Is there a Trojan Horse in the Tea Party Movement?

I’ve enjoyed reading the books of Thomas Sowell for many years. I became aware of him in the late ‘70s when he burst onto the intellectual scene with amazing analyses of economic trends. His defense of free markets is laudable and he has made many unique and perceptive points. Most recently he has written books that have been critical of intellectuals. I just finished his new book that brought home to me the problem for conservatives and, especially, why they have found themselves on the losing end of the political debate.

The book, entitled “Intellectuals and Society” is an excellent examination of progressive intellectuals’ inability to bridge the gap between their elitist ideas and reality. The first few chapters of the book give an excellent overview of the problems that progressive intellectuals create. According to Professor Sowell, intellectuals are wrong about social solutions because they come at problems from a limited elitist perspective that represents only a small percentage of the total knowledge available in society at large.

I find Doctor Sowell’s criticism to be excellent when it comes to analyzing the precarious position of intellectuals who are steeped in specialized knowledge but who have little understanding of the real world. Yet his argument fell apart for me when he compared today’s progressives with today’s conservatives.

“This vision of society, in which there are many “problems” to be “solved” by applying the ideas of morally anointed intellectual elites is by no means the only vision, however much that vision may be prevalent among today’s intellectuals. A conflicting vision has co-existed for centuries—a vision in which the inherent flaws of human beings are the fundamental problem and social contrivances are simply imperfect means of trying to cope with that problem—these imperfections themselves being products of the inherent shortcomings of human beings.”[1]

Professor Sowell takes for himself the position of the conflicting vision. His is “...the tragic vision of the human condition that is very different from the vision of the anointed.”[2] And, indeed, he joins a long tradition of philosophers and intellectuals who have shared that vision of human beings that are inherently flawed. Unfortunately, this vision includes that of the progressives.

You have to ask yourself what is the point of taking the position that man is inherently flawed? Why would conservatives want to start with this premise? And more importantly, why do they think that this position provides a better argument for limited government and capitalism?

As a former Catholic, I am familiar with this view. Man is a sinner who would wreak havoc if left to his own “selfish” devices. His only moral constraint is that given to him by God and the church. According to this view, man must follow the Ten Commandments handed down to him by God through Moses. If men do not follow God’s Commandments, God will punish them on this earth and after death. Men will only do right because of fear of God’s wrath.

Sowell asserts that the vision of contemporary intellectuals (progressives) today is based on an ages old view that sees problems as an outgrowth of social institutions. “In this vision, oppression, poverty, injustice and war are all products of existing institutions—problems whose solutions require changing those institutions, which in turn require changing the ideas behind those institutions.”[3] Is Professor Sowell saying that progressives are wrong because they are right about our social institutions? Are we to assume that progressives’ criticisms of institutions such as capitalism and the church are valid? Is he perhaps giving them too much credit?

In fact, progressives today threaten to destroy the most advanced, the most just and the most affluent civilization in the history of the world because the solutions offered by progressives for the problems of capitalism and the church involve collective coercive remedies that enslave individuals. These solutions are offered because progressives also see man as flawed and incapable of being moral.

Whether you receive your view of man’s nature from Hobbes or Hume, you cannot derive the principles of a free society and the anti-principles of a slave society from the same source, from the view that man is imperfect. The logic of ideas in practice is inexorable; you cannot get around it. If the conservatives and the progressives both have the same basic view of man, the result will be the same.

Yet, the question regarding man’s nature is the foundation upon which all human action must be based. The answer to that question indicates not only how intellectuals think men will act but how governments will treat them. Does man have rights? Is he to be a slave to the needs of others? These questions are important. The only difference between conservatives and progressives is not that progressives see certain institutions as needing change and that conservatives do not; the vital question is "from where does man derive his mandate for moral action?" Political debates and revolutionary change are not about merely changing institutions; they are about understanding man's nature and dealing with him accordingly.

When Barack Obama says he believes in service to the community, working for and dying for others, the conservatives can only say, ‘so do we’. They may counter the progressives with arguments for faith, hope and charity, but the progressives also talk about faith, hope and charity. The dilemma for the conservatives is that they are on the same side as the progressives.  They both advocate altruism as their fundamental principle. They have failed to recognize that man’s true nature is not that he is imperfect but that he is a creature of reason, a creature perfectly suited for survival and success. The result: the conservatives have nothing to offer against the views of the progressives.

To continue with Doctor Sowell, “In the tragic vision, barbarism is always waiting in the wings and civilization is simply “a thin crust over a volcano.” (This quote is from Havelock Ellis. The full statement is “All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.”) The metaphor, “a thin crust over a volcano” used to describe the position of civilization versus barbarism is illustrious of the problem that conservatives create for themselves. If civilization is truly a thin crust over a volcano, then what is the point of trying to create a better society? Eventually, the volcano will erupt (into revolution) and destroy that thin layer. If this is our choice, then why should we continue living on that thin crust? Better red than dead. This argument is a prescription for nihilism.

