A person who interprets the world through an ideology of lies, even if he is not aware of the lies, is capable of much harm.
You must remember: doing evil requires a conscious choice to hurt people.
It has been said that some people muddy their waters in order that they appear deep. I would add that they also expect full payment.
Honesty comes with a discount made up of truth and good will.
Anyone who says that Fox News brainwashes people is trying to brainwash people.
People who spend too much time on their trash have too much time on their germ-infested hands.
Democrats are now in control of our college students. That should be educational.
Economic principle: Never throw good money after bad.
Some people think it is the height of morality to criticize the rich as immoral. On the contrary, it is the height of immorality to criticize the rich as immoral.
Moral principle: Never waste your time talking to a person who declares an explicit hatred of reason.
You’re wasting your time if you think you can love humanity. You can only love individuals.
Sacrifice for mankind and you’ll be tired by noon.
Fighting for freedom is not a sacrifice. Being a productive person and paying taxes is a sacrifice.
People died fighting for freedom knowing that some others would not fight for freedom.
Your parents took care of you because they love you, not because they are evil capitalists who had a little surplus money that they stole from the poor.
Capitalist: a person who saves his money in a bank so it can be loaned to others to produce goods that improve lives.
Government: a group of people who take your money and give it to those who do not produce goods and improve lives.
Government job: employment of a person who doesn’t care, is incompetent, produces nothing and can’t be fired.
Union organizer: a person who will beat you up if you don’t join his union so he can protect you.
There may be a reason why the government wants our children to spend their time recycling and being ecologically correct. It makes them into willing slaves, eager to gain approval and especially eager to settle for a lower standard of living. They will be too busy counting plastic bottles to have the time to create the next new energy-saving, life-giving advance in the world. There shall be no rebels or inventors in the brave new world. There will be plenty of serfs.
Community organizer: a person who will do anything, say anything and countenance anything in order to save you from people who wouldn't hurt you anyway.
Government can only spend money. It produces nothing.
I believe in "wealth justice". If you earn it, it is just.
Marxist: a person who believes that any surplus money you earn through hard work and thrift was stolen from the person who hates his job, hates his boss, believes he is underpaid and hates to work.
What is the moral equivalence between freedom and force?
Honor your parents. They fed you while you were being a thoughtless, unappreciative brat.
A boss is like a parent, long-suffering, hard working and constantly spending money hoping someday you’ll be productive.
Progressives want the credit and the glory for helping the poor while removing money from the productive economy, destroy productive jobs, reducing commerce and enriching their friends with stolen money.
The easiest way to become a thief is to be a politician. You can steal all the money you want, and instead of going to jail, you will have monuments built for you, streets named after you and books written about you.
How to recognize a liar politician: Just listen to him.
If you choose a Bohemian lifestyle, remember: your friends have chosen the same.
Some people are more comfortable around rabble rousers and itinerants. Others wisely look for the door.
The sub-prime crisis was caused by re-distributing homes to the poor. The solution offered by the politicians is to re-distribute money to the poor so they can keep the homes that were re-distributed to them. This is called throwing good money after bad.
Do you believe there is such a thing as wealth inequality in the USA? That term assumes that such inequality is someone's fault...that there is something we should make equal, something we should fix. It is what Obama is all about...fixing wealth inequality. I think that if you have earned a lot of money through hard work, that is justice. You should be proud of it and you should keep your money.
Freedom is an idea that people have died to preserve. Slavery is a condition that kills people. Soldiers die for freedom...nobody dies to be a slave.
Age has the ability to look back and the virtue of deliberation...youth has the misfortune of inexperience and of hasty advance over the precipice.
Some things require a skilled craftsman to make. These are our most precious values. You can take them apart but you can't put them back together. I hope this isn't true of freedom though it is a precious value that took much skill to create.
Collectivist government can only create conflicts among men because it requires that some men pay for the benefits of other men.
Never trust the person who says he's doing something for your own good unless he's your parent.
30 million people to get health care. Who's paying for it? Not those 30 million people.
You can say it isn't socialism but you can also say it isn't real. In fact, you can say anything you want...doesn't make it so.
Shine the light of truth into the dungeons of mystics and kings...and you liberate the mind to explore the heights of knowledge. Courage, happiness and peace of mind are the rewards of truth. The alternatives are cowardice, decline, decay and misery. Make your choice. Dungeons or telescopes.
It is time that honest people realize you cannot be bi-partisan in an atmosphere where one party is intent on moving us toward dictatorship.
You cannot build an economy from the bottom up. The people at the bottom don’t know how to spend the money you give them. You build an economy by leaving people alone to make their own decisions.
The result of bottom up economics is top down wealth destruction. Eventually, no one has wealth.
People who can't take a stand between freedom and force are the reason we have so much force imposed upon us by government.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
The Forgotten "ism"
During the late ‘30s of the last century our political discourse was hijacked and many commonly understood words were changed to mush; it was during this time that we forgot one of our most important “isms”.
In fact, this forgotten “ism” has a distinguished, benevolent past. At one time, it was the foundation for one of the greatest transformations in world history; a transformation that changed the face of the earth for the better. This "ism", once forgotten, became buried under volumes of obfuscation and mis-representation. It was deliberately hidden from us by men who wanted us to forget that it was once our salvation. Indeed, our "forgetting" it has brought about one of the tragedies of history. This forgotten "ism" was fathered by the Enlightenment.
As Isaac Kramnick describes it:
“…political differences notwithstanding, the intellectuals of the French and British Enlightenment operated in relatively similar settings. They shared the profound transformation of Western life brought by commerce and industrialization and, with it, the emergence of middle-class Figaros (as in Mozart’s opera Le marriage de Figaro) as the new cultural ideal. Far from being alarmed at this great change, they generally embraced the new commercial civilization and its values, seeing it as a progressive, reforming force that would undermine the dead hand of aristocratic privilege and religious fanaticism. Theirs was also an age of increasing literacy, as for the first time in history reading ceased to be a monopoly of the very few, the rich, and the clergy. It was also an age when intellectuals eagerly wrote for and to this wider audience of new readers, not yet having become alienated from the philistine public in a posture of romantic weariness. (parentheses mine)
What was the message of these Enlightenment intellectuals? What were their ideals? They believed that unassisted human reason, not faith or tradition, was the principal guide to human conduct….Particularly suspect was religious faith and superstition. Humanity was not innately corrupt as Catholicism taught, nor was the good life found only in a beatific state of otherworldly salvation. Pleasure and happiness were worthy ends of life and realizable in this world. The natural universe, governed not by miraculous whimsy of a supernatural God, was ruled by rational scientific laws, which were accessible to human beings through the scientific method of experiment and empirical observation. Science and technology were the engines of progress enabling modern men and women to force nature to serve their well-being and further their happiness. Science and the conquest of superstition and ignorance provided the prospect for endless improvement and reformation of the human condition, progress even unto a future that was perfection. The Enlightenment valorized the individual and the moral legitimacy of self-interest. It sought to free the individual from all varieties of external corporate or communal constraints, and it sought to reorganize the political, moral intellectual, and economic worlds to serve individual interest.”(1)
Philosopher John Locke taught “…(t)hat individual mind imperially ordered chaotic sensory experience, constructing, therefore, its own meaning for the world. This Lockean portrayal of individuals as sole intellectual creators of their universe dominates the eighteenth century, from the writings of his disciples Hartley and Condillac to Helvètius, Beccaria, and Condorcet. No wonder, then, that Diderot and d’Alembert dedicated the Encyclopeie in part to Locke.
It wasn’t only Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, however, that held the Enlightenment in thrall. It was also the political liberalism of his Second Treatise on Civil Government. Indeed, it is in its basic assumptions about society, so heavily influenced by Locke, that one sees best the linkage of the Enlightenment’s ideals and liberal individualism. Enlightenment liberalism set the individual free politically, intellectually and economically. The political universe was demystified, as the magical power of thrones, scepters, and crowns was replaced by rational acts of consent. The individual (understood, of course, in the Enlightenment as male and property-owning) did not receive government and authority from a God who had given his secular sword to princes and magistrates to rule by his divine right. Nor did the individual keep any longer to his subordinate place in a divinely inspired hierarchy, in which kings and noblemen had been placed above him as “your highnesses” who were society’s natural governors. Government was voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract. Individuals rationally consented to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in order to have public protection of their natural rights. Government’s purpose was to serve self-interest, to enable individuals to enjoy peacefully their rights to life, liberty, and property, not to serve the glory of God or dynasties, and certainly not to dictate moral or religious truth.”(1)
Condorcet:
“The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in the works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses; and to learn how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear amongst us.”(2)
If you want to see what makes the United States different from any other nation, don’t assume it is because we are a Christian nation. Instead, look at the whole history of philosophy and recognize the magnificent transformation that was created by the Enlightenment and by the secularism that it inaugurated. Indeed, the Enlightenment and the Constitution of the U.S. both sought to mitigate the problems inherent in theocracy and dictatorship (based, at the time upon the tyranny of the King of England who also headed the state religion).
The philosophical movement called the Enlightenment resulted in a totally new age that spawned the scientific method, individual rights, limited government, economic freedom, the separation of church and state – and most importantly the right to happiness. These ideas liberated the individual mind and taught man to think and do as he willed, to travel, to learn about the world and to decide for himself the answers to the major questions of the ages. These ideas, not faith, are the cause of decades of affluence; the societies that institute them are the best, cleanest and safest in the world today.
Organized religion did not bring the ideas of the Enlightenment to the world but instead fought them for centuries. Before the Enlightenment gained influence, religion brought us oppression and political domination in the name of God. Although we seldom hear stories about the Inquisition and its tortures, we are often told that such oppressive practices were rare, exceptions to the norm, etc. Yet, I think the best way to understand our Enlightenment society is to analyze how the Constitution bans religion in the First Amendment and especially why the Founders chose to do so.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The first phrase says that the government cannot establish a religion or enact a law that establishes a state religion over the people. If this is not a direct prohibition of religion in public life, I don’t know what is. Why did the Founders insist on this Amendment? Because they knew that people had differing views on many topics and especially religion. They knew of the many religious wars where one group sought to impose itself on other groups. They knew the history of Christianity and the utter disregard it has had for people that sought to think differently. They knew of Galileo’s struggles and other thinkers who were punished and ostracized for disagreeing with the Church. They knew about the Inquisition and the witch trials. They also knew that many people came to the American continent to escape religious persecution in Europe and elsewhere. They knew that the best way to ensure that people could think for themselves as free people is to ensure that no one religion got control of the government. So they specifically prohibited the establishment of religion by government.
Notice they did not prohibit religion as long as it was practiced privately and through the consent of people who accepted its tenets. In fact, the second phrase about not prohibiting the free exercise of religion was intended to establish the prohibition of religion in a different way. By also protecting the free exercise of philosophical or religious ideas, the Constitution protects the mind against being forced to think in any way prescribed by others. Because of this phrase, people no longer saw the members of other religions as fearful or threatening. This situation did not exist before our Constitution.
