thought. And while our current Progressives like to think of themselves as “so very rational,” they are not as self-reliant in their thinking as Descartes would have had them be, they have become “RINOs” (Rationalists In Name Only).

#60: Why the Constitution Can't Stop the Dog's Eating

My good friend A.G., prosperous attorney and man about town during the day, is also the caped superhero, Scourge of Left, by night. As soon as the sun sets each day, he quickly finds a Tim Horton’s men’s room and swaps his Armani knock-off for his Conservative superhero costume modeled on Washington’s outfit in the famous full length portrait. Assuring himself that his powdered wig is on straight, he ventures out to do battle with the evil forces of the Left, embodied (yes, embodied) in the lissom bodies of errant young lawyettes who have strayed into socialist fields by listening to the siren songs of socialist Svengalis. We owe him much for his tireless efforts on the behalf of Western civilization!

Ok, enough of that.

It was fascinating to me, A.G., that in your comment on my last post, you drew attention to the U.S. Constitution. The reason is that that post had commenced life as a reflection on the Federalist Papers, a reflection which addressed the very point you make!

Yes, as we both agree, there exists no natural monitor or governor on popular greed or governmental appeasement of that greed. I see this as a terminal problem, but you believe that the U.S. Constitution provides an artificial governor on that appeasement.

My first response to your point is that if there does exist such a monitor, the evidence suggests that it is utterly ineffective, since Obama has jacked up the U.S. national debt to over 10 trillion dollars in feeding the entitlement appetite.

But on a more historical note, I believe that you do have a point. Conservatives who are interested in using the Founding Fathers for political conversions do not usually mention that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were as suspicious of masses as they were of monarchs, and they argued that the Constitution was as designed to defend us against a dictatorship of the mob as it was of a would-be monarch. Of course, the Conservatives inveigh against the East Coast snooty-poos and the Leftoids inveigh against the “right wing extrmists,” but the Founding Fathers were actually worried about both, as well as about leaving the important matters of state to individual citizens.

Which is why the U.S. is a republic and not a direct democracy.

The famous “checks and balances” were supposed to be a bulwark not only against one part of government becoming tyrannical, but also against “the people” becoming tyrannical. And it worked, for a time. What changed?

I think a number of things changed within the electorate that made an end-run around the artificial checks and balances possible.

The electorate of post revolution times consisted of farmers, small merchants, and artisans. All of these were independent minded people quite suspicious of government. That they were also shrewd is evidenced by the way the Federalist Papers appeal to them. The articles are all carefully argued, carefully reasoned efforts to rationally persuade the electorate that their own interests are best served by a unification of the states under a single constitution. This bunch of people would have snorted and spit if someone tried to sell them the snake-oil of “social justice,” and that was because they made their livings with their hands and backs and were not likely to give their money away lightly for a song and a story.

By way of contrast, the U.S. electorate today includes 47% who are parasites, who pay no taxes. If we add to that the percentage of people who work for government and the non-governmental union members, we begin to realize that even if the productive portion of the country still has the values of independence that controlled government vote-buying, that portion is massively outvoted by the remainder that is glued to the government teat.

What this means is that the Constitution can no longer be relied on to control populist appeasement spending.

The rot began with Wilson, was hugely increased under Roosevelt, and the final nail was put in the coffin by L.B.J..

The Founding Fathers never anticipated the electorate we face today, and even as we speak, the Democrat majority is in the process of increasing this dependent underclass by another ten million in a single shot by granting amnesty to the illegals.

The motto of the Democrat party is this: if the poor, illiterate, and stupid don’t exist, we have to either create them or import them or both. They create them by crashing the economy and they import them with a skewed immigration policy that focuses on increasing welfare recipients. Any improvement in the national standard of living is a political problem for the Democrat Party, not a cause of rejoicing.

#59: Damn, This Dog Just Won't Stop Eating!

Let’s talk about “Populism.”

Populism must be distinguished from Socialism, though the two are closely related. Socialism is nothing other than populism with a pseudo-scientific mask. Both are efforts to harness the power of simple greed and envy. But people, particularly people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are uncomfortable with their own greed and envy, and so the clever politicians invented a narrative in which their greed and envy resurfaced in the guise of fairness and justice. This narrative capitalized (no irony intended) on the powerful Enlightenment trend of science and pseudo-science from the 18^th c on, this narrative was the Socialism of Marx and Engels. What Marx decided was “let’s give Populism a popular 18^th c Materialist cloak and a trendy scientific ‘look’. Yeah! That’s the ticket, we’ll turn Populism into a ‘science’ which ‘proves’ that greed and envy are really fairness and justice!”

