Irrational Seduction Of Collectivism

There are so many important things to be said.  In a week where the pressures of family needs and a pending novel besiege me, I will not waste yours with the meandering thoughts I may scrounge up from between the cracks of time that leaves me with, but instead I'll direct you to very important ones that I suspect didn't get enough attention when they were first published.

In an article entitled The Collectivist War Against Cultural Heritage last July, Brandon Smith wrote what I consider to be a phenomenal set of thoughts regarding collectivism.  I cannot do enough to encourage my readers to read it themselves.

 To Smith's thoughts I will only add what I've found to be an excellent rule of thumb when evaluating movements and their ideas.  A good movement will bring along all things. Those are past, present, and future; tradition, reason, and emotions.  A bad movement must defy reason by trying to exclude some major part of the human experience.  If the preachers of a movement must teach disdain for tradition, shame of the past, and invalidation of strong feelings there is something very very wrong with it.

We are not a species, and indeed no species capable of anything even remotely resembling the cognitive is one that can thrive independently of whole segments of our being.  We cannot live entirely in a realm of total newness, divorced of the past.

We can all try to push against our feelings and act contrary to them, but ultimately we can only emotionally destroy ourselves if we persist.  Sure, there are cases where people have developed irrational fears they must overcome, but they are overcome through experiences that reveal those fears for what they are, baseless.  Most things however that we react to emotionally, we do so for good reason.  If that wasn't true we'd be a dysfunctional species that never should have survived as long as we have.

Read Brandon Smith's article and you will see how extremely important it is for us to cling to our heritage, not abandon it, and also how dangerous those lines of thought that tell us otherwise are.

Distant Thunder, But The Count Is Five

In a blog dated today, January 22nd, 2013 J. Michael Cole posted the following,  Tensions Mount Between Japan and China.

I encourage you to read it yourself.  In it he discusses growing tensions between Japan and China and the potential implications for the United States and the world.  Obviously I believe his points are worth thinking about, otherwise I wouldn't have started my own post with a link to it.

Now what's this "but the count is five" mean?  It goes back to when I was a kid.  My grandfather was a self-taught scholar in his own right and I benefited from his teachings on not only history but earth science.  We'd go on walks and look at the sky and he'd teach me about astronomy and meteorology, using the biggest and most spectacular prop any educator could ever hope for, the universe itself.

One of the many lessons I particularly remember was to start counting off seconds after hearing a thunder crack.  He taught me that every four seconds meant the actual lightning strike was a mile away, and most likely so was the storm.  So for example if I counted to twelve it meant the lightning was three miles away.  This lesson has come in handy many times in my life, like when hiking a mountain and trying to decide if a storm is far enough off to make it down or if I should seek shelter on the mountain until the storm passes.

We Americans have a tendency to think of tensions between Japan and China as "far off" from us and in many real ways they are, like a storm that's still three miles away we may never even see it reach us, but we live in a much smaller world than we used to.  I say the count is more like five than twelve.  In a mountain hiker's context that's as close to imminent as a storm can be and still not quite be there.

History is full of tensions that, as J. Michael Cole describes essentially, have slowly grown and escalated into full blown wars, and one between the world's second and third largest economies with the likely need of intervention from the world's first, that's no small storm.  There will be no ducking under a rocky over-hang until it passes.

My Analysis Suggests This Bit Of Advice

While it's popular to believe WWI came about because not enough was done to prevent conflict, that's not entirely true.  There is plenty of evidence to support that perhaps too much was done to, in a figurative sense, keep a lid on potential conflicts.  In the process of trying to tamp down conflict around the world, diplomats far too often ignored the forces driving the conflicts.  This made the eventual explosion that was WWI inevitable and very possibly worse than the aggregate of what all the curtailed conflicts might have been.

In short, my advice, for what it's worth would be to identify and address the root causes for the disputes.  Identifying them would be the greatest and most useful task in the near term.  Some are historical and have to do with legitimate issues of national sovereignty.  Some have more to do with just the current 'now' and are driven by politics and greed.

China's might gives it no ultimate right.  Nowhere is the temporal nature of economic and military might better understood than in East Asia.  These things come and go and cannot be a sound way to resolve issues in the long term.  The ultimate right over any piece of territory rests with two things, history and where people live.  Not with who has the biggest guns or the most soldiers.