Carry this idea further to the next phrase where the government could not prohibit free speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and you are on your way to creating a truly secular society by means of general principles that protect the mind and reason. The result of this protection is that people could be safe from persecution and prosecution for their ideas and beliefs – of any type. The benefits of free inquiry, open discussion and even the freedom to disagree with others all came from this Amendment and from the establishment of a government that protected the mind against coercion. This meant that any individual could, if he wanted, focus all attention on God as he understood him, or he could instead focus his attention on reality.
With the establishment of the Constitution, not only were people free of persecution for thinking, they were also free to develop new ideas and to express them. This created a free market of ideas where people could openly decide, without fear, what they thought. The result was better ideas, more useful ideas and this spurred the development of new products in an open market for ideas. Industries such as publishing, manufacturing, even political debates and strong disagreements could all flourish out in the open instead of in hidden backrooms. After a time, the result of free speech and free inquiry was a society that grew safer, citizens that grew more self-confident and an economy that grew stronger because the products being offered and delivered were increasingly better.
The last part of this Amendment, about petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances, established the basis for the judicial system where objective laws could settle disputes, where the government was the protector of rights and people dedicated to justice could actually dispense such justice in an impartial way. The focus of government was to ensure that no one had the right to appeal to and impose any ideas on the citizenry without coming up against a judicial protector of individual rights.
The First Amendment established the right of the free mind to live in society without threat or force. In essence, it established individual rights and liberated, above all, the previously captive mind. By outlawing religious domination, the American system of government inaugurated, for the first time on earth, or at least since the Greeks, a society where people were free to think, to speak their minds, to pursue economic well being, to be safe and to live among other men with little fear of envy or robbery. This was the legacy of the Enlightenment.
Because of the Constitution, individualism became so strong in America that people (religious and non-religious) learned to think for themselves about what would make a better life. This meant that religion, rather than trying to secure its dominance as it did in Europe, had to accept a position of political powerlessness. This led to the establishment of capitalism and even to a nation of the most generous people in the world. Rather than having to live with a religion imposed by government, the separation of church and state forced religious altruists to merely exhort people to be altruistic and go to church. The newly rich and affluent people that built America, because freedom had made them affluent, became benevolent givers through voluntary contributions – they called it altruism, but this benevolence was expressed, not as altruism, but as generosity.
So what happened? What went wrong? What the history books seldom tell us is that, because of the Enlightenment, our new nation was the first to effectively liberate the mind of man, to establish reason as the method among men for dealing with each other. Generally speaking, as time went by, those who advocated reason, freedom, capitalism, individual rights and limited government were called “liberals”. Their philosophy was called “liberalism” because they advocated “liberty”.
The big mistake came when we dropped the emphasis on liberty and reason and started seeing our dueling “isms” as a conflict between religious conservatism and “secular” progressivism.
Conservatism
How is it that God and religion were once the agents of monarchy and state religion, the agents of the divine right of kings and the "off with his head" form of justice while also being the agents of freedom and individual rights, of the pursuit of happiness and objective law, even capitalism? Logically, the contradiction cannot be resolved and it points to the flaws inherent in the position that our nation was a product of faith and God.
In Europe, as the Enlightenment flourished and began changing the world, many philosophers, because they were afraid that religion would die, did their best to undo the influence of reason. Kant and a number of other thinkers sought to save God and religion from the onslaught of science. In the name of reason, they declared that reason could not understand reality; they declared that man’s sensory make up was not able to apprehend it.
Even some of the leaders of the Enlightenment had difficulty reconciling a belief in God with the idea of reason. Deists, for example, attempted a compromise by declaring that God is the Creator of the universe but He no longer wanted to intervene in historical events. This view was intended to make room for reason but it too relied on rationalism; it postulated a belief as the foundation for reality. When the choice for man is between two forms of rationalism (Theism and Deism), reason has no defenders among philosophers. Its influence must decline. (3)
With few real defenders, the attacks against reason grew. Many thinkers, following Kant, argued that only religious morality could save man from being his own destroyer. The view that man is imperfect, with Kant’s help, as well as the similar views of earlier “conservative” philosophers like Hobbes, survived the Enlightenment and gave the conservative movement the ammunition it needed to argue that the separation clause was never intended to eliminate religion in government; rather God and his commandments were necessary in order to save man from the sins of “imperfect” individuals. Progressives, as their philosophy developed, saw government as the vehicle to accomplish God’s plan for the victims of greed while conservatives moved toward religiously-based institutions (including government) to control man’s greed. According to this view, religion was relevant because it was the only antidote to immorality. And by selectively focusing on certain aspects of Judeo-Christian theocracy, they argued that a free society was an outgrowth of societies described in the Bible.
Fundamentally, conservatives do not hold that reason is good for man. They hold that faith in God is superior to reason, that God is the ruler of the universe and men should be subservient to God’s plan. This is decidedly not the same philosophy that influenced many of the Founders when they declared that man had the right to the pursuit of happiness.
The pattern of the conservative strategy (that would also emerge in the progressive strategy) has been to change the meanings of terms presented in the Enlightenment-generated Constitution. The goal was to establish “sacrifice” as a defining motive of the Founders against the Constitutional protections of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; they preached against individualism and demanded that both the church and government follow God’s view of what was right for men. They sought to undermine a woman’s right to her body by claiming to be against “murder” of babies. They fought against the teachings of science in the schools, especially the scientifically proven views of Darwin and his theory of evolution. They advanced a literal interpretation of myths found in the Bible. They argued about the Pledge of Allegiance, into which they had inserted the words "under God", about removing God from our schools, Christmas decorations, even efforts to secularize Christmas (which had a secular past as well). They accused the progressives and other secularists of being atheists who hated God. They sought to ostracize and disenfranchise these people in order to defeat opposition to their own growing incursions, and, in an effort to enter the mainstream of political thought, they never mentioned that their actual goal was theocracy.
The genesis of the conservative movement was a need to discredit the Enlightenment for its contribution to freedom. By claiming that only religion could successfully lead to a moral life and freedom, they strove to disconnect the Enlightenment from having an influence as a moral force. They also strove to distort the individualism found in the Enlightenment (that consisted of men dedicated to reason rather than faith) by making a straw man out of secularism. They sought to bury the Enlightenment's cry for freedom by declaring it an agent of tyranny when, in fact, secularism was an outgrowth of the historically accurate truth that organized religion (and theocracy) was tyranny.
Through this twist of thinking, religion was able to associate itself with the good; creating a new movement of "freedom-loving" people who saw the rights developed in the Enlightenment as a gift from God, not part of man's nature. And to "prove" their point, they reminded us that the Declaration of Independence itself had said that rights were "endowed by their Creator". By taking the Declaration out of the historical context of the Enlightenment, they transformed our founding principles to those of the very religion against which the Founders were attempting to rebel.
What they ignored is that the term "endowed by their Creator" was intended to be inclusive of all opinions about the source of rights especially "natural law" and Deism. And, since the Declaration was a statement of individual rights, the term “their Creator” did not mean that man belonged to God but that each person’s interpretation of God was his own. Certainly, some of our founders believed that the Christian God was the source of rights and this position, to their minds, was consistent with the idea that God was nature. Yet, the Declaration made no mention of the Bible, Moses or supernatural intervention into the lives of men. Nor did it claim that man could only be moral by practicing God's injunctions. The intent of the Framers of the Declaration, rightly or wrongly, was to accommodate the views of all while also adhering to the principle that rights were derived from the laws of nature...from man's nature. This view was more consistent with Francis Bacon's view that "nature to be commanded must be obeyed" and that proper government must recognize that man must be free. The implication was not that rights were a gift from God but that they were derived from nature...regardless of how you interpreted nature.
But we must look at the Constitution to determine what the Founders were trying to accomplish: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Notice they did not say anything about religion when setting down the purpose of the document.
As the conservative movement grew, the Enlightenment philosophy that defended the individual, and made our nation possible, was now conveniently out of mind. When the progressives entered the fray and began to undo Constitutional protections, conservatives saw their opportunity to bury the influence of reason forever by connecting it to progressivism and government intrusions. Picking up on Marx’s materialist views, that touted the value of logic over faith, and the communists’ long-standing anti-religious persecutions, conservatives decided that if communists and socialists were advocates of science, then science, because it was this-worldly and materialistic, must also be false. Accepting the validity of science, they decided to reject it. When comparing science with faith, they extolled the value of faith. When comparing materialism to spiritualism, they extolled the superiority of the spiritual and they praised the idea that there was a relationship of the spiritual with the free.
This enabled the progressives to pick up the mantle of reason and science and gave prospective dictators the advantage. Rather than connect science with reality and an improving life for all, science became the handmaiden of dictatorship. When the progressives declared that they were advocates of reason, how could the advocates of rationalism and faith argue? Since Marx was not really scientific, neither were the progressives. Out goes reality for the conservatives and in comes pseudo-science for the progressives, the effort to use illogical thinking (that they called "science") to validate government power and collectivism.
The arguments for capitalism as developed by Smith, Locke, classical economists and other “liberals” could now be used, in a distorted sense, to provide cover for the religious conservatives in times when they were out of power. "Free market" ideas help conservatives to create political outrage against the dishonesty of progressives that keep them in the debate. Yet, it is conservatives, in various forms, who have championed some of our most disastrous policies including Anti-trust, government regulations and political graft to name a few. In an effort to capitalize on the political success of the progressive movement they attempted to beat the progressives to entitlement programs and, most often, because they have no argument against altruism, they wound up “me-tooing” the progressives.
Conservative intellectuals and politicians use a religious, utilitarian, form of pro-capitalist argument in order to get into the mainstream of debate but, once in power, they ignore economic freedom in favor of establishing religion in society. The idea of “compassionate conservatism” that ignores the free market in favor of faith-based charity is nothing more than religious progressivism.
If you doubt my assessment of religious conservatives, consider that most of these groups do not fight for individual rights. Their version of the fundamental unit in society is not the individual but the family. This form of collectivism holds that the family is the most important unit that must be protected in society. They use all sorts of "social" arguments that blame the family breakdown on selfishness and anti-social behavior. They claim that this breakdown causes crime, immorality, familial dysfunction and other "problems". By ignoring the value of the individual in society, they ignore his need to be free and proceed to enslave him or her to the family by insisting that self-sacrifice is the essence of our social strength. The progressives could not agree more. And since collectivism always requires a scapegoat, these conservatives are quick to blame the independence fostered by capitalism as the cause of society's breakdown. Their solution is more Anti-trust prosecutions and regulations. This leaves the door open for the progressives to “create” problems that can be blamed by both progressives and conservatives on capitalism.
Progressivism
Progressives, on the other hand, influenced by many of the same European philosophies as the conservatives, rather than seeking to establish religion, seek to use a more virulent form of collectivism as a cover for plunder. Their “god” is society; their ideas, also accepted on faith, pray to a different deity of power politics. Because of their Marxist base, they see their goal as gaining control of the “machines” so they can plunder production.
