A Brief History of Terror

The State requires two major groups to maintain power: the first are the thugs: the police, military, wardens and so on. The second, which can be more difficult to see, are the fear mongers. The fear mongers generate the terror that State power feeds on.

Fear mongers are paid by the State, or protected by the State. Fear mongers profit from the increase in State power, due to increased funding and protection.

Fear mongers create panic about two groups: external ‘others’ and internal ‘aliens’. External others are those outside the country who wish to destroy it; internal ‘aliens’ are minorities within the country who wish to profit at the expense of the majority. (Historically, internal ‘aliens’ can also be supernatural, imaginary entities, such as the ‘devil’, or ‘original sin’ – or even ‘bad thoughts’.) The term ‘aliens’ is used here because those so designated may have lived within the country for hundreds of years, but are still ‘different’.

In the Western past – or Eastern present – the fear mongers were priests. Brutal State power was required because sin was so prevalent, and human nature so degraded, that without endless coercion, pleasure and damnation would dominate.

The priests give moral sanction to the rulers – the ‘divine right of kings’ – and in return the rulers give protection and money to the priests. Both pillaged the pockets and psyches of the peasants.

The rise of rationalism in the 18th century – combined with brutal religious wars – broke the State and the priests in two. Without rampant religious fear mongering, State power collapsed throughout the Western world.

For almost a hundred years, State power struggled to grow, but failed, since the people were unafraid, and so did not need a false protector.

The State’s first triumph – in the mid-late 19th century – was the gaining of a coercive monopoly over education. Through State propaganda, children forgot their fear of the State – and were also inculcated with guilt, which is the first seed of State power.

The children were force-fed guilt about the poor. Because the State is an instrument for the violent transfer of wealth, it cannot understand wealth creation. Thus, when State employees look at the economy, and see rich and poor people, they can only imagine that the rich are wealthy because they have taken money from the poor. Asking a State representative to understand capitalism is like trying to teach win-win negotiating skills to a hit man.

Once the children believed that their parents’ money was stolen from others, they were susceptible in time to surrendering some of their own money to the State to ‘correct’ the injustice.

In order to sell itself as a ‘protector’, the State must turn children against their parents. By teaching children socialist lies, children innately understood that their parents’ wealth was stolen, and that their parents were bad people. If all concentrated wealth arises from exploitation, then my parents must have exploited others. Thus parents cannot be trusted. Only the State can be trusted.

This trust in the State is required to turn children into State thugs. State power requires the constant threat of coercion – and so it requires the police and military. State power demands the death of the young – and this is why the State is so fundamentally opposed to parents. Parents want their children to live; the State needs them to kill and die. This is why the State must constantly slander parents – so that the young will listen to the State and scorn their parents.

It is no accident that within 1-2 generations of the foundation of State education, 20 million young marched to their deaths in World War One. They learned socialism, mistrusted their parents, and swallowed wholesale the State babble about honour and courage and the noble slaughter of the innocent.

War feeds State power, and so the income tax was instituted and the State took control of money. Now the State had all the money it could dream of. Was it satisfied? Of course not! Those within the State probably were, but the more power and money the State accumulates, the more those outside the trough want in.

However, the State had a problem – no fear mongers. It could not bring back a State religion, and it could not start another war, since the horror of the last one was still fresh. Fortunately, through the general pillaging of the money supply, Western States provoked the Great Depression.

And that is when the socialist inculcation of State education truly paid off.

The State declared war on poverty – the poverty that the State itself had created – and because citizens were guilty, ignorant and helpless, they got behind the New Deal programs.

State inaction produced the Second World War, and in 1945, the Western States emerged with the greatest victory imaginable – they had vanquished one foe, and created another. The Axis powers were dead and buried, but the Soviet Union – and, all too soon, China – now rose as distant specters, perfect for the fear mongers.

Communism was constantly waved in front of citizens as the ultimate evil that required a constant expansion of State power. This was wildly ironic. Communism is the ultimate expansion of State power – thus expanding State power to fight communism is like shooting someone for fear of cancer.

The citizens rallied around the State, terrified of the specter of communism and nuclear war. The Second World War had been fought against State power, and although the Western governments had won, Western citizens lost completely. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, taxation, regulation and other State power grew radically.

Then, a great difficulty arose. After the Second World War, many soldiers took advantage of State largesse to get educated – which was the greatest expansion of socialist thinking in Western history. Naturally, these men taught their children what they had learned. When their children reached adulthood in the Sixties, they were utterly unable to understand their own society. The traditional capitalist respect for thrift, hard work, responsibility, entrepreneurship and honestly-earned wealth, had been utterly lost.

These children – the hippies – were anti-war, so they could not be cowed into open violence. They were anti-State, because they were pure socialists, and the current State was considered a tool of the capitalists. State power stood to gain, but the current holders of State power stood to lose.

So – the State could not create enemies out of other religions, since the hippies were largely secular, or Eastern mystics. They could not demonize communism, since the hippies were socialist. They could not start a war successfully, since the hippies were ‘one world’ pacifists. It was hard to demonize capitalism, since Western countries were far richer than poorer countries.

Here is where the true genius of the State revealed itself – as it had done before, notably in the ‘back to the land’ wandervogel hippies of Nazi Germany.

The industrialists were the new enemy – the internal ‘aliens’ profiting at the expense of the majority, just as the Jews had been before them. Pollution was the new threat to survival.

This meshed perfectly with the unambitious, nature-loving hippie movement. It also turned the children even further against their parents.

The State began funding any and all environmental studies. It created Environmental Protection Agencies and began teaching children about the evils of industrialization.

Through the professional fear mongers, one wave of terror followed another. No more oil! No more food! Black skies! Acid rain! Dead seas! A new ice age! Global warming! Garbage overflows! Nuclear winter! Birth defects! Cancer!

The deadly drumbeats of terror continued without respite. Scared of capitalism, industrialization, wealth and freedom, citizens surrendered more and more power to the ‘protection’ of the State.

However, as environmental problems began to be solved – largely through the initiatives of industry – and human lifespan continued to increase, the environmental movement faced a problem. Mankind was obviously not running out of raw materials. People were obviously getting healthier. Industrialists were obviously committed to cleaning up production.

Understanding the central purpose of any movement is simple: simply identify the one principle that does not change. Surely, after forty years of failed predictions, the environmental movement should be humbled. The latest debacle of falsified ‘global warming’ statistics should give the movement pause.

However, the central purpose of the environmental movement is not to protect mankind from pollution, but to serve State power by inculcating terror in the general population. Thus a string of failed and unexamined predictions are to be expected – the predictions were never designed to be true, but to serve the needs of State power. In that capacity, they have succeeded admirably.

Two examples should suffice to show the hypocrisy of the environmental movement. Environmentalists accuse industrialists of being motivated by greed, in that they would rather make a few percent more profit than clean up production.

The principle behind the accusation is rather simple to extract: people choose profit over goodness. We can also assume that when more profit is available, less good behaviour is chosen – which is why environmentalists target multi-national corporations.

So – the environmentalists attack corporations for choosing a few percentage points of profit over ethical behaviour. However – the vast majority of environmentalists receive one hundred percent of their income by predicting environmental disasters.

If more profit produces worse behaviour, then without a doubt the environmentalists stand more condemned than the industrialists.

If more profit does not produce worse behaviour, then environmentalists are just engaged in a witch-hunt of industrialists, since there is no reason to single them out.

Also, any hint of pollution from a private-sector company draws endless attacks from environmentalists – but what of environmental disasters which arise from government programs, such as the rape of the rainforest, the decimation of Canadian cod stocks or the over-use of energy which results from State subsidies? Barely a word is spoken. The fact that State-owned properties are far more polluted than private properties is never commented on.

Thus it is clear that the majority of environmentalists are mere fear mongers, ancient tools of State power, well-paid to create the panic which causes populations to stampede into the false cages of State ‘protection’. In the environment of logical thought, environmentalists are one of the most dangerous pollutants.

A Soldier's Freedom

Danny is born to a poor family. A poor mother, to be exact. His father has vanished, secure in the knowledge that his children will be taken care of by State welfare payments. His mother, faced with a life of low-paying jobs, prefers getting pregnant for a living.

Danny goes to a government school, where he is told that he would starve to death if not for government generosity. He is also told that, without the power of the State, the air would be unbreathable, companies would maim or kill him with unsafe work environments, and he would never have learned how to read. He would be a slave of the capitalists.

Over and over, Danny is taught that his government is his country, and that serving the State is the greatest thing he can do. He is never told that his country was founded out of fear of governments, or that the express intent of its founders was to limit the power of the State. Instead, the State is constantly portrayed as a benevolent, rich uncle, who selflessly cares for everyone and works tirelessly to keep them safe.

Danny only hears good things about the government – and in particular, three types of government workers. The first, of course, are the teachers. The second are the police, and the third are the military.

Government teachers are selfless and underpaid servants of the common good. They could do so much better elsewhere, but they sacrifice their material well-being to teach the poor and ignorant. Without them, poverty and illiteracy would reign, and democracy would collapse.

