Cultural Observations

When you begin to realize how central the issue of freedom is to every human soul – and how much propaganda is required to obscure the simple desire of everyone to live a life free of violence – you can easily begin to see the true undercurrents of what is commonly called ‘culture’, and how it serves to obscure State violence. Three major components are required to legitimize violence – the first are the figureheads, the second are the thugs, and the third are the flatterers.

Money generally flows from the thugs to the figureheads, and then back down to the thugs and flatterers. The police steal your money and give it to the politicians, who then give it to the media, so they can praise the police and politicians. Of course, this cash can flow in many other directions. The thugs can steal your money, then give it to the politicians, who then give it to artists, who use it to praise power, ridicule the population, or focus on inconsequential minutiae. Or, the thugs can steal your money, which then the politicians use to threaten the artists with revocation of broadcasting licenses, obscenity charges, funding cuts etc. Or, the artists can take the money from the politicians and use it to praise the thugs, as can be seen in any number of cop-worshipping shows and movies. Or, the thugs can take your money directly for their own use, as in the case of asset forfeiture, property seizures and other types of fines.

What we call ‘culture’ is simply the fog that the sword hides behind. Artists and intellectuals have always served the State – and once you begin to understand what they’re up to, it’s pretty simple to unravel the hidden messages.

Examples

The ‘Wild West’

When America was founded, the government – State and Federal – was tiny. During the twentieth century, it grew ferociously. How could such a
radical departure of the founding principles of the country be swallowed? Why, by inventing a myth called the ‘Wild West’ – a wondrous land where villains prey on settlers right at the edge of civilization, and all disputes are solved with guns, until grim noble sheriffs (the State) ride in to clean up the town.

Even a moment’s thought quickly reveals how ridiculous this scenario is. Criminals are drawn to cities, not frontier areas. Cities provide a constant stream of fresh victims, endless hiding places, fences for converting stolen goods to cash – and anonyminity.
Rich victims live in cities, not freshly-broken farmland. Goods gather in cities. People use money in cities, not barter. The idea that criminals spend weeks riding out into the dusty wilds to prey on dirt-poor settlers is laughable. But a growing government always needs to portray the world of smaller government as violent, so that people can more easily accept the increasing violence of expanding State power.

Of course, the government did not make Wild West films, but it certainly spent years educating everyone who made them – and watched them.

The desperate need to believe in a more dangerous past always accompanies growing violence in the present. ‘Freedom was fear – slavery is peace!’ It’s how cowards always reconcile themselves to their surrender.

Cop Shows

Cop shows have undergone an interesting evolution over the past few decades. In the Fifties, the pattern was clear – the ‘orderly majority’ of society was disrupted by some chaotic element – a drunk, a drifter, a beatnik – and the cops flexed their muscles to restore that order.

That all changed in the Seventies. Society was no longer orderly, but chaotic and violent. Cops could only hold back the tide a few drops at a time – and they were often as crazy as the criminals. There were
several reasons for this change – the drug war had begun, of course, which meant that cops were always destined to lose. But more importantly, State power grew enormously throughout the Sixties – and so naturally society had to be portrayed as more dangerous than it really was. It was the old cycle of guilt and blame, inherited from communism and fascism. The starvation created by communism was blamed on everything but communism – in fact, communism is portrayed as the only source of food, not of hunger. Similarly, the expansion of State power made society more dangerous – and so the State had to pretend that increasing State power was a response to rising crime – not the cause.

Cop shows are also portrayed as self-reforming, in that corrupt cops are usually apprehended and honest ones take their place. The fact that no government system or program has ever reformed itself internally is naturally lost on the show’s writers, who were also raised and trained by the State. Governments expand, start wars (either against other governments, or their own citizens) and go bankrupt. They don’t ever shrink or reform from within. The fantasy of the ‘honest’ cop exposing a corrupt system is both funny and sad – it’s funny, because it’s so surreal – and sad, since it’s also a hangover of totalitarianism, or the idea that ‘if only Stalin knew how power was being abused out here in the provinces, he would put a stop to it!’ The idea that corruption is some sort of ‘middle layer’ between honest front line workers and honest leaders is a mad fantasy. Always and forever, the higher you go, the worse it gets.

These days, cop shows also follow a dismally predictable pattern. One aspect of State power that most people have direct contact with is
permits, or a piece of paper that gives you the ‘right’ to open a store, drive a car, build a deck – or even, as I found out recently, put grass in your back yard(!). So naturally, State-worshipping drones have to justify why these permits are so great. No one can appeal to safety any more, not with governments taking half our money – and so now the cops always have the same conversation with the same seedy men:

Cop: I’m looking for Bob Deadly

Seedy Bar Owner: Never heard of him.

Cop: Oh really? Should we come inside then, and check that all of your permits are in order?

Seedy Bar Owner: Ok, ok! He’s out back.

So now permits aren’t just another form of brutal taxation and control – they’re excellent weapons enabling cops to get information just by threatening people! Aren’t we lucky that they’re able to bypass due process this way?

Also, have you ever seen a show where cops agonize about the question: should we really enforce this law? Of course not! Laws are handed down from courts, and just have to be enforced. For instance, recently the Supreme Court of the US ruled that real estate property could be stolen from citizens by local State authorities for the ‘social good’ – I can promise you that you’ll never see a show where a cop quits the force because he can’t stomach dragging grannies out into the mud. Ask any cop you know: what law would you refuse to enforce? You’ll just get the blank stare of a programmable thug.

Killer Robots

Another cultural corner where our terror of government is nicely sublimated is in our persistent and generalized anxiety that our technology will someday turn from ‘tool’ to ‘master’. Yeah – at 50% taxation, I really have to worry about my laptop…

Of course, government is nothing more than a species of social technology, designed to serve citizens (government by and for the people) – and governments always turn from tools to masters, enslaving the very citizens they were supposed to serve. What we invent to protect us always ends up enslaving us… Could the media help us understand that we are afraid of our government? Of course not. Instead, they give us killer robots.

This is clearly our fear of State thugs, sublimated into a fear of technology through conditioned cowardice and conformity. We fear that
our machines will end up treating us as livestock – but the violence of State power turns all who tangle with it into machines – parasites, without empathy, who act automatically to retain their power – by treating us as livestock. The ‘battery power’ of the Matrix and the taxation/regulation of modern nanny states is united in our unconscious

Real Robots

People often wonder why the 20^th century was so bloody – and the explanation is simple. The genocidal conflicts were the direct result of the intersection of three unprecedented elements: state self-financing, state education and capitalistic technology. After governments took over the money supply and banking system in the late 19^th century, they could loan to themselves, print money and perform all sorts of other dastardly tricks. Roughly around the same time, governments took over education, which meant that the young were raised by the State, and as a result naturally viewed the State as a benevolent, protective and all-powerful entity (and really, how could a parent warn a child about the danger of State power while sending him to a State school every day?). Previously, private schools regularly warned children about the danger of the State – all that was now gone, and the State was endlessly praised in State schools – both explicitly and implicitly.

Inevitably, this combination produced over-patriotic young men and near-limitless State funds – the heady brew that was to prove the undoing of the 20^th century. The First World War, for instance, required both shallow, hot-headed youths and staggering financial resources – both of which were finally available to governments for the first time in history. Putting those two factors together with the weapons that capitalistic manufacturers could now supply rang the death knell for tens of millions.

The fault does not lie with the manufacturers, of course, no more than with the man who buys a stolen watch unwittingly. The fundamental problem is that freedom makes citizens lazy about protecting liberty – yet the financial and technological fruits of freedom are so powerful that if liberty is not constantly secured, catastrophes such as world wars, universal famines and concentration camps are the inevitable result. Just as when we are freezing to death, it is when we are getting the most comfortable that we have to be the most active in order to survive.

Inconsequentialities

Finally, the one aspect that overshadows all of the above is the relentless inconsequentiality of our culture – the cannonballs of trivia that are constantly fired into our brains. I don’t mean ‘celebrity culture’ – that is simple gossip, wherein we can garner scraps of advice on how to live by learning about the troubles and foibles of pretty people – and where we learn more truth about life than those around us, who lie continually about their successes and failures.

What I mean by ‘inconsequentiality’ is that we are certainly within the last decade or two of the Great Western Experiment, or the Mixed Economy, which will come crashing down around us all too soon – and yet so many artists – even the most intelligent – are producing nothing but well-written trivia.

Runway models are understood to be pretty but empty – and the same is true of the prose of modern writers. Striking phrases are wrapped around empty characters – vivid metaphors illuminate hollow souls. The same is true for non-fiction writers. Think of the great herd of ‘nagging pundits’ who think they are doing something important by wagging a disapproving finger at the all-powerful State. ‘Oh, we should really reduce agricultural subsidies’ – ‘Oh, we really should increase foreign aid’ – ‘Oh, we should really find health care more’ – ‘Oh, we should have been more careful about the war in Iraq’ – the list is endless, and an utterly destructive waste of time.

Frankly, the government does not give a shit about what you say. The government is ringed by the police, prisons and military. The guns are
all pointed at us. Politicians like power, sure, but even if they get tossed out, they have gold-plated pensions for the rest of their lives. If you cannot threaten them directly – and by that I mean physically – they have absolutely no interest in what you say. If you want George Bush to listen to you about the Iraq war, then bring charges against him – and I don’t mean impeachment, I mean war crimes. Something that will end up with him being thrown in jail.

Of course, I am not advocating tossing bombs, since that is useless. Simply based on military hardware, the State is far more powerful than any combination of its citizens – and so, like the Soviet Union, or Communist China, or the Weimar Republic, we can only watch, speak and wait for its collapse and possible reform. We can no longer avoid catastrophe – we can only speak the truth about the State, and hope that when it collapses, our just predictions and moral judgments will give us credibility when we say that the State must never be suffered again to exist.

