A Guide to the Philosophy of Objectivism

By: David King

 DON'T READ MY BOOK
if you are a Conservative, a Randite, or a Statist.
But if you are a Libertarian Anarchist who wants a rational
philosophical
basis for your beliefs, give it a peek.
 Preface
It is my intention to present an introduction, from the

perspective of a scientist, to the ideas of Objectivism, a guide to

other presentations of these ideas, and some applications of the ideas

to important problems. Here you will find a rather motley mosaic of

subsections, each generated from whatever sources of information I

have encountered and each analyzed as best I can from within the

context of my three-decade study of Objectivism.

In order to promote the maximum dissemination of the ideas, I

have decided to place all my writings into the Public Domain. I grant

permission to anyone to use my writings, or any parts of them, in

any way that may help to further the spread of reason in our society.

MyBook is an ongoing project for me as I add new ideas and

revise old ideas in a continual attempt to make a better presentation.

The version you are now reading is current as of January 1998. I

would appreciate being notified of errors of any kind in these

writings, or of any statements that could be clarified so as to make a

better presentation.

MyBook is dedicated to two non-existent fictional characters:

William Hastings, who does not appear in ATLAS SHRUGGED
and
Emmanuel Goldstein, who does not appear in 1984

-David King
 Chapter 1
AYN RAND AND OBJECTIVISM - PHILOSOPHY
AND SCIENCE
Starting with a critique of Ayn Rand, I move into a presentation of
Objectivism, then to a consideration of the connection between Science and
Philosophy, with some additional comments in which I try to make the
scientific mentality a little less mysterious to people who have not been
explicitly schooled in a scientific field.

* Randism vs Objectivism
When Nathaniel Branden was asked (after his break with Rand) if he were
an Objectivist, he replied:
"If you mean, do I agree with the broad fundamentals of the philosophy of
Objectivism, I would answer, 'Yes.' But if you mean, as Miss Rand might very
well wish you to mean, do I agree with every position that Miss Rand has
taken and do I regard the sum total of Miss Rand's intellectual
pronouncements as being equal to what is meant by the philosophy of
Objectivism, then I am not an Objectivist."

I would like to introduce these two terms:

A Randite is a disciple of Ayn Rand.
Randism is the set of ideas that were Rand's personal beliefs. (This
includes, of course, some - but not all - of the precepts of Objectivism.)

There is a very important distinction to be made between Randism and

Objectivism. Randism asserts the congruency of Rand's statements with the
principles of Objectivism: "what Rand says and only what Rand says is
Objectivism." The fact that Rand has made incalculably valuable
identifications of certain philosophical principles does by no means convey
upon her exclusive or infallible domain in the further identification or
application of those principles; nor, on the other hand, do Rand's incorrect
identifications or improper applications in the least diminish the truth or
usefulness of the principles of Objectivism. Unfortunately, the waters of
Objectivism have been muddied by Rand's repeated attempts to convert her
personal preferences into philosophical principles.
A big difference between the Objectivists and the Randites is that the
Objectivists do not view Objectivism as a dogma i.e., a set of ideas to be
accepted without question. We see it as an intellectual tool that is useful
in helping us to understand the world, in much the same way that the
Scientific Method is. From this point of view, the idea that someone can be
"an enemy of Objectivism" (one of Leonard Peikoff's favorite denunciations)
is as ridiculous as the idea that someone can be "an enemy of the Integral
Calculus."
There are many parallels to be drawn between Rand/Objectivism and
Newton/The Calculus. In each case an immensly powerful, beautiful and useful
intellectual tool was derived by a human being who possessed some of the
foibles of humanity. In each case the tool was jealously clung to and
possessively circumscribed by its creator. In each case the tool was
rejected and reviled by some reactionary people. And in each case (as time
will eventually demonstrate) the power and utility of the tool will outlast
the small-minded people who criticize it. Alongside these parallels there is
a significant difference: it would be rather farfetched to regard a set of
mathematical principles as a religion, but it is quite possible (and is
indeed the practice of some people) to regard a set of philosophical
principles as a religion. There are those who adulate Rand almost as if she
were a deity and who regard Objectivism as a sacred dogma. And, on the other
hand, there are many people in the world who reject a good and powerful set
of ideas simply because they associate - wrongly - those ideas with the
personal beliefs of Ayn Rand.
I believe the important aspects of her life are the philosophical
achievements, not her personal attributes. Her personal foibles will
eventually fade into the oblivion of historical forgetfulness - like
Aristotle's male chauvinism, or Newton's alchemy, or Einstein's socks - and
what will be left for future generations are the valuable philosophical
identifications she made. How Rand was buffeted by the intellectual currents
of her time is of course of interest to the historian of ideas; but it has
little bearing on the truth of her propositions.

I would say this to the Randites: Abandon the attitude that the
principles of Objectivism and the pronouncements of Ayn Rand are congruent
sets. Realize that Objectivism, like the Scientific Method, is an open-ended
set of principles rather than a closed and rigidly defined dogma. Recognize
the importance of the work being done by those scholars who are trying to
develop the ethical and political implications of the Objectivist Ethics.
Until you do this, you will only be ostracizing yourselves from the living
and powerful body of philosophy that is growing on the foundation of Ayn
Rand's magnificent achievements.

In the hard sciences like chemistry we know pretty well who is a real
scientist and who is a flake, even though there is no authoritative
organization to enforce standards. The logical nature of science
automatically makes it clear who is in and who is out of a scientific
enterprise. You can tell whether or not someone is "really" a chemist by
comparing his statements and actions with the fundamental principles of
chemistry.
It is the same with "Objectivists." You don't have to (and shouldn't)
take anyone's word for who they are. You must examine their principles and
judge whether or not those principles are in accord with the fundamental
precepts of Objectivism. Just as a scientist manifests certain specific
attributes, an Objectivist manifests certain specific attributes:
objectivity, rationality, libertarianism.
The hallmarks of an Objectivist are:
In Metaphysics: objectivity; the belief that there is a reality which
exists independently of consciousness.
In Epistemology: reason rather than faith; the belief that it is the
function of man's mind to perceive and understand that reality - and the
confidence that the mind is capable of doing so.
In Ethics: libertarianism; the belief that the only proper society is one
that is founded upon the non-aggression principle.
By these signs you shall know him. Any person who denies any of these
three ideas is NOT an Objectivist. A full-context Objectivist will display
another behavior also: he will have Shrugged.

To say "Ayn Rand's Objectivism" is somewhat like saying "Trofim Lysenko's

genetics." In both cases, the set of ideas referred to is limited, severely
distorted and, in some fundamentally important ways, wrong.
Those who operate on false principles have about as much to contribute to
Objectivism as Lysenko contributed to genetics.
The contention that Objectivism must be defined only by reference to the
ideas expressed by Ayn Rand is like saying that the Calculus must be defined
only by reference to the ideas expressed by Newton.
The precepts of Objectivism must be accepted (or rejected) on the same
basis as any other set of scientific ideas: on whether or not they WORK, not
on what any person (myself included) claims they are or should be.

* Rand's incorrect definition of selfish

You will observe that in my essays I do not use the term "selfish," but
use instead "self-interested." Here is why.
From the introduction to THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, by Ayn Rand:
The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in
a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities
of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not
mean the things you mean?".... there are others, who would not ask that
question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies....