The police are tireless defenders of the helpless. They are the resolute men and women who stand firm against the growing chaos and violence of a decaying society. If they have to break the rules, it’s always with good reason. The front-line policemen are always right; the civilians who try to limit their power always petty, obstructionist bureaucrats. Policemen are harsh and cynical at times, but they are basically good, strong, decent people who are the foundations of a civil society. Without them, warring gangs would pillage civilians back into the Stone Age.

Soldiers, however, are the highest of the high. They selflessly defend the homeland against all threats, foreign and domestic. They are a brotherhood of loyal and honourable men. They have a higher calling. They are unimaginably brave, unimaginably dedicated, unimaginably noble. They represent the best that the country has to offer. Every November 11, the school pauses to honour their sacrifice. The names of the dead are carved in stone in the school’s front hallway.

As Danny prepares to leave High School, he begins to examine his options. There aren’t any decent jobs around, because most of the manufacturing companies have fled, for reasons that have never been explained to Danny (except as the bitter consequences of something called ‘free trade’). Danny doesn’t understand the world he lives in; he can’t reason, and has no knowledge of law, economics, politics or business. He can’t read or write very well, and his math skills are pretty terrible. After twelve years of State education, what skills does he have to offer a potential employer? He can’t negotiate, can’t think logically, doesn’t understand capitalism, knows nothing about sales, balance sheets or business plans.

But that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that Danny has no idea how ignorant he is. He passed his subjects in school. He regurgitated what he was told. He’s never had to think for himself. He just doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know. So he goes to job interviews having no idea how little he has to offer. Potential employers look at him and know that he is going to be very hard to train, since they’d first have to teach him about his own sad ignorance.

So Danny can’t find a decent job. He gets some offers for dead-end, low-wage jobs, but as a High School graduate, he feels above them. He wants something with a future. He is special. He wants a calling.

Sitting at home watching TV with his mother on New Year’s Eve, 2000, Danny feels a sudden surge of panic. He just can’t seem to get his life started!

A few days later, when Danny is at the mall he is approached by Ben, an Army recruiter. Ben praises Danny to the skies, and lies about how easy it is to get out of the Army once he’s in. Danny can go to school, get well-paid, see the world, learn valuable skills. Besides, what war could America possibly get into? Another Vietnam? Of course not! The Soviet Empire is gone. Maybe a bit of peacekeeping – but even that’s unlikely. Danny is dazed and excited. After months of chasing uninterested employers, Danny is finally being aggressively courted!
Danny thinks it over. The risk is low – thirty years without a war! He could get educated. Learn a trade. He’d have some structure. The thought of killing or being killed never really enters his mind. Who would mess with the last superpower?

Sadly, Danny has never been told that his government has been involved in dozens of dirty wars over the past thirty years. He has no idea how many soldiers have been killed in these black ops. He doesn’t realize that none of these wars were ever declared, or publicized. Or that, many times, his government was getting soldiers killed in order to clean up some mess that the government had made in the first place.

In other words, he knew nothing about his own history, so he had no way to evaluate the risk.

Danny also knew nothing about the fact that his government had hundreds of military bases in trouble spots all over the world. He had never been told about his government’s installation and support of dozens of dictatorships – and the hatred that millions of people the world over had for his government and its foreign policy and its constant use of force. He was told that his government only used the military when it had to, and only against bad people.

Danny knew nothing about the truth. None of the government teachers had ever taught him the facts about his own government. They had kept him in the dark, and ejected him into the marketplace with no skills, no reasoning abilities – into a world with no jobs, no opportunities, and no future.

And the whole world – the media, his school, all the movies he’d ever seen – told him that there was no better thing than being a soldier.

So Danny joins up. He hates basic training, but sticks with it. Just as he is about to be deployed to Germany, he is told that Iraq is about to attack his country with weapons of mass destruction, and he will be going there instead. Bad luck, his thinks. He doesn’t really want to go. He brings up his concerns with his superior, who laughs and tells him he’ll spend the rest of his life in military prison if he doesn’t go.

So Danny goes to Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction are found – or any evidence of a threat to his country.

Then, one morning, Danny gets his head blown off.

Back home, people shrug and say: “Well, he joined voluntarily, didn’t he?”

Really?

· Through government schools, Danny was stuffed full of lies and evasions about the true nature and history of his own government.
· Those same government schools killed Danny’s potential by refusing to teach him skills that would be useful in the marketplace.
· Instead, by instilling blind patriotism, conformity and a worship of the military, his teachers really only prepared him for one occupation: soldier.
· Government regulation and high taxation drove away the companies that might have given Danny a decent job.
· The decay of the family brought about by government welfare programs robbed Danny of a father, which makes young men more susceptible to ‘groupthink’ and joining gangs like the army.
· Because he was ignorant of his government’s violent history – and current habit of provoking fanatics around the world – Danny was unable to assess the real risks of joining the military.
· Danny was told that it was easy to leave the military if he didn’t like it.
· Danny was lied to about the reasons for war.
· Citizens are forced by the government to pay for Danny's salary and expenses.

In Hitler’s Germany, millions of young men also voluntarily joined the army. They were lied to about the danger of foreign invasion, about the nature and intentions of the German government, and Hitler’s goals. Once they found out the truth about the military, they were shot or imprisoned if they tried to escape. Does that sound familiar?

One last example – a clarifying metaphor. Your whole life, you are told that Hawaii is a paradise, full of noble and heroic people. It is a beautiful land of little danger, and endless opportunity. If you don’t like it, you can leave Hawaii at any time. Tickets are free – in fact, people are pressing thousands of dollars into your hands to go and try out life in Hawaii. Oh – and you have no other opportunities.

So one fine morning, you go and take the plane to Hawaii. When you get out of the plane, however, you find that you’ve been flown to Siberia, and what’s been called ‘Hawaii’ is in fact a concentration camp. You will now be enslaved for ten years. If you try to escape, you’ll be shot.

Were you free to choose? Were you free at all?

If you were, then what about Hitler’s Holocaust victims? They were never told that they were destined for the genocidal ovens – they were told that the next stop on their journey would be peace, liberty and respect. Did the Jews then enter the ovens of their own free will?

If you now understand the reality of freedom, then spare a thought for the poor slaves in Iraq, who were led by lies to a land where they must murder or be murdered – either by the insurgents they battle or the men who have enslaved them.

And for pity’s sake, don’t say that they joined through free choice.

Future Danger, Present Change

Challenging the State is an extremely dangerous business – not just for individuals, but for society as a whole. There is great danger in losing such a confrontation – but great danger in winning as well. Toppling those who rule the State does not destroy the power of the State, no more than removing a Godfather destroys the power of organized crime. In fact, the power vacuum created provides greater incentive for a new ruling elite to claw their way to the top.
It is very important to understand this fact, since the reason that people do not want to challenge the State is that they are very afraid of such a confrontation – and with good reason. When arguing with people, it is important that we respect that very real fear.

These days, no one really believes that the State helps the poor, heals the sick, educates the ignorant or protects the innocent – simply because the evidence against such foolish ideas has been mounting for the past century or so. Every intelligent person is fully aware of national debts, high-level corruption, interest groups and the constant expansion of State power.
Thus, when people defend the State, they may claim that they are doing so because they want to help the poor, heal the sick and so on, but that is not the real reason for their arguments. People argue for the State for two reasons:
1. They benefit from State power, or;
2. They fear that things will get worse if the State is challenged.

Thus those who defend the State take basically the same position as abused women. Such women either stay with their abuser because he pays the bills, or because they fear greater injury if they try to leave. To rationalize their position, of course, they will sing the praises of their husband, but don’t be fooled by that perspective. A woman does not stay with an abusive man for love of his virtues, but rather for fear of his vices. Coaxing her to leave him by arguing that he is not really very virtuous will not work, since in her heart she knows that already. Arguing that he is evil will also not work, since she has learned to live with that evil already.

No, the only way to get a woman to leave an abusive husband is to help her understand that she is doomed to a life of escalating misery, degradation and physical injury. That things will only get worse if she does not act. If she cares nothing for her own life and happiness, then the argument must be expanded to include her children. By staying with her abuser, she is exposing her helpless children to escalating brutality, and quite likely inflicting a lifetime of continued abuse and self-hatred upon them.

In other words, if people do not understand that the State will always grow in power until it destroys society, they will have no real incentive to question or oppose the State. If this understanding is not reached, then all other arguments are rather futile. Smokers quite smoking despite the hellish discomfort because they understand that cigarettes have a good chance of killing them.

This raises a challenging question about how to change people’s minds about the inevitable destruction of ever-expanding State power. Libertarians have a habit of complaining about the State – and then feeling guilty about their negativity and trumpeting the virtues of liberty. This is like saying: ‘cigarettes are bad’ (not ‘cigarettes will kill you’) – and then saying ‘your life would be better without cigarettes’. Of course, it’s true that people would be better off without the State, but unless they understand that the State will destroy them, they won’t act against it.

How does this work in practice?