In the case of the disputed islands there are no established residents so it all falls on history, all that's legitimate.  Unfortunately China's current elite are exceptionally prone to revisionism.  It's also unfortunate that China takes any attempt to correct them as not just a challenge but an insult.

Resolving a conflict with a nation that claims to historically own places it never owned, such as Taiwan, is no easy task, but I think the run up to WWI may have something to tell us.  Just tamping down conflict is a very bad idea, as frightening as instead confronting the issues may be.  It is better to confront ideas now than to fight a war later.  The time may be coming to start getting firm about China's delusions.  A stronger and more potentially assertive Japanese military could be a great prop in this ideological intervention.

One Story I Long For

As my bio suggests, I'm involved with some novelists, some much more than others, and I often analyze the social and moral implications of certain stories and potential stories.  In all of the scope of modern fiction I see many a story that has fantastic implications.  Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider is one good example.  In a world so inclined to rationalize a lack of justice, Pale Rider was a breath of fresh air.  I also was recently touched and quite frankly surprised by the positive symbolism in the movie Battleship, rogue American and Japanese naval officers team up to save the world (that shouldn't spoil anything for you, I at least hope).  The United States and Japan working in tandem, that is the path to a promising future IMHO.  Those are two examples, but in all of this there is still one particular story that no one has managed to run with that I would very much like to see.  Here is my synopsis of it.

Welcome To The Intergalactic Community

This story would begin with a diverse group of sentient beings from other worlds appearing to our leaders and telling them that we need to shape up fast or they will be forced to blast us to the stone age.  Their ultimatum could be triggered by any number of things that I would happily leave to the writer's imagination.  Perhaps we're on the verge of mastering environmental control that will lead shortly to a terraforming technique that could double as a weapon of mass destruction, just as one example of the sorts of things that could get these beings' attention.

They give us a list of things we need to correct and soon.  The list includes religious fundamentalism, the desire for regional ethnic homogeneity, the use of fossil fuels, and the killing of animals for food.  Maybe some other things as well.  I'm flexible, just as long as the basic story gets told.

Our world leaders hop to it.  Even the nations that would normally resist such things, however reluctantly, cooperate.  They fear the ultimatum.

But there is a resistance and, to the surprise of Earth's leaders, it's not isolated groups of extremists.  It's a unified and well coordinated resistance.  They don't use terror but make direct attacks on the alien beings.  Key operatives of Earth governments start to disappear without a trace and key elections around the world start to seem obviously rigged.  Slowly but surely the Earth's ability to cooperate with the aliens is being destroyed.

Desperately the leaders of Earth turn to the best analyst they can find.  Probably a quirky guy or gal who's quirkiness would only be tolerated because things are so desperate.  Our hero sets out to find who's behind this sabotage of Earth's ability to cooperate with the Intergalactic Community and thus avoid being blasted back to the stone age, and how that goes is what makes the story interesting, worth reading, worth watching, or enduring whatever other medium it's told through.  The only detail I offer here is that our hero discovers another alien is behind it, one that looks a lot like us.

Somewhere around the big climax, probably just before it, the hero discovers this alien who is working against the rest of them is Reason herself.  You know, something like the Greek goddess Athena.  Our hero then ends up helping Reason humiliate these other aliens along with many of Earth's leaders for their hubris.  

In some sort of epilogue it is made clear these aliens were not the all-wise and powerful beings they claimed to be, even though they may have actually thought they were, and now that Earth has been freed from their attempted tyranny, we now enter the greater Intergalactic Community as a worthy peer.  Worthy not because we did things the way some self-appointed judges told us too, but because we entered on our own terms with only Reason and our traditions as our guide.

------
 
I long for that story because I tire of the hubris of so many temporal movements.  Just once I'd like to see them take it on the nose and be put in their place.  History tells us that movements come and go, and most of them, no matter how important their participants think they were at the time, end up looking silly and misinformed in hind sight.

Only those movements that center around individual dignity and liberty last.  The moral lessons of Homer and even the morals of folklore all continue while Alexander's beloved cause of Hellenism is long dead, Greek and Roman democracy left with whimpers, modern liberalism has become near hopelessly corrupt, and no current political cause except possibly libertarianism has any legitimate hope to reach across more than a few decades or at best a couple centuries.  The lessons of history tell us this, if we are humble enough to listen.

