The Core Motivation behind Statism

Childhood narcissism - a stage that everyone goes through - is where the child is the centre of the universe and nothing and no one is seen by the child as having an independent existence. Virtually everyone works their way down from the obvious absurdity of that core assumption, but the climb down is staged. The next stage is tribalism. The tribe is a greater 'me'. Individual narcissism is transmuted into tribal narcissism with individuals being emotionally and physically bonded to the tribe. Most societies in human history were tribal. In the non-tribal west, a lot of young people go through a stage of belonging to a gang - vestigial tribalism. But there is another tribe in the modern western society, one that is growing and is not limited to young people. That tribe is The State. The core motivation of Statism is resentment of those who remind the Statist that there are others with an independent existence, of a different mindset, of a different tribe.

The Wild Frontier

Anthony de Jasay makes the point in his Liberty Fund interview that, more than anything else, the existence of the frontier for a great deal of time was the major source of the American character of independence and local self-help that de Tocqueville noted, and that the Constitution was not a particularly important factor, but more effect than cause. De Jasay goes on to conclude that in a hundred years - when the frontier is but a distant memory - America may well become indistinguishable from the typical European state. I would say that recent events suggest this timetable may be brought forward significantly. On the other hand... This is a physical frontier we are talking about. Physical land is a limited resource, leaving aside space and the deep oceans for the moment. There are of course other types of frontier that have yet to be discovered. In fact every (successful) entrepreneur discovers, or rather creates, a new frontier. The very successful entrepreneurs create whole new landscapes that others race to populate, in a sort of virtual Oklahoma land rush. But any act of entrepreneurship has the same effect in principle: the creation of a new frontier, small or large. Like a physical frontier, these entrepreneurial frontiers leave behind the settled and the timid and invite the independent and the adventurous; the risk takers. That is, people of the original American character. So perhaps the decline into statist indolence is not completely inevitable? Can the injection of new frontiers keep the American character alive?

Why Liberty?

I prefer the philosophical angle when thinking about liberty, starting with the clarification that comes from distinguishing a Liberty from a Right: A Right is paired with an obligation; a Liberty is not. On the other hand, perhaps there is something to be said for looking into the utility of liberty. It may be that, ultimately, the utility of Liberty and the philosophical basis of Liberty are two sides of the same coin - as Einstein expressed wonder at the utility of mathematics in explaining the behaviour of the physical universe. Who'd a thunk it? A relatively recent theory of the development of the human race came out of the discovery that the Rift Valley in Africa, where humans are thought to have first appeared, underwent a rapid (in geological/evolutionary time) series of drastic climate changes during that initial era of human development. Most evolutionary developments are thought to arise from the need to adapt to particular environments, but what development is needed to adapt to a rapidly changing environment? The answer is 'intelligence'. It is expensive to support a big brain, and quite unnecessary when the environment is relatively steady - slow physical adaptations will do the job. The only circumstance where a big brain pays off is when coping with rapid change is required.

The Higher Power

Currently reading David Horowitz's excellent "A Point in Time", the section given to Dostoevsky, where the beliefs and characters of the Russian radicals are explored. Though they don't believe in God, or a Divine purpose, they believe in the divinity of history and in the glorious future communism will bring forth: the heaven on earth. That's when it struck me - having been thinking about The State as an emergent order - that the attempt to produce heaven on earth is the key to the State's elevation to an almost divine status - to a position where the emotional compass of the population, instead of being fixed outside on an external divinity, is fixed on the State. And I suspect that the key to the creation of an emergent order from a group of people is emotional attachment rather than anything particularly intellectual.

Privatised Water ...