Try asking the following questions:
· Can you think of a single society in history that has not been destroyed by its own government, either through wars, revolution or collapse?
· Can you think of a State that voluntarily reduced itself in size? (The Soviet Union doesn’t count, since it went bankrupt.)
· Do you think that State power is growing, shrinking or staying about the same?
· What do you think is the logical end of the expansion of State power?
· How do you think that the national debt is going to be paid off?
· How much longer do you think we have before our freedoms are essentially gone?
· Do you think that there are more poor people, fewer poor people, or about the same number as when the War on Poverty began? (repeat for drugs, illiteracy etc.)
· Given that State programs produce more of what they are supposed to combat, what do you think the logical end is of those programs?
· How would an 80% tax affect your ambition?
· What kind of world do you think your children will grow up in? Will they have more freedom, less freedom or about the same amount of freedom as today?
· Do you think that your children should have at least the amount of freedom that you have today?

I find this approach very productive. Once you get people away from the immediate issues, and quiet the ‘disaster static’ that roars up whenever people think about cutting State programs, the trends generally become quite clear. There is no logical end to the expansion of State power except dictatorship, slaughter, poverty and collapse – an endless paradise for sadists and sociopaths; a living hell for any decent human being.

Once people begin to see what lies ahead, they can begin to change their behaviour in the present. Skin cancer prompts sunscreen; heart disease prompts exercise; lung cancer prompts butting out. Future danger spurs current change. If the future danger is unseen, stagnation and decay are inevitable, since no spur to action exists. It is this danger that we must make people aware of. If we do not see the oncoming train, we shall leave nothing behind but wet tracks.

War and the Fantasy of Protection

A few days ago, I was at lunch with a colleague, an ex-military man, and the talk got to politics. I mentioned that the government was never going to voluntarily shrink in size; it would only collapse in on itself through bankruptcy. He said that he had a lot of respect for Paul Martin, Canada’s Prime Minister, because Martin made some progress tackling the budget deficit in the 1990s. “I was very relieved,” he said, “because all our training in those days centered on containing civil revolt.”

I was, despite my two-decades long investigation into the nature of the State, shocked. I asked him what he meant. “Oh,” he shrugged, “the government was expecting a revolt, so we were all being trained to contain that. They really thought they were going to run out of money, so they wanted us ready to deploy just in case Canadians got real pissed off at them.”

I found that fascinating. And revealing, of course. As the Canadian government was trying to rein in its debt, it was also training its military to turn their guns on Canadians, just in case that didn’t work. Or in case it did work, but the Canadian people didn’t like the effects. No welfare checks. No old age pensions. That would be a recipe for revolution.

It is entirely to be expected, of course. Governments protect their own interests, not those of their citizens. However, it does illuminate an interesting point, which is that – despite the evidence of the 20th century – people still believe that governments exist to protect their citizens. It is an interesting – and eminently testable – theory. To put it to the test, let’s look at some of these State ‘protections’ throughout history. If State power exists to protect citizens, then State power should rise and fall relative to the threats those citizens face. If I say that my dentist drills my teeth because they have cavities, then obviously he should drill less – or not at all – if they don’t have cavities.

The first and gravest danger to a citizen is war. It is governments, of course, that always start wars, but those governments always say that they are protecting citizens from the aggression of other governments. In other words, other governments are bad, therefore war cannot be avoided – and so we must be partially enslaved by our own governments to protect us from these inevitable wars.

This premise is easily testable. If governments exist to protect their citizens from other governments, then as a particular country becomes more secure, its military should shrink in size. So, for instance, after the fall of the Soviet Union, European and NATO military budgets should have been reduced. Furthermore, a country like Switzerland, buried deep in the middle of fractious Europe, should have a military budget far higher than that of America, which has oceans to either side and friendly neighbours to the north and south. Or Japan, for instance, should have been a peaceful country throughout its history, since it is largely immune from invasion. The same goes for England.

Clearly, even the most cursory examination of history shows that no correlation can be made between a country’s security and its military spending. Since there is no relationship between military budgets and external threats, there can be no causality between the two. Thus governments do not have a military in order to protect their citizens from external enemies. The military must exist for some other reason.

Ah, perhaps you say, the Soviet Union has fallen, but what about the threat from Muslim countries? Well, that is also interesting. If our government exists to protect us from other governments, then our government should never sell arms to other governments. If policemen exist to protect us from criminals, then policemen should refrain from arming those criminals, right? A doctor cannot make people sick and then justify his income based on the fact that people are sick. Our leaders cannot use our money in order to arm other governments, while simultaneously claiming that they must take our money because other governments are dangerous.

This is usually countered by stating that only certain other governments are a threat. In other words, our leaders know how dangerous other governments are – both now and into the distant future – and are able only to arm those who will never harm their own citizens. Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Enough said. This position fails, since our leaders regularly arm those who turn out to be enemies.

There is one other argument that needs to be examined, which is whether leaders value their citizens’ safety more than citizens value their own safety.

Imagine a State that passes laws forcing its citizens to perform healthy actions such as exercising and eating well. Obviously, the implicit premise behind such laws is that the State cares more for its citizens’ health than they do. In order to justify this exercise of violence, we must accept that health is the greatest good, and that the State cares more for citizens’ health than the citizens do themselves – and that only State violence can achieve health.

However, no part of this argument is sustainable. Health is not the greatest good; if it were, then chocolate, potato chips, cars, skydiving, children and cigarettes would not exist. The greatest good, of course, is happiness, and sometimes health is sacrificed to that end – as we all know on occasion when we succumb to the dessert tray.

However, even if health were the greatest good, there is no guarantee that violence would be able to ensure it. At the most basic level, the stress of both inflicting and being subject to violence would probably eradicate any health benefits from exercise and better eating. And since health is not the greatest value, people would naturally try to avoid the violent infliction of healthy habits by trying to join those categories of people immune from such compulsion, those with sports injuries, depression, pregnancies, weak bones, diabetes, essential jobs etc. Doctors would be bribed to supply documentation for such excuses, lobby groups would grow to create exceptions, fake health clubs would hand out fake ‘exercise certificates’, and everyone’s behaviour would change to avoid the compulsions of the State.

Health cannot be achieved by violence, because happiness is the greatest good, and violence cannot achieve or maintain happiness either. (Save self-defense, which of course is not violence; it has the same relationship to violence that surgery has to a random stabbing; surgery aims to maintain health at the cost of short-term injury; self-defense aims to maintain happiness at the cost of short-term stress.)

However, to put the final nail in the coffin, let’s take the most extreme example, and imagine that health is the greatest good, and only violence can achieve it. If this is the case, there is absolutely no reason why only those in the State should be able to employ violence for this end. This is not an unprecedented premise. This is obviously the case in realm of self-defense, since a citizen can protect himself or his property without punishment. Thus if health is the highest value, and threatening people is the only way to help them maintain their health, then we should all be able to do it. I should be able to burst into my neighbour’s house and force him to drop his doughnut.

Let us take the lessons learned from this metaphor of health and return to the question of defense. Protection from violence is not the greatest good, and also cannot be achieved by violence, since violence is in itself a violation of protection. If I say that I must rob you in order to protect you, then I am immediately violating the very protection that I am claiming to offer.

However, if we accept that those in the State should be able to steal money from us in order to defend us, then everyone should be able to do so. If my neighbour does not buy a home-alarm system, then I should be able to go over there and force him to order one at gunpoint. In fact, the home-alarm company should be able to do the same thing. Obviously we would dislike that, since the conflict of interest would be obvious – just as it is with the State stealing money and providing services. So if you have a problem with the home-alarm company forcing people to buy its products, then the State can’t do it either, since both are just social organizations populated by people, who are all subject to the same moral laws and misgivings.

Finally, we come to the most important question: even if we accept that the State should protect its citizens, does the State leader care more for his citizens’ lives than they do?

None of us want to die, or be enslaved. Therefore we will take all the steps necessary to protect our lives and property. If someone demands that we give up this responsibility to him, it would only be a rational course of action if that person cares more for our lives and property than we do ourselves.

Let’s call the leader of our country Bob. If Bob cares more for our lives than we do – a position many parents hold with their children – then obviously he would be the first to sacrifice himself for us in times of war, just as parents often sacrifice their own interests for the sake of their children. In the realm of politics and war, this is obviously never the case, since leaders are never the first to die on the battlefield.

If Bob cares more for us than we do, he will be no less likely to wage war if he himself is threatened. Thus the proliferation of nuclear weapons should not have slowed down the rate of war between nations which possess them. Throughout history, certain countries have declared war on each other with depressing regularity. However, since the rise of nuclear weapons, not one single nuclear power has ever declared war on any other nuclear power. What has changed? The number of dead? Of course not – the First and Second World Wars killed tens of millions of people, and more people died in the conventional bombing of Tokyo than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It is not the scale of the suffering that has increased. Is it the long-term after-effects of nuclear weapons? That seems hard to fathom, since conventional weapons leave in their wake firestorms, plagues, lack of water and sanitation, landmines, pockets of mustard gas, poisons and other long-term after-effects detrimental to human life.

No, the only significant difference between conventional and nuclear weapons is that nuclear weapons threaten the direct and personal interests of political leaders. They can be killed, or their families, relatives and friends can be killed. In other words, the only difference between nuclear and conventional weapons is that the ruling class is threatened by nuclear weapons. (Of course what applies to nuclear weapons also applies to other weapons of mass destruction, which is why rulers speak about them with such horror.)