The influence of Kant and his philosophical descendants continued to grow in Europe even while the Enlightenment flowered in America. The power and influence of Hegel, Kant, Popper and others continued to feed the rhetoric of aspiring dictators. The progressive movement emigrated from Europe and became the American brand of communists, union organizers, socialists, pragmatists and today’s progressives that are bent on expanding government through higher taxes and entitlement programs – an American form of a fascist state. Progressives make up a descending scale, a “slippery slope”, so to speak. At the top of the slope are those that hide their true intentions by covering themselves as Constitutionalists who use the language of freedom. Sometimes we call these people “honest liberals”. The more brazen, the bottom of the slope, admit they favor a violent overthrow of capitalism. In essence, they are all the same; their only difference is the amount of force they claim to advocate. They all advocate force against citizens – this is the characteristic that invalidates their philosophy and exposes the lie that they are Constitutionalists.
History has shown that progressives will appropriate to themselves the language and emotions of their most powerful enemies in order to masquerade as people holding similar values. The early example was Kant himself. After declaring himself a man of the Enlightenment dedicated to reason, he maliciously wrote volumes to show men that there was no connection between man’s mind and reality and that the only thing one could do is his duty to God (5). Other thinkers such as Marx took these leads and provided the foundations for some of the most corrupt and murderous political systems in history, the various political ‘isms’ that required government brutality in order to accomplish feigned “social justice”. The legacy of Kant is millions of dead bodies. This is the legacy from which the progressives have sprung.
In America, because of the Constitution, progressives had a different challenge. The Marxists and socialists tried at first to declare violent revolutions through labor unions. They attacked and denigrated capitalist leaders, calling them robbers, thieves, charlatans and crooks. As they changed colors and morphed into progressives, they did everything they could to pry the Constitution from the hands of the people so they could replace it with the same destructive systems through which their brothers had devastated Europe. That pesky Constitution has always been in the way.
In those early times they recognized the true enemy. As the emerging religious right had also realized, their mortal enemy was the liberalism of the Enlightenment, the philosophy of reason and the individual.
In our early days, the two divisions of political thought were individualism/laissez faire capitalism (otherwise known as classical liberalism) and collectivism as embodied in the populists and early progressives such as Teddy Roosevelt. The classical liberals, who had nothing in common with today’s liberals, were the embodiment of the Enlightenment that created our society, while the early progressives saw capitalism, self-interest and individualism as the problem, not because it did not work, it clearly was successful, but because capitalists stood in the way of their taking over the machines.
Progressives have sought to turn government from one that protects individuals to one that would coerce them into working for “social goals” or “social justice” as defined by them. They needed a scapegoat which they found in capitalism, an economic system that was nothing more than freedom. They turned capitalism into a pariah by distorting its nature and best features. Through propaganda, they successfully turned capitalism and individualism into predatory killers and altruism (the real predatory killer) into a benevolent goal that just tried to improve life. As the ideas of Marx, Dewey and other philosophers gained ascendance, those of Locke, the Founders and classical liberals began to fade.
In her excellent book (The Forgotten Man) on the Great Depression, historian Amity Shlaes discusses an important theme that resounded through out the difficult years of the Great Depression. She reprises a theme put forward by philosopher William Graham Sumner about the forgotten man of the era. She writes:
“About half a century before the Depression, a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner penned a lecture against the progressives of his own day and in defense of classical liberalism. The lecture eventually became an essay, titled “The Forgotten Man.” Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote:
‘As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.
In 1932, a member of Roosevelt’s brain trust, Ray Moley, recalled the phrase, although not its provenance. He inserted it into the candidate’s first great speech. If elected, Roosevelt promised, he would act in the name of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Whereas C had been Sumner’s forgotten man, the New Deal made X the forgotten man-the poor man, the old man, labor or any other recipient of government help.”(6)
Many think that this focus on the consumer rather than the producer is the very idea that prolonged the depression. I submit that this shift away from the real forgotten man, the enlightened producer, is the very essence of progressivism. As a result of this shift our nation has been poorly served by politicians. In fact, there is a forgotten “ism” that parallels the forgotten man. Where the forgotten man for the progressives was the slave, the hard working American, who silently fed the nation, the forgotten "ism" was the philosophical fountainhead that had to be silenced so that conservatives and progressives could accomplish their baseless enslavement of the individual. These ideas, reason, the efficacy of the senses, individualism, natural rights and limited government, born in the Enlightenment, had successfully liberated the mind and the body of man so he could flourish and prosper. With progressives and especially with the New Deal, these ideas had to be removed from consideration. That forgotten “ism” is “liberalism.”
“(In 1936) Roosevelt won because he created a new kind of interest group politics. The idea that Americans might form a political group that demanded something from government was well known and thoroughly reported a century earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. The idea that such groups might find mainstream parties to support them was not novel either: Republicans including the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had long practiced interest-group politics on behalf of big business. But Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics more generally to include many constituencies—labor, senior citizens, farmers, union workers. The president made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It is no coincidence that the first peace-time year in American history in which federal spending outpaced the total spending of the states and towns was that election year of 1936. It can even be argued that one year—1936—created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties today.
Roosevelt’s move was so profound that it changed the English language. Before the 1930s, the word “liberal” stood for the individual; afterward, the phrase increasingly stood for groups….”(7)
From the advent of the progressive movement, the political debate in America became hijacked by progressives who began calling themselves “liberals”. Not only did they steal the name from an “ism” that was their diametric opposite, an “ism” that saw the individual as sovereign, they even took upon themselves the moral authority to expropriate his property, his mind and his accomplishments. Essentially, they wiped out the only “ism” in our society that defended the individual and they moved the discussion away from protecting the individual to employing coercive measures against him.
The problem for the progressive movement has always been that collectivism and self-sacrifice, do not work. In order to gain the upper hand against capitalism, progressives had to invent atrocities committed by capitalism so they could take over the corporations and blame them for all the failures created by collectivism. It has taken a massive campaign as well as a hugely corrupt re-writing of history to accomplish this most devastating of deceptions.
Yet, even after these decades-long propaganda campaigns and their successes, the Constitution continues to be in the way. It is a bulwark against the progressives because it is based on individualism and it creates checks and balances that must be negotiated in order to turn society from capitalism to re-distribution. During these campaigns to undermine the Constitution, the gridlock created by its checks and balances manages to keep the progressives at bay while individuals continue to prosper. We may be at the end of this process. The progressives are finally winning…so far.
Notice that the progressives have never sought to co-opt the conservative movement. They needed a weak opponent that they could blame for supporting capitalism. This strategy was part of their road to victory. Attack a movement that does not want capitalism, accuse it of being in bed with capitalists, and you limit any real opposition. Certainly, they sent a group out called the “neo-conservatives” to pretend to be conservatives while always advancing progressivism, but this has been a dead Trojan horse, so to speak.
In order for their strategy to work, they had to co-opt their only real opposition and turn its arguments inside out. All of the high-minded and evocative terms that animate near universal support for freedom and limited government were turned by progressives in the universities into their destroyers. Masquerading as “liberals”, the progressives have gotten away with a lot. For instance they ignored the term “natural rights” and expropriated for their use the income of producers; they ignored the term “individual” and began talking about “victims”; they ignored the term “individual rights” and promoted the right to be taken care of; they changed the term “freedom” to mean freedom from want; they turned our constitutional republic into democracy, the will of the people to coerce the productive; they changed the word capitalists to mean “oligarchs”, the very people they enslave and extort money from; they ignored the term “rule of law” so they could make “re-distribution” legal; theft became “social justice”; guaranteed income became “equality”; the pursuit of happiness became part of the corrupt past.
The progressives’ goal was to transition government from one designed to protect the individual to one that would enslave the individual. They want to turn man from a self-reliant, self-respecting “man of action” into a self-sacrificing robot devoid of mind and hope for the future – and they want to call it hope for the future.
---------
We can now evaluate and find the true causes of the present condition of the world.
Conservatives assigned to reason an inferior position and blocked themselves from arguing for limited government on a solid, believable foundation. What they lost was the strength of conviction that our founders were right. They became defenders of a Pre-Enlightenment past and the status quo; hardly worth listening to by educated people. Today, we are bombarded by weak arguments that our society was based on religion, that charity was a concept that belongs to conservatives not to progressives, that God and the Ten Commandments were the foundations of liberty and that references to religion and religious morality in the words of the Founders prove that they did not see religion as an element of tyranny.
With conservatives unwilling to give up faith in spite of the fact that the Enlightenment had clearly shown reason to be superior in the real world, their goal was to ensure that religion survived the Bill of Rights, that it did not become associated with theocracy and religious persecution. In order to make room for faith, they had to denigrate individualism and reason and exhort man to give up his mind in favor of an ineffable spiritual idea that the Enlightenment had discredited. The result is that individual rights had no defenders and the progressives were given a free ride on the road toward dictatorship. Not only is this state of affairs the fault of progressives, it is the fault of conservatives who saw reason as an enemy. The result, the greatest governmental and economic system in the history of mankind had no defenders.
On the other hand, the progressives picked up the banner of reason and gave us pseudo-science to justify their undoing of man's rights and capitalism. This made it possible for them to claim that their un-scientific prejudices, their rationalizations for force and violence were scientific and that their ideas were superior to those of the superstitious conservatives - which gave them the force of moral authority. The progressives turned the idea of charity into forced altruism and suggested that society should replace God. Once again, true reason was left out of the discussion.
This left us with only two options, two political "isms" that were both only variants of the very ideas against which the Enlightenment had argued. It was against the basic premises of the conservatives and the progressives that the Enlightenment had made the best arguments; arguments fully defensible and superior; but which had conveniently been pushed out of history with disastrous consequences. Worldwide, the result was poverty, concentration camps, genocide, war, plunder and a constant slide among many nations toward fascism and communism.
We must hold the conservatives and progressives fully responsible for these results. They have been witnesses to the wonders of reason, capitalism and freedom, they have all the evidence they need in order to make the right choice: classical liberalism; individualism, freedom, capitalism, man's rights, limited government - the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Instead, they chose the lowest values possible: anti-reason and a war against the body and mind of man.
In conclusion, I’d like to suggest that the Tea Party Movement is not a conservative movement. It is the movement of the forgotten man and the forgotten “ism”, classical liberalism, a movement that defends and celebrates the individual and his potential for greatness. The Tea Party movement need not compromise with any other group, progressive or conservative. Let these other groups work out their own issues and contradictions. Let them compromise with the individuals who make up the Tea Parties...but let us not put up core principles for negotiation. If other movements want to join the Tea Party protests, they can, but no other group is powerful enough to co-opt the Tea Parties. As Robert Tracinski has eloquently suggested, the Tea Party statement of principles is clear:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
What of the future? How can we defeat the progressives and their totalitarian dreams? I think the best way is to fulfill the promise of the 1st Amendment and become an opposition that is truly inclusive. We need to reclaim reason and individual rights in our political discourse by rejecting both theocracy and progressivism. We must stand up for the forgotten 'ism'; the true political philosophy of the Enlightenment known as "liberalism".