During the Thatcher years in Britain there was a Spectator cartoon of a ragged, wreck of a man crawling in a desert gasping "privatised water ... privatised water ...". I must have thought it was pretty funny; for some reason anyhow it has stayed with me. The long game, the long term trend - evolution perhaps - is toward privatisation. The usual reasons for socialisation of wealth are falling victim to the pincer movement that dooms anything: (1) it doesn't work well, and (2) a better alternative comes along. We will hang onto something that doesn't work well with hardly a thought, but when something better comes along its days are numbered. That suggests a continued area for growth (entrepreneurial activity): replacing government 'services' with something that works. It's not a matter of going 'full anarchist' - for surely not everything can be privatised at this time - but it's a matter of recognising the rationality of the trend.

Small and Large Freedoms

People in third world countries have small freedoms but they don't have large freedoms. People in the modern first world have large freedoms but they don't have small ones (any more). Bill Whittle - reflecting on his brief trip to Thailand - calls for hitting the sweet spot. http://www.therightscoop.com/bill-whittle-the-freedom-sweet-spot/

A person in the third world is typically free of micro-regulation - there just isn't enough money to support an army of bureaucrats. Of course if that person were to be successful and accumulate significant capital he would instantly stand out and become a target for the ruling elites (the house of the Chinese rich man is hidden behind an ordinary facade). People know that and so don't try.

Now, in the west, we have (had?) the money, so an army of micro-regulating bureaucrats is quite feasible. And so our small freedoms are curtailed. But we also are seeing more and more of the targeting of the One Percent that will only result in our large freedoms being curtailed as well. People won't bother to try and become successful.

The Elite

Civilisations and societies throughout history have been governed by the ruling class system. The English parliamentary system and the American revolution were isolated attempts at displacing the system of ruling elites.

I'd guess the impetus for this reform of the ancient central elite system was the expansion of the free market. The decentralised, unplanned free market system had been delivering improvements to the ordinary people for some time, without the participation of the central power elite, who if anything fought against the free market to protect their system of patronage. When people see their wealth coming from each other, and not a central authority, that central authority is on thin ice, especially when it comes to extorting taxes.

So, the ruling class were tamed by a system of contrary powers. Power divided is power diminished.

But the left is against limitations on the power of the elite, because they consider themselves rightful members of a ruling elite and resent limitations on their own powers. The left is a counter-revolutionary movement trying to undo the limitations on central authority brought in by, for example, the American revolution.

The left are a part of the push-back from the old system. At least that would be part of it. The other attraction of the central authority system is that it's fairly simple to understand: Central authority says do 'A'. People do 'A' (or else). It's simple enough for the adolescent mind of the leftist to grasp.

It's even worse when the left are the elite, because at least in the old system the ruling elite were either the strongest and smartest of their society, or at least employed the strongest and smartest. The modern left, by contrast, are a bunch of dodo heads.

The Adolescent Left

The leftist program is tailor-made for the narcissist. It promises the narcissistic mind the dream of forcing other people to conform to its own vision. The leftist puts through a government regulation and other people are forced to dance to its tune. He is the puppet master and the great unwashed will be the puppets.

That’s the dream. The dream of the adolescent mind. All the rest – all the programs and entitlements – is a smoke-screen.

On the other hand it’s hard for someone involved in a market system (where the road to success is to better serve other people) to be a narcissist. A system where success involves focussing on other people’s wants will very quickly snap someone out of any reserve of narcissism they may have carried over from adolescence. Every customer is your boss. The narcissist who tries to play puppet master with his customers is going to find himself short of customers in no time.

That’s why leftists hate the market system: It has no use for narcissists; it forces them to grow up.

AI or IA?

Artificial Intelligence of Intelligence Amplified?

The idea of AI is quite spooky, perhaps dangerous. IA is, however, here and now.

I can't work out the area of a circle in my head, but I can work it out with a calculator. That's an example of intelligence amplified. A better one is the probabilistic programming tools that can generate more accurate diagnoses than human doctors; they can take into account signals in the output streams of monitoring machinery that doctors and nurses can't even detect.