Thus it is clear that, when Bob’s own life and family would be threatened by war, he is miraculously able to refrain from declaring it. The answer that Bob is afraid of nuclear weapons not because of his own life, but because he wants to protect his country, is nonsense. If that were the case, then Bob would never declare war against other countries that did not possess nuclear weapons, which he tends to do with fair regularity.

To sum up, the idea that governments exist to protect their citizens is pure nonsense – and as long as we continue to believe it, we are in grave danger. Governments will grab at any justification for using violence against us, and defense is the most dangerous justification of all. The predations, robbery and despair of the welfare state is one thing; the murder, destruction and corruption of the military state is quite another. As long as we surrender our freedoms to governments for the sake of protection, those governments will continue to drum up threats against us, in order to further enslave us by ‘protecting’ us from the violence they provoke in the first place.

Morality and Society: A Liberating Elegy

When I was a teenager, and I was exposed to ideas as a simple as ‘taxation is theft’, I swallowed them as easily as a cold beer on a hot day. I devoured the whole world of rationality, objectivism, libertarianism and Austrian economics. I loved the whole system of logical analysis, because it made sense of the world, and gave me a framework for classifying and understanding all of the minutiae of data that come flying at us every day. The world became more than base preference; it became something scientific, clear, organized – and alarming.

For many years – too many, for a man with a scientific bent – I believed that I was like other people. Since I had so easily accepted the reality of certain obvious propositions, I assumed that such radiant truths would illuminate others just as they had illuminated me.

Of course, like all of us, I ran full-tilt into the blank irrationality of my fellow men. I would strive mightily to convince a person of a particular fact, gain their grudging agreement, and then find the next day that they had reversed their position without any reexamination. I was subject to the most bizarre psychological cross-examinations – i.e. what in your past makes you so addicted to these ideas? Well, yes, my mother was mentally ill, but so what? Even if that were my primary motivation, what effect would that have on the truth of my propositions? If a man finds a cure for cancer because it killed his mother, does that mean that his cure is illusory? Would those afflicted by cancer scoff and call his cure nothing more than the obsessive symptom of a psychological ailment?

I was also subjected to the usual ad hominim attacks. I was heartless, cruel, thoughtless, had never suffered myself, wanted their sick relatives to die etc etc blah blah. All just noise, since these attacks never dealt with the rationality of my arguments – thus did the Vatican attack Galileo’s theories for causing people to lose faith. The possible effects of ideas are always irrelevant. Should Einstein have refrained from publication because he feared the creation of nuclear weapons? Bill Gates wants a computer on every desktop – dictators, organized crime and the IRS also have desktops. Should he throw up his hands and close down his company?
I was also visited – if that is the right word – by the most staggering form of indifference. I know that I am intelligent, logical, creative, and a good writer – a combination which is not as common as it should be. Yet as I laboured through my undergraduate degree and graduate studies, I was ignored in a manner that was chilling at the time, but in hindsight was entirely logical. It took me months to find a thesis adviser, who then gave me an ‘A’ without reading my thesis, mostly to stop me from pestering him. I would argue for particular positions in class, and over and over receive a shrug and ‘well, that’s just your opinion.’ I was aghast at the idea that modern academics was all opinion, but of course I shouldn’t have been.

I’d like to share what I have learned since those dark, maddening days, because I think it will be helpful to all my secret friends out there who may be struggling with the same problems.
My particular issue was that I was rational enough to know the truth, but not rational enough to accept the facts. The fact that I was unwilling to swallow – despite ample and daily empirical evidence – is that people are very sick, very crazy, and very corrupt. I now believe that it is too late to save our current society, and we are too early for whatever is to come next. I don’t know how early we are, but I do know that we are too late by over a hundred years.

The simple fact I had such a hard time accepting was that people are just not interested in freedom or rationality. They don’t mind arguing about it as an academic exercise, but they just don’t like to think. They don’t know how to think – but they also don’t know that they don’t know how to think. And that is why I say that it is too late, and we are too early. If you are a doctor with a cure in the middle of a plague, but people don’t even know that they’re sick, what are you to do? Should you run around trying to stuff pills down everyone’s throat? You’d be arrested for assault! That, in a nutshell, is the modern world. People are sick, and we have the cure, but they don’t know they’re sick, so we appear dangerous and incomprehensibly obsessed. The more we insist that they’re sick, the more sick we look to them. There is no way out of this vicious circle.

You can change a mathematician’s mind about a particular equation if you present incontrovertible proof, but you can’t in any way even affect the mind someone who doesn’t believe in numbers. You are just shouting into the wind. You can change a smoker’s mind about smoking if you have convincing proof that puffing away causes cancer. You cannot change a smoker’s mind if he does not believe in medicine, cancer, health, his lungs, or even the existence of his cigarette – because, in this case, there is no mind to change.

This is perhaps a rather chilling realization, but it should come as no surprise to us logicians. Logical argument has no effect on people who do not believe in – or submit to – logic. And logic, like language, is not something that can be developed later in life. The reasons for that are complicated, but mostly have to do with the fact that a man can survive corruption only if he has never corrupted others, and later in life most men have, through their own irrationality, deeply harmed their children, spouses, employees, friends and so on. Once a man harms others, he cannot change, because he becomes the enemy he needs to fight. Moral sickness and mental stagnation is the inevitable price of corrupting others.

I used to place our goal – the development of a moral science – in a historical context; I saw that the physical sciences were doing well, but that the moral sciences were almost non-existent. The moral sciences were, to me, roughly where the physical sciences were during the early Middle Ages.

This was a grave mistake.

The moral sciences are the exact opposite of the physical sciences, because the physical sciences serve State power, while the moral sciences are in direct opposition to that power. During the late Middle Ages, the rise of the physical sciences corresponded with the discovery of the New World. The world had to be accepted as round so that States could sail soldiers off to rape and pillage the New World. This harmed the Church’s infantile cosmology in the short run, but the Church primarily serves the State, and so had to accept it.

As scientific and capitalistic progress swelled to serve State power, the State realized that it was gaining far more by taxing capitalists than it ever did from pillaging serfs. So the State encouraged the growth of the free market and the expansion of the scientific method – both for the increased wealth and better weaponry that capitalism and science produced. Even now, the modern State funds science and allows aspects of the free market to operate.

Since science and the free market served State power, they were allowed. However, the danger of freedoms in commerce and science is that they tend to spread to other areas of thinking. Since it turns out that commerce and science only thrive in the absence of a central tyranny, why wouldn’t society flourish without a central State? The simple moral rationality which would confirm this had to be killed in the crib.

So, over a hundred years ago, the State took over the education of the children.

This was the only step that could be taken. The State needed people to be rational in business and science, but not in morality. So it trained citizens in empty, formalistic, merely pragmatic rationality, but destroyed their ability to understand and integrate moral concepts. To save its own power, it prevented the development of people’s moral rationality – and so their ability to love, be good, be happy, and live lives of any real satisfaction.

In this light, my belief that the moral sciences were where the physical sciences were in the Middle Ages was entirely incorrect. The physical sciences were encouraged because they served the power of the State. Any rational moral science would destroy the State, and rational morality is – and will forever be – the mortal enemy of the State.

It is not paranoid to believe that those in the State act instinctively to protect their own power, since a knowledge of steps necessary to control and exploit others is a deep part of our instinctual apparatus. This is easy to see in the realm of families. Parents who beat or abuse their children are almost never exposed. They do not take special night courses on the steps required to maintain their children’s isolation and silence – it just comes naturally. The steps required are very complicated, but never have to be learned. Another example is that no secret State directive exists ordering teachers to ensure that students cannot think rationally, yet almost no student comes out of State schools with the ability to think. Destroying the natural development of rationality is a complicated process, but it comes so naturally and easily to us.
Simple biology explains this fact. There are only two survival strategies for any organism. Find/produce food, or steal food. Human beings can go either way – we can either be productive, or exploitive. If we are exploitive, it is a far better survival strategy to steal without combat, since we, as parasites, must by definition be far fewer in number than those we prey on. Thus we must steal without war – and for that, the moral subjugation of our prey is required.
As human beings, we have within us both the productive and exploitive instincts, which is why exploiting others is so easy – and the necessary steps so ingrained in our natures.
None of this analysis means that we shall never win. It just means that we are not about to win. We are not even close. The parasites currently run almost everything, and the successes in capitalism and the physical sciences should not blind us to the fact that they are allowed to succeed because they serve the greed of the parasites – and that our theories would unseat them utterly.

So in my view, we are too early. Perhaps a thousand years too early, who knows? But since we claim to be rational thinkers, we must work empirically, from all the evidence of our experiences. We are doomed to be the lonely keepers of a lonely flame, for all our days to come. We shall not prevail against the armed might of the modern State, because its violence has destroyed the concept of rationality in the minds of the vast majority. In the dark illiteracy that rises around us, we must keep the candle of our language alive. Not because we shall prevail in society, but because at this stage in human development, freedom is only possible for isolated individuals. We who are blessed with its bounty should experience all the joys that only we possess, because striving to share freedom only turns us into the slaves of those who hate and fear our gifts.