There are, roughly speaking, three classes of people:

1. Those concerned with their own advantage without any regard for
others.
2. Those having no concern for self at all.
3. Those who are concerned with their own self-benefit and who are also
aware of and concerned with their social context.
Rand makes a good case for altruism's having falsely divided humanity
into just two classes - the first and the second - leaving no room for the
third category, the "self-respecting, self-supporting man - a man who
supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor
others." But if you look into the history of the English language, you will
find that Rand's use of the term "selfish" to designate the third category
is not conclusively justified etymologically.
Historically, the terms most often used to designate these three
categories are:
1. Selfish: concerned with one's own advantage without regard for others.
This has almost always been described as wicked.
2. Selfless: having no concern for self. This has always been described
as being ethically laudable.
3. Self-interested: concerned with one's own well-being. This has only
sometimes been described as a vice.
These three usages are quite sensible terms of classification, enabling
us to distinguish clearly among the three categories. Rand's insistence on
using the term "selfish" to designate that third category is a mistake, both
a cognitive mistake and a communications mistake.
It is a cognitive mistake because when she usurps the term "selfish" she
does not provide an alternative term for the first category. Thus she
commits the same cognitive error for which she upbraids the altruist
semantics: providing convenient terms for only two out of the three
categories.
It is a communications mistake because the three terms enumerated above
are distinctly specified also in such references as Webster's Collegiate
dictionary, and thus are the terms most likely to be considered by educated
Americans.
It is certainly true that there are many people to whom "selfish" does
not mean the things Rand means, and to question her usage of the term is
not, as she so stridently claims, an act of "moral cowardice" but merely an
attempt to preserve cognitive clarity and communications utility.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that in THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, Rand
places at the very last her essay on "The Argument From Intimidation."

* Rand's personal statist views

 In the realm of politics we must make a careful distinction between
Rand's personal views and the implications of the Objectivist ethics.
The Objectivist stand is quite clear:
"The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may
INITIATE the use of physical force against others. No man - or group or
society or government - has the right to assume the role of a criminal and
initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man." (From "The
Objectivist Ethics," in THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS.)
But Rand's personal stand is fundamentally statist. We can best see this
in her answers to two questions put to her during her appearance at the Ford
Hall Forum in 1972.
Question: Have you heard of the Libertarian Party and would you consider
endorsing John Hospers and Tonie Nathan as presidential candidates?
Rand: "Look, I would rather vote for Bob Hope or the Marx brothers, if
they still exist, or Jerry Lewis - I don't know who is the funniest today,
rather than something like professor Hospers and the Libertarian Party.
Look, I don't think Henry Wallace is a great thinker but even he - he's
pretty much of a demagogue, though with some courage - even he had the good
sense to stay home this time if he wanted to some extent - if he had one
ounce of sincerity and wanted some freedom for his country. To choose this
year to start after personal publicity - and if Hospers and whoever the rest
are get ten votes away from Nixon, which I doubt, but if they do it is a
moral crime."
Question: Will you comment on the issue of should amnesty be granted to
draft dodgers?
Rand: "I think it is an improper question to be discussed while there is
a war going on. It is a very complex question but you cannot, when men are
dying in a war, say that you promise amnesty to those who refused. On the
other hand I do not blame those who refused to be drafted if they did so out
of general conviction, not necessarily religious, but if they oppose the
state's right to draft them. They would have a case, and they would go to
jail. And they would be willing to take that penalty."
What a distressing alternative: either submit to the draft or submit to
imprisonment. No true libertarian would willingly accept either of these
statist choices.
Both Rand and her disciples have continually asserted this strong
opposition to the political implementation of libertarianism. And her
acceptance of the legitimacy of government coercion was repeatedly expressed
both in word and deed.

* Rand's failure to distinguish between politics and economics

The last criticism I wish to present against Ayn Rand involves a failure
that was expressed not just in her personal behavior but also in her
philosophical writings. It is that she never made a distinction between
Politics and Economics. She almost always referred to capitalism as
"laissez-faire capitalism" or "free-market capitalism," thus inexorably
integrating this primary economic concept with a political institution.
In my writings I will try to make a clear distinction between the two
realms of human activity, and provide definitions that will make it easier
to think about them.

* What is Objectivism?
In considering the most fundamental ideas about the nature of the
universe, there are two basically distinct ideas:
One, known as subjectivity, asserts fundamentally that existence is
created by consciousness.
The other idea, known as objectivity, asserts fundamentally that there is
indeed a real world that has its own existence, independent of any
perceiving consciousness. The objectivity thesis controls your behavior,
even if it does not control your thoughts and speech. If this were not so,
you would already be dead: You wouldn't stop on the curb to let the trucks
go roaring past. You wouldn't cook your food. You wouldn't drive on the
proper side of the road. You wouldn't practice safe sex.... etc. The only
sincere solipsist is a dead solipsist.
Perhaps the best statement of objectivity was made by Albert Einstein:
"Out yonder there is this huge world, which exists independently of us
human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at
least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking."
In the realm of scientific endeavor, objectivity (in the form of the
Scientific Method) has predominated. But in other realms of human endeavor,
such as Psychology, Ethics, and Politics, objectivity has had much less
influence in human history, mainly because the lack of a solution to the
Problem of the Universals precluded the sort of firm and direct linkage
between concepts of consciousness and reality as exists between scientific
concepts and reality (where truth prevails in a much more immediate and
direct manner).
But in the late 1960s the Problem of the Universals was solved by Ayn
Rand. She showed that Definitions Are Not Arbitrary, and she demonstrated
how to derive them directly from observations of reality. The same cognitive
process that enables you to construct a correct definition also enables you
to think in principles: to identify and classify things by reference to
their fundamental distinguishing characteristics.
This epistemological breakthrough enabled objectivity to be applied to
ALL areas of human activity. The work of Rand and other philosophers who
have taken up this effort has produced a set of principles now known as the
Philosophy of Objectivism. These principles stand in distinct contrast to
most of traditional philosophy and are, by and large, rather unpopular. (But
that is to be expected of any set of ideas that is new and challenges the
existing state of affairs. It has always been this way.)
Objectivism is the only philosophy that is completely consistent with
Physics. The ideas of Objectivism are founded upon a set of Axiomatic
Concepts: Existence, Identity, and Consciousness, and are derived from those
concepts by the intellectual procedure set forth in the Objectivist
Epistemology. This is a scientific, rationalist method which subsumes the
Scientific Method of determining truth. It extends the Scientific Method to
include areas of inquiry not usually thought to be amenable to scientific
analysis. In her essay "The Objectivist Ethics," Rand applies this
intellectual procedure to identifying a rational basis for ethics and
morality. Nathaniel Branden, in his book "The Psychology of Self-Esteem,"
applies the procedure to identifying the bases of human psychology. Harry
Browne gives us a rational explanation of the nature of economics. Hospers
and Rothbard carry the procedure into the field of politics.

A philosophy is a set of principles which provides a consistent and

comprehensive frame of reference from which to judge man and his
environment.
If a philosophy is to be a comprehensive frame of reference it must
encompass the full scope of man's thoughts and activities. Especially must
it include Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Morality, Psychology,
Politics, Economics and Esthetics - since all of man's activities are
founded on one or more of these fields of study. I will give a brief
exposition of the Objectivist principles as they apply to each of these
fields. In order to clarify my presentation I will in each case contrast the
Objectivist position with its contrary or opposite. The general schema looks
like this:
 Metaphysics objectivity vs subjectivity
Epistemology reason vs faith
Ethics egoism vs altruism
Morality self-interest vs degeneracy
Psychology free will vs determinism
Politics libertarianism vs statism
Economics free enterprise vs socialism
Esthetics romanticism vs anti-romanticism

Let us consider each of these terms and see what they mean.