Unfortunately, this is the false alternative that conservatives create for themselves. A “thin crust” versus an inevitable explosion is hardly a choice. When they create such false alternatives based on non-essentials, they end up rationalizing false views and eventually they take the same side as the other haters of man, the progressives. To place one’s enemies, the enemies of freedom, in the position of “a volcano”, means you know they will win.

Is civilization truly “a thin crust over a volcano”? Or are the principles of a proper society based upon something more fundamental in man's nature that must be recognized and accommodated by government; facts and principles that endure and never explode. Shouldn’t we instead strive for a vision of man that will acknowledge his value and thereby help in the creation of a bulwark against the explosion of violence and barbarism? I submit that this bulwark is what the Founders of our nation attempted to create and their vision of man was not at all “tragic”.

“In the tragic vision, social contrivances seek to restrict behavior that leads to unhappiness, even though these restrictions themselves cause a certain amount of unhappiness. It is a vision of trade-offs, rather than solutions, and a vision of wisdom distilled from the experiences of the many rather than the brilliance of a few.”[4]

This means that civilization is nothing more than “social contrivances” designed to restrict immoral living in order to make a trade-off, to create a balance between immorality (selfishness) and self-sacrifice (the good). What is being traded here is your decision to be productive in return for the government getting a piece of your production. Your punishment for committing the crime of surviving is that you have to pay people who cannot survive. Remember, this is the conservative view. And, to prove it, notice that the desire of President Obama to “re-distribute” wealth is considered by the conservatives to be “the brilliance of a few”.

And to prove that they have no understanding of their own position, Doctor Sowell says, “The conflict between these two visions goes back for centuries. Those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed do not simply happen to differ on a range of policy issues. They necessarily differ, because they are talking about very different worlds which exist inside their minds. Moreover, they are talking about different creatures who inhabit that world, even though both call these creatures human beings, for the nature of those human beings is also fundamentally different as seen in the two visions.”[5]

Professor Sowell does not seem to recognize that both philosophical skeptics and conservative philosophers such as Hobbes and Burke saw man in essentially the same way. They both saw man as incapable of understanding reality, in other words, as imperfect. How can the same basic view of man lead to two different solutions in politics? They can't; progressivism and conservatism are two contrary ideas based on the same premise that will inevitably lead to the same result: enslavement. And this is the danger of accepting the stated goal of conservatives (limited government) without identifying their contradictory premise (that man is flawed) and its inevitable consequence.

The reason the conservatives use non-essentials (tragic vision versus anointed vision) in separating conservatives from progressives is that they must evade the hidden motive of the conservative vision. I doubt that Professor Sowell and other conservatives know that their argument on the issue of man’s nature is weak and I doubt that they have an ulterior motive. I think they truly want freedom, but even they cannot escape the logical consequences of their arguments. The truth is that their view of man is a false attack on him and it implies government action against him that would control his individual moral choices. The real goal of religious conservatives, since our founding as a nation, has been to make room for faith in a world that is constantly being transformed by the power of reason. Politically that goal can only be accomplished by authoritarian theocracy.

Since religious conservatives want to restrict what they consider to be immoral acts, their advocacy of capitalism necessarily leaves much to be desired. The conflict takes place when you attempt to graft the control of immoral acts (determined by God in the Bible) on a system that is based on the individual's right to decide for himself what is moral action. What the conservative considers to be immoral and selfish may actually be moral and life-serving when viewed from the perspective of the individual and his life. Where does that leave capitalism and man's rights? Economic conservatives therefore must avoid discussions of morality and stick religiously to economic statistics and the cause-and-effect consequences of central planning. It also takes some of them to pragmatism, realpolitik, neo-conservatism and, you guessed it, the inevitability of progressivism (the old "thin crust of the volcano").

In fact, the conservatives have managed to proclaim the superiority of their own stated enemies. “The two visions differ fundamentally, not only in how they see the world but also in how those who believe in these visions see themselves. If you happen to believe in free markets, judicial restraint, traditional values and other features of the tragic vision, then you are just someone who believes in free markets, judicial restraint and traditional values. There is no personal exaltation resulting from those beliefs. But to be for “social justice” and “saving the environment,” or to be “anti-war” is more than just a set of beliefs about empirical facts. This vision puts you on a higher moral plane as someone concerned and compassionate, someone who is for peace in the world, a defender of the downtrodden, and someone who wants to preserve the beauty of nature and save the planet from (pollution). In short, one vision makes you somebody special and the other vision does not. These visions are not symmetrical.”[6] In short, progressives are good and conservatives are evil. (parentheses mine)

Why aren’t conservatives good?