Morality is Honesty: The Science of Ethics

The question ‘what is morality’ has needlessly baffled mankind for centuries, if not millennia. Morality seems to have little root in objective reality; it is usually perceived as a form of localized cultural preferences, along with certain dances, songs and costumes, or as a set of arbitrary rules handed down from some unverifiable but imposing cloud formation.
However, morality is not a subjective preference. It does not require a divine stamp for proof, universality or absolutism. It does not change throughout time. It is, in fact, as constant and absolute as gravity.

Human beings can act in defiance of morality, of course, but that does not make morality any less real or absolute. A man can act in defiance of gravity and try to fly by running off a cliff, but neither his madness nor his fall do anything to disprove the existence of gravity.
The truth of the matter is that morality is a science, a form of honesty, or logical theory which conforms with verifiable and empirical facts of reality. It is predictable, provable and can be identified and propagated without reference to any divine foolishness or cultural preferences. Morality is, in fact, a subset of the scientific method, and it is high time that it was subjected to the same rigour, effectiveness and respect as the rest of science.

The elegance and power of the scientific method is that it is a set of principles for determining truth that accept that physical entities have objective properties – and that laws determined as true for a particular set of entities must be true for all those entities. Furthermore, the scientific method also states that any logical subset of those entities must have specific properties common to all the entity-subset. In more plain English, this means that atoms are matter, and frogs are matter, therefore frogs are composed of atoms. Furthermore, if frogs which live in trees are called tree frogs, then all tree frogs must be frogs which live in trees.

Human beings, of course, have particular properties as well, the most important of which is that man is a rational animal, endowed with free will. Therefore, it is a truism to say that any conceptual property applicable to any particular human being must also be applicable to all human beings. In other words, if I say that human beings have only one head, then I cannot say that an entity with two heads is also human, unless I am willing to change my definition.

Now, since a human being is defined as a rational animal with free will, then it is impossible for anyone to argue that free will is a property of only some humans, but not others. In other words, it cannot be possible for Person A to exercise his free will, while not possible for Person B to exercise hers. Either all human beings can exercise their free will, or none can. Unless compelling and objective physical evidence can be found differentiating human beings into different species – such as those between men and apes – then the truth of reality is that all humans can exercise their free will.

It follows from this that it is a logical contradiction for one person to subject another to violence, to force another to obey under threat of force. If Person A enslaves Person B, then Person A is saying: I am human, and must be free to exercise my free will; this person is also human, but must not be free to exercise his free will.

Since this proposition is a logical contradiction, it can be dismissed as false without further investigation, just as if a biologist defined a mammal as a warm-blooded creature, but then argued that, for five minutes, a single lizard was also a mammal. It is impossible. This biologist might scream this proposition from the rooftops, and take other scientists hostage and force them to sign documents agreeing with him, but that wouldn’t make his proposition any more true.

Taken as a simple science, problems of morality are really not that difficult to solve. Human beings can own property – thus all human beings can own property. If a man steals from another, he posits a contradiction: As a human being, I can own property; as a human being, you cannot. The same goes for all other violent crimes, from rape to murder to assault. It is the creation of a ‘special exception’ rule which utterly contradicts reality. You are a mammal, I am saying, but I want to temporarily classify you as both a human being and something else – and then I want to classify you back as a human being again. Thus I will steal your property from you – and then try to evade you, since I know you will want your property back.
But of course a thief cannot change the physical, biological nature of his victim, who remains as human as he is throughout the encounter. The mammal never becomes the lizard, even for an instant, and so the thief is utterly wrong in what he is doing.

This elemental dishonesty is the essence of immorality. Immorality is acting contrary to reality in a manner that simultaneously denies other people the very right you are asserting. If you stop your car and ask me for directions, and I accidentally give you incorrect information, that is wrong, but not immoral, since I am not exercising my ability to accidentally give incorrect information while simultaneously denying that you have or deserve that ability. If I rape someone, however, I am simultaneously saying that I have the right to free choice, while my victim does not. It is the simultaneous nature of my irrationality that differentiates immorality from just being incorrect.

The reason that simultaneity is the essence of morality is that it is impossible to ignore – and so, since it is being ignored, irrational malevolence must be at its root. A man cannot steal a watch without wanting to own it – and yet as he steals it, he knows that his victim also wants to own it, since he does not simply ask for it directly. Thus he is simultaneously asserting and denying the right to property. Mad irrationality!

However, if I make an honest mistake in giving you directions, I am not simultaneously denying your ability to make an honest mistake – as you have probably done by asking someone as incompetent as me! Thus this is a simple mistake, not a malevolent contradiction.
To take a more commonplace example, we have all met people who are intolerant of mistakes in others, but are very forgiving about their own shortcomings. This is hypocrisy, wherein a double standard is being applied. However wrong this is, it is not immoral, since it does not pass the test of simultaneity. I am not simultaneously criticizing you and forgiving myself, since that is physically impossible. (This is why immorality is only possible in action, not in thought or word.) If I am a biologist, and I categorize a salamander as a mammal, and then as a lizard again, I am not a very competent biologist, but I am not utterly mad, as I would be if I categorized a salamander as both a lizard and a mammal simultaneously. Indeed, if I said that categorization was important, and then immediately destroyed such categorization by the insertion of opposite instances - i.e. a warm-blooded lizard - I would be more than wrong. I would be directly assaulting rationality and reality, and so would be judged corrupt and malevolent.
Thus there is an essential difference between sequential contradiction and simultaneous contradiction. They are both incompatible with the facts of reality, but only the latter is immoral.

The fact that morality is based in reality is often alluded to in moral clichés. The idea of the ‘golden rule’, or that one should treat others as one would like to be treated, is obviously based on the universality of reality, and so morality.
The common complaint of the wronged – ‘how would you like it if I did that to you? – also falls into this category.
Kant’s famous dictum that one should only act as if one’s actions created a general moral rule is also related to the idea put forward here. However, none of the above moral theories tie into any physical facts of reality. None of them reference basic biological truths. Due to this crucial omission, no historical moral theory has ever become scientific, and the basic facts of moral reality have remained obscured, and subjective, and futile.

If moral rules are a simple recognition of reality, then they are not subjective – and they must be universal, as are all laws derived from physical reality.

The only question then remains: if this is all true, then why has it never been expressed before? The simple – and sad – answer is that rules are always ignored for the false benefit of those who break them. Sane human beings always benefit from the recognition of reality. Since the morality of humankind has always been defined in mad opposition to physical reality and simple logic, there is really only one conclusion that can be drawn. Sadly, what mankind generally calls ‘reality’ is nothing more than the manipulations of madmen.

One Faith, One Club: The Religiosity of Power

Those who desire power need only one faith to rule supreme over their flock: the belief that rulers are different in some irreproducible manner from those they rule. This differentiation is required to break the common morality of mankind, and cow the masses into uncomprehending submission. For priests, this differentiation is very simple: they are closer to God, or are appointed by those who are closer to God, and so their value cannot be reproduced by the uninitiated. For politicians it is more complicated. They must sink below the universal morality of mankind while seeming to be naturally elevated above it – no easy feat!

The first thing that is required is a double standard. For power to flourish, two opposing premises must be accepted: the first is that rulers are more moral than those they rule, and the second is that those they rule choose to submit to them. In other words, citizens must believe that they are surrendering their freedom to those who are more moral than themselves, because this is the only situation in which citizens could possibly benefit from being ruled. If rulers are less moral than the average person, or equally moral, then being ruled is a net negative for citizens. The negative consequences are obvious if rulers are less moral – but even if they are equally moral, citizens will inevitably suffer terribly. Since no one can be perfect, immoral choices are always possible. When individuals make immoral choices, the consequences are localized. When rulers make immoral choices, their choices are inflicted on the community as a whole. To add insult to injury, rulers and their phalanxes must be paid, so the individual citizen is forced to pay a high overhead for a greater risk of suffering from immoral choices.

However, what happens if we accept the premise that rulers are always more moral than those they rule, and that those they rule choose to submit to them? We quickly find that these principles contradict each other. If citizens choose to submit to their rulers, then they logically must be able to choose those rulers – otherwise how would the rulers know that the submission was voluntary? In other words, less moral people will always choose more moral people to rule them. However, if we turn this principle into a general rule – which, logically, we must, the foolishness of it quickly becomes clear. If less moral people will always choose more moral people; then criminals should choose policemen, wife-beaters should decide who single women should marry, and torturers should appoint surgeons. Asking an immoral person to choose a moral leader is to ask him to (a) identify and value a morality he does not himself possess, (b) choose a leader who embodies that morality and (c) submit to that leader’s enforced edicts. But if a moral person can identify and value moral principles, why does he need a leader to enforce them? If immoral people are wise enough to submit to a ruler’s superior morality, why would they not save the overhead and risk of a ruler and simply submit to morality itself? And if they are not wise enough to choose a moral leader, then they will choose an immoral leader, and that leader will then enforce immoral commandments – and so even the moral minority will suffer terribly.