Metaphysics is the science that deals with the fundamental nature of

reality. As I pointed out above, there are basically only two viewpoints in
this area. One, objectivity, maintains that there is a real, factual world
which exists independently of the consciousness of any perceiving entity.
This is not to say that there is no interrelationship between consciousness
and reality, or that an acting conscious entity cannot alter and transform
the entities of reality by acting in accord with the physical laws that
describe reality, but rather that the facts of reality have their own
existence whether we are aware of them or not. Subjectivity, on the other
hand, maintains that reality, in its fundamental essense, is not a firm
absolute but is instead somehow dependent on, or a function of,
consciousness. The basis of subjectivity is a denial of the Law of Identity.
(There is another, quite different, sense in which the term subjective is
used: it refers to choices or decisions which are generated by reference to
internal states of consciousness rather than by assessment of external
factors. For example: the choice between chocolate or vanilla ice cream is a
subjective choice. But the choice between an ice cream cone for me or a
bottle of milk for my hungry baby should be an objective choice.)

Epistemology is the study of the source, nature and validity of human

knowledge. Here the Objectivist says that since there is a real world "out
there" (outside myself) it is the job of my consciousness to identify it. To
do this I make use of my faculty of reason - the ability to perceive,
identify and integrate the evidence of reality provided by my senses. The
source of all my knowledge lies in the rigorous adherence to logic, the art
of non-contradictory identification of the facts of reality. The
subjectivist, however, is bound by no such procedure. Since for him there is
no firm, absolute "out there," his knowledge has its source in some form or
another of introspection (revelation) and its validity is accepted on faith
- that is, accepted without evidence or in spite of evidence to the
contrary. Subjectivism is not an issue of what a statement or conclusion is
about; it's an issue of the kind of evidence one uses to support a
conclusion. It is not only a way of adopting conclusions, but also a way of
evading conclusions by refusing to believe in them. It is not merely an
emotional state of mind - it is a philosophy. It says that we should act
upon our own impulses no matter what they are BECAUSE they are impulses. The
very fact that we feel them is not only good enough to justify our actions,
but the awareness that they are impulses is all the validation we, as human
beings, require. To a subjectivist, rational explanation of thoughts and
actions is not only unnecessary, but impossible.

Concerning Ethics and Morality I make this distinction: Morality

describes intra-personal actions whereas Ethics describes inter-personal
actions. For example: dope addiction is immoral (it is self-destructive) but
it is not unethical. Stealing to support one's addiction is, however,
unethical. Drunkenness is merely immoral; blocking the sidewalk with your
stupefied body is unethical. Refusing to think is immoral, but failing,
through this intellectual laziness, to fulfil your obligations as a
husband/father or wife/mother is unethical. As you probably infer, I believe
that most unethical actions have their basis in immorality. I will save you
the trouble of consulting your dictionary by telling you that this
distinction is etymologically unjustifiable. Cicero was the first to use the
term "morals" and as he did so he noted that he meant this term to have
precisely the same meaning as the Greek term "ethics." Since that time the
two terms have been used synonymously, but I think it clear that there is a
distinction to be made between two kinds of behavior, and the most
appropriate terms to use in labeling this distinction are Ethics and
Morality.

In the field of Ethics the Objectivist position is egoism: that man is an

end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, and that each man should
live his own life for his own sake. The contrary position, altruism, holds
that man must make the welfare of others the primary goal of his social
relationships and that self-sacrifice is the highest virtue.
At this point I am sometimes beset with an argument that starts out: "Do
you mean to say that you're the sort of wretched brute who tramples all over
other people to gain your ends?" and continues by proposing a kind of false
dichotomy which divides all human intercourse into two categories: sadism
and masochism, and then tries to sell me masochism on the grounds that
sadism is my only alternative. Most people posing this argument refuse to
recognize the existence of a third type of man - the independent, self-
supporting, profit-making trader, who neither sacrifices others to himself
nor himself to others.

Morally, this sort of independently existing man is a self-interested

person. That is to say, he is a man who is CONCERNED WITH HIS OWN BENEFIT.
This implies, of course, that he knows what his own benefits actually are.
Is it in my own physical self-interest to be a drunkard or a dope fiend?
Hardly, for these activities are clearly self-destructive. Is it in my own
psychological self-interest to be a liar or a thief? Again, no, because
these actions, although not as obviously self-destructive as alcoholism or
other drug addiction, are saboteurs of the mind's most basic function:
integration. You cannot integrate a contradiction, and both lies and thefts
are contradictions. (My second examples - liar/thief - are not merely
immoral but unethical as well, and you can see from considering them that
unethical actions are associated with immoral conditions.) What I'm trying
to point out is that many actions which are usually called "selfish" (lies,
thefts, or the wretched brute trampling on his poor fellow creatures) are
not IN FACT in one's self-interest at all, and that the truly self-
interested man is one who has carefully examined and rationally analysed his
nature as a proper human being and thereby determined just what is IN FACT
in his self-interest. The liar, thief and brute are not self-interested,
they are actually self-destructive. They are degenerate. Genuine self-
interest requires an awareness of the larger context that makes it possible
to achieve one's values.
Objectivist morality has two fundamental bases: the acceptance of life
itself as the standard of values; and the identification of the actions that
are required by our nature to maintain that standard - to sustain life. The
primary task of morality is to identify the conditions that must be
satisfied to live successfully. We prove that something is a proper moral
value by showing that we need it in order to live properly. We prove that
some course of action is a virtue by showing that it is required to achieve
a proper moral value. The concept of value is inextricably linked to the
concept of life. The two concepts cannot be separated in practice. Each
requires the other. Just as value presupposes a living valuer - "of value to
whom and for what" - so life requires values, for without values the process
of life is impossible: a man dies if he does not achieve values.
 In the realm of Psychology, Objectivism holds that man is a creature of
free will. This is to say that he is capable of making choices which are
causal primaries. Determinism, on the other hand, is the principle that all
of man's choices and actions are determined by forces (usually heredity
and/or environment) which are outside of his control.

In political issues Objectivists are promoters of the libertarian ideal.

Their political goals are based on the ethical principle that no man or
group of men has the right to engage in coercion against the person or
property of other people. We hold that there are only three proper functions
of a governing agency: the military, to protect men against aggression by
foreign criminals, the police, to protect men against aggression by domestic
criminals, and the courts, to resolve disagreements which can at times arise
even among just and rational men. We hold that a governing agency has no
right to restrict a person's activities in the moral area (thus we oppose
drug laws, laws forbidding sex acts between consenting adults, and all other
"victimless crime" laws) and that it can rightfully act in the ethical area
only when force (or its derivative, fraud) have been initiated. Thus we
oppose all subsidies to businessmen or farmers, all tariffs and
import/export restrictions, licensing laws, and all other laws restricting
the freedom of production, transportation and trade. In brief, we advocate a
political system wherein each individual has the right to do anything
whatsoever which does not initiate force or fraud against anyone else, and
in which the role of a governing agency is strictly restrained to the
protection of that right. This is in contrast to the statist system, which
is widespread and becoming ever more prevalent today, in which the State
exercises predominant control over the actions of individuals, continually
increasing the scope and intensity of its regimentation and by "a long train
of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same Object, evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute Despotism."