There is no permanent residence for Reason in any collective movement or cause.  That is why they don't last.  The collective mind is the mind of an irrational beast.  The rational mind, contrary to some modern philosophies, must be an individual mind.  Productive group-think only occurs to best effect when each mind involved is distinctly individual.  To paraphrase Stephen Covey's 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People, a group of individuals can become an interdependent and highly effective unit, but a group of collectivists become co-dependent and get less done as a group than even a typical set of individuals working apart would.  The key is the individual in this, and any movement or cause that doesn't see the individual as greater in importance than the group is doomed to be swamped in time's wake.

I know this is a hard concept.  How can the individual be more important than the group when the group is made up of multiple individuals?  Here are just a few reasons why the individual is more important than the group.

(1) The group can cease to exist while all the individuals that comprised it remain.  They can go their separate ways, the group is gone, but all of the individuals that were part of it still exist.  

(2) The group exists to benefit individuals, not the other way around.  If at least one individual doesn't benefit from a group, doesn't it go away?

(3) Groups are conceptualized entities.  They have no concrete existence.  They can be an easy illusion or delusion.  One doesn't need to be mentally disturbed to believe one is interacting with a group that doesn't in fact exist.  Some times perceived friends, people who you believe to be part of a group you call 'your friends', turn out not to be in that group. Individuals on the other hand, their existence is very concrete.  They may not be in groups you believe them to be in, but their existence is undeniable, short of questioning your very grasp on reality.

Finally, there is a very important distinction to be made between "the individual" and "me as an individual".  "The individual" is third person, meaning reverence of "the individual" is a reverence of others not of self.  This fine point confuses many a highly regarded scholar.  

Individualism is not self-centeredness, but quite the opposite.  As an individualist I want you and others to have your individual dignity respected and your individual liberty maximized.  The third person nature of this fixes the commonly perceived problems with individualism and liberty.  Since I want to see not only your liberty maximized but everyone else's as well, I balance the extent of your liberty with that of others.  You should essentially be free to do whatever you wish as long as it doesn't cause a critical problem for someone else.  

e.g. You're free to own and use guns but your not free to use them to harm others except for defensive purposes.  You're free to behave as you please in privacy with other consenting adults, but you're not free to bother people with public displays of what most think should be private behavior.  The question of harm may be debatable, but it is reasonable for people to expect not to be blatantly offended in public places, unless of course the subject of their offense does not offend most others in the community.

Too often people have launched from the need to accommodate others into a collectivism that some how elevates the community above the individual, or at least attempts to put it on par.  The launch is an irrational leap.  I think we could use a good story told that helps more of us to see that.

Nancy Pelosi On Stilts

Now for some more logic defying stunts.  Our current performer in the center ring, Nancy Pelosi.   In a recent interview she suggested the use of the 14th Amendment to bypass congress if it should refuse to increase the debt ceiling.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/07/pelosi-urges-obama-to-sidestep-congress-use-14th-amendment-to-raise-debt-ceiling/
 
Her logic insults the American mind, but what can we say if most American voters buy it?

She claims raising the debt ceiling is about the government paying its bills, not about it spending too much.  So thus she is saying the government can only pay its bills if it borrows more money.  Now doesn't that sound like a spending problem?  Who depends on borrowing to pay their bills?  Businesses with long range prospects of future profits capable of covering short term costs are one such group of people.  What about people with only modest potential future growths in revenue like most people and, yes, governments?  When such people find themselves needing to borrow in order to pay their bills it makes perfect sense to associate such increased debt with spending cuts.  Doesn't it?

Pelosi wants to reason it out differently.  She wants to claim that the debt ceiling increase is inseparably tied to the government's abilities to pay its bills, but doesn't want the reasonable implications of that.  Either we don't need to borrow more to pay our bills, which would make her argument fall apart on its face, or if we do, demanding spending cuts is extremely relevant and appropriate.

Her interpretation of the 14th amendment is also highly questionable.

“[t]he validity of the public debt … shall not be questioned.”

It simply means the United States government must not default on its debts.  Its debts only include its debts and nothing else.  It means if the government ever should be unable to come up with all the funds needed to do all that it normally does, creditors will have first dibs on those limited funds.  Obligations like Social Security checks and retired military benefits would probably have next dibs, and all other programs and operations would have last dibs and some of them would have to do without if they could, otherwise they would just have to cease.  Judges could get involved in determining what is and isn't an absolutely necessary obligation to meet, but creditors are the only group with clear priority according to the 14th Amendment, not everything the government spends money on.