Imagine better ideas

I was revisiting this earlier post paraphrasing Evan Sayet's dissection of the Modern Liberal's mind: "We look over history and see that cultures have established their own religions, philosophies and practices, and each culture in turn has believed their own religion, philosophies and practices to be true and right. 'Others' are barbarians. The Modern Left targets this 'bigotry of belief' as the cause of conflict with other cultures of different religions and practises. These conflicts become the wars and injustices that have always been evident in history, up to and including the present. It is therefore the attempt by people to be right, to find 'the one true way', which is the cause of conflict with others, and hence it is this attempt to be right which is the cause of humanity's problems."

OK, so the left's solution to this 'conflict caused by different ideas' is to give up on ideas: The John Lennon Imagine solution in action.

So what is the right's solution? Let ideas compete. We find truth - the 'one true way' - through the competition of ideas.

A clear example comes from the world of science. The essential feature behind the success of science is not 'the scientific method', it is rather that science is a veritable Thunder-dome for ideas. Science is a particular example of the debating forum invented by the Athenians of Ancient Greece. The debating techniques of science typically involve a lot of mathematics and experimental data, but in essence the idea is to convince the forum that one's idea conforms more closely to reality than do the competing ideas. (The debating technique called 'mathematical proof' is particularly powerful; a mathematical proof is unanswerable. Another good one is the repeatable experiment).

Cultural ideas/religions/practices are less susceptible to intellectual debate, but they do compete in less abstract ways, as anyone who has had fried chicken at "Dickos", the KFC knock-off in Mainland China, can attest.

Bugs

Sitting in a garden in an Australian summer, the old saw that the natural world is full of probing, investigating, exploiting and competing little creatures is brought to "life", so to speak. You don't have to be David Attenborough in an Amazonian rainforest to get a sense of the clamouring competition that rewards the pushy and destroys the weak.

The funny thing is that although the world of business is essentially the same as nature in this respect, 'greenies' express hatred of business and love for nature, while 'conservatives' express love for the former and sometimes want to concrete over the later. Greenies have a romantic ("Disney-fied") view of nature and conservatives have a romantic ("Rand-ified") view of business.

Conservatism

Conservatism is about looking to history for clues: Clues as to what works and clues as to what doesn't. Conservatism is pragmatic; it doesn't have an all-encompassing theoretical framework from which it derives policy positions. What accidental framework there may be in conservative thought comes from the current (perhaps temporary) consensus about what works.

A key feature of conservatism is that there is no 'ego identification' with an idea or set of ideas. Reality is allowed to be the ultimate arbiter.

"It" Which Shall Not be Named

Many people on the right say "we are Capitalists". Either they don't know that the word Capitalism is a pejorative invented by Karl Marx or else they know this but use the word anyway as an appropriate badge, whatever its source. In fact they may see it as a badge of honour: The epithet given by an enemy.

The problem is, "Capitalism" is not even an appropriate word for describing what we on the right support. In this, as in most things, Marx got it wrong.

What is the appropriate word, then? What word should we on the right use?

There isn't one.

And that's the way it should be.

There isn't a word, and we don't have a system to apply a word to, anyway.

The only theoretically appropriate word would be something uselessly generic, such as "reality". "We support reality"? meh

The left needs a word and a system because they are creating an alternate reality; an invented system with an invented type of people ("Soviet Man") populating it, and so it is meaningful and useful to give their system a label and a definition. We call their system Socialism and we can get a functioning definition of it from any good dictionary.

However, we on the right are not opposing "our" system to their system. It's not a "Battle of the Brands", or "Coke versus Pepsi". We don't have a system to oppose to the left's. The left are battling reality all by their selves. We are on the sidelines; we're dad watching junior trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. The main thing is to keep junior away from sharp objects, until he learns better.

PS. The titles of two of the most important books by the great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, illustrate the point: One is called Human Action and is descriptive of natural economic activity, the other is called Socialism and defines, describes and draws out the implications of that invented system.