Corresponding to its political system, a society has an associated

economic system. Considering the nature of libertarianism, it is clear that
its associated economic system must have a strong foundation in the
individual's right to own, control, use and dispose of his private property.
Libertarians advocate a capitalist economic organization in which the means
of production - land, capital, etc. - are owned and controlled by
individuals (or voluntarily associated groups of individuals), and in which
there are no restrictions on the freedom of production, transportation and
trade. The opposite form of economic organization, socialism (of which
fascism and communism are variants), is a system in which the economic
resources are controlled by the State and in which individuals have little,
if any, economic freedom.

The last philosophical category I will consider is that of art forms.

Here, as before, I divide the field into two major domains. One, subsumed by
the term romanticism, includes all those works which are based on the
recognition that man is a volitional creature - that he has the power to
make choices and that those choices are major determinators of his life. The
greatest portrayal of romantic heroism can be found in the novels of Ayn
Rand. The major task of a romantic work of art is, as Aristotle said, "to
show things as they might be and ought to be." The other esthetic domain
(which, for lack of a suitable general label, I will simply call "anti-
romanticism") shows things as they "must be" (or are seen to be) and depicts
man as a creature who has, essentially, no power over his destiny. Anti-
romanticism began with classicism, evolved into naturalism, and is in turn
evolving into absurdism. The best such work of great classical literature is
the Greek drama "Oedipus Rex." A good example of naturalism is "Death of a
Salesman" and a typical representative of absurdism is "Waiting for Godot."
Esthetically, an Objectivist is a romantic realist. Existentially, he is
a practical idealist.

If I were asked to express the essence of Objectivism in one short

statement I could do no better than to paraphrase Ayn Rand, the foremost
identifier and expounder of these principles:
Man is a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his
life, non-aggression as his standard of social behavior, productive
achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

* The Antagonism Between Philosophy and Science

Scientists are very devoted to the scientific method, and they find that
the scientific method is to be applied most successfully in the world that
can be observed. That is not the world of moral values or the world of
philosophical thought, but in the laboratory where ideas can be tested. They
regard science as the only really genuine form of knowledge. This leaves
them with an empty spot in their lives. They're not practiced in applying
logic and reason to questions of value or philosophy, so they move this area
of thought over to the realm of faith. Their very devotion to the world of
fact leaves them hungry for some sort of clear guidance as to their conduct
for the remainder of their lives. Scientists stay so long in the educational
process, become so involved in their chosen, often quite narrow,
specialties, that they come to the realities of everyday life much later
than other people. Indeed, many scientists never come to grips with those
realities at all.
On the other hand, philosophers spend their entire lives dealing with a
world of imaginings, conjectures, and fantasies, NOT with the physical facts
of reality - at least not beyond the faucet in the sink and the switch on
the wall. They look with disdain upon the world of the physicist and the
engineer as being one of "crass materialism" - beneath the dignity of their
lofty intellectual position and not worthy of any serious consideration. The
result is that their ideas are usually entirely separated from reality and
produce a distortion when applied to the real physical world.
Consider Immanuel Kant, for example. He went to school, then he was a
tutor, then he was a professor at university for the rest of his life. As
far as I know he never even did so much real-world engineering as to draw a
bucket of water up out of a well. Thus whereas Thales (who was a bridge-
builder) gave us Aristotle, John Locke, and the United States of America -
Kant (who was a pure philosopher) gave us Fichte and Nazi Germany, Karl Marx
and the Soviet Union.
But I cannot place all the blame on the shoulders of the philosophers.
After all, the philosopher does only half the job - he just conceives the
ideas. It is the scientist who creates the means of implementing those
ideas. Both men are equally responsible for the effects of their joint
product.
Just as the philosophers are guilty of not knowing science - and thereby
of failing to test their ideas against reality, so the scientists are guilty
of ignoring philosophy - and thereby failing to understand the principles
underlying their actions.

* How Scientists Can Build Bombs

Interviewer: "You must feel good, working for peace like that." [on the
Manhattan Project]
Richard Feynman: "No, that never enters my head, whether it is for peace
or otherwise. We don't know. You see, what happened to me - what happened to
the rest of us - is we STARTED for a good reason, then you're working very
hard to accomplish something and it's a pleasure, it's excitement. And you
stop thinking [about principles], you know; you just STOP."
Another scientist, at age 89, had a similar realization:
"People should be taught when they are young that they HAVE to consider
the value of the experiment before they start in on it. It is absolutely not
enough to be interested. But you get so carried away with interest that you
lose all sense of proportion."
Enrico Fermi was a hero-figure to many scientists. He designed and
supervised the first nuclear reaction in the history of the world - in the
squash court at the University of Chicago. He was dapper. Jaunty. My God, he
even had a sense of humor! Then he built the first nuclear bombs and started
this whole nuclear misery. You expect him to look and act like
Mephistopheles, but here was a marvelous little guy making jokes, while
doing everything better than everyone else. I wanted to be like him, but I
couldn't. I didn't have whatever it takes for a man to enjoy himself while
perfecting these weapons.
When I first heard a Nazi scientist tell of his work on weapons, I
wondered if it were possible to be so completely divorced from the
consequences of one's work. It seemed to me that no matter how subtle the
problem a given weapon presented or how challenging its contemplation might
be, the ashes and the bones resulting from government's use of that weapon
would, in the end, be the same. Was it his responsibility that the rockets
he helped design had fallen on London, killing helpless civilians? He
claimed it was not, that he had never been accused, that in fact the
Americans were glad to whisk him away to work for them before the Russians
could get hold of him. He had been happy to come, and never regretted it. In
this rich country the stories about postwar conditions in Germany had seemed
very unreal. As had the War Crimes trials. People had followed orders - yet
they appeared to have committed crimes. This troubled his orderly mind and,
in the end, he had stopped reading about it or even thinking about it.
But not all of them manifest this absence of ethical responsibility in an
implicit "non-thinking" manner; for some the renunciation is quite
thoughtfully explicit:
"They believe that they are not obligated to judge whether they are being
asked to work on the best research problem, but only whether they are being
asked to do valid research. They believe that it is the responsibility of
those who provide the funds to establish the directions of research. These
typical scientists act according to their own beliefs and thus they have
integrity. The process of producing new, valid knowledge in any area is very
difficult and is typically all-consuming for those who undertake it. Those
who work hard and well to this end will have little time, or intellectual
firepower, to spare for issues that are beyond their area of focus. The
division of labor requires that they depend upon others to evaluate the
importance and broad implications of the new knowledge they produce."
Those words came from R. Paul Drake, Director of the Plasma Physics
Research Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
One might well wonder if their abdication extends outside the laboratory
to their ordinary daily behavior. Do they consider themselves responsible
for the safe operation of their automobiles? For exercising due care when
target shooting with their hunting rifles? Or are these things, as is the
morality of their professional conduct, considered to be "beyond their area
of focus"?
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, said Wernher von Braun.