“They favor capitalism and self-interest”, say the progressives.

“No we don’t” say the conservatives. “We want capitalism because we believe that it is the best way to achieve “the highest good.” We're just like you.”

“How is that possible? Isn’t capitalism about greedy acquisition and theft from the poor?” ask the progressives.

“Yes, it is,” say the conservatives. “But we can control that through regulations and Antitrust. We just want to manipulate the market so it can achieve “the highest good.””

“So do we,” say the progressives. “That’s why we want to re-distribute wealth.”

“But that will create distortions in the marketplace. We don’t want any distortions, do we?”

“See,” say the progressives. "You really don’t mean what you say. You are really just working for those greedy capitalists.”

This is called “the moral argument” and it is based on the premise that all human action should be without self-interest; that it should be “for others”. The conservatives have no answer except to say they agree; they just want to accomplish social well being in a different way, a way that works.

“Trickle down,” say the progressives. “Capitalism has failed. We’ve got a better way. Let’s just take the money.”

The problem for the conservatives is that pesky little word “self-interest”. Because of their altruistic (utilitarian) premises, they just can’t get around the idea that capitalism is really about self-interest. They wish that it weren’t so.

"But the Founders established our traditions and those are good, aren't they?"

The progressives just chuckle at the hypocrisy.

Indeed, self-interest is a pretty bad motivation if you believe that man's duty is to sacrifice for others. The conservatives are stuck with the contradiction. And the dubious utilitarian argument just doesn’t seem to work when you’ve got those left-wing protesters out on the streets in front of television cameras complaining about greed and riches and theft and MONEY, even wild parties and lots of sex too. Once you lay that guilt trip on them, conservatives shut up and vote the way the progressives want.

The progressives have been successful in manipulating the conservatives into being the agents of “self-interest”. Not only have they painted the conservatives into the corner as stealthy advocates of it, but they are also the teachers who have put the proverbial dunce caps on them as well. The conservatives simply cannot get out of that corner until they learn to claim the moral high ground. They are evading the moral arguments for capitalism, the very arguments that hard working Americans in the Tea Party Movement would champion and support. These are the arguments that they need if they are to establish the moral fervor necessary to withstand the same progressive arguments that have silenced the conservatives for so long - and that make the conservatives into weaklings hardly worth getting out of bed to vote for.

How do they find that moral high ground? You might be surprised to hear that they can't do it by quoting God at every turn. No voter is going to get excited about "moral contrivances" designed to restrict immoral actions. Voters are only going to get excited about a bright new future that liberates men to solve their own problems through hard work and that protects their earnings from thieves who call themselves representatives of the people. They will only get excited about the possibility of working hard and keeping their earnings so they can benefit themselves (and their families). They need a "selfish" reason to vote.

They have to reject the view that man’s nature is part of any “tragic” vision. They must stop focusing their arguments on the idea that man is fallible, that he can only survive by sacrificing for others; they must stop implying that men will always make the wrong moral decisions and that government is there to hold him back. These arguments do not justify freedom; they justify coercion against individuals. Under this view, choosing to live, to create values, to trade values, to organize companies, to be productive, to think, to produce, to make a (huge) profit, to flourish and to enjoy life are all immoral decisions. Conservatives must learn to embrace morality by embracing the pursuit of happiness and by being guiltlessly proud of it. It is not a sin to declare that man is a creature with the ability to reason, to choose and to enjoy life.

As I wrote in my recent blog, “The Immoral Roots of Anti-capitalism”, “Altruism is not the moral base of a capitalist system. We can’t have a successful capitalist system if we just want to help people. Capitalism requires an independent mind. We must want men to be successful, we must know that it requires work, we must honor the independent mind and we must give credit where credit is due. Altruism requires a mind ruled by the edicts of superiors and it tells man that to be moral he only needs to follow the easiest path of all: the road that preaches sacrifice as virtue. Capitalism requires integrity. Altruism requires that man fight his bodily nature with his spiritual self-sacrificial code. Capitalism requires honesty. Altruism requires that one deceive one's own mind. Capitalism requires justice. Altruism requires that justice be suspended among men, that men do society's work by being unjust towards those who refuse to sacrifice. Capitalism requires productiveness. Altruism requires that the productive are not as important as those who give away the confiscated money of the productive. Capitalism requires pride. Altruism requires both humility in some men and pretentiousness in others. Capitalism requires principled action based on abstract concepts that are tied to reality. Altruism requires Kantian mush, vague, disconnected equivocation, switching contexts, unintelligibility, one reality that is inaccessible by the mind and a second mental universe that is incompetent. Capitalism is a challenge to the individual and it demands his best effort. Altruism demands only envy and hatred of capitalism.”