And lastly, think about all the movies and TV shows you have seen in the last year – have any of them talked about the danger of the State? Maybe ‘Farenheit-911’, but that’s just a left-winger complaining about a right-wing policy (I’d use the power of the State differently!) I watched part of ‘Veronica Geurin’ last night, and just rolled my eyes. It’s about a woman who goes about exposing the drug dealers in Ireland, and the dangers she goes through. It’s all the purest nonsense – I mean, if she really wanted to solve the drug problem, she wouldn’t put her own life in danger – she’d just advocate for the legalization of drugs! It’s not like it’s some unprecedented, kooky idea – I’m sure she knew about Prohibition, and the disaster that was. I’m sure she was aware that the drug problem is a new phenomenon which arose directly after criminalization. I’m sure she knew how much money there is to be made in drugs simply because they are illegal. I’m sure she was aware that drug dealers want to get kids hooked on their foul wares because that guarantees them a constant source of money – one of the addicts even tells her as much at the beginning of the film: ‘the first hit is free’.

So she knows all of this, but just wanders about the underworld stirring up trouble until she gets attacked. Of all the idiocies! You don’t fight slavery by nagging slave-owners or exposing their abuses! You fight slavery by eliminating slavery! What’s the point of exposing drug dealers? To eliminate them? To create a market vacuum where great profit can be made? To increase the price of drugs by eliminating suppliers? Gee, I wonder what might happen then?

So even when movies try to deal with any sort of real issue, they get all soft-minded, melodramatic and trivial. I often wonder what artists and intellectuals will say to themselves when the State collapses… Will they wonder why they spent so much time on such inconsequential nonsense? Will Stephen Spielberg wonder why he wasted his talents on aliens and airports? Will Margaret Atwood ponder why it was so important to write about eating disorders and neurotic women? Will Clint Eastwood frown and try to remember why spunky boxers and lonely housewives were so important?

I do consider it unlikely. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to culture, you can only rise to prominence if your work is a scintillating series of polished inconsequentialities.

After all, we must be distracted as our pockets, souls and futures are picked clean.

National Defense

The last resort of the State is the realm of National Defense. Briefly put, National Defense is defined as the need for a government to protect citizens from invasion by other governments.

This is an interesting paradox, even beyond the obvious one of using government to protect us from governments. If you were able to run a magic survey throughout history, which government do you think people would be most frightened of? Would it be (a), their local State or Lord, or (b), some State or Lord in some other country. What about ancient Rome – would it be the local rulers, who forced young Romans into military service for 20 years or more, or the Carthaginians? What about England in the Middle Ages? Were the peasants more alarmed by the crushing taxation and strangling mobility restrictions imposed by their local Lord, or was the King of France their primary concern? Let stop in Russia during the 18th century, and ask the serfs: “Are you more frightened of the Tsar’s soldiers, or the German Kaiser?” Let’s go to a US citizen of today, and demand to know: “Are you more frightened of foreign invaders, or of the fact that if you don’t pay half your income in taxes, your own government will throw you in jail?”

Of course, we have to stop at the Second World War, which has had more propaganda thrown at it than any other single conflict. Didn’t the British government save the country from Germany? That’s an interesting question. The British government got into WWI, helped impose the brutal Treaty of Versailles, then contributed to the boom-and-bust cycle of the 1920’s, which destroyed the German middle class and aided Hitler’s rise to power. During the 1930s, the British government supported the growing aggression of Hitler through subsidies, loans and mealy-mouthed appeasement. And then, when everything had failed, it threw the bodies of thousands of young men at the German air force in the Battle of Britain. Finally, it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more British citizens by defending Africa and invading France, rather than let Nazism collapse on its own accord – as it was bound to do, just as every tyranny has done throughout history. Can it really be said, then, that the British government protected its citizens throughout the first half of the 20th century? Millions killed, families shattered, the economy destroyed, and half of Europe lost to Stalin… Can we consider that a great success? I think not. Only States win wars. Never citizens.

The fact of the matter is that we do not face threats to our lives and property from foreign governments, but rather from our own. The State will tell us that it must exist, at the very least, to protect us from foreign governments, but that is morally equivalent to the local Mafia don telling us that we have to pay him 50% of our income so that he can protect us from the Mafia in Paraguay. Are we given the choice to buy a gun and take our chances? Of course not. Who endangers us more – the local Mafia guy, or some guy in Paraguay we’ve never met that our local Mafia guys says just might want a piece of us? I know which chance I’d take.

Here in Canada, all this talk of foreign invasion is patently absurd. If the US suddenly decided to appropriate our natural resources, what would happen? We’d hand it over with a barely-audible whimper, because the US would just threaten to nuke Ottawa and then walk over the border. So the idea that we need our government to protect us is utterly foolish.

There is a tried-and-true method for resisting foreign occupation which doesn’t require any government – which we can see being played out in our daily news. During the recent invasion, the US completely destroyed the Iraqi government, and now has total control over the people and infrastructure. And what is happening? They are being attacked and harried until they will just have to get out of the country – just as they had to do in Korea and Vietnam, and just as the USSR had to do in Afghanistan. The Iraqi insurgents don’t have a government at all – any more than the Afghani fighters did in the 1980s. So even if we were invaded here in Canada – and we didn’t like the invaders – we could just take to the sewers and pick them off one by one until they were forced to leave.

(Of course, if some foreign government invaded Canada and cut my taxes in half, well I’d still fight them – but it sure as hell wouldn’t be to restore our current band of bandits!)

But let’s look at the Iraqi conflict in a slightly different light. It’s crucial to understand that America was attacked on 9/11 because the American government has troops in Saudi Arabia – and because it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through Clinton’s Iraqi bombing campaign. Given that the US government provoked the attacks, how well were the innocent victims of 9/11 protected by their government? Even if we don’t count the physical casualties of the war, given the massive national debt being run up to pay for the Iraq war, how well is the property of American citizens being protected? How much power would Bush have to wage war if he didn’t have the power to steal almost half the wealth of the entire country? As I have written elsewhere, the government does not need taxes in order to wage war; it wages war because it already has the power of taxation – and it uses the war to raise taxes, either on the current citizens through increases, or on future citizens through deficits.

This simple fact helps explain why there were almost no wars throughout the West from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1915 to the start of WWI in 1914. This was largely because governments could not afford wars – but then they all got their very own special Central Banks and were able to pave the bloody path to the Great War with printed money and deficit financing. World War I resulted from an increase in State power – and in turn fed State power, and set the stage for the next war. Thus the idea that we need to give governments the power to tax us in order to protect us is laughable – because it is taxation that gives governments the power to wage war.

For pacifist countries, this ‘war’ may be a war on poverty, or illiteracy, or drugs, or for universal health care, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. The moment you give one man the power – and moral ‘right’ – to force money out of others, you set the stage for the eventual destruction of your society.

So the question arises – how does a citizen keep his property and person safe? It’s an interesting question. The first answer that I would give is another question, which is:

Which sector does more to protect you and your property – the public or the private?

Let’s look at the security mechanisms the private sector has introduced in just the last 40 years:
- ATMs (less need to carry cash)
- Cell phones (can always call for help)
- Call display (virtually eliminates harassing phone calls)
- Sophisticated home security systems
- ID tracking tags
- Credit card numeric security
- Pepper spray
- and much more...

What has the public sector done? Well, they shoot harmless drug users and seize property. They’ll shoot you, too, if you don’t pay the massive tax increases they demand. The police are virtually useless in property crimes – and many violent criminals are turned loose because the courts are too slow, or are put in ‘house arrest’ because the prisons are too full of non-violent offenders.

So, who has most helped you secure your person and property over the past twenty years? The government, or your friendly local capitalist? Those who have stepped in to protect you, or those who have doubled your taxes while letting criminals walk? Have capitalist companies enraged foreigners to the point of terrorism? Of course not – the 9/11 terrorists attacked the World Trade Center (for protest the financing of the US government), the Pentagon, and the White House. They didn’t go for a Ford motor plant or a Nike store – and why would they? No one kills for shoes. They kill to protest military power, which rests on financing.

Thus the most effective securer of our person and property is the private sector. And even if we never get a private-sector army, it doesn’t really matter. Even without an army, the most effective method for keeping foreign invaders out of Canada is for us to get rid of our government. Then, no foreign invader has a clue as to how many of us have rifles, or bombs, or landmines lying around. If you’re some foreign government looking to pillage, are you going to set your sights on some weak government which has disarmed its citizens, or a land with strong private security forces, and where no records exist as to who is armed with what?

In summation, then, it makes about as much sense to rely on governments for security as it does on the Mafia for ‘protection’. The Mafia is really just protecting you from itself, as are all governments. Any man who comes up to you and says: “I need to threaten your person and steal your property in order to protect your person and property” is obviously either deranged, or not particularly interested, shall we say, in protecting your person or property. As long as we keep falling for the same old lies, we will forever be robbed blind for the sake of our supposed property rights, and sent to wage war against internal or external ‘enemies’ so that those in power can further pick the pockets of those we leave behind.

A Perfectly Legal Tax Revolt

It falls upon certain generations to wrestle liberty back from an ever-expanding State. It happened in England in the 17th century, America in the 18th century – now, in Canada, in the 21st century, our time has also come. For the sake of our freedoms, our futures, and our children, we must now take a stand against the increasing predations of our leaders. To save a once-noble system, we must cut off the supply of money to the politicians – just as one must stop serving liquor to an alcoholic.

Therefore, in order to protest the crazed pillaging of our public finances, I invite all my fellow Canadians to stop paying the GST and PST. It is time for us to understand that the Federal Government will never reform itself, populated as it is by corrupt, selfish and power-hungry autocrats.

How can this be achieved? Why, quite simply! All we have to do is take advantage of one perfectly legal method for avoiding the GST and PST. One simple little trick which will withhold billions of tax dollars from corrupt politicians. It is, perhaps, the simplest and easiest tax revolt in history.

How can you avoid paying the GST and PST? The trick is as simsple as this: stop buying stuff.

Buy groceries, pay your mortgage, fill your gas tank, buy presents for children too young to understand our struggle – but apart from that, stop buying stuff. No clothes, furniture, cars, cell phones, vacuum cleaners, mittens, shoes, computers – anything you can conceivably live without – live without!

What will this achieve? First of all, it will cut off a vital source of revenue for the government, forcing them to stop wasting our money. Secondly, it will propel leaders of industry – who have far more access to politicians than you and I – to sit down with the government and hammer out an agreement to truly cut spending and waste. Will this harm the economy in the short run? Of course – but what harm does out-of-control government spending do? Far more!