Pelosi apparently thinks every person promised to by and/or served by the government is the same as a creditor.  As nice as it would be to think such a thing, being nice, warm, and fuzzy doesn't make something true.  Our debt is huge, getting bigger, soon the interest on that debt will exceed any plausible future revenue, and nothing as of yet has been done to reduce this debt.  We are past the time to save the warm and fuzzy things just because they're warm and fuzzy.  If the president should choose to follow her advice he would be guilty of gross incompetence to say it kindly.

The article I linked to also speaks of scholars who support Pelosi's interpretation.  Whoever these unnamed academics are, they're only support for their interpretation is some sort of alchemy by which groups of scholars co-enable each others disregard for reality (thus "alchemy" where things are done like turning lead into gold).  There is no way either through literal interpretation or through context at the time it was written that they can translate "public debt" as including all planned government spending.  Congress and the president can go without pay, non-essential employees can get laid off, property can be sold, and if worse comes to worse even employees deemed essential can go without pay.  None of the financial actions or omissions listed above constitute a public debt, and I would challenge any scholar to find a significant case where the normal expenditures of any government in the United States was ruled to be equivalent to an owed debt.

One of the few great benefits of this last election is that we are now free to identify nonsense where it is.  We no longer need to guard our words so as not to offend potential swing voters.  Stupidity won this last election and is now in charge.  Such a circumstance means that now is the time to point it out and not mince words while doing it.  The left can have their victory and the power that goes with it, but they are not entitled to defy reason without consequence.  They will drive this nation further and further towards ruin and they should have their stupidity pointed out as we go along.  To do anything less would make us even more stupid than they are.  I for one will use the intellect God gave me.

In conclusion, Nancy Pelosi is suggesting idiocy, but as much as I'd like to respect her reasoning capabilities more, I have to say this doesn't surprise me.  It's not that she's an idiot, since that would be someone who can't even be counted on to breath on their own.  Rather I suspect she has been poorly served by her education.  That is probably behind all of the people who's political, legal, and rational opinions defy reality.  Getting them to come out of their mass delusion is likely going to be a long hard task, but at least we'll be able to have some fun laughing at them.  And no, not that we'll be laughing at them as we point out their idiocy.  That would be unnecessarily cruel.  We will get our laughs when they just keep coming back with the same nonsense and try to impress us with things like modern academia's answer to alchemy, which happens to be much of the Ivy League, Oxford and Cambridge.  We will just counter their attempts at academic snobbery with reality and listen for the gates of pseudo-academia to start crumbling.

Questions We Should Ask But Too Often Don't

A good starter for this new year, I think, would be for us to ask a few questions that should have come up in every college level modern history class, but far too often have not.  Thinking on these questions can get us to the core of what current politics is all about.

Here we go.

-- King George III tried very hard to mollify the American colonists.  He cut taxes to a mere fraction of what they were and then ordered actual enforcement of them.  If he was so willing to compromise why did the American Revolution still happen?

-- Significant elements of the British parliament were working hard to represent the wishes of their constituents in the colonies.  In a few more years they may well have seen the colonies getting all that they claimed to wish of their government at the time.  So why did the revolution happen anyway and why do we all seem to like the long term results so much?

-- Why was it during the American Revolution that one third of the people who could not have commanded a majority of a popular vote were right, and now a third of the people who can't seem to command a majority of a popular vote are considered wrong?

And now to the heart of the core.

-- If the majority isn't always right, is it the right thing to let the majority always rule?

-- If a ruling majority is usually right, how many times does their being wrong outweigh the benefit of their rule?

-- If the majority is always considered right, what should those in the minority do?  Should they always abandon their conviction, or are there times they shouldn't?  If there are times they shouldn't, what are the potential consequences for both them and the majority when they take their stand?

-- Does unfettered majority rule inevitably lead to violent conflict with a minority?

-- How can that violence be avoided?  Rule by those who happen to be right, whether they're the majority or not, or a government that is so greatly restrained from effecting its citizens that disagreements between majorities and minorities have few if any unavoidable consequences?

If you see where I'm leading you with these questions but don't agree with my conclusion, I welcome you to explain yourself in the comments section below.  And I don't say that in any but the sincerest of ways.  I have an open mind and relish challenges.  Now if you agree with me about where these questions lead, welcome to the cause of liberty, and happy new year.

Happy new year everyone.  Whether I wanted to or not I ended up taking the day off.  Check in on Thursday for this week's post.

Eddie Fontaigne