The Founders understood that man should be free to make a better life. They knew that he can only do so by identifying reality, understanding what is in his best interest, knowing or discovering how to achieve it and then taking action. They understood that man was good because they had themselves achieved success in life by means of study, practical action and reason. This is the source of our “rugged individualism”; the source of a unique image of a man with the self-confidence and the ability to survive in the wilderness. “Daniel Boone was a man!” This is why they based our society upon the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit happiness”. This is why they limited the power of government to violate those rights.

The Founders understood that freedom makes possible the unhindered pursuit of values. And in order to produce values, a man must have the ability to identify what values are, what human purposes they achieve and not only how to create them but also how to price them, deliver them and discuss their features and benefits in terms of value for the purchaser. A value can only be created as an outgrowth of a rational process, a thinking process that identifies what is in the maker's and the buyer's mutual self-interest.

Values must be proudly selfish because their creation depends upon a person’s choice, and in order for you to choose a life-enhancing value, it must first be validated by a process of reason that justifies it in terms of benefit to the life of the valuer. There is no other way to think about values. Conservatives will never argue for capitalism on this basis and this is why you see Professor Sowell attempting to explain the differences between conservatives and progressives on grounds other than an individual’s moral right to the pursuit of his own, individual happiness.

Contrast the politician of today with an architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright and you will see the difference between a valuer and a nihilist. Wright and his designs are pro-man, pro-life, pro-value. The architect expressed his love of life and of values by means of manipulating natural resources to express in his buildings a concept of priceless utility combined with ultimate beauty and the enjoyment of both. The designs of his buildings expressed so much more than just lines and corners; they expressed the beauty of nature, the organization of natural resources and the feelings of comfort and relaxation. The emphasis on values is so implicit yet so real that you must grow intellectually in order to comprehend the beauty within the mind of the architect. He brings you to a new evaluation of man and all that is possible through him. This is what America and American business is all about, this love of values, this moral high ground, not the sleazy smile of a person who has done nothing notable except write grants for non-profit (and unprofitable) organizations, write books about nothing that he has done and became famous for writing books about nothing that he has done. Contrast a Wright with an Obama and you’ll see the difference between a person who creates values and one who re-distributes them. One is a businessman who creates life as a natural outgrowth of loving life and the other creates poverty through flim flam and manipulation. One inspires the upward glance; the other inspires the glance of hatred and envy aimed at any man with a mind.

This refusal by the conservatives to defend capitalism on proper moral grounds has created a situation where there is no opposition to the progressives; and it opens the door to the vilest forms of nihilism. At every turn, President Obama destroys values. Whether it is American free enterprise, the sacredness of contract, the rewarding of failure, the bailouts, the dismissing of our allies (and especially of Israel), the hand (full of cash) extended toward dictators, unilateral nuclear disarmament, the unwillingness to take on Iran, socialized medicine, Cap and Trade, Union Card Check – everything he does destroys values.

• The President’s antipathy toward free enterprise moves businessmen to hold off investment in the future, freezes cash expenditures and destroys economic recovery.

• His violation of the Chrysler contract with investors has established the precedent that destroyed the sacredness and inviolability of contract, a pillar of all great civilizations.

• His boondoggles and “social justice” programs have taken money from the hands of honest working people, lowering their standards of living and creating poverty and hunger.

• His bailouts of banks and other companies has turned these companies into oligarchs, harmed their competitors, slowed their growth, caused them to lay off employees and spend inordinate amounts of money in campaign contributions to Democrats.

• His dismissing of our allies on various occasions will harm international cooperation for years into the future and give dictators a stronger reason to attack our troops, our citizens and our long-time friend Israel, creating a more unsafe world.

• His outreach to dictators and his bowing before potentates sends a clear signal that the United States is now under the control of a person who has offered it up as a sacrificial lamb to be bled by sundry third world non-entities.

• His unilateral canceling of the nuclear defense shield has put Poland and other former Soviet satellites inside the gun-sights of Russia and it has emboldened Iran in her pursuit of nuclear weapons.

• His “ObamaCare” program will destroy the medical profession, reduce the number of hospitals, reduce the quality of health care, put insurance companies out of business and increase costs while also raising taxes and rationing care.

• His Cap and Trade Bill will create a large oligarchy of companies that will milk money from the taxpayer to build unproductive factories, producing unwanted products, lowering energy consumption, reducing the output of other factories, destroying jobs, raising taxes and lowering our standard of living.