Our goal? For me, the existence of the income tax is the entire problem. First introduced in 1917 as a temporary war measure, it has swollen to mammoth proportions, and gives politicians a near-bottomless pit of money to plunder. Thus to secure our liberties – both now and in the future – I want nothing less than the abolition of the income tax. Your goals might be more modest. That’s fine! If all you want is for government to be less corrupt, or less wasteful, then we are fellow-travelers, and should aid each other any way we can.

Therefore, my fellow citizens, join with me today and stop shopping! Go on strike as a consumer until the government reforms itself. Close your wallets! Cut off the drug that turns leaders into bandits!

In our current crisis, if we fail to act, we shall deserve our eventual fate. However, if we rise and act as one, we can take back control of our government, our lives, our incomes – and secure our children’s liberties, which surely is the most precious gift we can bestow upon the future.

The Vanity of the Leftists

One of the questions I have heard asked over and over is just why intellectuals tend to be so left-wing? (A similar question is: why do people with verbal skills tend to be left-wing?)

I find this question rather perplexing. Intellectuals are an utterly useless lot – as are people with merely verbal skills (usually honed by compulsive lying). Intellectuals are know-it-all bores who think the world owes them a living. They are vain, shallow and entitled. Why do they tend to be left-wing? Good Lord – for the same reason that a bad worker tends to favour unionization! If you are an unproductive leech stuffed with fantasies about your own wonderful self, are you really going to be in favour of the free market? Of course not! Deep down, everyone has an innate and honest sense of their own objective value – if they did not, then vanity would inflict no emotional penalties, and if you have ever known a really vain person, you would know the horrors they suffer.

Anyone who comes out swinging against the free market is driven to protect his own ‘value fantasy’. He thinks he’s great, but he doesn’t want to put it to the test. Most intellectuals, without the blood money provided by the State (for which they sell their souls!), would end up working as temps, or baristas, or ESL teachers in Bali. They would not end up with well-paid and socially-respectable positions like professor, reporter, or publisher – not because these positions would not exist, but because their own vanity would make them terrible at them. As I once wrote in a novel, vanity is the natural enemy of statistics. It is also the natural enemy of customer satisfaction – and so of the free market. If you’re touchy, and smug, and falsely superior, you can’t be empathetic. You can’t work for the pleasure of others, because your vanity will turn the act of selling into crushing humiliation. People should just know how wonderful you are. You shouldn’t have to prove it – how base!

It is the old aristocratic instinct – I am born into greatness, and should never have to negotiate, or prove my worth.

The simple fact is that being good at language is, in and of itself, just not that valuable. It’s not like being able to build a bridge, or set a broken bone. If you have other emotional skills such as empathy, you can use your language skills in advertising – if you are creative, you can write. If you are funny, you can be a comedian. But being just ‘verbally acute’? So what? It doesn’t add much value. You might think it does, but you have to mix it with something a lot more valuable in order to really make it shine. I work in IT, and I am a good writer and speaker. But you have to have something to write or speak about – in my case, software. It’s better to be a geek who can speak than just a geek – but the ‘geek’ part is far more important. (In fact, those with only verbal skills give software a bad name, since they get into sales without a clue about what they’re selling.)

In short, the answer to almost all questions about social motivation is: follow the money and/or the power. The answer to the question: why are intellectuals usually socialists is – because the State pays them a hell of a lot more than the free marlet would.

Who Is Evil?

The word ‘evil’ is thrown around rather carelessly. George Bush is regularly called ‘evil’, as is Hitler of course. There seems to be little or no distinction between those who perform violence and those who counsel violence. This muddies the moral problem of good and evil – and obscures those who are actually evil.

So – what is evil? It’s simpler than you might think. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

If I write up a list of people I wanted killed, and tuck that list away in a filing cabinet in the basement of my house, am I evil? Of course not. What harm have I done?

If I write up that same list, and give it to a friend of mine, who goes out and kills those people – without instigation from me – then am I evil? Of course not. I neither condoned nor encouraged my friend’s actions.

Let us say that I stand in my backyard and say that I am declaring war against Antigua. Am I evil? Of course not. What effect do my words have? None. I can point at people over my fence and say: “I conscript you and you and you to fight my war against Antigua!” Now I have declared war and I have a draft. Am I evil? Of course not. No one is likely to pay me the slightest attention.

So – words and letters and intentions and speeches are never evil, since they can just be ignored. We don’t have to dig much deeper to get to the grist of the matter.

Let’s look at the war in Iraq. Who is evil? George Bush? Good Lord no! What has he done? Made some speeches, signed some papers. So what? You and I can do that too. Morality is not circumstantial to the degree that two men can both do exactly the same thing, and only one be called evil. If it is, then there can be no such thing as principles.

If Congress evil? No – being windy, dull and overly white is not evil.

What about the recruiters who go out and get young men and women to sign up? Well, have you ever been to a job fair? Lots of companies go out and canvas for people to come and work in dangerous positions – logging companies, for example. What’s the innate harm in that?

The soldiers are paid through tax money. Are the tax collectors evil then? If I don’t pay my taxes, they send me letters. So what? I can just throw their correspondence out. If I send a letter to someone telling them that they owe me half of their income from last year, they’ll probably just laugh and crumple it up.

The difference between what you and I do and what George Bush does is really quite simple: George Bush has enforcers. If I declare war on Antigua, who cares? If George Bush declares war on Antigua, he has men in uniform who will go around and shoot anyone who refuses to pay the money he needs to wage his war. These men are not acting in self-defense. They are the enforcers, who will take aim at whoever their leader points at. Don’t blame the leader. Pointing is not evil. Blame the enforcers, who are willing to murder on command.

These vicious parasites – the police and military – are usually portrayed as noble heroes. Perhaps some of them are. But the question to ask these men and women is: what law would you refuse to enforce – and why?

I bet not one in a thousand would be able to answer that question. A few would raise issues about torture – but that’s irrelevant. The State enjoys its power and privilege because we are all afraid of being imprisoned, not of torture.

If you want a clear view of the police, talk to minorities. Talk to illegal immigrants. Talk to drug users. They are under constant threat from the enforcers. They are on the front lines of social terror. They know what makes the cop tick. They know what he’s in it for. Brute power and humiliation.

Another interesting question to ask a cop is: what level of taxation would you refuse to enforce? So far the police force has had no problem enforcing tax rates rising from 10-60%. Would they enforce a tax rate of 70%? 80%? What about pure communism, or 100%? So – what, really is the difference between our police force or the SS or the NKVD? It’s only in degree. Not kind. There are almost no laws that a policeman would refuse to enforce. They are not heroes. They don’t have any real moral opinions about the violence they inflict on society. They are paid thugs, well-paid to wave their guns at the helpless.

So – George Bush is not evil. The war in Iraq involves only two groups of evil people. The first is the soldiers, who will go and gun down Iraqi citizens just because they’re told to. The second is the cops, who will shoot anyone who refuses to pay for the war. Take away those two ingredients, and George Bush is just a guy at a desk – a rather sad little rich boy making rather mediocre speeches and declaring ‘war’ in the privacy of his own imagination.

'Humanity’s Curse' – It’s Not What You Think

(a response to the article Humanity’s Curse in the National Post, Saturday, April 30, 2005)

Well, here is another fine article pondering the mystery of Hitler. Weighty words, post-modern musings, looking for the silver lining in the very blackest cloud – all of which obscures the real point in a very dangerous way.

Hitler is irrelevant. Stalin is irrelevant. Mao is irrelevant. These men were mere individuals, who had no power whatsoever to kill millions of people. Hitler did not start a war all by himself. He did not personally murder millions. He did not run concentration camps. All he did was sit around and issue orders. He sat on top of a vast and brutal social fiction called the State – the State which had violently educated him when he was a child, forced him into war when he was a youth, and then destroyed the economy when he was a man.

And why were Hitler’s orders obeyed? For three main reasons: first, because if you didn’t obey his orders, a State representative would shoot you. Second, because the State paid you to obey Hitler’s orders, and you had to put food on the table. And third, because the State had educated you as a child, filling you with propaganda about how obeying the State was the greatest virtue. Are we seeing a pattern here?

Hitler was a brutal nobody, unworthy of close examination. The atrocities of World War Two occurred as a result of a poisonous fantasy – the fantasy that the State should rule over society. The fantasy that any group of individuals should have the power to force others to do their bidding has been the cause of most social horrors throughout history.

“Humanity’s Curse” is, therefore, the State itself – and corrupting effects of arbitrary power, as we have lately seen here in Canada, were not confined to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century alone.

Why We Are Where We Are

I am reading a book at the moment called ‘Fatherless America’, which is, like most sociology texts, strong on effects and hopeless on causes.

The stunning rise of fatherlessness in North America over the past 30 or so years is perhaps the most obvious symptom of escalating State power – and yet I can think of no prominent academic who has made the obvious connection between effects and cause.

My own particular ‘big picture’ theory about social causes is deep, far-reaching – and unproven. However, I think it’s a useful framework for discussion. Here is, in my view, how we got to where we are.

The beginning of the end of liberty took place throughout Western society in the mid-late 1880’s, when the State engineered a violent coup and gained a coercive monopoly over the education of children. From that moment, the destruction of freedom was utterly inevitable – and it will continue to be inevitable until parents wrest back the education of their children from the State.

It is no accident that the First World War – as well as the introduction of the income tax and the centralization of monetary policy in the hands of the State – occurred within a single generation of the introduction of State education. Children who are taught by the State will inevitably become tools of the State, since they will never be taught the truth about the State. Also, the children logically reason, if only the State is allowed to teach us, it must be the most noble social institution.

After the First World War, State power was further extended because so many soldiers had been murdered that millions of families and individuals were dependent on State benefits. The manipulation of currencies and interest rates produced the boom of the 1920s and then created and extended the Great Depression – which in turn produced the Second World War.