As John Locke wrote: "...all the power of civil government relates only to men's civil interests, is confined to the care of the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come."(8)
By following this maxim, we can put those of us who favor liberty on an equal footing against progressives and conservatives. We can re-establish the foundations of our arguments based on reason while we expose the pseudo-science of the progressives; and the potential tyranny of the theocrats; and this will expose their views as truly ignorant and primitive. We can discuss man's rights on a proper metaphysical base that derives from reality rather than another realm of existence. On this foundation, we may yet save our country and create a political majority that could include, not only those who favor religious toleration, but also those who have become disenchanted with the unwarranted force and control being advanced by both the progressives and conservatives. We can see the Republicans for what they are; theocrats who would use force against citizens and who only repeat arguments for liberty when it helps them get votes. We can see the Democrats for what they are; radical descendents of Hitler and Stalin who have learned how to use words to hide from us that they intend to make us slaves.
Hopefully, we will soon be able to say, “Liberalism is dead. Long live liberalism.”
(1)The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick, paperback, The Viking Portable Library
(2)The Future Progress of the Human Mind, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) Reprinted in The Portable Enlightenment Reader edited by Isaac Kramnick, the Viking Portable Library
(3)Read Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff
(4)See Persian Letters by Baron de Montesquieu
(5)What is Enlightenment? Immanual Kant
(6)The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, Harper Perrennial, paperback Page 12
(7)Ibid Page 11
(8)A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke
In fact, this forgotten “ism” has a distinguished, benevolent past. At one time, it was the foundation for one of the greatest transformations in world history; a transformation that changed the face of the earth for the better. This "ism", once forgotten, became buried under volumes of obfuscation and mis-representation. It was deliberately hidden from us by men who wanted us to forget that it was once our salvation. Indeed, our "forgetting" it has brought about one of the tragedies of history. This forgotten "ism" was fathered by the Enlightenment.
As Isaac Kramnick describes it:
“…political differences notwithstanding, the intellectuals of the French and British Enlightenment operated in relatively similar settings. They shared the profound transformation of Western life brought by commerce and industrialization and, with it, the emergence of middle-class Figaros (as in Mozart’s opera Le marriage de Figaro) as the new cultural ideal. Far from being alarmed at this great change, they generally embraced the new commercial civilization and its values, seeing it as a progressive, reforming force that would undermine the dead hand of aristocratic privilege and religious fanaticism. Theirs was also an age of increasing literacy, as for the first time in history reading ceased to be a monopoly of the very few, the rich, and the clergy. It was also an age when intellectuals eagerly wrote for and to this wider audience of new readers, not yet having become alienated from the philistine public in a posture of romantic weariness. (parentheses mine)
What was the message of these Enlightenment intellectuals? What were their ideals? They believed that unassisted human reason, not faith or tradition, was the principal guide to human conduct….Particularly suspect was religious faith and superstition. Humanity was not innately corrupt as Catholicism taught, nor was the good life found only in a beatific state of otherworldly salvation. Pleasure and happiness were worthy ends of life and realizable in this world. The natural universe, governed not by miraculous whimsy of a supernatural God, was ruled by rational scientific laws, which were accessible to human beings through the scientific method of experiment and empirical observation. Science and technology were the engines of progress enabling modern men and women to force nature to serve their well-being and further their happiness. Science and the conquest of superstition and ignorance provided the prospect for endless improvement and reformation of the human condition, progress even unto a future that was perfection. The Enlightenment valorized the individual and the moral legitimacy of self-interest. It sought to free the individual from all varieties of external corporate or communal constraints, and it sought to reorganize the political, moral intellectual, and economic worlds to serve individual interest.”(1)
Philosopher John Locke taught “…(t)hat individual mind imperially ordered chaotic sensory experience, constructing, therefore, its own meaning for the world. This Lockean portrayal of individuals as sole intellectual creators of their universe dominates the eighteenth century, from the writings of his disciples Hartley and Condillac to Helvètius, Beccaria, and Condorcet. No wonder, then, that Diderot and d’Alembert dedicated the Encyclopeie in part to Locke.
It wasn’t only Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, however, that held the Enlightenment in thrall. It was also the political liberalism of his Second Treatise on Civil Government. Indeed, it is in its basic assumptions about society, so heavily influenced by Locke, that one sees best the linkage of the Enlightenment’s ideals and liberal individualism. Enlightenment liberalism set the individual free politically, intellectually and economically. The political universe was demystified, as the magical power of thrones, scepters, and crowns was replaced by rational acts of consent. The individual (understood, of course, in the Enlightenment as male and property-owning) did not receive government and authority from a God who had given his secular sword to princes and magistrates to rule by his divine right. Nor did the individual keep any longer to his subordinate place in a divinely inspired hierarchy, in which kings and noblemen had been placed above him as “your highnesses” who were society’s natural governors. Government was voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract. Individuals rationally consented to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in order to have public protection of their natural rights. Government’s purpose was to serve self-interest, to enable individuals to enjoy peacefully their rights to life, liberty, and property, not to serve the glory of God or dynasties, and certainly not to dictate moral or religious truth.”(1)
Condorcet:
“The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in the works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses; and to learn how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear amongst us.”(2)
If you want to see what makes the United States different from any other nation, don’t assume it is because we are a Christian nation. Instead, look at the whole history of philosophy and recognize the magnificent transformation that was created by the Enlightenment and by the secularism that it inaugurated. Indeed, the Enlightenment and the Constitution of the U.S. both sought to mitigate the problems inherent in theocracy and dictatorship (based, at the time upon the tyranny of the King of England who also headed the state religion).
The philosophical movement called the Enlightenment resulted in a totally new age that spawned the scientific method, individual rights, limited government, economic freedom, the separation of church and state – and most importantly the right to happiness. These ideas liberated the individual mind and taught man to think and do as he willed, to travel, to learn about the world and to decide for himself the answers to the major questions of the ages. These ideas, not faith, are the cause of decades of affluence; the societies that institute them are the best, cleanest and safest in the world today.
Organized religion did not bring the ideas of the Enlightenment to the world but instead fought them for centuries. Before the Enlightenment gained influence, religion brought us oppression and political domination in the name of God. Although we seldom hear stories about the Inquisition and its tortures, we are often told that such oppressive practices were rare, exceptions to the norm, etc. Yet, I think the best way to understand our Enlightenment society is to analyze how the Constitution bans religion in the First Amendment and especially why the Founders chose to do so.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The first phrase says that the government cannot establish a religion or enact a law that establishes a state religion over the people. If this is not a direct prohibition of religion in public life, I don’t know what is. Why did the Founders insist on this Amendment? Because they knew that people had differing views on many topics and especially religion. They knew of the many religious wars where one group sought to impose itself on other groups. They knew the history of Christianity and the utter disregard it has had for people that sought to think differently. They knew of Galileo’s struggles and other thinkers who were punished and ostracized for disagreeing with the Church. They knew about the Inquisition and the witch trials. They also knew that many people came to the American continent to escape religious persecution in Europe and elsewhere. They knew that the best way to ensure that people could think for themselves as free people is to ensure that no one religion got control of the government. So they specifically prohibited the establishment of religion by government.
Notice they did not prohibit religion as long as it was practiced privately and through the consent of people who accepted its tenets. In fact, the second phrase about not prohibiting the free exercise of religion was intended to establish the prohibition of religion in a different way. By also protecting the free exercise of philosophical or religious ideas, the Constitution protects the mind against being forced to think in any way prescribed by others. Because of this phrase, people no longer saw the members of other religions as fearful or threatening. This situation did not exist before our Constitution.
Carry this idea further to the next phrase where the government could not prohibit free speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and you are on your way to creating a truly secular society by means of general principles that protect the mind and reason. The result of this protection is that people could be safe from persecution and prosecution for their ideas and beliefs – of any type. The benefits of free inquiry, open discussion and even the freedom to disagree with others all came from this Amendment and from the establishment of a government that protected the mind against coercion. This meant that any individual could, if he wanted, focus all attention on God as he understood him, or he could instead focus his attention on reality.
With the establishment of the Constitution, not only were people free of persecution for thinking, they were also free to develop new ideas and to express them. This created a free market of ideas where people could openly decide, without fear, what they thought. The result was better ideas, more useful ideas and this spurred the development of new products in an open market for ideas. Industries such as publishing, manufacturing, even political debates and strong disagreements could all flourish out in the open instead of in hidden backrooms. After a time, the result of free speech and free inquiry was a society that grew safer, citizens that grew more self-confident and an economy that grew stronger because the products being offered and delivered were increasingly better.
The last part of this Amendment, about petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances, established the basis for the judicial system where objective laws could settle disputes, where the government was the protector of rights and people dedicated to justice could actually dispense such justice in an impartial way. The focus of government was to ensure that no one had the right to appeal to and impose any ideas on the citizenry without coming up against a judicial protector of individual rights.
The First Amendment established the right of the free mind to live in society without threat or force. In essence, it established individual rights and liberated, above all, the previously captive mind. By outlawing religious domination, the American system of government inaugurated, for the first time on earth, or at least since the Greeks, a society where people were free to think, to speak their minds, to pursue economic well being, to be safe and to live among other men with little fear of envy or robbery. This was the legacy of the Enlightenment.
Because of the Constitution, individualism became so strong in America that people (religious and non-religious) learned to think for themselves about what would make a better life. This meant that religion, rather than trying to secure its dominance as it did in Europe, had to accept a position of political powerlessness. This led to the establishment of capitalism and even to a nation of the most generous people in the world. Rather than having to live with a religion imposed by government, the separation of church and state forced religious altruists to merely exhort people to be altruistic and go to church. The newly rich and affluent people that built America, because freedom had made them affluent, became benevolent givers through voluntary contributions – they called it altruism, but this benevolence was expressed, not as altruism, but as generosity.
So what happened? What went wrong? What the history books seldom tell us is that, because of the Enlightenment, our new nation was the first to effectively liberate the mind of man, to establish reason as the method among men for dealing with each other. Generally speaking, as time went by, those who advocated reason, freedom, capitalism, individual rights and limited government were called “liberals”. Their philosophy was called “liberalism” because they advocated “liberty”.
The big mistake came when we dropped the emphasis on liberty and reason and started seeing our dueling “isms” as a conflict between religious conservatism and “secular” progressivism.
Conservatism
How is it that God and religion were once the agents of monarchy and state religion, the agents of the divine right of kings and the "off with his head" form of justice while also being the agents of freedom and individual rights, of the pursuit of happiness and objective law, even capitalism? Logically, the contradiction cannot be resolved and it points to the flaws inherent in the position that our nation was a product of faith and God.