• Union Card Check will give unions the upper hand in shaking down businesses, destroying production, increasing graft and corruption and destroying jobs while raising wages that will put companies out of business or cause them to move to other countries.

This "victory of nihilism" that Obama has wrought is clearly the fault of conservatives who did not fight for capitalism and freedom in a way that defended the rights of Americans to live, succeed and enjoy life. It has destroyed our ability to produce abundance, but more importantly, it may have destroyed our futures. And because conservatives have too easily attempted bi-partisan cooperation with progressives for so many decades, Americans will wonder if the conservatives they elect to save our country will not merely continue to do what they’ve always done – promise smaller government but deliver bigger budgets.

In order to defend limited government, we must defend the capitalist system that is its product. In order to defend the good men who are living moral lives by being productive, we must have a different view of man, a view that sees man, not as a tragic joke who needs to be free because he is stupid - but as a healthy, strong and independent thinker who can make the right decisions about this life and actions – and who needs to be free because it is his right to use his mind. Only when we defend man’s competence, can those who advocate limited government and individual rights capture the moral high ground.

But here’s the nagging question for me and it should give those in the Tea Party Movement some thought. It is understandable that freedom of religion is a fundamental right and it should be fought for whenever it is being threatened. It is a fundamental right because a belief in religion comes from a decision made by each individual mind and, if a person chooses to believe, that right is his alone. But in making a big issue about freedom of religion in the Tea Party Movement, are we perhaps putting ourselves in danger of having religious conservatives co-opt the movement and turn it into a Trojan Horse for theocracy? Are we inadvertently making room for the kind of system that is antithetical to a free society? Is it possible that these arguments are being inserted into the Tea Party debate by those who would take over the Tea Parties and use them to create a national religion established by the government? These are important questions.

In my view, the Trojan Horse could come into the Tea Party Movement under the guise of traditional values, family values, charity and sacrifice. The emphasis on faith, hope and charity is conservatism, a veiled effort to square religious collectivism with individual freedom. The result would be the destruction of individual freedom. Religious collectivism is as great a threat to our freedoms as is progressive collectivism.

How will they do this? They will continue to argue, like many conservative speakers in the past, that our freedoms are from God (rather than leaving the individual alone to decide about the source of his freedoms). They will continue to advance issues around legislated morality rather than individual freedom and they will attempt to divert the Tea Party passion for freedom toward the conservative insistence on religion in government. Once they win politically, by associating with the success of the Tea Party Movement, there may be no opposition to the establishment of a national religion. Just like the progressives who are attempting to hide their fundamental goal which is a totalitarian society, the theocrats are hiding their fundamental goal which is a theocracy, a form of totalitarian society that was defeated by the American Revolution.

Should the Tea Party Movement make common cause with the conservative movement? I say no. The Tea Party Movement should only make common cause with individuals. It should be about what America is about; freedom for every individual; freedom of thought, speech, property, self-defense, limited government and constitutional protections. It should welcome every person regardless of color, creed or origin. We must stand on the inviolability of the individual not the collective. If individual conservatives want to change their basic principles and become champions of freedom and individual rights, that should be welcomed. They can join the Tea Party movement. But the Tea Party Movement should never allow the conservative movement to take over the debate and replace it with a veiled argument for theocracy. In addition, we should scrutinize conservative political candidates and insist on their adherence to individual rights and constitutionally protected liberties. And they should tell us what they will do specifically to change the institutions of government to reflect those principles.

I think it is critical to the success of constitutionally protected liberty that we not become champions of religious collectivism. We must honor the individual and his rights.

The Founders did not create a society that was based on the imperfectability of man. If any of them expressed that view, they were wrong. In fact, they created a society based on the Enlightenment view of man as a creature of reason and they established the governmental machinery that protected man's mind from the encroachment of unreason. They wanted to foster free expression, free thought, free choices, free markets, in short, liberty; the right of man to live as he chooses without the imposition of government – including without the imposition of a religion.

Jefferson said, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity (of religious thought). What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.”[7] (Parentheses mine)

Many of the original settlers of our country were concerned about finding a place where they could practice their religion. Few of them were concerned about spreading their faith to other men. They had experienced too much of that imposed upon them in Europe. They wanted the freedom to experience and practice their religious principles in their own way. In fact, many of these sects saw religious faith as an individual choice to be contemplated and enjoyed individually in the wondrous and scenic nature that our new land provided. Many of them clearly understood the importance of religious tolerance. We should follow their example.