After the Second World War, millions of ex-soldiers went to colleges and universities through government programs. Before, State education only turned children into State slaves –subsequently, State-run or State-controlled universities produced an entire new cohort of relativists and philosophical cripples through the corrosive anti-rationality of university courses. In lower schools, rationality was merely ignored – in higher education, rationality was directly attacked and undermined. Instead of being merely starved, students at State schools were now being actively poisoned.

The children of these new State-slaves became the hippies of the Sixties. Hippies hated and feared both rationality and naked power – and thus opposed science and war simultaneously. They supported State power in the form of social programs, but opposed the Vietnam war, because they might actually get drafted. Of course, many of them escaped the draft by going into University – a neat reversal of the Second World War. Instead of war causing people to become further mis-educated, people submitted to mis-education in order to escape war.

The result of this mis-education was that the massive expansion of State power throughout the Sixties and Seventies went virtually unopposed. Taxation went through the roof – largely because the computer revolution facilitated a massive expansion of both State and personal credit, so that individuals and governments could escape the natural limits of earned income. The productivity gains of the information revolution went straight into the coffers of the State – the result being that, starting from the early 1990s, real incomes began to decline.

The State was wise enough to refrain from regulating the software field – and also ensured continual innovation through generous tax breaks for start-ups and R&D. The State desperately needs improvements in information technology in order to suck up the extra income provided by improved processes – also, improved computers help the State further tax, regulate and spy on its own citizenry.

From the 1980s, the massive expansion in credit made possible through information technology provoked an orgy of State borrowing and spending. Citizens could temporarily escape the effects of higher taxation through borrowing, increased real-estate prices, and inheritance. However, for those at the bottom, unable to take advantage of these middle/upper class benefits, the losses began to mount.

Now, of course, we are waiting for the inevitable crash, which is not more than 10-20 years off. As the day of reckoning gets closer and closer, States will attempt to tax their citizens more and more. This will drive citizens into the grey market, or into low-income jobs, or welfare, or into early retirement, or communal arrangements. This will cause real estate prices to crash. The State will also raise inheritance taxes, which will wipe out the final source of supplementary income for the middle classes.

This kind of massive financial convulsion represents the strenuous attempts of an economy to shake off an excess of parasitic coercion – much as a fever must peak before breaking. Citizens will reduce their spending, expectations and circumstances, hunkering down as the State convulses and collapses all around them. State parasites – from unions to teachers to tax collectors – will have to change and evolve, casting aside their lust for power and violence. What will emerge will be far healthier – and, hopefully, with the memory of such a catastrophe – especially the effects on the aged – society will finally have a built-in set of anti-bodies against the accumulation of State power. (With a great deal of luck, society will emerge from this convulsion without a State of any kind, which would be the start of a real golden age for mankind!)

The great risk, of course, is that this convulsion will lead to totalitarianism. This has been the pattern throughout human history, but for various reasons I remain optimistic that this will not be the case. The current and growing cynicism about politicians may be strong enough to resist the final expansion of State power.

As can be seen from the above, these problems all begin with State education. Why is that?

The most obvious problem with State education is that State teachers will never teach children about the violent nature of the State. How could they? Imagine a teacher telling her students: I am paid with money taken from people by violent means – your parents must pay me or they will be thrown in jail – this entire system of instruction is based on violence – the State uses coercion to achieve its ends. Can you picture any violent system – other than organized crime – being honest about coercion? Of course not. No parent says to a child: I am beating you because I am frustrated, or because I am a drunk, or because I was beaten when I was a child. Instead, they say: I am beating you because you are bad – and it is for your own good.

On a recent trip to Florida, my wife and I attended a time-share presentation. I asked the presenter – a woman who had gone to college – whether she knew that America was founded on a tax revolt? No. I asked her if she knew that the Founding Fathers had specifically banned the income tax in the Constitution? No. Did she know that it took about forty years to bring the income tax about? No. Did she know which three powers the Constitution granted the Federal government? No. (Anti-piracy, anti-counterfeiting, and the postal service, in case you were wondering.) Did she know that the President had to ask Congress to declare war, and that the war in Iraq was unconstitutional? Nope.

This woman had gone to public schools, of course, and knew nothing about the genesis of her own freedoms. This is entirely natural. Throughout history, the State has employed legions of well-paid intellectuals (and priests) whose sole job is to obscure the brutal reality of State power. The sequence of fall-back arguments of these ‘State-sluts’ is, generally:
the State does not use coercion
the State does use a small amount of coercion, but the use of that coercion is approved of by the vast majority
the State uses some coercion which is not approved of by the vast majority, but that is because they don’t know their own interests
the State uses extensive coercion, the only alternative to that coercion would be civil war, mass murder and/or invasion by a malignant foreign power

Prior to all these arguments, of course, is an enormous cloud of murk obscuring the simple question what effect does State coercion have on the choices of individuals?

The first – and most obvious – fact is that State coercion destroys the choices of individuals. Adapting to violence is not the same as having choices. However, academics fell entire forests obscuring this simple fact – for the simple reason that they themselves have robbed those who pay them.

What does this mean? I was watching a show about whales the other night, and heard the story of a man who had spent the last twenty years studying humpback whales. How is this possible? I assume that he is not the recipient of voluntary checks mailed directly from whale enthusiasts. He is either an academic – paid by tax dollars – or paid by a charity, which can take advantage of tax-deductible donations. This really irritated me. I would love to write books for a living – but I would never assume that others must be forced to support my desires. This man wants to study whales, and will take blood money from the State to support his preferences. How abysmally selfish is that? Why must I be forced at gunpoint to support his whale fetish? Don’t get me wrong – I like whales. I’d be happy to rent another whale documentary. If he can support himself from my rental fees, great. More power to him. But I resent being held hostage so that he can sail around the Caribbean playing with whales. I have less chance to pursue my dream because my money is being taken so he can fund his.

Sociologists are in the same boat. They are funded by the State, and so they cannot hope to be objective about State power. This is for many reasons, not least of which is laying themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy for taking State money and then correctly identifying the State as a violent institution. Also, the State is their only source of funding. We can expect more objectivity from an advertising company. If the CEO of an ad company finds out that one of his client’s products is harmful, he can drop that client without closing his company. But an academic cannot really criticize the State – i.e. the institution, not specific policies – without putting his entire livelihood and career at risk.

The closest analogy would be to imagine a group of intellectuals paid by slave-owners to write articles and teach children. You can write any articles you want, say the slave-owners, but we can fire you or cut your funding at any time. Oh, and by the way, if we cut you off, you will never be able to find another job again. Now off you go – and be free to be as intellectually independent as you like!

How many of these intellectuals would take the position that slave-owning is an unadulterated evil? How many of them would start any lecture by pointing out that all money earned from slave-labour is stolen, blood money?

The answer is: almost none. These intellectuals are just another one of the slaves owned.

These slave-intellectuals, however, are fascinated by social trends. They are very interested in the fact that slave-families seem to be very unstable. One argues that slaves have a ‘culture of irresponsibility’ which contributes to family break-up. Another argues that male slaves feel irrelevant, since the slave-owners are the actual providers. Another argues that male slaves are lazy, or ‘under-socialized’. Another argues that male slaves, since many of them are fatherless, never learned how to be fathers.

Do you see how sad and insane all of this is? The simple fact is that slave families are regularly broken up because they are sold off in parts. The slave-intellectuals are simply describing the effects of slavery, and pretending that they have discovered something about causes.

In a free society, morality and self-interest are one and the same. In a coercive environment, the two split into myriad and contradictory fragments. Everyone studies the effects of the wound, without mentioning the real cause, which is the stabbing knife.

Why has fatherlessness become so prevalent? Simply because woman are rewarded for having children, and punished for getting married. Similarly, men suffer no negative consequences for fathering children – and are punished for being fathers – especially if they have a job. It is really that simple. State violence is at the root of any and all general social trends – because only State violence changes the incentives and punishments throughout the entirety of society.

How are women rewarded for having children? Simply: they are paid welfare by the State to have children. How are they punished for getting married to a man with a good job? Well, their welfare drops according to their husband's income. In other words, a man with a good job who wants to get married is a net negative for a young woman, since his income – split between two people – is less than the income she gets from the variety of social programs designed to pay her for having children. (It is probably true that if she has children later in life, when the man’s income is greater, she will do better – but we are generally talking about young women here.)

Furthermore, having children on welfare avoids the central problem for women contemplating having children, which is the problem of risk.

In a free society, having children is a very risky venture for a woman – and especially for a poor woman. If she chooses a man who abandons her, then she is stuck raising children for twenty-odd years on her own, which is truly the portrait of a ruined life. Thus she must be very careful about the man she chooses to start a family with. He must be loving, productive and dependable. She must also possess desirable characteristics, since an honourable man cannot love a selfish, needy or demanding woman. She must be hard-working, supportive and affectionate to win and keep his love and commitment.

Thus freedom supports and rewards all that is best in human nature. However, violence corrupts and undermines such luminous morality. The woman does not have to be a good person to get checks from the State. She does not have to develop her own goodness. She does not have to worry about choosing the right man. In fact, if she chooses a good man, who wants to get married and stick around, she will be worse off, since she will have less financial support initially – and will now be dependent on his goodwill. Thus economically – though not morally – she will be far better off choosing an unreliable man who does not want to get married.

That is the simple truth of the interaction – everything else is just static, noise and nonsense. Families are unstable because people are paid to be unstable – and, on the other side, forced to fund instability. The coercive power of the State tears families apart by reversing the natural incentives of freedom.
Suppose the State stopped arresting rapists, and instead started paying them $10,000 per rape. Would it be a great mystery if rape increased? Would the increased rapes result from some foggy ‘change of values’ or ‘sea change in social mores’? Would we examine men’s perceptions of women, or wonder if video games or movies had something to do with it? Would we be surprised if men and women colluded to fabricate rape in order to collect the 10 grand? Of course not. We’d just say: huh, well if you’re going to reward people for doing something they were previously punished for, of course their behaviour will change.

This is not to say that there is no place for sociology. As long as sociologists are funded voluntarily – and confine their studies to areas where human beings are really free, or to studying the effects of admitted coercion, then the profession is an honourable one.

However, we are a long way away from that at present. Currently, since academics are all paid by State to obscure the brutal reality of State power, we shall get no truth from such owned-and-operated State whores.