Von Mises was the economist who, in the beginning of the 20th century, proved mathematically that socialism would not and could not work (because there is no way for a socialist system to determine efficient prices). Many prominent economists spent fruitless years trying to find a flaw in von Mises' argument, while at the same time ignoring the devastating reality in the new Soviet states that was playing out in front of their noses, and incidentally proving von Mises correct. But then, ignoring/replacing reality is the point of inventing a system.

Fight the Injustice!

The core component of politics is: Forcing people to contribute. Without the force there is no politics.

From North Korean despotism to Swiss (or Californian) direct democracy this core remains. Although they are very different systems the central injustice stays intact: Some people are forced to contribute against their will.

This injustice does not suddenly go away when 50%+1 of the people agree on an action. In this case 50%-1 of the people are being force to contribute to something they don't agree with. That is a plain injustice. It doesn't even go away when 100%-1 agree on an action. Injustice against one person is still an injustice.

So, to all our friends on the left whose almost daily mantra is a railing against injustice? To be consistent you must also do what we on the right seek to do: Limit politics to the smallest sphere possible. Fight the Injustice!

Don't Cry for Me, Am-er-I-ca

Great post here by Doug Ross on the warning afforded by what was the wealthiest country (GDP per head) a century ago: Argentina, now a veritable basket case.

Government entitlement programs are (compulsory) Ponzi schemes - Bernie Madoff on steroids; early adopters get the benefits (hence Peron's populatiry) and later arrivals/generations get the bills.

It takes very little cultural/economic sophistication on the part of a population to enable the market to work; yet to guard against such things as government run Ponzi schemes it requires the majority of a population to be very sophisticated - a depth of character that can be easily lost in a generation, as Ronald Reagan warned.

A lesson of history we either learn or repeat.

Why Support Israel?

Another note derived from The Israel Test by George Gilder.

Although The Holocaust against the Jews is the most well known example of genocide, it is a tactical mistake for American Jews – the richest people on Earth – to try to trump the depredations that many, much poorer ethnic groups have suffered in the tale of woe that is the history of the world. The Holocaust is not a useful reason for supporting Israel.

The useful reason for supporting Israel is the same reason we, who live in free market economies, support 'middleman minorities' with our custom: 'Middleman minorities' generate wealth for the rest of society; Israel generates wealth for the rest of humanity. “In a dangerous world, faced with an array of perils, the Israel test asks whether the world can suppress envy and recognize its dependence on the outstanding performance of relatively few men and women.” We need Israel. That's a useful reason for supporting it.

It's really a subset of a larger question: Do we support a system (the free market) which allows unequal results but generates wealth for all, or do we allow envy to rule us and return to barbarism?

Why the Jews?

Some notes on The Israel Test by George Gilder. My copy finally arrived from Amazon...

Gilder rejects the idea that religion is the basis of discrimination against Jews [after all, it was the Romans who killed Jesus, not the Jews...]. Instead, he notes the similarly unpopular position of overseas Chinese in South-east Asia [we could add the example of Indians in Fiji] and compares it to that of the Jews in Europe. Although the overseas Chinese constitute just 5 percent of the population (in Indonesia, as an example), they control 70 percent of private domestic capital. They attract a lot of hostility from the remainder of the population. In fact, as Thomas Sowell says "Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as the 'Jews of South-east Asia', perhaps Jews might more aptly be called the overseas Chinese of Europe."

This resentment of wealthy 'middleman minorities' is founded on zero-sum economics; someone's gain is necessarily someone else's loss; the merchant's wealth has been bled from the general population. Yet the free market is absolutely founded on the reality of positive sum economics: If a trade does not benefit both parties it typically won't occur; the classic 'win-win situation' literally happens every minute of the trading day. Thus, the obvious wealth of the 'middleman minorities' is only the 'tip of the iceberg' of the total wealth they bring to the whole of society, through their industry. In free market economies 'middleman minorities' generate wealth for the society they live in. In this way anti-Semitism whithers in free market (positive-sum economics) countries and, conversely, it grows in socialist (zero-sum economics) countries.