I think the insecurity of many conservatives stems from a feeling that religion will someday go away. I think they are afraid that they don’t have an argument against science and reason and they want to convince us that if religion goes away so will freedom. Many of them probably believe this. Their insistence that reason and science (secularism) will turn man into a wild wanton sinful brute is the flaw in their argument. Their belief that man cannot be good without God is intolerant and insulting to many Americans who have fought for the principle of religious freedom while also holding to their own philosophies or religions. In truth, only free men want to think the highest thoughts; they want to traverse the frontiers of the planet and the universe. If they discover God at the end, it is their right to think as they wish. If they do not, that is their right as well. In truth, only free men can be perfect and that perfection is not a threat to God.

I would like to state that I admire Thomas Sowell immensely. His defense of capitalism through these many years has undoubtedly required heroic courage and intellectual honesty considering our present political climate. He is truly an admirable man who deserves the highest praise. With that said, I think he is wrong on this crucial issue. If you believe that man is tragically imperfect, the logical conclusion is that you should not leave him free; you should restrict his freedom. And this is clearly what Doctor Sowell advocates when he says that “social contrivances seek to restrict behavior that leads to unhappiness, even though these restrictions themselves cause a certain amount of unhappiness.”

In fact, the correct view of man is that he is a perfect being, fully capable of survival and success using his own considerable and wonderful attributes. He is a creature that should be allowed to discover his perfection through his freely chosen thoughts and actions. Because man is perfect, he must be free. If there is anything in this world to "believe" in, it is the glorious possibilities of man.

Only a free man can be moral.

[1] Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, hardcover page 77
[2] Ibid page 77
[3] Ibid, Page 76
[4] Ibid page 78
[5] Ibid page 78
[6] Ibid page 79-80
[7] Thomas Jefferson, The Notes on Virginia

Good versus Evil

An issue that I’ve studied a lot is the issue of how an honest person can deal with and survive in the presence of evil. I define evil as the ability and willingness of a person to do harm to other people, their minds and properties without concern for the damage done.

The average person must confront a myriad of situations that involve dealing with evil and the difficult question is how to recognize it, how to make sure you aren’t being fooled by someone who claims to be doing good but who has ulterior evil intent. That an honest person is put into a situation where he must confront evil is a travesty in itself; the best policy is to avoid it, not deal with it and let it destroy itself. But when a society is on the slippery slope toward the dominance of evil, honest people must learn to defend themselves. So, to begin, we must start with a proper foundation.

As Voltaire said about Francis Bacon when he asked how we can know a great man. His answer: "It is the man who sways our minds by the prevalence of reason and the native force of truth, not they who reduce mankind to a state of slavery by brutish force and downright violence..." The implication is that the evil person has only one goal in the final sense: to destroy or enslave people. The good person is one who adheres to reason, truth, morality.

The difference between the good and the evil represents two fundamental principles, each the direct opposite of the other. I break them down in the following way:

Good---------------------------------------------Evil
Life as Standard-----------------------------Death as Standard
Life-serving Values-------------------------Nihilism/Moral Equivalence
Reason/Logic/Truth------------------------Unreason/Illogic/Un-truth/Lies
Self-Interest------------------------------------Self-Sacrifice
Individualism/Freedom-------------------Collectivism/Force/Violence
Capitalism/Limited Government------Dictatorship/Unlimited Government

Notice that each of these principles has an exact opposite. This is based on the principle of anti-thesis that takes abstract principles and defines them in terms of their contradictories.

This approach makes it possible to draw clear lines between good and evil, truth and falsehood, and eliminates the confusion created by taking a moral “middle-of-the-road”. The middle-of-the-road approach is called moral equivalence which puts us on a slippery slope (so to speak) that leads to the victory of evil. This is the position of many of the "talking heads" on television and radio who admonish people for taking a stand against the progressives; their position is that you should not judge, not question and just assume that the left is really just trying to make things better. They accuse you of "McCarthyism" "racism" or anything else they can get away with so that you feel guilty for taking a stand against government coercion. Those who favor evil, consciously or sub-consciously, want to get you on that slippery slope toward evil so you don't really know what is happening to you in terms of your integrity and moral sensibility.

I like this approach to understanding human problems because it starts with a broad abstraction that subsumes a host of other abstractions and concretes. By understanding issues in this way, you can sweep aside the ideas of those who want to confuse you about their ends and the means of accomplishing them. For instance, if you hear an argument based on nihilism, you know that its opposite must be life as the standard and therefore nihilism holds death as the standard. This enables you to eliminate the influence, in your mind, of people who are nihilists (such as George Soros, his funded organizations and other pragmatists). The same can be said of those who favor self-sacrifice. Their opposite is self-interest which explains why they are constantly criticizing capitalism, individualism, reason, etc. This puts them squarely on the side of evil though they claim to represent the good.