Are People Just Stupid?

There is one thought that has occurred to every libertarian at one time or another:

Are people just, like, stupid?

It’s a fair question. The news is stuffed full of government failures. No one likes paying taxes. Everyone knows that politicians are corrupt. Everyone is sentimental about the death of this monstrous Pope – the doddering bigot who covered up pedophiles and condemned homosexuality and birth control. (A good friend of mine, when asked what he thought of the Pope’s death, replied: “It’s a good start!”) The great mystery is: why on earth are people so blind to the tyrannies that rule them?

Another way of asking this is:
If we’re so right, why do so few people agree with us?

My wife and I have come up with two solutions. Mine first, since hers is better.

In the turn of the last century in China, girls of a certain class went through a tortuous process known as ‘foot binding’. Through years of excruciating manipulations, their toes were curled inward, towards the balls of their feet, so that in the end they could barely walk. This was done because men apparently liked women with little feet. (Naturally, it was the result of a lack of free markets – women could not earn their own way, so they were utterly dependent on the whims of men.)

Let’s suppose that you were a little Chinese girl at the time, and for some reason, you escaped this brutal practice. You can walk easily. But all the women around you are hobbled, and can hardly get around. Is this really such an incomprehensible situation? Are you the fittest, most athletic woman around? Of course – but only because your feet were never bound!

It is exactly the same with libertarians. For some reason – the subject of another article, surely! – we escaped the general ‘mind-binding’ inflicted by church doctrine, State education and cultural bigotry. (Just as a hint, for the most part it seems to do with having unconvincing authority figures early in life.) The natural intelligence that is the birthright of every child flowered in us – and makes us now tower over the general herd, just as a free-footed Chinese girl sped in circles around her groaning and crippled companions. It is not our intelligence that makes us so much smarter, but the general crippling of others.

So people cannot understand freedom because their minds have been crippled through religion, dogmatic cultures and State schools. That is my explanation. My wife’s is, I think, much more complete, since it incorporates an elegant solution that I need a entire separate article to articulate!

For my wife, everything comes down to the family. People can quite easily understand freedom, but the social cost for them to do so would be far too great, so they scorn it and pretend ignorance. As she puts it, if people grasped freedom, what would happen to their relationships? They’d have to break with their families, end their marriages – quit their jobs perhaps. Everything would have to change!

Thus it’s not that people are stupid – they just can’t handle the effects of letting even a hint of real freedom into their lives. If they have children, they’d also have to take an honest look at their own parenting. And at their own parents of course.

But so what? What’s the problem with shaking things up? Why is it so difficult for people to break out of unhealthy or unproductive relationships?

The answer is, in my view, because mental health has always been defined in social terms – a combination of sustained relationships and productive work. In other words, a popular Auschwitz guard with a long marriage is the very definition of mental health. Moral considerations do not form the basis of mental heath – a compliant Nazi is considered more ‘healthy’ than an outcast one. This form of ‘social ethics’ is largely due to the Jewish influence over psychology. It would be hard for a Jew to say that individual morality is more important than social acceptance, since to be ‘Jewish’ is to automatically place the authority of the group over the conscience of the individual – just as Christians, socialists, Muslims and soldiers do.

This problem of ‘social approval’ is a cancer right at the root of modern psychology. ‘Solitariness’ is always considered sick. Therapists generally consider that a patient who is terminating a multitude of long-term relationships is acting in an impulsive and self-destructive manner. In particular, breaking off relationships with family members is considered only a last resort, usually reserved for physically abusive parents or spouses. Everything else is supposed to be ‘worked out.’

Of course, quite the opposite is true. Of all the relationships in your life, your relationship with your parents and siblings is by far the most likely to be completely screwed up. Not only that, but you also have absolutely no power to improve these relationships.

Harsh? Not at all. Merely logical.

When raising children, parents have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Why should children obey them? Because parents are right? Hell no – ask parents why they hold their beliefs, they don’t have a clue. How could they? The last competent philosopher was probably John Locke, over three hundred years ago. The general social stream of ideas is just muck and confusion, designed by evil people to baffle and paralyze any good souls that accidentally emerge from the sick swamps of modern thought.

Average parents can no more reinvent morality from scratch than they can build a Space Shuttle in their backyards. Still, they have to get their children to obey them – how do they do it?

Oh, the usual suspects. Guilt, shame, withdrawal, criticism, bribery, bullying, manipulation – the usual crap that has passed for parenting throughout history. Guilt, shame and bullying always rush to fill the void when logical morality loses favour, because children must be taught, and if no carrots are to be found, sticks will always just have to do.

So face it: your parents were bullies, or weak curriers of favour, or manipulative emotional infants themselves. You have no respect for them, for respect requires courage, and courage requires logical morality. You do not love them, since love demands virtue, and manipulating children into blind obedience is not at all virtuous. There are only a few possible responses to modern parents:
- Contempt
- Indifference
- Boredom
- Hatred
- Empty conformity

These are usually mixed into an over-stimulating frappe of conflicting emotions, leaving family gatherings fraught with tension, alienation, dissociation and emptiness.

You are told to repair things with your parents, but that is an impossible task – a complete waste of time that will also make you crazy. Since they hurt you when you were young, you cannot fix the relationship. To make the point with an extreme example, if you are raped by a man, you cannot cure him of his desire to rape. Maybe someone else can, but you cannot. Since your parents bullied or bribed you into blind obedience, you cannot help them become better people. Maybe someone else can. A therapist perhaps. But not you. You have no hope, since their guilt about how they treated you will always muck up any attempt at honest communication.

And really, it is impossible to forgive someone who has bullied a child. Forgiveness is for repairable events, like being distracted or breaking a vase. A bad childhood cannot be repaired or returned intact. Where restitution is impossible, forgiveness is impossible. Don’t even try.

Does this sound too radical? Do you think it extreme for me to say that almost all parents are horribly bad? Perhaps it is. However, if you look at the state of the world – the general blindness and the slow death of our liberties – the challenge you take on by disagreeing with me is this: if it’s not the parents, what is it?

Either the world is not sick, or parents are. Because, as my wife says, it all starts with the family. If you want to perform the greatest service for political liberty, all you have to do is turf all of your unsatisfying relationships. Parents, siblings, spouse, it doesn’t matter. If you can do that, you can speak honestly about freedom.

If you can’t, well, then you have no right to complain about the government. You can’t ask people to give up their illusions about remote political tyrannies if you can’t escape your own domestic tyrants.

Gomery and the true source of corruption...

So now everyone is pretending to be shocked and horrified over the Gomery inquiry. Sum total misspent: $200 million – a drop in the bucket of State spending. Not a few years ago, an HRDC scandal topped $5 billion – naturally, the 200 million is getting more attention, since the math illiterates that State schools churn out probably think 200 million is more than only 5 billion.
Of course, everyone knows that the entire system is corrupt, but we love to focus on the party in power – thus maintaining the comforting illusion that somewhere out there, someone exists who can handle billions of dollars of scantily-documented taxpayer cash without becoming corrupted. Our general inability to think in terms of principles is also shown by the fact that when the Liberals made it legal to take taxpayer dollars to fund their party (i.e. through campaign contribution ‘reforms’), nary a voice was raised in protest. In other words, it is not the behaviour of those entangled in the sponsorship scandal that is objectionable, but the legality of that behaviour. If memory serves, this approach to law – that whatever the government makes legal, is right – got the Germans into significant trouble a couple of generations ago.

So now we are faced with three unpalatable choices. We have the power-hungry Liberals, utterly corrupt; we have the spend-happy NPD, utterly socialist – and we have the Progressive Conservatives, who are only fairly spend-happy, somewhat socialist – and very Christian. Thus it is now officially safe to predict the coming demise of our current form of mob-rule democracy. Like the German Weimar Republic of the 1930’s – and French Third Republic of the same decade – no government will now be able to hold on to power for more than a year or two before being consumed by the corruption that is already endemic to the system as a whole.

To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history, it is all grimly predictable. Once any government gains the power to tax income, State spending, debt and corruption always go through the roof. More and more parasites are drawn to the mountain of money the government guards. The simple greed of money-lust gives soon way to the more sinister corruption of the manipulation of State power to favour individual groups – farmers, unions and manufacturers, to name just three. Protective and biased legislation is passed. Taxes continue to rise. The economy begins to slow, causing more people to flock the relative safety of State payouts. Limiting State spending becomes almost impossible, since so many voters now depend on State largesse – in one form or another – to survive.

This all paralyses a sequence of individual governments, resulting in cynicism in both the general population and those in power. Knowing that proactive action is impossible, and that the system is doomed to failure, everyone at the top just grabs whatever money they can as fast as possible – which accelerates the coming collapse.

The relevant question is thus not whether our current democracy is doomed – or when – but rather: what do we want to come afterwards? Most failing societies take entirely the wrong approach, mistaking the collapse of mob-rule democracy for the failure of freedom, and thus fleeing into the false security of an authoritarian system. Those societies which flourish, however, recognise that State power – especially the brutality of the income tax – always leads to the collapse of the State – and, with clear eyes and strong arms, work to rebuild a new society free of such destructive tyrannies.

The Clarity of Concepts

I once had a passionate argument in a coffee shop with a philosophy student who tried to convince me that the concept of ‘truth’ was entirely man-made. ‘Truth’ does not exist in the world, he said, in the same manner as a rock or a tree. ‘North’, he insisted, has not existence at all.

Of course not, I replied, but so what? ‘Truth’ is a category of ideas containing those ideas that have been validated by the senses. Categories – or concepts – do not exist, of course, no more than the concept of ‘tree’ exists. The concept of ‘tree’ is just a category of sense-experience, describing those entities that share the properties of trees.

As to ‘North’, well of course it doesn’t exist, but the truth value in the assertion ‘Toronto is north of New York’ can be objectively established. The physical locations of the two cities, relative to the magnetic field of the Earth, can be determined through measurements. Thus, although the concept ‘North’ does not exist as an objective physical entity, the statement ‘Toronto is north of New York’ can be validated relative to objective physical entities – and so gains objectivity without requiring physical existence. This is not rocket science – it has all been thoroughly established for the past four hundred or so years, through the ‘logic plus reproducible, empirical verification’ approach of the scientific method.