John Galt described these men:

"The guiltiest among you are the men who HAVE the capacity to know, yet
choose to blank out reality, the men who are willing to sell their
intelligence into cynical servitude to force... who reserve their logic for
inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires
and deserves no rationality... who sell their souls in exchange for a
laboratory supplied by loot.... they deliver their science to the service of
death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to
inventing weapons of coercion and destruction."

* The Connection Between Philosophy and Science

Since the time of Aristotle, the scientist has known how to apply reason
to the realm of inanimate objects (and to living objects which have no
volition), and since the time of Galileo the scientist has known how to
verify those applications of reason. But the scientist has never had the
fundamental principle (an explication of the basic connection between "is"
and "ought") necessary to apply reason to those areas of behavior that rest
on volitional choice. This is what the Objectivist ethics provides. Thus
Objectivism is the only philosophical frame of reference which can provide a
rational comprehension of such realms as psychology, morality, ethics,
economics, and sociology - to all those areas of study which rest upon
chosen values rather than upon physical facts.
The primary obstacle in developing any ethical philosophy is the lack of
a starting point. The scientist sees a set of "ought" terms: good, well,
right, proper, virtue, should, bad, wrong, etc. - each of which can
evidently be defined in terms of the others, but none of which has an
independent, non-relative existence. Rand's genius was to identify the
connection between the "ought" of volitional judgment and the "is" of
reality.
It is no accident that many of the early Greek philosophers were
practicing engineers, architects, bridge-builders, harbor designers. They
were men whose minds were intimately tied directly to the facts of reality,
and that's why so many of their philosophical ideas are so profound.
In an attempt to link science and philosophy, a reasonable question to
ask is "Where can we find a starting point - a foundation stone of certitude
as the ultimate basis of human knowledge? A place where we can stand in
unquestionable certainty and from whence we can build a structure of sure
knowledge?"
For the scientist this is no problem - he starts by looking at the
objects around him - the things that are observed by his senses. His
contemplations eventually lead him to the fundamental notion (the First Law
of Thermodynamics) that entities do indeed exist autonomously - they can
neither be created or destroyed. This is the starting place of the
scientist. But is there something that is fundamental even to this notion of
the scientist? Yes, there is, and we can approach it through such questions
as "What is the fundamental nature of all the things that exist?" "What laws
or principles underly all things - and all the behavior of all the things?"
There is an answer to these questions. It was given to us by Aristotle, and
it is the Law of Identity.
The Law of Identity is one of the fundamental, axiomatic concepts
identified by Aristotle. In his Metaphysics, Book 4, Part 3, he observes:
"...for these truths hold good for everything that is.... And all men use
them, because they are true of being qua being.... For a principle which
everyone must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis....
Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle
this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the
same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect."
Stated as a tautology: A is A. A thing (ANY thing and EVERY thing) is
what it is. This idea is the foundation stone of all human knowledge. It
serves to tie human consciousness to the facts of reality. That it is indeed
fundamental can be seen when you observe that it cannot be escaped, that it
is implicit in all knowledge, and that it has to be accepted and used even
in any attempt to deny it. For example, suppose you say "The Law of Identity
is invalid." Observe that you have made a specific statement and that it has
a specific meaning. (Even within your own mind, you do NOT intend it to have
the opposite meaning!) Therefore your statement is what it is - it complies
with the Law of Identity - in spite of its own contention to the contrary.
This is a situation which you cannot escape, no matter how cleverly you
might attempt to rephrase your contention. The Law of Identity always
prevails, in everything that you think, that you say, and that you do. It is
truly fundamental. It is, as Aristotle said, "the most certain of all" - it
is the foundation of certainty.
The Law of Identity is a foundation of objectivity. Any scientist who
probes beneath the First Law of Thermodynamics will soon encounter the Law
of Identity, and there he will find the doorway into the philosophy of
Objectivism. That doorway is the link between science and philosophy.
When you find, in the Objectivist Ethics, the TANSTAAFL principle (There
Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch): the idea that "You can't get something
for nothing, unless someone, somewhere, sometime, is getting nothing for
something", you see the direct link between Ethics and the First Law of
Thermodynamics.
Objectivism is the only philosophy that is completely consistent with
Physics. Indeed, Physics is a subset of Objectivism, for the fundamental
principles of Physics (the Laws of Thermodynamics) are themselves founded
upon the Axiomatic Concepts identified by the Objectivist Epistemology.
Objectivism starts with fundamentals and builds knowledge on a solid
foundation, from the ground up. Adherents of many modern philosophical
perspectives hate this very approach, and reject the need for "foundations"
of any kind. They point out that philosophers have been trying to establish
foundations for centuries but cannot agree on anything. Therefore, they
argue, what's the use? And so THEY start in midair, with contentions that
allegedly are agreed upon, but which in fact are controversial, derivative,
and even arbitrary. The result is usually a ramshackle mess which
presupposes an enormous amount that is never discussed, leads nowhere, and
solves nothing. What Objectivism has is a consistent, comprehensive
philosophical framework from which to ask questions about reality, and a
consistent, comprehensive scientific framework in which to seek answers to
those questions. Only this scenario can lead to a useful understanding of
reality.
Philosophers have had a great deal of difficulty with the problem of what
constitutes truth and how to recognize whether something is true or not. But
this is a difficulty that philosophers have no business trying to impose on
other fields. In other words, the fact that philosophers are still debating
the nature of truth should have no more effect on the practice of science
than the fact that the average business person is ignorant of the details of
accountancy should have on the day-to-day behavior of a CPA. The proper
attitude of the scientists should be: "We will be limited in our work
strictly by the problems WE can't solve, not by the problems YOU can't
solve."

* The Scientific Attitude of Mind

Science is not a body of knowledge but a way of thinking - a process - a
method. The body of knowledge is what results from that process. And a
Scientist is not necessarily someone who has a PhD in physics, but is anyone
who practices that way of thinking. It is characterized primarily by being
reality-oriented and flexible. A scientist assumes, as Einstein put it, that
"Out yonder there is this huge world, which exists independently of us
human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at
least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking."
This is the fundamental premise of science.
 The other primary element of scientific thought - flexibility - is the
ability and willingness to alter one's ideas so as to bring them into
correspondence with that "independently existing world." Nature does not
necessarily comply with the parameters established by human conjecture, and
when she does not, we must accept the necessity of modifying the conjecture.