“I love it!” he said to Engels, “Ain’t bullshit great when you serve it on a plate?” (loosely translated from the German)

That was the brilliant first step. The brilliant next step came from Lenin, who said to himself, “the pseudo science thing is good, but it can’t hurt to make it a secular religion, too! Yeah! That’s the ticket, we don’ need no God to make a good religion!” Stalin, of course, took that thought and ran with it.

The point is that if we focus on Socialism, we are not looking at the root phenomenon. Socialism is not the name of a societal impulse, it is the name of a marketing strategy, a sales story or narrative.

Populism has been around for quite a long time, it’s an answer to the question that has vexed rulers for as far back as rulers have existed. I suppose the question came into existence just around the time that people left behind that mythical condition that Hobbes called “the state of nature” that preceded any society at all. The question is: How do you control all those people?

Most of the time the answer was simply threat and killing. Those who respond to threat, you keep and enslave, those who don’t, you kill. But, eventually it dawned on rulers that there was another consideration, namely that of national productivity. The problem with the primitive repression method was twofold, 1) it was always risky for the rulers, and 2) that the wealth required to maintain a state did not seem to be generated under primitive repression. There’s always an overhead to running a state, even a slave state. You have to pay your army, and pay it well, and you have to feed the slaves, so as to produce the wealth with which you pay your army. The rulers in such a state are only safe as long as they can keep their army satisfied. This problem is exemplified in the state of North Korea today, and it is trying to solve it by blackmailing the outside world with nuclear weaponry. Primitive repression, as it turned out, was not a very good system, not even for the rulers.

The Romans had a better idea: Populism at home, primitive repression in the empire. The rulers of Rome were safer than their primitive repression antecedents. Of course, there were ongoing assassinations, but these were often prompted more by the insanity of the rulers than by the nature of the system. The empire could be sucked dry of its wealth for the maintenance of the army, but, more important, that wealth made it possible for the rulers to buy the passivity of their citizens. The Romans, bless them, invented (drum roll!) … ENTITLEMENTS!

The Romans gave their citizens “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses). Of course, that was still a far cry from free health care, free education, welfare, working for the government, etc. etc. etc., but it was one of Rome’s most lasting inventions (right up there with roads and aqueducts!).

But people are naturally greedy and ungrateful. What have you done for me lately? they ask. And they’re fickle. Once the Pandora’s Box of entitlements was opened, the only way of acquiring power was by trumping an opponent’s offers. That’s how we went from panem et circenses to free enrolment at the Sorbonne and welfare in the Bronx.

Once we left primitive repression behind and the people’s voice (the vox populi) got a say in who got to milk the national cow, the mechanism for acquiring power automatically became Populism or the distribution of new entitlements.

Now, one could argue, as many have done, that this is a great system because the power acquisition mechanism for the greedy would-be rulers mechanically assures the distribution of national wealth to the citizenry. And there is truth to this, since the unwashed masses (I’m not speaking specifically of the French here), the hoi polloi, have done much better under this system than any preceding one. However, the system suffers from an intrinsic and fatal flaw. The system forces the rulers to offer benefits that the national wealth cannot pay for. To put the system’s internal problem as succinctly as possible: the modern democratic system lacks a natural internal governor on entitlement spending.

What I mean is this: the impulse to acquire political power is psychologically natural; the greed and envy of the electorate is psychologically natural; but there exists no psychologically natural impulse to curtail the desire for power or greed and envy.

I’ve been told, don’t know if it’s true, that dogs have no internal monitor on their eating, that, unless stopped by their owner, they will eat until they die. The problem of the democratic state is that it is like a dog in this respect.

Thus, the financial problem for the rulers is always the same: how do we pay for the panem et circenses? There have always been only two possible sources of money: outside the nation and inside the nation. These days, nations are finding that their options have dramatically shrunk.

Originally, they took the path of least resistance, they solved the problem by looting enslaved colonies. But the cost-benefit equation increasingly turned against this strategy until the imperialist nations found that their colonies were actually costing more to control than they were yielding in wealth. The imperialists left their colonies, most often in expensive, protracted, stupid, and bloody conflicts. They still had to pay the costs of ever increasing panem et circenses. So, they turned to the inside, to taxation.

But while the unwashed masses, a.k.a. the electorate, quite naturally psychologically loves having its greed and envy satisfied, it equally naturally psychologically hates the opposite of that, namely being taxed. And so the government, the rulers, did the clever and inevitable thing, they taxed the few in order to provide the panem et circenses of the many.

And here we arrive at the inevitable, the inexorable consequence of democracy: Populism, the attempt to control a large mass of people by harnessing the greed and envy of the majority against a productive minority.

But even the most extreme taxation on the productive minority has failed to yield the requisite amount of money, so they now they turn once again to the outside, only this time in the form of borrowing.