In Europe, as the Enlightenment flourished and began changing the world, many philosophers, because they were afraid that religion would die, did their best to undo the influence of reason. Kant and a number of other thinkers sought to save God and religion from the onslaught of science. In the name of reason, they declared that reason could not understand reality; they declared that man’s sensory make up was not able to apprehend it.
Even some of the leaders of the Enlightenment had difficulty reconciling a belief in God with the idea of reason. Deists, for example, attempted a compromise by declaring that God is the Creator of the universe but He no longer wanted to intervene in historical events. This view was intended to make room for reason but it too relied on rationalism; it postulated a belief as the foundation for reality. When the choice for man is between two forms of rationalism (Theism and Deism), reason has no defenders among philosophers. Its influence must decline. (3)
With few real defenders, the attacks against reason grew. Many thinkers, following Kant, argued that only religious morality could save man from being his own destroyer. The view that man is imperfect, with Kant’s help, as well as the similar views of earlier “conservative” philosophers like Hobbes, survived the Enlightenment and gave the conservative movement the ammunition it needed to argue that the separation clause was never intended to eliminate religion in government; rather God and his commandments were necessary in order to save man from the sins of “imperfect” individuals. Progressives, as their philosophy developed, saw government as the vehicle to accomplish God’s plan for the victims of greed while conservatives moved toward religiously-based institutions (including government) to control man’s greed. According to this view, religion was relevant because it was the only antidote to immorality. And by selectively focusing on certain aspects of Judeo-Christian theocracy, they argued that a free society was an outgrowth of societies described in the Bible.
Fundamentally, conservatives do not hold that reason is good for man. They hold that faith in God is superior to reason, that God is the ruler of the universe and men should be subservient to God’s plan. This is decidedly not the same philosophy that influenced many of the Founders when they declared that man had the right to the pursuit of happiness.
The pattern of the conservative strategy (that would also emerge in the progressive strategy) has been to change the meanings of terms presented in the Enlightenment-generated Constitution. The goal was to establish “sacrifice” as a defining motive of the Founders against the Constitutional protections of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; they preached against individualism and demanded that both the church and government follow God’s view of what was right for men. They sought to undermine a woman’s right to her body by claiming to be against “murder” of babies. They fought against the teachings of science in the schools, especially the scientifically proven views of Darwin and his theory of evolution. They advanced a literal interpretation of myths found in the Bible. They argued about the Pledge of Allegiance, into which they had inserted the words "under God", about removing God from our schools, Christmas decorations, even efforts to secularize Christmas (which had a secular past as well). They accused the progressives and other secularists of being atheists who hated God. They sought to ostracize and disenfranchise these people in order to defeat opposition to their own growing incursions, and, in an effort to enter the mainstream of political thought, they never mentioned that their actual goal was theocracy.
The genesis of the conservative movement was a need to discredit the Enlightenment for its contribution to freedom. By claiming that only religion could successfully lead to a moral life and freedom, they strove to disconnect the Enlightenment from having an influence as a moral force. They also strove to distort the individualism found in the Enlightenment (that consisted of men dedicated to reason rather than faith) by making a straw man out of secularism. They sought to bury the Enlightenment's cry for freedom by declaring it an agent of tyranny when, in fact, secularism was an outgrowth of the historically accurate truth that organized religion (and theocracy) was tyranny.
Through this twist of thinking, religion was able to associate itself with the good; creating a new movement of "freedom-loving" people who saw the rights developed in the Enlightenment as a gift from God, not part of man's nature. And to "prove" their point, they reminded us that the Declaration of Independence itself had said that rights were "endowed by their Creator". By taking the Declaration out of the historical context of the Enlightenment, they transformed our founding principles to those of the very religion against which the Founders were attempting to rebel.
What they ignored is that the term "endowed by their Creator" was intended to be inclusive of all opinions about the source of rights especially "natural law" and Deism. And, since the Declaration was a statement of individual rights, the term “their Creator” did not mean that man belonged to God but that each person’s interpretation of God was his own. Certainly, some of our founders believed that the Christian God was the source of rights and this position, to their minds, was consistent with the idea that God was nature. Yet, the Declaration made no mention of the Bible, Moses or supernatural intervention into the lives of men. Nor did it claim that man could only be moral by practicing God's injunctions. The intent of the Framers of the Declaration, rightly or wrongly, was to accommodate the views of all while also adhering to the principle that rights were derived from the laws of nature...from man's nature. This view was more consistent with Francis Bacon's view that "nature to be commanded must be obeyed" and that proper government must recognize that man must be free. The implication was not that rights were a gift from God but that they were derived from nature...regardless of how you interpreted nature.
But we must look at the Constitution to determine what the Founders were trying to accomplish: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Notice they did not say anything about religion when setting down the purpose of the document.
As the conservative movement grew, the Enlightenment philosophy that defended the individual, and made our nation possible, was now conveniently out of mind. When the progressives entered the fray and began to undo Constitutional protections, conservatives saw their opportunity to bury the influence of reason forever by connecting it to progressivism and government intrusions. Picking up on Marx’s materialist views, that touted the value of logic over faith, and the communists’ long-standing anti-religious persecutions, conservatives decided that if communists and socialists were advocates of science, then science, because it was this-worldly and materialistic, must also be false. Accepting the validity of science, they decided to reject it. When comparing science with faith, they extolled the value of faith. When comparing materialism to spiritualism, they extolled the superiority of the spiritual and they praised the idea that there was a relationship of the spiritual with the free.
This enabled the progressives to pick up the mantle of reason and science and gave prospective dictators the advantage. Rather than connect science with reality and an improving life for all, science became the handmaiden of dictatorship. When the progressives declared that they were advocates of reason, how could the advocates of rationalism and faith argue? Since Marx was not really scientific, neither were the progressives. Out goes reality for the conservatives and in comes pseudo-science for the progressives, the effort to use illogical thinking (that they called "science") to validate government power and collectivism.
The arguments for capitalism as developed by Smith, Locke, classical economists and other “liberals” could now be used, in a distorted sense, to provide cover for the religious conservatives in times when they were out of power. "Free market" ideas help conservatives to create political outrage against the dishonesty of progressives that keep them in the debate. Yet, it is conservatives, in various forms, who have championed some of our most disastrous policies including Anti-trust, government regulations and political graft to name a few. In an effort to capitalize on the political success of the progressive movement they attempted to beat the progressives to entitlement programs and, most often, because they have no argument against altruism, they wound up “me-tooing” the progressives.
Conservative intellectuals and politicians use a religious, utilitarian, form of pro-capitalist argument in order to get into the mainstream of debate but, once in power, they ignore economic freedom in favor of establishing religion in society. The idea of “compassionate conservatism” that ignores the free market in favor of faith-based charity is nothing more than religious progressivism.
If you doubt my assessment of religious conservatives, consider that most of these groups do not fight for individual rights. Their version of the fundamental unit in society is not the individual but the family. This form of collectivism holds that the family is the most important unit that must be protected in society. They use all sorts of "social" arguments that blame the family breakdown on selfishness and anti-social behavior. They claim that this breakdown causes crime, immorality, familial dysfunction and other "problems". By ignoring the value of the individual in society, they ignore his need to be free and proceed to enslave him or her to the family by insisting that self-sacrifice is the essence of our social strength. The progressives could not agree more. And since collectivism always requires a scapegoat, these conservatives are quick to blame the independence fostered by capitalism as the cause of society's breakdown. Their solution is more Anti-trust prosecutions and regulations. This leaves the door open for the progressives to “create” problems that can be blamed by both progressives and conservatives on capitalism.
Progressivism
Progressives, on the other hand, influenced by many of the same European philosophies as the conservatives, rather than seeking to establish religion, seek to use a more virulent form of collectivism as a cover for plunder. Their “god” is society; their ideas, also accepted on faith, pray to a different deity of power politics. Because of their Marxist base, they see their goal as gaining control of the “machines” so they can plunder production.
The influence of Kant and his philosophical descendants continued to grow in Europe even while the Enlightenment flowered in America. The power and influence of Hegel, Kant, Popper and others continued to feed the rhetoric of aspiring dictators. The progressive movement emigrated from Europe and became the American brand of communists, union organizers, socialists, pragmatists and today’s progressives that are bent on expanding government through higher taxes and entitlement programs – an American form of a fascist state. Progressives make up a descending scale, a “slippery slope”, so to speak. At the top of the slope are those that hide their true intentions by covering themselves as Constitutionalists who use the language of freedom. Sometimes we call these people “honest liberals”. The more brazen, the bottom of the slope, admit they favor a violent overthrow of capitalism. In essence, they are all the same; their only difference is the amount of force they claim to advocate. They all advocate force against citizens – this is the characteristic that invalidates their philosophy and exposes the lie that they are Constitutionalists.
History has shown that progressives will appropriate to themselves the language and emotions of their most powerful enemies in order to masquerade as people holding similar values. The early example was Kant himself. After declaring himself a man of the Enlightenment dedicated to reason, he maliciously wrote volumes to show men that there was no connection between man’s mind and reality and that the only thing one could do is his duty to God (5). Other thinkers such as Marx took these leads and provided the foundations for some of the most corrupt and murderous political systems in history, the various political ‘isms’ that required government brutality in order to accomplish feigned “social justice”. The legacy of Kant is millions of dead bodies. This is the legacy from which the progressives have sprung.
In America, because of the Constitution, progressives had a different challenge. The Marxists and socialists tried at first to declare violent revolutions through labor unions. They attacked and denigrated capitalist leaders, calling them robbers, thieves, charlatans and crooks. As they changed colors and morphed into progressives, they did everything they could to pry the Constitution from the hands of the people so they could replace it with the same destructive systems through which their brothers had devastated Europe. That pesky Constitution has always been in the way.
In those early times they recognized the true enemy. As the emerging religious right had also realized, their mortal enemy was the liberalism of the Enlightenment, the philosophy of reason and the individual.
In our early days, the two divisions of political thought were individualism/laissez faire capitalism (otherwise known as classical liberalism) and collectivism as embodied in the populists and early progressives such as Teddy Roosevelt. The classical liberals, who had nothing in common with today’s liberals, were the embodiment of the Enlightenment that created our society, while the early progressives saw capitalism, self-interest and individualism as the problem, not because it did not work, it clearly was successful, but because capitalists stood in the way of their taking over the machines.
Progressives have sought to turn government from one that protects individuals to one that would coerce them into working for “social goals” or “social justice” as defined by them. They needed a scapegoat which they found in capitalism, an economic system that was nothing more than freedom. They turned capitalism into a pariah by distorting its nature and best features. Through propaganda, they successfully turned capitalism and individualism into predatory killers and altruism (the real predatory killer) into a benevolent goal that just tried to improve life. As the ideas of Marx, Dewey and other philosophers gained ascendance, those of Locke, the Founders and classical liberals began to fade.
In her excellent book (The Forgotten Man) on the Great Depression, historian Amity Shlaes discusses an important theme that resounded through out the difficult years of the Great Depression. She reprises a theme put forward by philosopher William Graham Sumner about the forgotten man of the era. She writes:
“About half a century before the Depression, a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner penned a lecture against the progressives of his own day and in defense of classical liberalism. The lecture eventually became an essay, titled “The Forgotten Man.” Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote:
‘As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.