I have staunchly maintained for years that concepts are not at all complicated. They are intangible, but objective, in the manner described above. Time and time again, however, I’ve run into the most patently ridiculous arguments against the objective validity of concepts. I could understand this if I was Francis Bacon taking on medieval scholasticism, but this is an age where intelligent people should not have any real difficulties understanding the power and accuracy of logical concepts, validated by sense-experience.

The sad fact is that the relationship between concepts and entities has been so thoroughly mucked up by Platonism, mysticism, superstition and religion that it has become almost impossible to see it with clear eyes. But it’s really not that complicated.

The human mind, thankfully, is capable of great errors in relation to sense-experience. I say ‘thankfully’ because without our capacity for ‘error’, we would have never figured out that the world is round – because it looks so flat! Similarly, the fact that we are moving around the sun, and not vice versa, would have remained similarly misperceived. So all praise to our capacity for error – it is the avenue to greater truths!

Because we can err, and because we cannot perceive basic truths about reality through the senses – not because the senses err, but because we are limited in our perspective – we must use concepts to organize sense-data into categories. This is a simple matter of efficiency, and arose with the use of language. ‘Did you round up the sheep?’ is just easier to say than ‘Did you round up all the little four legged white fluffy things that keep moving around when you don’t round them up?’ Similarly, those apes which learned to say: “A leopard! Run!” did a whole lot better than those who played the grunting charade of saying ‘a cat-like thing that has spots and runs really fast and likes to eat us and is coming now!’.

The simple fact that nature and matter is organized into categories – liquids, rocks, trees, sheep – is the reason why concepts are both possible and accurate. If atoms weren’t stable, and if nature didn’t require pairings of genetically-similar animals for reproduction, then everything would be random, and concepts wouldn’t be possible. Concepts are valid for the simple reason that trees are like other trees, and rocks are like other rocks. Trees are similar because they are a very efficient organization of self-reproducing cells – and rocks because the matter that makes them up behaves in similar, predictable patterns, being subject to the same universal forces of physics – and, so, geology.

Concepts, then, are just descriptions of physical similarity – and there’s nothing very complex in that. Of course, concepts can describe other concepts, but at some point physical reality must come into play. Even something as abstract as the theory of relativity was able to predict the bending of light through a gravitational field.

To take a short example, the concept of ‘numbers’ is nothing more than the description of discrete attributes of matter. ‘Two rocks’ is a description of a physical reality: there is a clump of matter, with a space, and another clump of similar matter. There are two of them, and so we get the number ‘two’. Very simple, don’t you think? Everything that is more complex comes out of such simple observations.

Also, concepts work, which is another proof of their validity. Through concepts, astronomers can predict the motion of planets. Using concepts proves concepts, since those that accurately describe the current nature of matter can accurately predict the future motion of matter. The scientific method for validating the truth of individual concepts – logic plus reproducible predictability – also validates the idea of concepts as a whole.

So why is there such mud around the idea of concepts? Why are such simple facts subjected to such endless mental static?

Well, wherever lies are told, just look for the money, and all will become clear.

Churches obviously profit from muddying the basic truth about concepts, since concepts only have value relative to sense-experience, and so gods cannot exist. But there’s much more to it than that. Some Jewish friends of my wife’s are being asked to contribute hundreds of dollars a month to their synagogue – and they don’t even have to believe in God! They just have to want to be ‘Jews’ – which of course is a concept without any roots in physical reality, since it is not a race. If it were rooted in physical reality, of course, it would not require an entrance fee – I don’t have to pay anyone to be white, or male, or bald.

Political and military leaders regularly get people killed to defend non-existent concepts – and of course they don’t start wars to defend the concepts, but use the concepts to declare the war, so that they can tax and threaten the non-combat citizenry.

Parents also use non-existent concepts to bully their children into dull, conforming compliance – cultural pride, the innate superiority of parents, fear of disapproval, the one-way, exploitive virtue of being ‘good children’ and so on.

Government employees – from bureaucrats to teachers – also require the false concept of ‘benevolent violence’ to justify their paychecks and privileges. The same is true for all the myriad leeches which feed off State power.

Sports teams also benefit from irrational concepts like ‘my team better’, as do unions, with their ‘bad bosses’ mantras.

So many parasitical groups profit from false concepts that it is not hard to understand why so much mud is thrown into the simple waters of conceptual accuracy. The methodology for fighting this corruption is the same as it has been since the age of Socrates: follow the money to the falsehood, reveal the false prophets, and free the truth.

Historical Causality

When I sat down to figure out what I wanted to do for my Master’s degree, one of the topics highest on my list was rescuing the reputation of the Industrial Revolution (IR). I presented this topic to my condescending (and very short-lived) thesis advisor, who patiently explained to me that the Industrial Revolution had no root cause.

I found this rather fascinating, and questioned him further. If the IR had no root cause, what on earth could? The IR was the single greatest event in the history of our species –it rescued us from a hundred thousand years of slavery to brute nature and callous rulers. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of the IR seem to be from completely different worlds. From rural ignorance, poverty, disease and starvation, mankind vaulted – in the span of a generation or two – to a self-subsistent and growing world of urban opportunity.

How could such an unfathomable transformation not have a root cause? If an ancient desert was suddenly replaced by a fertile valley, wouldn’t agriculturists and climatologists be fascinated? If a stable land mass suddenly sprouted a massive volcano – wouldn’t that excite geologists? If human beings suddenly developed immunity to all forms of cancer, wouldn’t that propel the greatest medical investigation in history?

The IR – which was even greater than all the above – merits no such investigation. Instead, we rely on resentful liars such as Marx and Dickens for ‘analysis’, and muddy all penetrating questions with smug assertions of ‘historical complexity’.

The common historical approach is that the IR was the result of complex interactions of unrelated factors. The improved horse harness of the eleventh century produced more crops, as did the upgrading of crop management throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. The re-discovery of Roman law sped up urbanization, and the plague decimated existing social structures – especially the Catholic church. Protestant ideas contributed a new ethic of saving and hard work, and the invention of certain technologies sped up the potential for industrialization.

All these factors – and a thousand others – are then thrown into a magic cauldron which somehow produces the IR.

This is the most ridiculous approach that can be imagined. I got a Masters degree from the University of Toronto – how would these ‘historians’ explain that? Well, I attended this class, ate that meal, took that exam – and somehow it all came together, and I got the degree! That is the purest nonsense! The question is not how I got my degree, but why? Why was I even interested in getting a Masters? ‘How’ anything happens in history is unimportant – only the why is relevant, because only through the ‘why’ can we understand the future.

The central premise of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy was that the Earth was the center of the universe. However, to explain the baffling retrograde motion of Mars, incredibly complex ‘circles within circles’ were posited – sometimes into the hundreds. How they calculated the orbit of Mars is now unimportant – no one studies it these days. Why they took their approach to their calculations is important, and forms the fundamental principle called Occam’s Razor. Their calculations became ludicrously complex because their central premise was wrong – which is an invaluable lesson for the future, courtesy of the past.

In the same vein, how I took my Masters – the specific steps – is utterly uninteresting. Why I took my Masters was:
1. to gain access to a better career
2. to make more money
3. to pursue my love of knowledge

If we look at my first reason – a better career – the real question is: why does having a Masters help my career?

The answer is two-fold. Either the free market places a high value on a Masters degree, or some regulatory body requires me to have one. Since I have a Masters in History, and no regulatory body requires that, it must be because the free market values a Masters.

So why weren’t people getting a Masters in the Middle Ages? Quite simply – because there was no value in it. And the reason there was no value in it? Because the free market did not exist, and no regulatory body required a Masters degree.

How do we know that the free market did not exist in the Middle Ages? Well, there were no property rights (other than vague ‘historical inertia’ squatting privileges), and because ‘trade’ was subject to endless reams of violent coercion. Guilds controlled the production of goods, requiring years of pointless ‘apprenticeship’ in order to make something as simple as a pair of shoes. Sons were forced into the trade of their fathers. Advertising was illegal – in a medieval market, even sneezing as a potential customer passed by was illegal, since the passer-by was required to say ‘bless you’, which might lead to a conversation, and so a sale. Both the Church and the aristocracy conspired to keep usury illegal – and, because interest was disallowed, it was impossible to start a business. Foreign trade was strangled with punitive tariffs.

Why all the coercive bullying? Well, both the Church and the aristocracy stood to lose if the middle class was allowed to develop – the Church because the optimistic materialism of the entrepreneurial spirit directly opposed the death-cult and guilt-metaphysics of Christianity – and the aristocracy because when wealth depends more on capital than land, the political power of land-owners is undermined.

The answer to the question ‘why did people not take a Masters degree in the Middle Ages?’ is thus simple: because they were not allowed to gain value from it. If men are not allowed to choose their own professions – or their professional associates – self-improvement becomes a net negative. Where there is no competition, there is no need for excellence – and so self-improvement is a complete waste of time and resources.

George Orwell makes this point in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. He mocks the pompous sociologists who wax on about how a ‘gypsy spirit’ or ‘sense of restlessness’ keeps tramps on the move. Tramps keep moving, he says, because they are compelled to keep moving. If they stay more than one night in a particular locale, they are thrown in jail.

Tramps keep moving simply because it is illegal for them to stay in one place. People were poor in the Middle Ages simply because it was illegal for them to become rich. It really is as simple as that.

This approach also answers another essential question about IR, which is: why did the IR occur in the 18th-19th centuries, rather than at any other time in human history?

There is absolutely no reason why the advances of the IR could not have occurred in Ancient Rome, or Greece, or China – anywhere in fact. Physics hadn’t changed. People weren’t magically more intelligent or entrepreneurial or materialistic in the 18th century. No accidental alignment of multiple factors produced the IR, because those ingredients had always existed, all throughout history. Romans dabbled in steam power, but the existence of slavery made labour-saving devices pointless. The growth of political corruption in ancient Greece – always synonymous with increased State power – created a world where ambitious men were certain to make more money through politics than business – thus escalating State coercion at the expense of the productive economy.