For those of you who think there is no harm in compromising with bad ideas or who say that you can see good in all sides, I'd like for you to consider where you stand on the chart and to what you are opposed. I'd like for you to consider that self-imposed blindness is still blindness. Any compromise with nihilism and anti-reason puts you on the side of evil. You have to decide the truth for yourself. "Whenever men expect reality to conform to their wish simply because it is their wish, they are doomed to metaphysical disappointment. This leads them to the dichotomy: my dream vs. the actual which thwarts it... "(1)

Those who would usher evil into society, those people dedicated to plundering values of all varieties, must convince the good people that their rationalizations are really aimed at the good. This is why you hear progressives in our society constantly telling you that they respect freedom and the Constitution, but they want just a little bit of force in society in order to do good. The truth is, because they advocate force as a means for accomplishing their goals, they really don’t want to do good. They want to destroy and they should be rejected out of hand.

Just look at the chart.

(1) Objectivism, The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff

The Immoral Roots of Anti-Capitalism

Intellectuals, historians, and economists of free market persuasion have asked themselves, "Why have the historians been predominantly anti-capitalist? Why have they sought to make capitalism appear to be such an evil system when it is responsible for so much good?" Indeed, the history of economic thought is full of intellectuals that have had a selective bias against the achievements of capitalism.

While reading a book on this subject, I noticed that the writers who were trying to defend capitalism offered little argument that completely discredited the profusion of anti-capitalist viewpoints. In fact, there was almost a condescending, apologetic attitude toward men whose words were but crass virulent hatred of capitalism. The book, “Capitalism and the Historians”, although excellent in many ways, is weak in one major area: It does not adequately answer the question, "Why do historians distort the facts about capitalism's development?"

None of the distinguished historians whose papers appear in the book attribute to anti-capitalist historians an evil intent. T. S. Ashton refers to "pessimistic views of the effect of industrial change" and says such historians "are not informed by any glimmering of economic sense." Another problem for Ashton is that certain commentators preferred political interpretation of an interventionist nature. He notes also the threading of "facts on a Marxist string." And finally, "The truth is (as Professor Koebner has said) that neither Marx nor Sombart (nor, for that matter, Adam Smith) had any idea of the real nature of what we call the Industrial Revolution. They overstressed the part played by science and had no conception of an economic system that develops spontaneously without the help of either the state or the philosopher. It is, however, the stress on the capitalist spirit that has, I think, done most harm, for, from being a phrase suggesting a mental or emotional attitude, it has become an impersonal, super-human force. It is no longer men and women, exercising free choice, who effect change, but capitalism or the spirit of capitalism. 'Capitalism,' says Schumpeter, 'develops rationality.' 'Capitalism exalts the monetary unit.' 'Capitalism produced the mental attitude of modern science.' 'Modern pacificism, modern international morality, modern feminism, are products of capitalism.”

Whatever this is, it is certainly not economic history. It has introduced a new mysticism into the recounting of plain facts. "What should we do with a candidate who purports to explain why the limited-liability company came into being in England in the 1850's with the following words? I quote literally from the scripture: 'Individualism was forced to give way to laissez faire as the development of capitalism found the early emergent stage of entrepreneurial capitalism a hindrance to that rational expansive development which is the very ethos of capitalism.'" Professor Ashton's solution? "But I hold strongly that the future of the subject lies in closer cooperation with the work of economists and that phrases which perhaps served a purpose a generation ago should now be discarded."

L. M. Hacker, in his address, "Anticapitalist Bias of American History," holds that it was not so much Marxist influence that led to the anti-capitalist bias in America, but American political development, primarily, "the recurring struggle between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideas--that is, the creation and maintenance of a weak or a strong central authority; the intrusion of moral questions into the American public debates--slavery, women's rights, prohibition."

This explanation does not answer the question of why the supposed solutions to these matters involved an anti-capitalist bias. Why was capitalism always seen as morally wrong?

Bertrand De Jouvenal, in his "The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals," holds that the Western intelligensia dislike capitalism because of "a grafting of strong feeling onto a weak stem of positive knowledge." He then proceeds to discuss some ways that capitalism is "unpleasant to the intellectuals," and moves to a suggestion that social science may tell us, if it decides to look at such an issue, why the intellectuals act and think as they do. His basic argument is that the peculiar position in society held by the intellectuals could account for an anti-capitalist bias. The "market value of the intellectual's output is far below factor output."

And so it goes. You can read on and on, finding in the defenders of capitalism what appears to be an unwillingness to define the one factor, the one idea that gives rise to the hatred of capitalism. Most of the reasons given in the book are true, in a sense, and to a point, but they do not go far enough. The defenders of capitalism do not yet sufficiently understand the nature of capitalism and this makes it impossible for them to provide for it what its enemies have in profusion: a moral argument.