In 1932, a member of Roosevelt’s brain trust, Ray Moley, recalled the phrase, although not its provenance. He inserted it into the candidate’s first great speech. If elected, Roosevelt promised, he would act in the name of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Whereas C had been Sumner’s forgotten man, the New Deal made X the forgotten man-the poor man, the old man, labor or any other recipient of government help.”(6)
Many think that this focus on the consumer rather than the producer is the very idea that prolonged the depression. I submit that this shift away from the real forgotten man, the enlightened producer, is the very essence of progressivism. As a result of this shift our nation has been poorly served by politicians. In fact, there is a forgotten “ism” that parallels the forgotten man. Where the forgotten man for the progressives was the slave, the hard working American, who silently fed the nation, the forgotten "ism" was the philosophical fountainhead that had to be silenced so that conservatives and progressives could accomplish their baseless enslavement of the individual. These ideas, reason, the efficacy of the senses, individualism, natural rights and limited government, born in the Enlightenment, had successfully liberated the mind and the body of man so he could flourish and prosper. With progressives and especially with the New Deal, these ideas had to be removed from consideration. That forgotten “ism” is “liberalism.”
“(In 1936) Roosevelt won because he created a new kind of interest group politics. The idea that Americans might form a political group that demanded something from government was well known and thoroughly reported a century earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. The idea that such groups might find mainstream parties to support them was not novel either: Republicans including the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had long practiced interest-group politics on behalf of big business. But Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics more generally to include many constituencies—labor, senior citizens, farmers, union workers. The president made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It is no coincidence that the first peace-time year in American history in which federal spending outpaced the total spending of the states and towns was that election year of 1936. It can even be argued that one year—1936—created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties today.
Roosevelt’s move was so profound that it changed the English language. Before the 1930s, the word “liberal” stood for the individual; afterward, the phrase increasingly stood for groups….”(7)
From the advent of the progressive movement, the political debate in America became hijacked by progressives who began calling themselves “liberals”. Not only did they steal the name from an “ism” that was their diametric opposite, an “ism” that saw the individual as sovereign, they even took upon themselves the moral authority to expropriate his property, his mind and his accomplishments. Essentially, they wiped out the only “ism” in our society that defended the individual and they moved the discussion away from protecting the individual to employing coercive measures against him.
The problem for the progressive movement has always been that collectivism and self-sacrifice, do not work. In order to gain the upper hand against capitalism, progressives had to invent atrocities committed by capitalism so they could take over the corporations and blame them for all the failures created by collectivism. It has taken a massive campaign as well as a hugely corrupt re-writing of history to accomplish this most devastating of deceptions.
Yet, even after these decades-long propaganda campaigns and their successes, the Constitution continues to be in the way. It is a bulwark against the progressives because it is based on individualism and it creates checks and balances that must be negotiated in order to turn society from capitalism to re-distribution. During these campaigns to undermine the Constitution, the gridlock created by its checks and balances manages to keep the progressives at bay while individuals continue to prosper. We may be at the end of this process. The progressives are finally winning…so far.
Notice that the progressives have never sought to co-opt the conservative movement. They needed a weak opponent that they could blame for supporting capitalism. This strategy was part of their road to victory. Attack a movement that does not want capitalism, accuse it of being in bed with capitalists, and you limit any real opposition. Certainly, they sent a group out called the “neo-conservatives” to pretend to be conservatives while always advancing progressivism, but this has been a dead Trojan horse, so to speak.
In order for their strategy to work, they had to co-opt their only real opposition and turn its arguments inside out. All of the high-minded and evocative terms that animate near universal support for freedom and limited government were turned by progressives in the universities into their destroyers. Masquerading as “liberals”, the progressives have gotten away with a lot. For instance they ignored the term “natural rights” and expropriated for their use the income of producers; they ignored the term “individual” and began talking about “victims”; they ignored the term “individual rights” and promoted the right to be taken care of; they changed the term “freedom” to mean freedom from want; they turned our constitutional republic into democracy, the will of the people to coerce the productive; they changed the word capitalists to mean “oligarchs”, the very people they enslave and extort money from; they ignored the term “rule of law” so they could make “re-distribution” legal; theft became “social justice”; guaranteed income became “equality”; the pursuit of happiness became part of the corrupt past.
The progressives’ goal was to transition government from one designed to protect the individual to one that would enslave the individual. They want to turn man from a self-reliant, self-respecting “man of action” into a self-sacrificing robot devoid of mind and hope for the future – and they want to call it hope for the future.
---------
We can now evaluate and find the true causes of the present condition of the world.
Conservatives assigned to reason an inferior position and blocked themselves from arguing for limited government on a solid, believable foundation. What they lost was the strength of conviction that our founders were right. They became defenders of a Pre-Enlightenment past and the status quo; hardly worth listening to by educated people. Today, we are bombarded by weak arguments that our society was based on religion, that charity was a concept that belongs to conservatives not to progressives, that God and the Ten Commandments were the foundations of liberty and that references to religion and religious morality in the words of the Founders prove that they did not see religion as an element of tyranny.
With conservatives unwilling to give up faith in spite of the fact that the Enlightenment had clearly shown reason to be superior in the real world, their goal was to ensure that religion survived the Bill of Rights, that it did not become associated with theocracy and religious persecution. In order to make room for faith, they had to denigrate individualism and reason and exhort man to give up his mind in favor of an ineffable spiritual idea that the Enlightenment had discredited. The result is that individual rights had no defenders and the progressives were given a free ride on the road toward dictatorship. Not only is this state of affairs the fault of progressives, it is the fault of conservatives who saw reason as an enemy. The result, the greatest governmental and economic system in the history of mankind had no defenders.
On the other hand, the progressives picked up the banner of reason and gave us pseudo-science to justify their undoing of man's rights and capitalism. This made it possible for them to claim that their un-scientific prejudices, their rationalizations for force and violence were scientific and that their ideas were superior to those of the superstitious conservatives - which gave them the force of moral authority. The progressives turned the idea of charity into forced altruism and suggested that society should replace God. Once again, true reason was left out of the discussion.
This left us with only two options, two political "isms" that were both only variants of the very ideas against which the Enlightenment had argued. It was against the basic premises of the conservatives and the progressives that the Enlightenment had made the best arguments; arguments fully defensible and superior; but which had conveniently been pushed out of history with disastrous consequences. Worldwide, the result was poverty, concentration camps, genocide, war, plunder and a constant slide among many nations toward fascism and communism.
We must hold the conservatives and progressives fully responsible for these results. They have been witnesses to the wonders of reason, capitalism and freedom, they have all the evidence they need in order to make the right choice: classical liberalism; individualism, freedom, capitalism, man's rights, limited government - the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Instead, they chose the lowest values possible: anti-reason and a war against the body and mind of man.
In conclusion, I’d like to suggest that the Tea Party Movement is not a conservative movement. It is the movement of the forgotten man and the forgotten “ism”, classical liberalism, a movement that defends and celebrates the individual and his potential for greatness. The Tea Party movement need not compromise with any other group, progressive or conservative. Let these other groups work out their own issues and contradictions. Let them compromise with the individuals who make up the Tea Parties...but let us not put up core principles for negotiation. If other movements want to join the Tea Party protests, they can, but no other group is powerful enough to co-opt the Tea Parties. As Robert Tracinski has eloquently suggested, the Tea Party statement of principles is clear:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
What of the future? How can we defeat the progressives and their totalitarian dreams? I think the best way is to fulfill the promise of the 1st Amendment and become an opposition that is truly inclusive. We need to reclaim reason and individual rights in our political discourse by rejecting both theocracy and progressivism. We must stand up for the forgotten 'ism'; the true political philosophy of the Enlightenment known as "liberalism".
As John Locke wrote: "...all the power of civil government relates only to men's civil interests, is confined to the care of the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come."(8)
By following this maxim, we can put those of us who favor liberty on an equal footing against progressives and conservatives. We can re-establish the foundations of our arguments based on reason while we expose the pseudo-science of the progressives; and the potential tyranny of the theocrats; and this will expose their views as truly ignorant and primitive. We can discuss man's rights on a proper metaphysical base that derives from reality rather than another realm of existence. On this foundation, we may yet save our country and create a political majority that could include, not only those who favor religious toleration, but also those who have become disenchanted with the unwarranted force and control being advanced by both the progressives and conservatives. We can see the Republicans for what they are; theocrats who would use force against citizens and who only repeat arguments for liberty when it helps them get votes. We can see the Democrats for what they are; radical descendents of Hitler and Stalin who have learned how to use words to hide from us that they intend to make us slaves.
Hopefully, we will soon be able to say, “Liberalism is dead. Long live liberalism.”
(1)The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick, paperback, The Viking Portable Library
(2)The Future Progress of the Human Mind, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) Reprinted in The Portable Enlightenment Reader edited by Isaac Kramnick, the Viking Portable Library
(3)Read Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff
(4)See Persian Letters by Baron de Montesquieu
(5)What is Enlightenment? Immanual Kant
(6)The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, Harper Perrennial, paperback Page 12
(7)Ibid Page 11
(8)A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
John Galt versus Cloward-Piven
The political scene today is a clash between two views of politics and morality. Some say it is a clash between left and right but I disagree; it is a clash between right and wrong. One view holds that political action is agitation for the sake of social/collective goals while the other views it as a struggle for freedom.
These views are represented by two visions of man; one is collectivism, the other individualism. One vision is praised, elevated and practiced all over the world and the other is virtually silent with one representation in a fiction novel. Both of them have a strategy intended to bring their vision into reality.
It has been said that both the Cloward-Piven strategy and John Galt’s strike in the novel Atlas Shrugged sought to bring society to a halt. One sought to eliminate poverty; the other to liberate the individual. They both can’t be right.
Cloward-Piven Strategy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy was put forward in an article written by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two professors at Columbia University of Social Work. It was published in 1966 and has been an inspiration for progressives ever since. They recommended that social workers in New York City engage in a campaign to register as many people as possible for welfare benefits. Their goal was to overwhelm the welfare system.
The universe of “social work” is one with a long past. It stems primarily from a belief that man is imperfect. From Hume, who claimed that man could not connect his perceptions to knowledge; to Kant who claimed that duty represented man’s highest moral calling; to Hegel who advanced a historical battle between thesis and anti-thesis; to Marx who used this idea to advance an inevitable historical process (where communism would emerge victorious); and then to Dewey who wanted society to adjust to the child, and the child to adjust to the collective.
Starting with the invalid view of Hume, philosophers have built an edifice of falsehoods that can best be summed up by the words, “coercive sacrifice” or altruism. The final result historically has been totalitarianism where the government makes all decisions for the people who must work selflessly to advance collective solidarity.
Today, we see the spectacle of social workers charged by “society” with the task of identifying the poor and compensating them, through re-distribution, for the damage supposedly done to them by capitalism.