Of course, rulers don’t say that we must be ruled because we are bad. Rather, we are told: you are good, of course, but you are outnumbered by bad people, and we will protect you from them!

Sadly, this does not solve the problem, since modern democracy is defined as majority rule. If good people are outnumbered by bad people, then the rulers chosen by the majority will be immoral. If challenged on this, rulers inevitably reply: well, there are in fact only a small number of bad people, but they are very dangerous! This solves the problem of voting, but not of morality. If the number of bad people are very small, then they can be dealt with without the danger of a appointing a ruler. We submit to risky medical procedures when our lives are threatened by illness, not when we have a cold. However, even if we accept the premise that somehow private citizens are unable deal with a small number of bad people, the problem still remains unsolved. Rulers always outnumber citizens; if there are only small numbers of bad people, and citizens create a State to protect themselves from them, why wouldn’t the bad people just take over control the State? The State holds a monopoly on violence, so surely the first goal of bad people would be to gain control over that monopoly. This is analogous to a child pulling a gun on a hardened criminal – who would immediately wrestle the gun away from him and steal even more.

Thus, as we can see, every avenue of questioning leads to the same place, the same fundamental contradiction. There is no way that citizens can be ruled by leaders who are more moral than they are. Therefore, morality cannot be used to justify the power of the rulers.

When pressed on this matter, the defenders of State power inevitably bring to bear another argument which is much harder to disprove, which is that the services provided by the rulers cannot be reproduced by any other person or persons.

If a ruler justifies his rule by citing specific services he provides, then it obviously makes no difference whether he provides those services, or someone else does. If a priest says that his power comes from his generosity to the poor, then he is just not that special, since anyone can give to the poor. In a similar manner, rulers always claim that only they can provide property protection, health services and aid to the sick and poor and so on. This is obviously false. The ruler does not provide these services himself; instead, he takes money by force and gives it to other people who provide these services, such as policemen and doctors. He adds nothing to the transaction except threats and overhead. Citizens would be far better off paying those individuals directly to recreate government services such as property protection and aid to the sick and poor.

Of course, the defenders of State power always argue that private companies are unable to provide those services, but that is a logical contradiction. Why would certain people be unable to provide what citizens want but other people be able to? What is the difference? Well, say some, the government is not motivated by profit, and so can do certain things that the private sector cannot. But that argument fails very quickly, of course, because motives ascribed to one group of people must logically be applied to all groups of people. If people in the private sector are motivated by self-interest, then so are people in the government. The only difference is that, as one voter among millions, the people in the government have very little interest in satisfying individual citizens in particular, whereas those in a private company must please the individual in order to get his or her money. Thus if human beings are motivated by self-interest, individuals shall fare far worse at the hands of the State.

Here, naturally, the argument is made that the government provides services which private companies would not be interested in because the recipients of those services don’t have enough money to pay for them. Very well. But if the people in the government are able to determine those people’s needs and give them money, then why would other people be incapable of doing so? If people in the government can be charitable, then why cannot private citizens be equally charitable? The standard answer is that people are selfish, but that doesn’t help the case for State power at all. If people are selfish, then people in the government are also selfish, and so will not really help the poor or the sick. If the argument is then made that private citizens are more selfish than those in the government, we are back to where we started, which is that the worse cannot choose the better, and so this is impossible.

There is one final logical problem. People in the government are legally allowed to take people’s money by force and redistribute it to others. But why is it that only people in the government can do this? If forceful transfers of income are to be allowed, then what is the State needed for? The poor should then be able to rob citizens directly. Ah, say State apologists, but the State is required to ensure that this violent income transfer does not descend into general chaos. However, this is already happening – and even if it were not, so what? Citizens can easily hire private security guards to turn back those who are stealing from them when they hit a certain percentage. But, comes the rebuttal, that would create a free-for-all where all the poor people would grab whatever they could and it would all turn to madness.

But if this is the case – if the existence of money that can be legally stolen turns the poor into mad greedy jackals – then why would it only turn the poor into mad greedy jackals? If a certain stimulus makes some people irrational, why wouldn’t it make all people irrational? In other words, if poor people go mad for free money, why not the people in the government? There is certainly enough evidence that this is currently the situation, so we shall rest the case here.

In conclusion, then, a democracy can never produce a society wherein the rulers are more moral than those they rule. The only chance for such a society to exist would be for the most moral people to seize power and rule by totalitarian edict. However, history has so effectively debunked the myth of the ‘moral dictator’ that we scarcely need to waste time here discussing it. There can be no justification for the existence of a State, since it will always and forever be populated by people far less moral than the citizens they point their guns at. Even a cursory logical examination of the facts damns the existence of this terrible institution, the most vicious and corrupting body of moral degenerates in the history of the species.

The Challenge of Charity

Charity is a core concept in modern morality; it is one of the unquestioned virtues which demand utter adherence in all circumstances.

When examining moral concepts, there are only two real questions which need to be asked. The first is: is it universal? The second – inevitably – is: if not, who does it benefit?

Charity is defined as (a) generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering; also : aid given to those in need (b) an institution engaged in relief of the poor (c) public provision for the relief of the needy. As a moral commandment, it is not at all universal. It is a top-down directive, wherein goods or services are transferred from one person to another. The person who is ‘needy’ or ‘suffering’ receives the goods of the person who is less needy, or not suffering. Thus the sufferer gains a benefit at the expense of the donor.

How does the sufferer convince the donor to give him goods or services? Mostly, by completely avoiding the issue of responsibility. In other words, charity is virtuous regardless of the morality of the recipient. If an abusive man has become homeless because his wife has taken out a restraining order against him, he must be helped. If an old woman who beat her children lives in poverty because they want nothing to do with her, she must be helped. People who suffer as a result of their own evil actions must be helped as surely as those who suffer from no fault of their own.

How is this rather obvious problem avoided? First, the argument is made that evil people are not responsible for their actions. The murderer had a bad childhood, for instance. This may be true, but it still creates an insoluble contradiction. People argue for the virtue of charity because they believe in free will, conscience and responsibility – because any moral argument requires belief in these things. Thus they must believe that good people are responsible for their own actions, and can swayed through reason. But if good people have free will and reason, why don’t bad people have them? If bad people don’t possess free will, then some physical difference must be found to explain the difference. This is essential: if I say that some people have no skin pigmentation, I must find at least one albino to justify my belief. What would it mean for me to say that albino’s exist, but they are exactly the same colour as everyone else? Wouldn’t that be just an imaginary difference? If I claim that some people have free will, and some people don’t, but I cannot find any physical differences between them, then my distinction is pure imagination, and pure nonsense. I might as well say that some people have incorporeal hats on their heads, and some don’t.

Finally, if evil people are not responsible for their own actions, then they are more like pets than people. We don’t believe that animals have free will, but merely instinct. We do not allow dogs to vote, or hold jobs, or roam the streets alone. We round them up, try to find them homes, and destroy them if they are dangerous or unwanted. If a man claims that he has no free will, no problem – we simply take him at his word and treat him as an animal. It is likely that he will quickly rediscover his essential humanity.

Evil people have free will. They have chosen their paths – and those paths usually lead to suffering and want. How does that fact affect our charitable impulses?

Let us say that a man becomes desperately sick because he smokes, drinks, refuses to exercise and eats poorly. Furthermore, he becomes so sick that he will never become well again. Also, the moment his health improves, we know that he will return to his self-destructive habits. Would you give him a kidney? Of course not – it would be futile. He would destroy his new kidney as relentlessly as he destroyed his old one. In fact, you would now be part of his circle of self-destruction, since by his actions he would have roped your health into his downward plunge.

The medical metaphor only goes so far, however, since we are all subject to illness, regardless of our ethics. However, life failures as significant as homelessness, chronic joblessness or poverty, substance abuse and so on are almost always the result of moral failings, or of historical decisions so poor that they have effectively destroyed opportunity. A boy who regularly takes Ecstasy usually ends up with permanent brain damage. If this renders him unable to make a lot of money, he may want others to subsidize his income, but why? He was the one who voluntarily decided to trade in his earning potential for an exciting nightlife. I for one have no particular issue with his choice. There are times I would have loved to blow off studying and go party with mind-altering drugs. He made his choice, I made mine. I don’t really care about his choice. I mean, I disagree with it, but so what? I can’t go back in time and change his choice for him, so what does my opinion matter? He made it, got his benefits, and lives with the consequences – just as I have. I might as well disagree with Napoleon’s choice of hair style.

All choices have consequences, and poverty, excess children, ill health or mental derangement are just some results of some choices. All those negatives were preceded by positives – which is why they were chosen. A man may choose to be violent rather than examine his abusive childhood, but that is still a positive, in that he avoids the pain of examining his past. We may choose to avoid the discomfort of going to the dentist, but we cannot then rationally complain of toothache.

Since all choices have consequences, but not all choices are equally healthy, we certainly would prefer that better choices have more positive consequences. This is the great danger of charity, and its terrible capacity to corrupt and destroy rationality, morality and happiness. Charity is one of the most dangerous drugs that humanity possesses. Nineteen times out of twenty, charity blunts morality, numbs cause and effect, and rewards evil. It is a weapon wielded by horrible people to escape the consequences of their own corruption – and to destroy the empathy and judgment of those who give.