This dog just won’t stop eating! It’s gonna die.

Marx thought there was a “logic” to history, a natural, inevitable progression in which capitalism was just a stage on the way to the ultimate classless society. It may be that he was half-right, that there is natural mechanical progression in the affairs of men, but that he was wrong where it would end and how. History has seemed to take us from primitive repression states to increasingly democratic ones. But the democratic ones seem to suffer from an internal defect that will not lead them to the so-called workers’ paradise, the “classless society,” but rather to an inevitable collapse, from which will arise, most likely, societies once more of primitive repression.

#58: The BIG Oil Spill: Conspiracy or Coincidence?

I love a good conspiracy theory.

I would probably be a conspiracy believer if I weren’t so convinced of the incompetence of conspirators and the inevitability of unintended consequences. But, if I can’t get in on the fun by believing some conspiracies, I can, at the very least, participate by occasionally contributing one. Here’s one I haven’t seen anywhere yet.

Just a short time ago, an off-shore drilling rig exploded, killing some of the workers and creating an enormous and continuing oil spill off the southern U.S. coast.

A short time before the explosion, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. announced that he would be allowing the development of further off-shore drilling.

Now, the drilling announcement was met, on the one hand, with surprise and relief by millions of American who thought it no less than common sense to develop America’s own resources when it was being blackmailed and sucked dry by the Arabs; it was met predictably, on the other hand, with shock, dismay, and a sense of betrayal by what is generally considered Obama’s “base,” the ultra-left screaming wackos. How could he? they screamed, Why would he?

Well, the answer to both of those questions seems pretty obvious. There are mid-term elections coming down the pike, drawing rapidly ever nearer, and the democrat chances are looking pretty grim. Perhaps, said the Bamster to himself, I can bleed off a few of the “independents” by doing what Clinton did, namely “move towards the center.” All I need to do, he said to himself, is something that will allow them to think what they really want to think anyway, namely that I’m really just a “pragmatic” guy, not an extreme leftie ideologue, and giving out a few new drilling licenses will convince them that I’m really not in the pocket of the eco-nazis, that I’m also “independent,” just like them, and that I can be depended on to do the common sense thing. Yeah, he said to himself, that's the ticket!

Of course, the problem with his reasoning would have been immediately apparent to any one of the brains he keeps around him. It would have seemed to them that while such a move might gain some independents, it would equally likely lose some loyalists. At best, it would only have a very small net gain, at worst, a large net loss, most likely no net change at all. Unless… unless … unless …

Unless, one of them thought, we could add a little complication that could turn his move into a bonanza for the left generally, and for the eco-freaks particularly.

What if, they said to themselves, what if, if after a bit of time following the granting of the licenses, there were to be a major ecological disaster?

Well, how would that help us? asked Obama (not being the sharpest knife in the drawer).

Well, answered the brain, if there were an oil disaster, then you could immediately put a halt on all of those new licenses (which has just been done) and you would still have gained your new Independents while retaining your loyalists. The independents would say, He's an ok guy, he can't help stopping the new drilling, it'sot his fault. The leftoid crazies would say, He's an ok guy, he stopped the drilling, he was on our side all along.

But, even better than that, the brain went on, this disaster would make any future off-shore drilling application a sure-fire d.o.a.. And, in addition, he said, it would further depress the American economy (which always makes a population turn to bigger government).

From a leftoid’s point of view, he said, this could be the gift that keeps on giving.

So, the question one has to ask oneself is this: Did the Bamster or one of his brains have anything to do with the causing of this accident? Here are some reflections.

The last big spill was the Exxon Valdez (why do they always pronounce it “Valdeez” on the news?) way back in Mar of 1989. Is it just a coincidence that, after 21 years of off-shore drilling without incident all around the world, that there should be a major oil spill just shortly after the granting of new licenses by a president who is in the pocket of the eco-nazi movement? I, for one, find that a bit too much of a coincidence.

There seems to have been absolutely no investigation of exactly what caused the explosion. Isn’t that strange? Could it have been, for example, just one of those shoulder fired mini-missiles so common in the U.S. armory?

Admit it, it could have gone down exactly like this:

The pressure is getting to the Bamster, it looks like November is going to be democrat Armageddon. He needs to do something, he calls in, say, some like mindeds from the Pentagon, and they send out a couple of reliable agents. The agents get themselves all wet-suited, go out on a raft, take a bead on the rig, and Bob’s your uncle, the whole thing is done.

Too crazy for you? How about this?

I just heard on the news that there was an actual emergency plan specifically targeted on the exact kind of spill that just occurred. Mysteriously, it was not activated, even though the locals were aware of it and were just waiting for the orders to begin.

All of this, a coincidence? I think not, I’m afraid, I think not.