Why would anyone want to create a crisis over welfare? The goal, according to Cloward-Piven is to bring about legislative reform that would establish income re-distribution. Although some have said their goal is to establish a communist or socialist society, I don’t think this is quite accurate. They want to enslave productive people and force them to provide the incomes for the non-productive. Whether this society takes the form of fascism, socialism, welfare-statism or the war on poverty did not seem to matter to them.
Of course, you never hear progressives discuss things in terms of “isms” unless they are together behind closed doors. These people believe that the end justifies the means yet they have no rational argument that makes their approach to politics correct. The progressive philosophy spawns the worst kind of people and draws a cadre of thieves who want to use the power of government to accomplish their own aggrandizement and riches; fully aware that their propaganda for the poor is nothing but a cynical attempt to gain power.
Cloward-Piven:
“In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits which they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.
Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive educational campaign Brochures (sic) describing benefits in simple, clear language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements should be placed in newspapers; spot announcements should be made on radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in the slums should also be enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls. In fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive, will lend it legitimacy.”
In these two paragraphs you have the genesis of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Starting from the premise that the poor have rights to government-provided income; that the poor are deliberately being kept from asserting these rights; you have a business plan dedicated to helping the poor get the most from government. Establish a set of services to help the poor file their taxes, file for unemployment, food stamps, public housing, home loans, voter registration; take them to the voting booth and help them join a union and you create a huge international corporation dedicated to re-distribution; except that now the goal is not to stress the system but to see how much you can game the system. Enter the community organizer; the professional parasite.
This organizer, specially trained to wedge his way into the lives of poor people in neighborhoods all around America, can attain a high position of leadership wherever he goes. Not only does he help the poor negotiate with government, he can use these poor in organized protests and shakedown initiatives that extort donations from corporations (and harm the competitors of paying “partners”).
Today, we have a community organizer for President. He is more comfortable going to the people (those that ACORN has organized for him), denigrating and shaking down huge corporations, working on behalf of corrupt unions and gangsters, nationalizing whole industries, steering huge grants and other tax dollars toward community organizations and favored (crooked) real estate developers, creating a government/business partnership that works with oligarchs who not only benefit from government “investments” but also pay huge dollars to political campaigns. If this is not a scandal, a sham, a corrupt money laundering scheme at the highest levels, I don’t know what is.
Where are the investigations? Where is the honest journalism that exposes these scandals? Put simply, why should anyone investigate these scandals when the majority of people agree with the “social goals” of the Cloward-Piven strategy? If most people had not had self-sacrifice drummed into them since they were children, you would not have gangsters taking advantage of their moral disarmament.
The real problem with the ACORN (Cloward-Piven) strategy is that success only comes to the organization if poor people stay poor. Just like the union agitators with whom they partner, professional parasites need people to believe the following lies:
1. Capitalism steals from the poor and owes a living to the poor
2. Self-interest is evil
3. Collectivism works and the poor have to fight against capitalism as a collective
4. Altruism is the best philosophy
5. Socialism (or other coercive forms of government) are inevitable
6. We need higher taxes on the rich
Unfortunately, these lies are a prescription for individual failure. The Cloward-Piven strategy cannot work - no matter how many people believe in it. A society, based on the sacrifice of each to all, winds up with all sacrificing to one (the dictator). The prospective dictator, the community organizer, in order to continue the facade of his "moral" mission, must ensure that people don’t question his authority. Especially, they must not become aware that there is another better way to live that does not include mooching off of others.
In fact, ACORN is an obstacle for the poor. Community organizers, like union organizers, must teach their members that their enemies are capitalists - yet most of them would give an eye tooth to be in the middle class. To please the collective, they must, as a matter of principle, be perennially unemployable. Once they realize that their enemy, the business owner, is really their ally, the game for the ACORN organizer is up. Salvation comes when they realize that hard work, not welfare, will give them a better life.
Yet, we must acknowledge that in order for the Cloward-Piven strategy to bring about income re-distribution, the entire society must conclude that more sacrifice is the solution to problems caused by sacrifice. What would happen if this is not the logical conclusion; if instead people decided that we need less re-distribution after the system breaks? What if they asserted their right to keep their income?
In fact, this is John Galt’s point. His fictional strike in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957, was based on a different philosophy. Derived from Rand’s view of man as a rational being who survives by means of reason, Galt held that any sacrifice of the able to the unable is immoral. He saw that the philosophy behind the Cloward-Piven strategy was evil because it represented hatred for man and his mind. His oath, "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" is the essence of his philosophy and the opposite of that embodied in the Cloward-Piven document.
He vowed, through his strike, to clear the way for people who aspired to a better life, not by actively working to defeat altruism, but by letting the altruist morality run its course. He saw that the way to defeat the exploitation of his ability was to refuse to work for the “exploited” masses. He convinced the producers of the nation to go on strike – so the government had no one to loot; and would then collapse of its own weight.
Where John Galt wanted men of ability to go on strike in protest over their exploitation by society, Cloward-Piven wanted the poor to demand more exploitation of people like John Galt. Where Galt celebrated individual rights, property rights and the pursuit of happiness, the Cloward-Piven strategy held that no one is allowed to be happy unless everyone is taken care of – and they set up a barbarous system against which any person of self-esteem would rebel. Galt would say, your happiness is yours to achieve; Cloward-Piven say that John Galt is a criminal.
Ayn Rand did not intend for John Galt’s strike to take place in real life. She did not want her novel to be prophetic. As long as men were free to speak out, she thought, they could build a better world by appealing to reason and free will. She had hope for the future and she offered that hope through a new morality that held life as the standard - with success, pleasure and enjoyment as the goals.
Cloward-Piven, on the other hand, had every intention of bringing their protest to the streets; and the result is more poverty, the decline of neighborhoods, immorality and the elevation of need over ability. Cloward-Piven unleashed professional parasites who have no problem destroying everything good about our society; they think it is the right thing to do. By creating more parasites, they create division, hatred of accomplishment, conflict, dis-trust and theft.
About this point (among many) Ayn Rand was right: a strategy like that of Cloward-Piven cannot succeed. To stop it, productive people need only say “No more sacrificing”.
These views are represented by two visions of man; one is collectivism, the other individualism. One vision is praised, elevated and practiced all over the world and the other is virtually silent with one representation in a fiction novel. Both of them have a strategy intended to bring their vision into reality.
It has been said that both the Cloward-Piven strategy and John Galt’s strike in the novel Atlas Shrugged sought to bring society to a halt. One sought to eliminate poverty; the other to liberate the individual. They both can’t be right.
Cloward-Piven Strategy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy was put forward in an article written by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two professors at Columbia University of Social Work. It was published in 1966 and has been an inspiration for progressives ever since. They recommended that social workers in New York City engage in a campaign to register as many people as possible for welfare benefits. Their goal was to overwhelm the welfare system.
The universe of “social work” is one with a long past. It stems primarily from a belief that man is imperfect. From Hume, who claimed that man could not connect his perceptions to knowledge; to Kant who claimed that duty represented man’s highest moral calling; to Hegel who advanced a historical battle between thesis and anti-thesis; to Marx who used this idea to advance an inevitable historical process (where communism would emerge victorious); and then to Dewey who wanted society to adjust to the child, and the child to adjust to the collective.
Starting with the invalid view of Hume, philosophers have built an edifice of falsehoods that can best be summed up by the words, “coercive sacrifice” or altruism. The final result historically has been totalitarianism where the government makes all decisions for the people who must work selflessly to advance collective solidarity.
Today, we see the spectacle of social workers charged by “society” with the task of identifying the poor and compensating them, through re-distribution, for the damage supposedly done to them by capitalism.
Why would anyone want to create a crisis over welfare? The goal, according to Cloward-Piven is to bring about legislative reform that would establish income re-distribution. Although some have said their goal is to establish a communist or socialist society, I don’t think this is quite accurate. They want to enslave productive people and force them to provide the incomes for the non-productive. Whether this society takes the form of fascism, socialism, welfare-statism or the war on poverty did not seem to matter to them.
Of course, you never hear progressives discuss things in terms of “isms” unless they are together behind closed doors. These people believe that the end justifies the means yet they have no rational argument that makes their approach to politics correct. The progressive philosophy spawns the worst kind of people and draws a cadre of thieves who want to use the power of government to accomplish their own aggrandizement and riches; fully aware that their propaganda for the poor is nothing but a cynical attempt to gain power.
Cloward-Piven:
“In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits which they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.
Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive educational campaign Brochures (sic) describing benefits in simple, clear language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements should be placed in newspapers; spot announcements should be made on radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in the slums should also be enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls. In fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive, will lend it legitimacy.”
In these two paragraphs you have the genesis of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Starting from the premise that the poor have rights to government-provided income; that the poor are deliberately being kept from asserting these rights; you have a business plan dedicated to helping the poor get the most from government. Establish a set of services to help the poor file their taxes, file for unemployment, food stamps, public housing, home loans, voter registration; take them to the voting booth and help them join a union and you create a huge international corporation dedicated to re-distribution; except that now the goal is not to stress the system but to see how much you can game the system. Enter the community organizer; the professional parasite.
This organizer, specially trained to wedge his way into the lives of poor people in neighborhoods all around America, can attain a high position of leadership wherever he goes. Not only does he help the poor negotiate with government, he can use these poor in organized protests and shakedown initiatives that extort donations from corporations (and harm the competitors of paying “partners”).
Today, we have a community organizer for President. He is more comfortable going to the people (those that ACORN has organized for him), denigrating and shaking down huge corporations, working on behalf of corrupt unions and gangsters, nationalizing whole industries, steering huge grants and other tax dollars toward community organizations and favored (crooked) real estate developers, creating a government/business partnership that works with oligarchs who not only benefit from government “investments” but also pay huge dollars to political campaigns. If this is not a scandal, a sham, a corrupt money laundering scheme at the highest levels, I don’t know what is.
Where are the investigations? Where is the honest journalism that exposes these scandals? Put simply, why should anyone investigate these scandals when the majority of people agree with the “social goals” of the Cloward-Piven strategy? If most people had not had self-sacrifice drummed into them since they were children, you would not have gangsters taking advantage of their moral disarmament.
The real problem with the ACORN (Cloward-Piven) strategy is that success only comes to the organization if poor people stay poor. Just like the union agitators with whom they partner, professional parasites need people to believe the following lies:
1. Capitalism steals from the poor and owes a living to the poor
2. Self-interest is evil
3. Collectivism works and the poor have to fight against capitalism as a collective
4. Altruism is the best philosophy
5. Socialism (or other coercive forms of government) are inevitable
6. We need higher taxes on the rich
Unfortunately, these lies are a prescription for individual failure. The Cloward-Piven strategy cannot work - no matter how many people believe in it. A society, based on the sacrifice of each to all, winds up with all sacrificing to one (the dictator). The prospective dictator, the community organizer, in order to continue the facade of his "moral" mission, must ensure that people don’t question his authority. Especially, they must not become aware that there is another better way to live that does not include mooching off of others.