To take an current example, let’s look at the problem of the tsunami victims. The capitalist world has generated many billions of dollars in aid, which will go to the governments of the stricken countries. Will the money go to the victims? Of course not! If these governments had any concern for their citizens, they would not be corrupt and brutal dictatorships to begin with! Giving money to Stalin to help with the Ukrainian famine was equally mad – if he cared about the Ukrainians to begin with, he wouldn’t subject them to such tyranny that they couldn’t farm properly! What the general public does not seem to understand is that the reason so many people died in the tsunami disaster was because they were poor, and they were poor because they were enslaved.

Imagine this: a group of slave-owners lock their slaves in a barn every night. One evening, a fire breaks out and kills a number of slaves. Would we then give money to the slave owners? What if we gave money to the slaves? Would that be any better? Of course not – the slave owners would just confiscate it!

If we really wanted to help the slaves, we would focus on the real issue, which was not that people who were slaves died, but that they were slaves at all! By giving money to the slave owners, are we not implicitly approving slavery? Are we not legitimizing the corrupt and vicious state governments of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and others? We would be better off arming the slaves than giving money to the slave owners.

But of course, most of us can’t see that metaphor with any real clarity, since we are slaves as well, and our slave masters are simply giving our money to other slave masters – whom they are, for obvious reasons, unlikely to condemn.

This is the grave challenge of charity. Charity must begin with a moral foundation, which is that people are responsible for their own actions. Transferring resources from moral people to immoral people punishes the good and rewards the evil. Given that any rational morality must be concerned with increasing good behaviour and decreasing bad behaviour, providing resources to evil people is a purely immoral action. Charity, then, can only be morally provided to those whose ill fortune is not the result of their own actions.

Lies of Authority

Authorities tell us so many obvious lies that is seems amazing that we do not simply laugh outright at them. Here are a few, followed by some observations as to why our laughter is less common than it should be.

For the State to gain our allegiance, it must first create an imaginary enemy, and second reassure us that we are not in that camp. This is the trinity of power: the benevolent State, the terrible enemy, and the helpless dependent. First, the benevolence of the State is trumpeted, always by inculcating the young. Second, the power of the State is hidden, by a consistent refusal to point out the guns that are the source of that power. As the child grows, however, sooner or later he will understand the State’s dependent on the police, prisons and military. At this point, the enemy is introduced, in order to justify State violence. The child is reassured that State violence is only used against the enemy, and this seems believable at the time, since children do not pay taxes, and are not subject to regulations. As the child grows into adulthood, however, it becomes increasingly clear that State power is not primarily used against the enemies, but against the allies. The vast majority of State violence is designed not to punish the malevolent, but to rob the productive. The State does not tax citizens in order to protect them from enemies, but rather protects enemies in order to tax citizens. A large part of the State is dedicated to increasing the number of enemies, which is why laws and regulations continually expand. Every additional law adds to the number of enemies – and those enemies are commonly thought to be those who were formerly acting malevolently, but are in fact those who will in the future transgress the law, and so be subjected to threats, thievery or imprisonment. Laws, in other words, are not created by the State to protect citizens from thieving enemies, but rather to protect State revenue by inventing enemies and robbing citizens.

By far the best enemies the State can create are people whose ‘bad’ actions are increased by State violence. There are four major categories here: poverty, health care, education and drug use. The State has always used the existence of poverty as a threat with which to rob its citizens. Modern capitalism gravely threatened this threat by systematically eliminating all poverty but the most pathological. It was no accident that the Great Society was created in the 1960s; if the State had waited even another decade or two before stepping in, there would have been too few poor left to make it even remotely believable. Using violence to subsidize poverty has always resulted in an increase of poverty, and so the State was able to save one of its primary weapons against its citizens by creating the welfare state just in the nick of time.

The same is true of health care. In the 1960s, many governments took over health care – and again, just in time, since people were becoming so healthy that the costs of health care were becoming ludicrously low. Just as subsidizing poverty increases it – as well as decreasing wealth – so the subsidizing of illness increases it, and decreases health. It is no accident that the first generation of children to grow up in families with no direct memories of unsubsidized health care are so desperately unhealthy and overweight. Thus, along with poverty, health care is the perfect tool of State power, since the exercise of that power leads to an increase of demand for that power. Government-run health systems make people sicker, and so require additional coercion for funding.

Education is another prime example. State schools do not exist to serve the needs of either parents or children, but rather the greed of the State and its parasites. Citizens are not taxed for the sake of improving education; rather, education is forced to deteriorate so that citizens can be further taxed. Logically, this is not hard to spot. If a man claims that X is his goal, and Y his means, and he never achieves X, but continually achieves Y, it is obvious that Y is in fact his goal, and X his means. The State does not rob its citizens in order to improve education, but rather forces education to deteriorate in order to rob from its citizens. That much is clear, insofar as for the past half-century, education has continued to decline while taxes have continued to climb. Thus the goal must be the taxes, and education is the means. The State forces education to deteriorate by shooting anyone who wants to opt out, or anyone who wants to teach without paying a union, or wants a more personalized curriculum, or the introduction of objective standards or values and so on. Note that the State does not threaten to shoot people who wish such things – if all the State did was threaten, it would scare none but the most jumpy. It does in fact shoot people who disobey it. That much is clear to anyone who wants to follow the logical path from letters to calls to the ‘break, enter and kidnap’ tactics of people wearing particular clothing.

Drug use is also fertile ground for the creation of enemies. Making drugs illegal, of course, increases their value, and so increases the value of creating addicts. Again, there is no conceivable logic by which the State can be said to be dedicated to decreasing the amount of illicit drug use. Such drug use was far less before our current prohibitions, and has only been increasing since these laws went into effect. What has continued to increase, of course, are State drug-enforcement budgets, along with all the arbitrary powers of search and seizure that go along with them. Thus drug laws are not designed to protect citizens from drugs; they are designed to protect State income from a decline in drug use.

This is all perfectly obvious – the question is: why do so few people see this nonsense for what it is?

The main reason is two-fold. The first part is that there is little point having passionate opinions about things we cannot change. I may hate gravity, or dying, but getting all riled up about them won’t do me much good. It looks rather insane to get mad at things we cannot change. And the fact of the matter is that the average citizen can do absolutely nothing to limit the power of the State. We cannot resist well-armed State thugs. We cannot enter the system and change it, since the system has raised impervious barriers to anyone with integrity. No one with integrity will promise State loot to backers, and so will get no backing. Media will not publicize any substantial State criticism, since the State controls access to the airways through licensing and fines, and criticism of the State will result in a cut-off from the largest news source. Media may criticize this team or that team, but not the sport itself.

The second reason is pure – and rational – terror. Morally condemning the State is a dangerous hobby, since State power is so extensive. Imagine a student in government-run school exposing the violence at the root of the public education system. Imagine the reaction of a teacher being informed that she is being paid in blood-money robbed from the innocent at gun-point. What teacher would be able to respond to such simple and accurate moral condemnation? Pure rage would result. Through one mechanism or another, the child would either be severely disciplined, medicated, expelled or failed. Hate crime legislation would probably be invoked, and the child’s parents would also be culpable. The child and his parents would be subject to the most brutal and public kind of character assassination. He would be cut off from State education, and forced into home schooling. The child’s life would be ruined – and for what? Angering an inconsequential government teacher? Bewildering and alienating his classmates? He would not emerge victorious, since there are only two effective ways to oppose evil: moral condemnation and physical force. The first is not materially effective in isolation, and he is incapable of the second, and so his life would be destroyed for no purpose.

A third reason is that the spread of State violence utterly corrupts human relations – especially the bond of the family. Parental authority is undermined by student and adult welfare, while State schools implicitly teach children that violence is the most moral way to resolve differences of opinions. State schools, both by example and instruction, cannot teach children about win-win solutions, or the supremacy of peaceful rationality in dispute resolution. Their very existence proves the axiom that force is more moral than reason.

Thus children are taught that differences of opinion can only be resolved through violence and utter subjugation. This breeds the most stifling, claustrophobic and conformist types of relationships, where no values, fundamental ideas or important discussions can be allowed. Empty conversation displaces deep commonality of experience, and trivia, boredom, irritation and resentment take the place of stimulation, love, loyalty and integrity.

Such ‘relationships’ are brittle houses of cards, utterly opposed to any rational discussion of values, morals, ideas or deep experiences. Morals, if they exist, are imposed as mere absolutist and threatening prejudices. Families in particular, due to their relative longevity, become obsessed with ‘keeping the peace’ and defusing conflicts which cannot be resolved except through subtle emotional – or overt physical – dominance. Families, which should be the deepest relationships, become landmines of conflict carpeted over with silly stories, empty gossip, annoying advice and petty criticism.

It is for this reason that people also fear morally criticizing the State. The most abstract is also the deepest, and so for a child to criticize the violence of the State is to criticize the parents who placed him in a State school, or a brother who works for the State, or a grandmother on a State pension plan, or a cousin still in school, or a sister-in-law who is a teacher and so on. The State is now so powerful that a man cannot condemn the State without also condemning his family. State corruption has corrupted his family, as it has all his relationships.

