The Clarity of Concepts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Causality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Industrial Revolution occurred because it was allowed to occur.

Or, put another way:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some examples:

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

…the list goes on and on.

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

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

Lateral Paranoia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, finally:

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

Why The World Is Sick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, who cares?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Targets of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.