In free market countries it is only in outposts of zero-sum economics, such as academia, where anti-Semitism flourishes; where one man's government research grant is another's year of having to keep teaching full time. And the man with the grant is quite likely a Neumann or a Goldstein.

What is "Left" and "Right" in politics?

Maggie Thatcher was right wing but shook up the established order. In the true sense she could not therefore be called conservative. She was the proponent of change in her time. (see also Hayek, who wrote an essay "Why I am not a conservative"). A contemporary, Leonid Breshnev, was left wing but also determined to prevent change in his country. He could not therefore be called a progressive. He was against those calling for change.

Regimes of the Right and Left have been variously militaristic or pacifistic, nationalistic or internationist, expansionist or isolationist. So what is the difference between left and right, and what is extreme left and extreme right?

The difference is essentially one of economics: The right believes in the free market, the left believes in central planning. The right believes in planning by individuals for themselves and the left believes in planning by the State for everyone.

So what is extreme left? The answer is fairly obvious: Communism. The State owns (or directs) all the means of production.

So what is extreme right? The answer is not quite as obvious: Anarchy (used in the secondary sense of "self government"). There is no central authority.

That stupid "wheel of politics" which shows left and right extremes eventually meeting at the same point was invented by the Communists and, stupidly, taken up by Loser -er- Libertarians. It's not a wheel; it's a straight line from total government control to no government at all.

Is Anti-Semitism at core Anti-Intellectualism?

(No, it's not a JR post - but apologies to Dr John if I am repeating one of his points)

Dennis Prager (US conservative talk show host) notes that those societies which treat their Jewish population well prosper, and that those who don't do badly. It's an historical fact with many illustrative examples from Ancient Egypt on down to the present day. Prager, who is Jewish, sees The Hand of God in this, reasonably enough; the Old Testament certainly does make the same point.

There is clearly something real going on here, even apart from The Hand of God.

From this article in the LA Times we see that though Jews represent less than 3% of the US population they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950, account for 20% of this country's chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students.

Something to note is that many of the actual achievements behind these statistics would not have happened if the United States did not give the Jews of Europe a safe haven in which to prosper. Intellectual achievement is not like a foot race where, no matter how slow the field of runners, someone, in the end, wins. In the intellectual world, if the runners are slow, no one wins the prize. The task doesn't get done. The scientific discovery doesn't get made. The new inventions don't appear.

(This is the Arab world today. Scientific and technical progress comes from a tiny, tiny fraction of the brightest people - and the Arabs got rid of theirs.)

People who are used to dealing with the very smart - university maths lecturers for example - know not to stress out when, occasionally, a student comes along who is obviously far smarter than they are. Intellectual ability - unlike athletic ability, which varies by only 30 or 40% in healthy people - varies by orders of magnitude between people. Even though university maths lecturers are far above the average in mathematical ability, they know there will be others who are equally as far above them, also.

The problem is that many people don't have this relaxed view toward the very bright. They harbour miss-trust and suspicion. Since most progress is made by smart people, a society which is suspicious of and shuns smart people is generally going to stagnate; the Hand of God moves against them.

Suspicion of intellect will naturally attach itself most strongly to a group which is both very bright and distinctive in some way - in the case of the Ashkenazy Jews, they are both religiously and ethnically distinct.

So, is anti-Semitism at its core a manifestation of anti-intellectualism?

Here be Dragons II

I realise I'm tresspassing on the territory of our esteemed JR somewhat, but as promised, here is a run down on what has been called Evan Sayet's Grand Unified Theory of Modern Liberalism (Liberalism in the American sense - in other words what we would call a hard core leftist).