* Some History of Science

Thales made the extraordinary assumption that the world is a thing whose
workings the human mind CAN understand. This led subsequent Greeks to
conclude that the material world is fully real, and to begin to treat nature
as an object for careful consideration. Over the course of several
centuries, the Greeks progressed from mystical tribesmen inhabiting a
chaotic universe they believed was god-driven, to rational individuals in
control both of themselves and of a comprehensible world. These were the men
who, starting with nothing, created the philosophic foundations for all
subsequent civilization.
In the seventeenth century, there arose a mode of scientific procedure
usually associated with the names of Galileo and Francis Bacon. It was based
upon observation, reason, and experiment. Galileo's work established the
priority of experiment over deductive science (which was itself a great
advance over the use of myth and religion to explain natural phenomena).
Furthermore, Galileo's conclusions could not be ignored as a mere
intellectual oddity, for they had to be used in the practical business of
pointing cannons at the correct angle to compensate for the fall of
cannonballs in flight.
It has sometimes been maintained that Galileo's greatest contribution was
his method of thinking about the physical universe. Unfortunately the great
majority of philosophers were (and remain) unable to understand his method.
They still possess the deductive habit of reasoning from what SEEM to be
valid basic assumptions and rarely believe it necessary to check their
conclusions against the real universe.
By insisting on the experimental verification of scientific conjectures,
Galileo and his successors established a general test of scientific truth
which enabled scientists specializing in widely different disciplines to
accept and use each other's results. The shared method created an organized
scientific community, with a division of labor among scientists in various
specialized fields, all contributing to the accumulation of a demonstrably
valid body of knowledge. By the close of the seventeenth century, the scale
of Europe's scientific effort was already overwhelmingly greater than that
of any contemporary or earlier culture, and so too was the European
civilization's progress in understanding natural phenomena.
We are so much accustomed to think of organizations solely in terms of
hierarchical bureaucracies like armies, governments, or corporations that it
is difficult to realize that an enterprise so individualistic and non-
hierarchical as modern science can properly be said to be highly organized.
But such a narrow impression of organization must be dismissed as misleading
on the basis of the history of science. Without a formal hierarchy, Western
scientists created a scientific community within which they pursued shared
goals of understanding natural phenomena with dedication, cooperation,
collective conflict resolution, division of labor, specialization, and
information generation and exchange at a level of organizational efficiency
rarely matched among large groups, hierarchical or nonhierarchical. Western
science had another advantage over contemporary and antecedent sciences: it
arose at a time when political and religious authorities lacked the power to
suppress new ideas incompatible with conventional beliefs, though they often
tried to.
 * Science vs Magic
Every day we take for granted things that people 500 years ago dreamed
about, but could only think of in terms of magic. We can fly through the
air, stare into magic mirrors and watch things going on in other places,
even talk to people all over the world. We made all those things happen, but
we've used methods of doing so that people from way back could never have
imagined - because they had no comprehension of the natural principles
underlying these phenomena. Once you understand the principles involved,
what remains is merely a question of engineering. They imagined flying but
had to talk about levitation, because they couldn't see in advance the kind
of engineering needed to make the idea work.
Arthur Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic."
If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start
getting magic - what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is
miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore.
But it does no good to try to explain something as being a product of
science rather than magic, in speaking to people who have no idea what is
meant by "science" and who have a culturally-induced antipathy to rational
thinking. They lack the basic conceptual machinery that makes any rational
account of an objective world possible. They don't seem to share the
ordinary, commonsense notions of causality and consistency that are
necessary to even begin understanding the universe. They don't grasp that
the same causes always produce the same results. They don't see anything
natural about predictability at all. They act as if it were mysterious.
Machines - especially computers - baffle them. They talk instead about magic
and mysticism. They rely on some intuitive process that dwells deep below
rational thought.
This is not necessarily the fault of the ignorant people. Although there
is a vast untapped popular interest in the deepest scientific questions, for
many people the shoddily thought out doctrines of borderline science are the
closest approximation to comprehensible science readily available to them.
The popularity of pseudoscience should be a rebuke to the schools, the press
and commercial television for their sparse, unimaginative and ineffective
efforts at science education. This unfortunate situation is compounded by
the popular media's obsession with controversy and sensationalism. In its
rush to expose "dangers" to the public health and well-being, the
distortions and outright falsehoods it presents as "science" serve only to
corrupt what little factual knowledge the public does possess. To top it
off, we are beset by the quantum mystics, whose dim comprehension of
physics, and abysmal ignorance of philosophy do not in any way inhibit their
subjectivist metaphysical pronouncements. (In fact, the ideas of quantum
mechanics do not contain any reasons whatsoever for giving up the concept of
a reality that is independent of the mind.)
Amid the utter darkness of mysticism, scientific reason is a candle
lighting the way to sense. Science is an attempt to understand the world, to
get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. In
contrast to mysticism, the scientific method has been mostly successful:
microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was
considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
In every country we should be teaching our children the scientific method
and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. This is all that stands between us and
the barbaric darkness of mysticism.

Goethe: "Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always

serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are
always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her she despises and
only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal
her secrets."
 T.H. Huxley: "Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune
of evey one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing
a game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a
primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to
have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and
getting out of check? Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the
life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less,
of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of
the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It
is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us
being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is
the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the
game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is
hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But
also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the
smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest
stakes are paid, with that sort of overlflowing generosity with which the
strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated -
without haste, but without remorse."

* Examples of the Scientific Attitude applied

Nearly four centuries of experience since Galileo's time has shown that
it is frequently useful to depart from the real and to construct a model of
the system being studied. Some of the complications are stripped away, so a
simple and generalized mathematical structure can be built up on what is
left. Once that is done, the complicating factors can be restored one by
one, and the model suitably modified. To try to achieve the comlexities of
reality at one bound, without working through a simplified model first, is
so difficult that it is rarely attempted, and usually does not succeed when
it is.
Newton started with a mathematical construct of the solar system that
represented nature simplified: a point mass moving around a center of force.
Because he did not assume that the construct was an exact representation of
the physical world he was free to explore the properties and effects of a
mathematical attractive force even though he found the concept of a grasping
force "acting at a distance" to be abhorrent and not admissable in the realm
of good physics. Next he compared the consequences of his mathematical
construct with the observed principles and laws of the external world, such
as Kepler's law of areas and law of elliptical orbits. Where the
mathematical construct fell short Newton modified it. He made the center of
force not a mathematical entity but a point mass. From the modified
mathematical construct Newton concluded that a set of point masses circling
a central point mass attract one another and perturb one another's orbits.
Again he compared the construct with the physical world. Of all the planets,
Jupiter and Saturn are the most massive, and so he sought orbital
perturbations in their motions. With the help of John Flamsteed, Newton
found that the orbital motion of Saturn is perturbed when the two planets
are closest together. The process of repeatedly comparing the mathematical
construct with reality and then suitably modifying it led eventually to the
treatment of the planets as physical bodies with definite shapes and sizes.
After Newton had modified the construct many times he applied it to the
entirety of nature, asserting that the force of attraction, which he had
derived mathematically, is universal gravity. Since the mathematical force
of attraction works well in explaining and predicting the observed phenomena
of the world, Newton decided that the force must "truly exist" even though
the philosophy to which he adhered did not and could not allow such a force
to be part of a system of nature. And so he called for an inquiry into how
the effects of universal gravity might arise.

In 1830, the Swedish chemist Jakob Berzelius, who didn't believe that
molecules with equal structures but different properties were possible,
examined both tartaric acid and racemic acid in detail. With considerable
chagrin, he decided that even though he didn't believe it, it was
nevertheless so.

Charles Darwin: "In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my
systematic enquiry (into the mutability of species), I happened to read
'Malthus on Population,' and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle
for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of
the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these
circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and
unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation
of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work."

* Some Critiques of Science

Critic: "There is no poetry in science."
Isaac Asimov: "Not all the soaring genius of Shakespeare sufficed to lift
him to such empyrean heights as to reveal to him the vision of the universe
that bursts in upon the dullest scientist who now lives. In every branch of
science fascinations lurk, ready to burst out upon even the most plodding
soul. Peeping from behind the symbols of the mathematician are formulas,
such as the Mandelbrot Set, so beautiful in their subtle symmetry that no
artist could improve on them. Where can one come across forms of things not
only so thoroughly unknown but so majestically unknowable as in the quantum
world within the atom? All the dictates of "common sense" - based upon the
ordinary world about us - break down in the face of the ultimately tiny.
Imagine the poetry of a science that calmly abandons common sense in order
to preserve sense; a science that admits into its fold an ineluctable
uncertainty in order to be more nearly certain. What mysteries, what
clanking chains, what dim ghosts of Gothic romance can compare with the
mysterious muon-neutrino? There is poetry everywhere and in everything, and
it is most clearly present in the world that scientists dwell in."