In fact, ACORN is an obstacle for the poor. Community organizers, like union organizers, must teach their members that their enemies are capitalists - yet most of them would give an eye tooth to be in the middle class. To please the collective, they must, as a matter of principle, be perennially unemployable. Once they realize that their enemy, the business owner, is really their ally, the game for the ACORN organizer is up. Salvation comes when they realize that hard work, not welfare, will give them a better life.
Yet, we must acknowledge that in order for the Cloward-Piven strategy to bring about income re-distribution, the entire society must conclude that more sacrifice is the solution to problems caused by sacrifice. What would happen if this is not the logical conclusion; if instead people decided that we need less re-distribution after the system breaks? What if they asserted their right to keep their income?
In fact, this is John Galt’s point. His fictional strike in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957, was based on a different philosophy. Derived from Rand’s view of man as a rational being who survives by means of reason, Galt held that any sacrifice of the able to the unable is immoral. He saw that the philosophy behind the Cloward-Piven strategy was evil because it represented hatred for man and his mind. His oath, "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" is the essence of his philosophy and the opposite of that embodied in the Cloward-Piven document.
He vowed, through his strike, to clear the way for people who aspired to a better life, not by actively working to defeat altruism, but by letting the altruist morality run its course. He saw that the way to defeat the exploitation of his ability was to refuse to work for the “exploited” masses. He convinced the producers of the nation to go on strike – so the government had no one to loot; and would then collapse of its own weight.
Where John Galt wanted men of ability to go on strike in protest over their exploitation by society, Cloward-Piven wanted the poor to demand more exploitation of people like John Galt. Where Galt celebrated individual rights, property rights and the pursuit of happiness, the Cloward-Piven strategy held that no one is allowed to be happy unless everyone is taken care of – and they set up a barbarous system against which any person of self-esteem would rebel. Galt would say, your happiness is yours to achieve; Cloward-Piven say that John Galt is a criminal.
Ayn Rand did not intend for John Galt’s strike to take place in real life. She did not want her novel to be prophetic. As long as men were free to speak out, she thought, they could build a better world by appealing to reason and free will. She had hope for the future and she offered that hope through a new morality that held life as the standard - with success, pleasure and enjoyment as the goals.
Cloward-Piven, on the other hand, had every intention of bringing their protest to the streets; and the result is more poverty, the decline of neighborhoods, immorality and the elevation of need over ability. Cloward-Piven unleashed professional parasites who have no problem destroying everything good about our society; they think it is the right thing to do. By creating more parasites, they create division, hatred of accomplishment, conflict, dis-trust and theft.
About this point (among many) Ayn Rand was right: a strategy like that of Cloward-Piven cannot succeed. To stop it, productive people need only say “No more sacrificing”.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Senator Bayh
Many people are wondering why Senator Evan Bayh from Indiana has decided to retire from the Senate. It seems incongruous that this still youthful Senator is making an exit especially at a time of momentous change in our country.
Over the years, I have written to Senator Bayh many times. Most of the time, I disagreed with his public positions. Yet, I always received a well-written answer. The letter I received from Senator Bayh about his retirement, among other things, went like this:
“In the Senate, I have continued to fight for the best interests of our state. I have worked with Hoosier workers and businesses, large and small, in the defense sector, the life sciences, the medical device industry, autos, steel, recreational vehicle manufacturing, and many, many more, to save and create jobs.
Since 9/11, I have fought to make our nation safe with a national security approach that is both tough and smart. I have championed the cause of our soldiers to make sure they have the equipment they need in battle and the health care they deserve when they get home.
I have often been a lonely voice for balancing the budget and restraining spending. I have worked with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike to do the nation’s business in a way that is civil and constructive.
I am fortunate to have good friends on both sides of the aisle, something that is much too rare in Washington today.
After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned. For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is too much partisanship and not enough progress -- too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the peoples’ business is not being done.
…
My decision should not be interpreted for more than it is: a very difficult, deeply personal one. I am an executive at heart. I value my independence. I am not motivated by strident partisanship or ideology. These traits may be useful in many walks of life, but they are not highly valued in Congress.
My decision should not reflect adversely upon my colleagues who continue to serve in the Senate. While the institution is in need of significant reform, there are many wonderful people there. The public would be surprised and pleased to know that those who serve them in the Senate, despite their policy and political differences, are unfailingly hard-working and devoted to the public good as they see it. I will miss them.
…
My decision should not reflect adversely upon the President. I look forward to working with him during the next 11 months to get our deficit under control, get the economy moving again, regulate Wall Street to avoid future financial crises, and reform education so that all children can fulfill their God-given potential. This is the right agenda for America.
...
At this time, I simply believe I can best contribute to society in another way: creating jobs by helping grow a business, helping guide an institution of higher learning, or helping run a worthy charitable endeavor.”
A major bill that Senator Bayh supported (that seems not to be in the interest of Hoosiers) was the Stimulus bill that promised to create enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate down to 8 percent. As of January 2010, Indiana’s unemployment rate was 9.7%. Certainly, one of the biggest questions on my mind is “Where are the jobs, Senator?”
Yet, in spite of Senator Bayh’s compliments to his peers in Congress and to President Obama, there seems to be an edge in his leaving Washington that was not expressed in his letter. In an interview replayed on television, after he said that he looks forward to creating just one job in the private sector, he added that it would be one more job than has been created by Congress.
Apparently Senator Bayh has been reading his mail. The American people are angry and their message is clear: “Stop the spending. Just stop. What is it about ‘stop’ that you don’t understand?” And he knows that this incredibly high level of anger will be especially directed at a Democratic Senator in a conservative state where his opponents can take full advantage of it. He will not be able to frame the debate to his advantage in such a climate...the anger will be too palpable and drown his message.
Yet, I have some concerns about Senator Bayh’s statement. He says he has always sought what he thought was best for Indiana. But what does that mean? It doesn’t answer the question of what is in the best interest of his state. Read again what he said about President Obama: “I look forward to working with him during the next 11 months to get our deficit under control, get the economy moving again, regulate Wall Street to avoid future financial crises, and reform education so that all children can fulfill their God-given potential. This is the right agenda for America.”
How can anyone in their right mind believe that President Obama wants to get the deficit under control? What has President Obama done to give anyone the impression that he knows what will get our economy moving again? He certainly wants to regulate Wall Street, but how can accusing Wall Street for the fiasco be credible without also accusing himself, Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the executives of these organizations, ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (fostered and strengthened by Democrats)?
And do we really think that the Democrats know anything about how to avert future financial crises when they do nothing but engage in crony capitalism, bailouts, corporate takeovers, tax increases, backroom deals and massive boondoggles that were supposed to create jobs? Finally, how can indoctrinating our children to support the Obama administration do anything to reform education? This is not a prescription for fulfilling any potential except the potential for a coming disaster.
Do you wonder why Senator Bayh is resigning? His philosophy is bankrupt.
Good riddance.
Over the years, I have written to Senator Bayh many times. Most of the time, I disagreed with his public positions. Yet, I always received a well-written answer. The letter I received from Senator Bayh about his retirement, among other things, went like this:
“In the Senate, I have continued to fight for the best interests of our state. I have worked with Hoosier workers and businesses, large and small, in the defense sector, the life sciences, the medical device industry, autos, steel, recreational vehicle manufacturing, and many, many more, to save and create jobs.
Since 9/11, I have fought to make our nation safe with a national security approach that is both tough and smart. I have championed the cause of our soldiers to make sure they have the equipment they need in battle and the health care they deserve when they get home.
I have often been a lonely voice for balancing the budget and restraining spending. I have worked with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike to do the nation’s business in a way that is civil and constructive.
I am fortunate to have good friends on both sides of the aisle, something that is much too rare in Washington today.
After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned. For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is too much partisanship and not enough progress -- too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the peoples’ business is not being done.
…
My decision should not be interpreted for more than it is: a very difficult, deeply personal one. I am an executive at heart. I value my independence. I am not motivated by strident partisanship or ideology. These traits may be useful in many walks of life, but they are not highly valued in Congress.
My decision should not reflect adversely upon my colleagues who continue to serve in the Senate. While the institution is in need of significant reform, there are many wonderful people there. The public would be surprised and pleased to know that those who serve them in the Senate, despite their policy and political differences, are unfailingly hard-working and devoted to the public good as they see it. I will miss them.
…
My decision should not reflect adversely upon the President. I look forward to working with him during the next 11 months to get our deficit under control, get the economy moving again, regulate Wall Street to avoid future financial crises, and reform education so that all children can fulfill their God-given potential. This is the right agenda for America.
...
At this time, I simply believe I can best contribute to society in another way: creating jobs by helping grow a business, helping guide an institution of higher learning, or helping run a worthy charitable endeavor.”
A major bill that Senator Bayh supported (that seems not to be in the interest of Hoosiers) was the Stimulus bill that promised to create enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate down to 8 percent. As of January 2010, Indiana’s unemployment rate was 9.7%. Certainly, one of the biggest questions on my mind is “Where are the jobs, Senator?”
Yet, in spite of Senator Bayh’s compliments to his peers in Congress and to President Obama, there seems to be an edge in his leaving Washington that was not expressed in his letter. In an interview replayed on television, after he said that he looks forward to creating just one job in the private sector, he added that it would be one more job than has been created by Congress.
Apparently Senator Bayh has been reading his mail. The American people are angry and their message is clear: “Stop the spending. Just stop. What is it about ‘stop’ that you don’t understand?” And he knows that this incredibly high level of anger will be especially directed at a Democratic Senator in a conservative state where his opponents can take full advantage of it. He will not be able to frame the debate to his advantage in such a climate...the anger will be too palpable and drown his message.
Yet, I have some concerns about Senator Bayh’s statement. He says he has always sought what he thought was best for Indiana. But what does that mean? It doesn’t answer the question of what is in the best interest of his state. Read again what he said about President Obama: “I look forward to working with him during the next 11 months to get our deficit under control, get the economy moving again, regulate Wall Street to avoid future financial crises, and reform education so that all children can fulfill their God-given potential. This is the right agenda for America.”
How can anyone in their right mind believe that President Obama wants to get the deficit under control? What has President Obama done to give anyone the impression that he knows what will get our economy moving again? He certainly wants to regulate Wall Street, but how can accusing Wall Street for the fiasco be credible without also accusing himself, Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the executives of these organizations, ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (fostered and strengthened by Democrats)?
And do we really think that the Democrats know anything about how to avert future financial crises when they do nothing but engage in crony capitalism, bailouts, corporate takeovers, tax increases, backroom deals and massive boondoggles that were supposed to create jobs? Finally, how can indoctrinating our children to support the Obama administration do anything to reform education? This is not a prescription for fulfilling any potential except the potential for a coming disaster.
Do you wonder why Senator Bayh is resigning? His philosophy is bankrupt.
Good riddance.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)