Sayet calls himself a 9/12 Republican. It wasn't so much the attack on the WTC itself as the reaction to the attack - a day later - by his leftist friends (and fellow Democrats) that caused him to re-think his assumptions. He finally realised: They (Americans of the modern left) really do hate America. Why is that?

Looking at a whole raft of issues he saw that the Modern Left seemed always to support "Evil, failed and wrong". Evil people. Failed policies. Wrong ideas. Examples are legion.

And yet, judging from his leftist friends (and relatives), he can see that they themselves are neither evil nor stupid. So what's the deal? Why do good and smart people support "evil and stupid"? Here's why...

We look over history and see that cultures have established their own religions, philosophies and practices, and each culture in turn has believed their own religion philosophies and practices to be true and right. 'Others' are barbarians. The Modern Left targets this 'bigotry of belief' as the cause of conflict with other cultures of different religions and practises. These conflicts become the wars and injustices that have always been evident in history, up to and including the present. It is therefore the attempt by people to be right, to find 'the one true way', which is the cause of conflict with others, and hence it is this attempt to be right which is the cause of humanity's problems.

The solution presents itself: Stop attempting to be right; stop striving after the one true way; recognize that all supposed knowledge of good and evil is little more than bigotry imposed by variable cultural factors. Instead, imagine that no one believed they were right and others wrong; that no one believed that they alone held the truth and that others were mistaken. There would be no need for conflict. There would be no need for war. No need for injustice. In short, imagine nothing to fight and die for, and no religion, too. It's easy if you try.

All that is required is that we eschew the singular evil that is 'discrimination'.

Given that we cannot/must not discriminate – categorizing some (people, cultures, behaviours) as evil or wrong, and others as good or right – how do we then explain the success of some people/cultures/behaviours and the failure of others?

Given the premise of non-discrimination – there is no 'right' and no 'wrong' – there can only be one explanation: Somehow, the successful ones cheated. Maybe the successful ones stole from the unsuccessful ones; for example, they stole their oil, or their land? The big successful countries became big and successful by stealing from the poor and the unsuccessful. It is the only explanation consistent with the basic premise of non-discrimination.

So, the unsuccessful cultures are the victims of the successful cultures. Therefore, any evil done by these unsuccessful cultures is proof, not that they are evil, but that they are victimized. And the greater the evil they do, the greater must be their victimization. How victimized must the people in the Gaza strip be, that they celebrate in the streets - handing out sweets and dancing on cars - over the deliberate mass murder of Israeli school children?

Thus is maintained the following world view: (1) We are virtuous because we don't discriminate, and because we side with the victims of discrimination, and (2) conservatives/Republicans/etc are evil because they engage in the only true evil (discrimination) and side with the victimizers.

To help promote this world view it is useful to muddy the distinction between the successful and the unsuccessful; to lift up and promote the unsuccessful, and to tear down and degrade the successful. We need to show that the results of discriminating thought, of the striving to be right, though they may appear to be good and successful (America) are actually failed and bad (Ameri-kkk-a). We need to show that unsuccessful groups are not unsuccessful because they adopt inappropriate behaviours (there are no "innapropriate" behaviours), but because they are the victims of discrimination. The schools, the movies, the courts, the media are used to push this line at every opportunity: (1) discriminating thought used to strive after the right and true fails, and (2) the refusal to discriminate, the refusal to judge some good and others bad, succeeds. Lift up the evil, failed and wrong and tear down the good, successful and right until it is all a wash; until there is no 'good' and no 'bad'; until there is nothing to discriminate between.

This is the core belief (non-discrimination) and the ultimate motivation (prove it works) behind all policy that can be characterised as Modern Left (note: not all (or even most) policy by those on the left, and not that of "old time" leftists). And it is why Modern Left policy is always wrong. Not usually wrong but sometimes right, like a stopped clock. Always wrong. It is designed to be wrong. It is designed to promote the wrong and to degrade the right; to prove to you that discrimination is the ultimate evil and that non-discrimination is the solution.