"I question the accuracy and validity of the Scientific Method - Science
is young and clumsy - still too gross to truly measure some things."
Let us examine the accuracy, validity, and gross clumsiness of science by
taking a look at just a few of its actual accomplishments.
To begin with, here is a measure of the accuracy between a theoretical
prediction and its corresponding experimental measurement:
Experiments measure the electron's magnetic moment at 1.00115965221. The
theory of Quantum Electrodynamics puts it at 1.00115965246. To give you a
feeling for the accuracy of these numbers, consider them this way: If you
were to measure the distance from Los Angeles to New York to this accuracy,
it would be exact to the thickness of a human hair. I believe we can
conclude that the theory is reasonably close to reality.
As for the validity of scientific hypotheses - surely the most
outrageously unbelievable hypothesis of modern physics is the Quantum
Mechanics, and yet a clever application of the uncertainty principle (which
places a limit on the precision with which position can be known) yields
very fine-tuned control over a type of electron flow known as quantum
tunneling. The resulting device (the Scanning Tunneling Microscope,
manufactured by Digital Instruments, Inc.) uses the quantum tunneling effect
both to view, and to perform mechanical operations on, very tiny objects.
Right down to the level of individual atoms. At the IBM Zurich lab,
researchers used a Scanning Tunneling Microscope to cleave a single benzene
ring off of a dimethyl phthalate molecule.
In its practical application (where the validity of the Quantum Mechanics
can be measured by its commercial utility), an STM is used to monitor the
production quality of an optical-disk stamping machine.
And as for gross clumsiness, these three examples should suffice to
dispel that erroneous view:
The optical telescope on Palomar Mountain can detect a 10-watt light bulb
on the moon. This telescope could also measure the width of a needle - at a
distance of 5 miles. The best infrared telescopes could record the heat from
a rabbit on the moon - were it alive and hopping.
Using very long baseline interferometry, maser images can be made
accurate to 300 microarc-seconds. Were the human eye to have this resolving
power, you could read these words from about 3000 miles away.
Workers at the National Bureau of Standards used a Paul electromagnetic
trap to detect a single quantum jump of the outermost electron on a mercury
ion from its ground state to an intermediate state. That's one single
quantum jump of one single electron! Not quite the sort of thing you could
reach in and fondle with your finger.
Look again at the criticism - and consider the principle underlying it:
She really should not "question the accuracy and validity of the
Scientific Method" while she is writing with a ball-point pen on a sheet of
paper, probably supported by the plastic surface of a desktop, and
illuminated by an electric light bulb. You see what's happening - the author
is using the very thing she denies, in the act of denying it. This is an
excellent example of the Stolen Concept Fallacy: she is using the thing
while she is rejecting the thing.

If you have difficulty grasping the Uncertainty Principle, consider this:

It is easily possible to construct a square, having specified exactly the
length of a side. When you have done so, you will find that you cannot
measure the diagonal with exactness (because it is a function of the square
root of 2).
It is equally easy to construct a square having specified exactly the
length of the diagonal. But in this case you will be just as unable to
measure the exact length of the side.
Thus we are in the position of being able to specify one or the other of
two quantities - but not both simultaneously.
This exercise in simple geometry is a good example of the Uncertainty
Principle in action: the universe is built in such a fashion that we humans
are not omniscient - we can't know everything.

If you have difficulty with the notion of "mere chance being the
instrument of creation" try this experiment:
Take about a dozen teaspoons and drop them (randomly but with handles up)
into a soda glass. Tilt the glass to about a 45 degree angle and shake it.
You will see the spoons begin to nest together. This nesting is the
inevitable consequence of energy dissipation - of the interplay of the laws
of physics - as the spoons settle into a "least energy content"
configuration. When you consider that the fundamental morsels of matter
(atoms and molecules) are sets of identical objects (every water molecule,
for example, is exactly identical to every other) just like the spoons -
then it is not too hard to realize that they would fit together in certain
ways. Just like the spoons. This fitting together - on a larger and larger
scale - can account for many aspects of the world of living things we see
around us.
Always remember this: the words "chance" and "random" do not really
describe the world of Reality. What they DO describe is the state of human
knowledge. To be precise, they are terms that describe a state of human
ignorance. When I say that an event happens by "mere chance" all I am really
saying is that I do not precisely know what are the causal factors of that
event. Personally, I would much rather admit to my own ignorance of the
world than to invent, as an absolution for that ignorance, a Divinity to
account for things I cannot yet explain.
Heisenberg: "The laws of nature which we formulate mathematically in
quantum theory deal no longer with the elementary particles themselves but
with our knowledge of the particles."

A commonly encountered criticism is "How can you believe in something -

like an electron - which you can't possibly see?"
No one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the
brick, you see only the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple
assumption which helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons
is analogous.
The ultimate justification for the ideas of science is that logical
conclusions drawn from these ideas have led to useful solutions to real-life
problems. From science have flowed all those great inventions by means of
which mankind in general is able to exist with more comfort and in greater
numbers upon the face of the earth. Hence arise the great advantages of men
above brutes, and of civilization above barbarity. The acre of ripe wheat
that once took a dozen men and a dozen horses all day to cut and thresh is
now gathered up in six minutes as the combine rolls, one person at the
controls.
How can science achieve fantastic things in the material world and yet
you suppose for one minute that what we are doing is arbitrary and has no
absolute, unquestionable relationship to the facts of reality? How is it
possible that what we do works, if it doesn't correspond to reality?
Many scientists who are exposed to philosophy come away with the
realization that if their work were to be attempted within the muddy, vague,
and contradictory intellectual frame-of-reference of the philosophers, they
would never achieve anything useful. So they simply abandon all
philosophical considerations and confine their lives to the realm of clear,
precise and meaningful scientific investigation. Thus it is that during the
past 300 years the human race has gained an immense store of practical
knowledge about the natural world while the philosophers are still
struggling to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Steven Weinberg: "I know of NO ONE who has participated actively in the
advance of physics in the post-war period whose research has been
significantly helped by the work of philosophers."
Their talk is vague nonsense. At times their terms are so loosely defined
that what they say cannot help but be partly true. Unfortunately, the sort
of language that is admired by many philosophers does not, in fact, mean
anything at all. All too often, they use language not as a means of
communication but as a way to establish and defend an academic reputation.
But there is nothing surprising here. In the mind of a professional
philospher rhetoric is always more important than reality. Perhaps it would
be more accurate to say that in his mind rhetoric IS reality.

It was difficult for Satan alone to mislead the whole world, so he

appointed prominent philosophers in different localities.