Thus if a man criticizes the State, he must either retract his criticisms and destroy his own moral integrity, or face the inevitable unraveling of all his personal relationships. And those in the proximity of someone criticizing the State face the same choice. They must either condemn him, or stand with him in isolation.

Who among us is brave enough to stand for the universal morality of our common humanity and insist, over and over, that violence destroys all that makes life worth living? That violence corrupts our capacity for rationality, love and empathy. That we are ruled by petty dictators and threatened by brutal men in particular clothing. That what we call the State is nothing more than a club of criminals whose mad addiction to violence and power is eating away the very heart of morality, integrity and everything that brings a golden light to our lives.

Almost none of us choose to take this thorny, uphill, lonely and lovely path. We gain nothing but hostility, indifference, defensiveness, condemnation, attempted humiliation – and the truth. The truth, which makes it all, all worthwhile. For while violence rules, we are outcasts. But we must ready our trumpets for that glorious day when the State finally collapses from the weight of its own brutality, and we shall be free to speak with one another openly once more.

The State and the Family

The State and the family are two closely interrelated mechanisms for suppressing the moral authority of the individual. The State is a fairly obvious case, in that it corrupts the morals of children for over a decade so they end up, at best, resentful but compliant – and at worst, worshipful. The corruption of these morals is quite simply achieved, by creating imaginary enemies – corporations, environmental degradation, the rich, the free market and so on – and by creating imaginary victories over these imaginary enemies. Thus without the State, we would all be chained to factory benches, poor, sick, hungry and so on.

The corruption of morals is, in essence, the corruption of rationality, and so of empathy. Any rule of instruction regarding human beings must by definition be applicable to all human beings, or it is mere irrational prejudice. The creation of conceptual categories whose moral nature takes precedence over the actions of individuals makes no difference. If I say that lions eat meat, but that a pride of lions is vegetarian, does that make any sense? Of course not. However, if I say that one group of people are greedy and destructive – i.e. capitalists – while another group is noble and moral – i.e. the government – what have I achieved? I have said nothing more than that one pride of lions eats meat, while another is vegetarian. But how can I call both groups ‘lions’ then? If a lion is defined as a meat-eater, then all lions must be meat-eaters – and no group of lions can be vegetarian. The concept derives from the instance, and can add no other characteristics to that instance. Calling a group of stars a constellation does not change the physical characteristic of any particular star. A ‘constellation’ is a conceptual convenience for us, not a magic wand that changes the nature of matter.

By creating categories which change the moral nature of human beings – corporations versus the government – the State destroys the moral logic that children are innately capable of. Children have no problem developing conceptual thinking; they don’t think that the next piece of broccoli is going to taste like chocolate, or vice versa. The natural conceptual abilities of the human mind must be corrupted by an endless stream of propaganda which plays on two additional innate mental habits: fear and tribalism.

We are, of course, designed to be logical – but even more fundamentally, we are designed to survive. In primitive times, when danger was constant, we gathered together in tribes, because only numbers gave us a chance against other – mostly human – predators. Thus fear triggers subjugation to the group for the sake of physical survival, which requires the dissolution of both logic and the individual personality. We are afraid of being murdered, and so we fight. Yet peace is nothing more than the recognition of reality. We fear murder, and if we are rational then we understand that our opponents also fear being murdered. We believe that blind obedience to a leader will save us, but if we are logical then we also realize that it is the blind obedience of our enemies warriors that is what endangers us to begin with. Blind obedience is not our salvation, but what gets us killed. Or turns us into murderers; it is hard to know which is worse.

That State generally takes over the primary task of education when children are five or so years old. Children are usually fairly obedient by this time, so the question then becomes: what is it about the family that prepares children for subjugation to the State?

There are several characteristics of the family which create the irrational prejudice so central to subjugation to the State – and of course this irrational prejudice is primarily designed to serve the irrational authority of the parents first and foremost. The State is, initially, a mere grateful recipient of broken and slavish children. (Later, it turns the children against the parents, but we will deal with that shortly.)

Parents have near-complete control over their children, and parents are rarely logical, since logic is an innate art that has been largely scrubbed from the human soul over the past two centuries or so. Thus if parents were to train their children that reality, logic and the resulting empathy is the highest moral goal, then of course parents would have to be logical and empathetic to begin with, which they are not. In other words, corrupt parents will never teach their children that integrity is a value. They will punish things like inconsequential dishonesty, but only to exercise their own power to control and humiliate, not to underscore any moral or rational principles.

Families excel at training the children in the black art of irrational prejudice by claiming that family is more important than reality. Children are told that they must love their parents, their siblings, their extended family for no other reason than biological or physical proximity. Is this not the basest form of irrational preference? Children naturally love moral, rational and wise people; they do not have to be bullied into doing so. Children naturally withdraw from smelly grandmothers who are distant, false or unkind. Saying to a child: ‘go and give your grandmother a hug’ is irrational and destructive. It inflicts the terrible lesson: love your grandmother because she is your grandmother, and not for any other reason. But what sense does it make to love one’s own grandmother, rather than someone else’s grandmother? If every child must love his grandmother, then every grandmother is deserving of love, but not for any objective reason. Bobby must love his grandmother, but not necessarily Ralph’s. Ralph must love his own grandmother, but not necessarily Bobby’s. Thus what can Ralph and Bobby have in common? How can they empathize with each other’s experience of love? They cannot. Their experiences have been sundered, and they have lost the capacity to empathize with each other’s perceptions of love. In fact, it is even worse than that. If for some reason they end up empathizing with each other’s experiences of irrational preference, they will realize that they were told to love someone simply on the basis of blind prejudice, and will feel violated and angry. It is not just that empathy becomes more difficult – it actually becomes a negative experience. If I am told that I must love the tree growing in front of my house for no other reason than that it is growing in my front yard, what is my relationship to the child across the street, who is told the same thing? How can we avoid fighting each other? He is told to love his tree; I am told to love my tree – how can we understand each other? If we ever do end up truly understanding each other, what we will understand is that our families told us lies – a fact that will collide head-on with the first lie that our families told us, which is that our family is always better than anything else.

There are many corollaries to this first lesson – my family is best – and they spread out like ripples in a pool. The second, usually, is either my country is best – or, for immigrants, my culture is best, for racists, my race is best – or, for classists, my class is best. There are many permutations of this, all designed to give the child false pride in some attribute that he has not himself earned. This is crucial. If a child can be trained to develop a false sense of self based on unearned attributes, he will be far less likely to question the value of those attributes in any fundamental manner, since it will cause him great emotional pain and mental disorientation.

Sports also play their part. The child must be exposed to – and encouraged to participate in – the rank irrationality of sports-team preference. We want Team X to win, he is told. Why? Because they are like us, in some manner, either through cultural, racial or physical proximity. The desire of the opposing team to win – and the desire of their fans for that team to win – is not explored. Again, the child’s capacity to reason – and so empathize – is blunted. We want our team to win is an absolute which utterly divides the fans of both teams.

So, when the child is handed over to the State, his capacity for rationality, morality and empathy is already broken. He cannot grasp the emotional states and preferences of those he is told are unlike himself. He takes pride in inconsequential attributes he has not earned. His capacity for integrity and rational thought has been crippled. In fact, all of the above positive values are now a threat to him, since they utterly oppose the false values he has been taught. If he ever comes close to understanding this, then he will also come close to understanding that his family is corrupt, and destructive, and has crippled his natural abilities for the sake of their own petty and irrational power. That what he was taught was the highest value – family is best – is in fact a negative value, since irrational preference destroys morality. And no children – and very few adults – are capable of that kind of radical reevaluation.

And so, when the broken child is handed from the family to the State, he is ready for his miseducation to continue. The two central principles of irrational preference – that proximity is better, and so categories of people are utterly different – have been so drilled into his helpless mind that the government will have little trouble with him. They can tell him that corporations are bad, and that the government is good, and he will believe them, because he is in a State school, and closer is better. He also believes that groups of people can be utterly different, and so the irrational idea that those in the government are somehow better than those in corporations – that some groups of lions are vegetarian, and some are meat-eaters – is comfortably familiar to him.

However, it is a truth of history that the irrationality that parents force-feed their children will inevitably turn on themselves. If children are taught that they must be loyal to whatever is closer to them, and have no empathy for those who are defined as ‘different’ they will inevitably be trained by the State to turn on their own parents. This is the grim retribution that parents inevitably sow for themselves by breaking their children so early in life. At first, the State merely gratefully takes over these children – but later, in time, it takes over not only the children but the role of the parents as well. Where the parents teach the child loyalty to irrational but personal authority, the State will teach the child loyalty to irrational but institutional authority. The parents want to retain their own power over their children, but will inevitably find their power destroyed by the far greater power of the well-armed State. Their children will be sent to war, to prison camps, and set to work exposing their parents for a variety of ideological crimes. Although we believe that we secure our own power by crippling our children, the truth is that there are far more malevolent forces in the world than parents, who will take up the empty shells we have created, arm them, and turn them against us.