If one studies the arguments of capitalism's enemies throughout history, one will find, almost to a man, that they hold one philosophical viewpoint, specifically one moral premise: altruism, the idea that it is man’s duty to sacrifice for others. They sense, more than do the defenders of capitalism, that a capitalist economic system represents, for most men, an alien code and view of man. Compared to the defenders of capitalism, they know that capitalism is based on selfishness, not charity. They know that if capitalism were to remain pure, their moral code of ritualistic self-sacrifice, as well as their view of man as a helpless pawn under history's or God's or the government’s control, would hold no influence over men. If capitalism were allowed to be capitalism, in other words, if the defenders of capitalism were to defend man’s right to be moral, to live for his own sake, to be responsible for himself, proudly, passionately, with conviction and pride, the philosophies of Kant, Marx, Hegel and a host of modern offshoots, would be swept away. Men would no longer be intrigued by the ineffable, the vague and undefined, and would instead insist that ideas have a real value, a real application to their individual lives.

Once Americans begin to stand for their right to be moral; once they begin to fight against the idea that their role in society is to be dutiful sacrificial victims; once they realize that the motive and goal of the detractors of capitalism is nothing more than the destruction of freedom, which means the destruction of their right to live by means of their independent minds; once men begin to demand that government get out of their lives, only then will the progressives become part of the disastrous past that they have created.

That the defenders of capitalism do not know this is proof of the success that the altruist morality has had in keeping from men the fact that a rational, moral code of ethics is possible. The defenders of capitalism are, for the most part, altruists themselves (see the conservatives). They adhere to the ideas of altruistic self-sacrifice--so much so that it blinds them to the true nature of capitalism and forces them into the position of being condescending but cheery opponents of men who are neither condescending nor cheery in their hatred of freedom and capitalism.

Altruism is not the moral base of a capitalist system. We can’t have a successful capitalist system if we just want to help people. Capitalism requires an independent mind. We must want men to be successful, we must know that it requires work, we must honor the independent mind and we must give credit where credit is due. Altruism requires a mind ruled by the edicts of superiors and it tells man that to be moral he only needs to follow the easiest path of all: the road that preaches sacrifice as virtue.

Capitalism requires integrity. Altruism requires that man fight his bodily nature with his spiritual self-sacrificial code. Capitalism requires honesty. Altruism requires that one deceive one's own mind. Capitalism requires justice. Altruism requires that justice be suspended among men, that men do society's work by being unjust towards those who refuse to sacrifice. Capitalism requires productiveness. Altruism requires that the productive are not as important as those who give away the confiscated money of the productive. Capitalism requires pride. Altruism requires both humility in some men and pretentiousness in others. Capitalism requires principled action based on abstract concepts that are tied to reality. Altruism requires Kantian mush, vague, disconnected equivocation, switching contexts, unintelligibility, one reality that is inaccessible by the mind and a second mental universe that is incompetent. Capitalism is a challenge to the individual and it demands his best effort. Altruism demands only envy and hatred of capitalism.

Certainly, the detractors of capitalism have a massive blind spot. Their altruistic premises color their interpretation of historical facts to such a degree that they believe reality conforms to their views. But the defenders of capitalism have a more devastating yet hardly noticed, blind spot. Their evasion of the evil of altruism has kept them from discovering that capitalism is the moral system--the system to be advocated with fire and vigor and enthusiasm. It is, after all, freedom among men that makes capitalism successful. It is the possibility of moral living that makes capitalism the moral system.

It is the idea that no man should live as a serf that liberated our country and made it the most successful in the history of the planet. Freedom is what makes America a better place to live. Freedom is what makes Americans the happiest and most tolerant people on this earth. Freedom is what makes us the envy of the world. Freedom is what makes us hated, not because we are decadent, but because, as a nation, we give every citizen the possibility of creating his own happiness in his own way. We are the first nation since the Greeks that made moral living possible on earth.

The mortal enemies of freedom are those who believe that men are moral only when they perform ritual sacrifice. Freedom is the enemy of the man who believes deep down in the core of his being that if men were free, he would not be able to survive.

Are most intellectuals and economists biased against capitalism? Yes, as long as they hold that altruistic self-sacrifice is the proper morality for man and for an economic system. Are they right? No, and no amount of condescending argument that says capitalism will achieve the goals of altruists will work against intellectuals who hate themselves and men. No amount of cheery debate against people that want slavery for men will enable capitalism to win. The haters of capitalism must be exposed as haters of men and haters of freedom.

We must fight for capitalism based upon man’s right to be free, his right to property, his right to speak and think, and his right to happiness. Consequences, such as the fact that capitalism creates the most vibrant economy, are irrelevant. Capitalism is moral because only free men can be moral.

Aphorisms – Part 2

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.

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.

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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