The results of this were inevitable. Rome fell for one simple reason: the massive increases in taxation and conscription required to support a brutal and expansionist foreign policy. Rome could only profitably tax and conscript those who lived in cities – thus, as taxes rose, people fled the cities for the countryside. Unable to conscript its own citizens, Rome had to hire more mercenaries – which in turn required more taxation – which drove even more people out of the cities, further lowering the taxable population. This vicious circle destroyed Rome remarkably quickly. When Rome ran out of money to pay its mercenaries, they marched on Rome and destroyed it. Violence always begets violence. Taxation always destroys the State – and, sadly, this destruction only occurs after the State has corrupted the population to the point where they cannot function without a brutal State.

So – why did the IR happen in the 18th and 18th centuries? The answer is quite simple, and can be traced through the growth in property rights, destruction of the guilds, and the limitations placed on arbitrary State power:

The Industrial Revolution occurred because it was allowed to occur.

Or, put another way:

People became productive because they were no longer punished for being productive.

The IR could have happened at any time throughout human history – and tens of thousands of years of pointless suffering could have been averted. The endless famines, wars, plagues – the misery of millions – were all completely unnecessary.

Why, then, do modern academics refuse to point all of this out?

The answer is quite simple: because the State pays them not to. This is a very common pattern. The State always takes money from the general population, then uses that money to pay moralists to justify State power. For the aristocracy, these moralists were priests – now, for secular demagogues, they are academics and school teachers, who continually praise the State that pays them.

All the above underlines an essential truth about human society, which should be obvious to any historian:

All general social patterns result from universal (i.e. State) coercion.

Here are some examples:

· If people do not engage in trade, it is because they punished for trading.
· If people do not lend each other money, it is because they are punished for charging interest.
· If people accumulate useless knowledge, it is because they are punished for practicing their profession without it (this applies to academia, apprenticeship programs in the trades – as well as the ten years of medical school required to write a prescription for antibiotics or refer someone to a specialist).
· If people do not accumulate wealth, it is because they are not allowed to, or because their wealth can be taken arbitrarily.
· If a large number of businesses fail, it is always due to State policies, usually to do with the money supply, taxation or punitive regulation.
· If people become warlike, it is because the State is paying them to be warlike – either through direct pay, in the case of soldiers, or through subsidies, in the case of arms manufacturers.
· If a group of people do not criticize the State, it is because they are directly benefiting from the State. Some examples:
o The media must apply to the State for operating licenses, and rely on the State for news.
o Teachers and academics are paid and protected by the State.
o Large businesses need State regulations to punish potential competitors.
o Scientists rely on State grants and academic appointments to survive.
o Health care professionals rely on State coercion to limit competition and price-cutting.
o The old, the sick and the poor receive massive payments from the State.

…the list goes on and on.

This is the simple truth of historical causality. Random factors do not affect all people simultaneously. The only force powerful enough to affect the whole of society – to choke, enslave and define the actions of the entire body politic – is the universal power of the State.

When the State is eliminated, and historians no longer have to be court toadies to the power that pays them, this simple truth can finally be made clear.

Lateral Paranoia

Last Saturday night (March 12, 2005, if it’s of interest), I had one of the most predictable arguments in the history of political thought.

I was arguing against the welfare state, and I was told – perhaps for the millionth time – that we have to have coercive taxation because there are mean, stingy people in the world who wouldn’t help the poor.

I responded, as I always do, that I had been arguing against the welfare state for over twenty years, and in all that time, I had never once run across a person who rubbed his hands and said: ‘Oh, man – I’d love to get rid of taxation, because I hate helping the poor!’. Every single person I have ever talked to immediately expressed deep concern about the fate of the poor. Or the sick. Or the homeless. Take your pick.

This is fascinating. Obviously everyone I have ever argued with believed in the existence of this vast majority of mean people, but had never in fact ever met any of these ‘mean people’. In other words, they are not in favour of taxation because they have met so many mean people. They believe in the prevalence of ‘mean people’ because taxation exists – a complete reversal of cause and effect. This is the similar to the 1930s belief of many Germans that ‘the Jews must be being persecuted because there are so many bad Jews.’ The laws create the facts.

What I want to know is this: what on earth made us so hostile and suspicious of each other? Doesn’t that seem strange? At a personal level, almost everyone I meet is kind, considerate, generous – altruistic to a fault. (Politically, they are all totalitarians, but that is another matter!) Stop your car and ask for directions. People quiver to help. Struggle with a large package. People will open doors for you. People hold elevators. Let you ahead in line if you’re desperately late. Give you shelter in emergencies. Give billions to the victims of natural disasters. On a personal level, people are, by and large, lovely.

Sure, there are bad people. So what? Have you ever spent any real time with them? Can you confirm their prevalence? Of course not! They’re just theoretical entities.

Also – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in my essays – no system of taxation ever catches the money of these mean people. They are criminals anyway. They don’t give to charities, and they don’t pay taxes. Crime is a cash economy. Taxes only hit the honest and conscientious – who would help the poor anyway.

So if there aren’t very many bad people – and taxation doesn’t get their money – then why are ‘bad people’ such popular justifications for State power?

First of all, very, very few people can actually think for themselves. In fact, they think so badly that they actually think they can think! Because they can’t think, they attempt to construct theories from immediate evidence, like primitive physicists who imagine that the world is flat because it looks flat. They sneer at any contrary evidence because they do not understand the limitations of their immediate senses. But economics and morality are logical disciplines because reality is not obvious – if it were, we wouldn’t need logic; we could get by on instinct and adrenaline, like dogs. But we are not dogs, and we are not gods, so we need to think.

So – how are we turned against each other? The ‘why’ is simple, and it is a useful maxim to understand that anyone who says you have any enemy – without empirical proof – is the enemy.

To turn us all from allies to enemies, human nature must be deemed foul and self-serving – and so must be commanded into virtue by wise and violent masters.

This, of course, is the portrait of a certain type of parenting (i.e. almost all) – children do not understand what is good for them, and so must be bullied and coerced into doing good. In other words, virtue is a square hole, and the soul is a round peg, which must be forever pounded into shape.

‘Politeness’ is a good example of this. ‘Be nice!’ parents growl – and so of course children are confused and bewildered – and ultimately resentful of the hypocrisy. This style of contradictory parenting translates well into the language of the State: ‘help others’, say the politicians, while holding a gun to your head.

Of course, the politicians do not want to reveal this gun to you – no more than parents want you to figure out that they are bullies concerned with their own vanity and power, not your moral development. Politicians have to hide the gun so we can fantasize that we are participating in the process. The politicians use three layers of deception here:
1. there is no gun
2. there is a gun, but it’s a last resort
3. there is a gun, and it’s not a last resort – but we only use it against bad people

In this way, they strive to reassure us that the guns are not pointed at us. But of course the gun is only pointed at the moral, conscientious people, because the people don’t pay taxes, or are above the law. Bad people are either criminals (local theft) or politicians (global theft). Criminals don’t pay taxes, and politicians are above the law. (If you don’t believe the latter, then recognize that business people go to jail for false accounting and advertising practices, but no politician has ever been even charged for lying about a deficit or breaking a promise.)

The guns are pointed at people who have regular jobs. The guns are pointed at the good people, not the bad people. They are pointed at those with something to lose – with spouses and children. They are pointed at those who value liberty, and have done something productive with their lives. They are not pointed at bad people by good people. They are pointed at good people by bad people. Targeting good people is not a regrettable side-effect of targeting bad people. The bad people are invented so that the good people can be targeted.

As it is with the State, so it is with parents. Parents do not bully their children to be good – they create a contradictory standard of ‘good’ in order to bully their children. For instance: parents say: ‘be considerate of others’ feelings, or I will lose my temper.’ Very well. So when a boy meets a girl who is not considerate of his feelings, he loses his temper. Surely that is logical! But of course he is not praised for his moral behaviour – he is further condemned.

So he struggles to understand the rule. He is told: You have to be nice to people, even if those people aren’t being nice to you! Very well. Then he does not have to be nice to his parents, since they have to be nice to him no matter how he acts. Oh, but that is not allowed either!

The real ‘rule’ is: Don’t cause me trouble. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t interrupt me. Don’t disturb me. Obey my whims!

Of course – that is not a rule at all. That is rank subjectivity. It’s like me ordering you: don’t like music I don’t like. That’s not a rule. That’s just subjugating your individuality to my whims. It cannot be a universal rule, since it only applies to one side of the equation of interaction: you do what I please! That is just bullying.

So of course both parents and politicians resist rules and definitions of any kind. They create dictatorships of whim, wherein the child can never predict the right course of behaviour. This is about the worst form of abuse, since it causes the child to spend his entire existence in fear, trying to read the whim-indicators of his rulers – both his parents and, sadly, his political masters.

So the next time someone tells you that you have to subject yourself to the power of the State because there are so many ‘bad’ people out there, simply ask:

• How many bad people are there?
• Am I one of those bad people?
• Are you?
• Is anyone in this room a bad person?
• How many have you met in your life?
• How did you know the bad people you met were bad?
• Have you ever seen any studies establishing the prevalence of these bad people?
• And, even if they are as prevalent as you think, how does taxation help? Surely bad people don’t pay taxes

And, finally:

• If there are a lot of bad people, then there must be a lot of bad people in the government, right? So how does giving the power of violence to bad people make the world a better place?

Why The World Is Sick

My wife is a psychotherapist, and so one of the most fascinating discussions we have (among many!) is whether the world is sick because of politics, or philosophy - or because of the family.

Her belief, of course, is that everything starts with the family. Politicians are mentally sick because they were treated badly as children. Raise the standard of parenting, she believes, and the world will be well.

I find her theory (and not just her theory!) extremely seductive. It is so important to understand what is making the world sick, so that whatever it is can be opposed. You don’t want to fight for cleaner air if the pollution is in the water.

And there is no doubt that she is right. Parenting is universally abysmal. Children are ordered and managed, not listened to and understood. Even liberal parents shut out their children’s unpopular questions and opinions. ‘Politeness’ is a great scourge, of course, since it enslaves the child to the shallow opinions of vain people. ‘Culture’ is another great child-killer, since it inflicts false pride and empty conformity. ‘Religion’ replaces clear reality with bullying language and hellish intimidation. Parental authority is a pure lie, since most parents are little more than empty incompetents, more than half-children themselves.

The only problem with my wife’s excellent formulation is that it tends to be a little circular, like much psychological causality. Why are people sick? Their parents are sick! There remains no First Cause.

One of the greatest problems that parents face is that they base their authority on the logic of universal morality, without being themselves logical to the slightest degree. ‘Respect your parents’ is an obvious example of this kind of illogic; there are countless others. No wisdom is objectively granted to people through the mindless act of giving birth. Rather, it would seem that parents are far more corrupt than children, since children themselves don’t have dependents, and so have little power to abuse the helpless.

It is very important to understand what sorts of ideas the parent is compelled to bully the child about. Very few parents bully their children about the fact that it gets dark at night, or that a mattress is softer than a rock, or that chocolate tastes good, or that food is kept in the fridge. In other words, no parent needs to bully a child about what that child experiences directly. No parent yells at a child about the fact that objects are subject to gravity, or that a bike has round wheels.

In other words, what is true does not need to be inculcated. Valid and verifiable ideas do not need to be inflicted through emotional pressure. If a child wonders whether a cat is in a closed box, no mother must manipulate the child into believing either way: she just opens the box, and they see. It is all very simple.

However, the parent faces a great challenge when he desires to get a child to believe something that is false, or self-contradictory – for which there is no evidence, either rational or sensual.

For my wife, one of these was that ‘Greeks are best’. This was played out a number of ways ‘Be proud of your culture’. ‘Our religion is the best’. It was a short step to another chestnut: ‘Not only are Greeks the best, but we are the best Greeks.’

Now of course this is all nonsense. There are only two possibilities for Greek virtue: either Greeks are best because they possess specific virtues – such as honesty – or Greeks are best because they come from a specific geographical location. If honesty is what makes Greeks the best, then anyone who is honest is equally good – and any dishonest Greek person is not the best. In other words, being Greek has nothing to do with being the best. If geography is the key, then there is no reason to suppose that being from Greece is better than being from any other place. Also, is a Muslim born in Greece better than a Greek person raised in Saudi Arabia?

Finally, ‘Greece’ doesn’t even exist. Land and trees and water exist. ‘Greece’ does not. Greece is a fiction with passports – which are also a fiction. ‘Culture’ also does not exist. Even ‘beliefs’ do not exist in any verifiable manner, since they can change minute by minute, and only the person who is reporting that he holds those beliefs knows if he in fact does or not. If you ask me: ‘are you thinking of the colour blue?’ is there any way to verify whether my response is accurate or not? There is no truth-value to subjective statements. They are absolutely immaterial, ethereal opinions without substance. They exist as a category, as the category ‘clouds’ exist, but they have no more reality than the specific shape of an invisible, shifting individual cloud in deep space behind the moon.

In short, who cares?

Now parents have a great problem on their hands when they have children.

There are so many things that parents believe that are not true, and here they have coming into their lives inquisitive, rational, empirical and honest creatures. How are they to establish their authority in the face of their own falsehoods – especially given the natural rationality of children?

Well, either they must give up their own illusions, or they must bludgeon their children’s fresh minds with the ghostly clubs of their own fantasies.

The first fantasy, of course, is authority. ‘Authority’ is a singularly silly concept, since reality is the only real ‘authority’ in human existence. If I cannot breathe, I will die – no human ‘authority’ can deem otherwise. A knowledgeable scientist may be deemed an authority, but his authority is based only on his knowledge of the facts of reality. Knowledge of reality is all that counts. But of course parents have almost no knowledge of reality – they prefer mad fantasies such as patriotism or religion or social conformity. And it is for that reason that they must compel and bully and humiliate their children into surrendering their integrity, honesty, morality and mental health to the sick fantasies of the vast majority.

And it is for this reason that families are so unutterably lonely. I can only relate to you through tangible reality – we cannot merge minds, and we cannot meet in dreams. Only through our physical senses can we meet, through speech, vision and touch. Yet most human sicknesses arises from the direct rejection of reality – and those who deny reality deny contact, comfort, intimacy and all the sweet solace of love. Yet people remain addicted to all their alienating fantasies about the supremacy of concepts, rather than accept the simple facts of the senses.

My wife and I almost never misunderstand each other. If she says that she is hungry, I don’t imagine that she is secretly rebuking me for not feeding her. If she feels sad, I do not fantasize that she is going to leave me. And why would I? She has given me no evidence to! Yet most relationships lurk in this murky world of imagined slights and intentions. And how could they do otherwise? Children, forced to comply with the lies of their parents, learn to read people, not reality. They strive to divine the impossible – the secret mind of another.

Many years ago, I was on a beach in Mexico. I was reading Nietzsche, because I am a relentless philosophy geek, and I was watching a bird peck at grains of bread buried in the sand. And the thought came to me: my primary relationship is with the sand, not the bird! It is physical reality that I must relate to and understand – not the motives and thoughts of others. If others want to share their thoughts, good. I may be happy to listen. But I will not attempt to divine their motives, since that is impossible. Even if, after hours of thought, I was able to perform such a miracle, those motives would have likely changed. It is like trying to paint the ocean, with each wave simultaneous and correct.

So – my wife is right, and I am right. The world is sick because of the family, and the family is sick because fantasies have taken the place of philosophy. To save the world, we need better parenting – and to save parents, we need true philosophy.

One last thought, or perspective perhaps. The question which always seems to arise, to me anyway, is: why do people believe so much nonsense?

Ah, that is simple – and perhaps already understood by those who have read a number of these essays. People believe nonsense because they are taught nonsense. And people teach nonsense because they are well paid to do so, and would not be well paid otherwise. To understand this at its most elemental level, imagine how successful a sadist is in a slave-owning society – and imagine how unsuccessful a sadist is in a free market. By beating and terrorizing the slaves, he breaks their will to escape – and so reduces the cost of ownership. However, in a free market, a boss who beats his employees will go to jail.

It is far from likely that the sadist will be able to change his nature – and so, knowing that the difference between slavery and freedom is, for him, the difference between wealth and jail – he will do everything possible to ensure that slavery remains the law of the land.

Think of a priest. How would he receive his money if his lies were not believed? Think of the Vatican, or the synagogue? How would Catholic or Jewish leaders reap their millions without poisoning the minds of the children?

For parents the ‘virtue of the family’ is a highly profitable fiction since they get to be taken care of in their old age. We are all constantly told that blood relations are the most important, and that obedience and forgiveness are the highest virtues. There are almost no parental misdeeds which we are not supposed to forgive. We can divorce our spouses for mere differences, but never our parents, with whom we have even less in common as the years pass. When our parents finally get old and frail, they need our time, money and attention – and what do they have to offer us in return? The pleasure of their company? Not likely. At least when we were children we received, food and shelter for putting up with them – what is our benefit when they get old?

Like all bad people, the only thing that parents have to offer their children is: relief from a pain that the parents themselves are inflicting. In other words, like priests, parents provoke guilt, and then offer relief from that guilt in return for slavish obedience. And because children know nothing of philosophy – and very little of reality – their behaviour is ruled by the needs and desires of those around them, rather than the objective reality of the situation. As mentally-crippled emotional dependents, adult children fear nothing more than disapproval, regardless of its source. Thus aging parents get taken care of – reaping all the rewards of virtue – simply by repeating and cashing in on the prevailing social views that only bad people don’t care of aging parents.

It is impossible to imagine that people who are benefiting from a scam will act to change it. Thus it is up to the adult children to refrain from supporting parents who are not good people – and this includes parents who did not promote individuality and rationality in their children. (Most parents, in fact.) If we do not stop rewarding sickness, we cannot ever expect the world to be healthy.

The Targets of War

Who is the Iraq war being fought against? The answer to large and complex political questions is always very simple: follow the money.

The Iraq war – like all wars – centers around a massive transfer of money from the majority to a minority. Your money – and your children’s money – is being stolen through taxation. A tiny part of it goes to the troops – and the vast remainder goes to well-connected war profiteers.

It is crucial to understand this reality: your money is not stolen so that the troops can go to Iraq. The troops are sent to Iraq so that your money can be stolen.

If this seems cynical, imagine the following scenario: your brother says he needs $500 from you because he has to fix his car. You are about to give him the money, when you suddenly remember that he sold his car a year ago. “Oh,” he says, without missing a beat, “I meant that I have to fix my roof.” Again, you are about to give him the money, when you frown and realize that he lives in a rented apartment. You bring this up, and he says: “Sorry, I meant that I need $500 to get my guitar back from the pawn shop.” However, he has never played guitar.

Is it so hard to figure out what your brother is really after? Every story he makes up has to do with getting $500 out of you. Every time you point out a flaw in his request, he changes his story. He doesn’t want $500 from you to satisfy a particular need. He invents random needs to get your $500.

The relevance of this analogy to the Iraq war is obvious. The American government has gone to war in order to steal from the American population. All other reasons change, but the cost of the war – and the fact that it is not being paid for by any reductions in government spending – is the one constant, as it is for all wars. The ‘enemy’ is merely the means: the taxpayer is the end.

This much should be familiar with everyone who reads Orwell – what is not as often mentioned, however, is the relationship that taxation has to the ‘free choice’ of soldiers.

I had an argument once about the US Civil War. My opponent said that, by freeing the slaves, the government did a good thing. I replied that the freeing of the slaves was irrelevant. What was relevant was that, through the draft, the government enslaved hundreds of thousands of men – killing many of them – to fight the Civil War. Enslaving men to fight slavery is logically foolish and morally evil. (Besides, it was the government that made slavery legal in the first place by refusing to add property rights to the Constitution.)

In the same way, it is not that important whether the soldiers in Iraq are there because they want to be there. What is important is that current and future Americans are being enslaved at gunpoint to pay for the war.

We must save the soldiers by fighting the violent taxation that makes it profitable to have them out shooting and dying. We must reclaim our own freedom, because war is the greatest evil we shall ever face, and wars will never cease until we are free.