* Why Objectivism is rejected

Max Planck observed: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by
convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because
its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar
with it."
A whole generation of adherents must frequently die off before an old
theory can be replaced by a superior version. This is in part because humans
invest so much self-esteem in their ideas (as opposed to their thinking
process) that any challenge to the ideas assumes the threat of a personal
attack on their ego.
Objectivism, in revealing much of the nature of psychological reality,
has also disclosed why many of its own important findings are still
rejected: the ego of man sees that what the Objectivists have found - if
analyzed and digested - would change ego itself. And man's greatest fear
then rises to defend ego: the animal dread of any change in his personal
identity. Only those courageous enough to master that primordial fear have
been able to understand, and to benefit by, Objectivism. Even where the ego
itself is not threatened, an unacceptable burden of self-responsibility is
laid on the individual. It is easier to reject the philosophy than to bear
the burden.

In a popular work of fiction, the story is often designed mainly to

provide entertainment: the pleasure of observing the characters and events
for their own sake, with no deeper significance intended. This is why
popular fiction so often seems to satisfy what Rand describes as "the
psycho-epistemological role of art" much better than many serious works that
may give us great insights but little entertainment. And this is why Rand's
own fiction is so frequently classified as merely popular fiction, since her
works, like popular works, offer exciting stories that involve the reader
emotionally and imaginatively in the story world. But this does not mean
that her works should be dismissed as superficial fiction, or that they
should be read just for pleasure.
Rand is frequently reviled, not just because she was an egoist, an
atheist, and a pro-capitalist, but because she did not present her ideas in
a "scholarly" fashion. This is very unpalatable to most philosophers. They
want someone who documents what she says, defends it, and deals with
contrary positions. Their focus is not on physical reality but on statements
made by other philosophers. Rand pretty much dismissed other positions and
went directly on to make her own identifications of reality. She was usually
right to dismiss them, and the reasons she gave were usually correct, but to
most scholars encountering her for the first time her dismissal is
personally upsetting. Some find her style so offensive, in the sense of
being non-scholarly, they refuse to read anything else she wrote. She did
not play by the rules of their game. She did not deal with their arguments.
She just brushed them aside and proceeded to make accurate identifications
of fundamental truths - not merely responses to other people's
dissertations.
But this process by which Rand is rejected is merely part of a technique
that has been used for centuries to advocate philosophical ideas that have
no relation to reality. It works like this:
The conclusion must be brazenly clear, but the proof must be shrouded in
unintelligibility (this is the "scholarly fashion" of presentation mentioned
above). The proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader's
critical faculty. To provide a veneer of sophistication, the author may
include many pages of abstruse technical notes, which generate an almost
impenetrable aura of erudition. The students will believe that the
professors know the proof, the professors will believe that the commentators
know it, the commentators will believe that the author knows it - but the
author is self-blinded to the fact that no proof exists and none was ever
offered. Within a few generations, the number of commentaries will have
grown to such proportions that the original work will be considered a
subject of philosophical specialization requiring a lifetime of study - and
any refutation of the author's theory will be ignored or rejected if
unaccompanied by a full discussion of the theories of all the commentators,
a task which no one will be able to undertake. This is the process by which
Kant and Hegel acquired their dominance. Many professors of philosophy today
have no idea of what Kant actually said. And no one has ever read Hegel,
even though many have looked at every word on his every page. (As J.S. Mill
remarked: "Conversancy with Hegel tends to deprave one's intellect.")
This process is not necessarily a deliberate attempt to defraud people.
It may be merely the inevitable consequence of how a certain kind of people
handle ideas. As Branden observed, genuine self-esteem results from
comparing oneself not with other people (or their opinions) but with the
facts of reality. A person who lacks genuine self-esteem builds a pseudo
self-esteem by comparing himself with other people. The most obvious example
is the braggart who does NOT say "I can do it well," but says "I can do it
better than YOU can!" When the braggart becomes a philosopher, his main
intellectual focus is not on understanding, developing and expanding ideas
which are the expressions of TRUTH - his main focus is on interacting,
either positively or negatively, with statements made by OTHER PEOPLE (his
own personal "significant others").
Rand is rejected because she did not fit into this category. Her focus
was directed toward the identification of facts, not to the analysis of
other people's opinions.
People focused on facts will tend to enter fact-oriented fields and
become scientists, engineers, technicians, or mechanics, depending on their
level of intellectual power and their specific area of personal interest.
People with a more social-metaphysical focus will tend to become
philosophers, scholars, politicians, or journalists, in a similar manner.
Of course there are people who buck this trend: Ayn Rand as a philosopher
is an outstanding example.

* The Commentator Syndrome

The commentators I mentioned above usually have an encyclopedic
familiarity with the writings of virtually everyone who has written
critically about an idea. They at times show great skill in synthesizing
passages scattered throughout a multitude of sources. But in spite of this,
they may have little or no comprehension of the factual essence of the idea
that was the original object of their commentary. They deal not with
reality, but with other people's interpretations of it. They dream of
achieving "definitive" texts and seek to determine which one of many
versions of a manuscript is the most authentic. Quite often they are so
bogged down with word apprehension that simple facts escape them.
They focus on arbitrary academic distinctions and disputes, rather than
on underlying principles. Without fundamental principles to refer to, the
commentator is totally dependent on the words of previous scholars.
Consequently debate becomes increasingly attenuated into a series of false
alternatives. The context of discussion becomes more and more nebulous,
always requiring that everybody's thought be tacked onto some previous,
established thought rather than attempting to refer to reality. Debate on a
subject becomes lost in an argument over what so-and-so actually wrote, what
he meant, how he has been interpreted, etc. Like a swamp that engulfs a
myriad of streams, the commentators are tolerant, all-embracing, and
stagnant.

From the introduction to an essay by Fred Seddon in a recent issue of a

philosophical journal:
"The purpose of this study is to examine Adolf Grunbaum's claim that
F.S.C. Northrop's interpretation of Newton's concept of relative space is
incorrect."
You gotta go through Seddon to get to Grunbaum, go through Grunbaum to
get to Northrop, and then go through Northrop to get to the concept of
relative space. It would require a lifetime of study to dig through this
mountain of commentary.
 Here is a complaint from a commentator (a well-known professor of
philosophy), expressing his dissatisfaction with a discussion in which the
participants were attempting to identify the nature of the concept
"anarchism":
"It is rather perplexing to see supposedly morally upright people
embarking on sketchy discussions of the issue, ones in which no quotations
are used, no careful reproductions of the arguments of their adversaries.
Most of those who are critical of anarchism manage to omit reference to the
actual statements of the arguments advanced by those they criticize. I have
dealt with [other's] versions of anarchism, in ways that I think adhere to
scholarly caution and precision - i.e., I have used their words to
characterize their views and then examined these views with those words in
mind. To just jump in there and state the views without reference to the
words of those who advance them is, well, irresponsible."
He was dissatisfied because of the lack of a detailed examination of the
commentary. I was dissatisfied because of the lack of contemplation of
fundamental truths.

* Objectivism in the Universities

For thirty years now we've had Objectivists trying to get established in
the universities. They've had very little success. Why? Not because they're
stupid or incompetent, quite the contrary. The problem is that Objectivism,
being a scientific rather than a scholarly approach to philosophy, can never
gain real acceptance in academia unless it gives up the very essence of its
approach.
Philosophy is a "scholarly" subject, rather than scientific. There are
competing schools of thought - Aristotelian, Plationist, Kantian,
Positivist, etc. - and there is an implicit but inescapable relativism: at
any given time, although one particular school of thought may be in the
ascendant, the idea is never considered that one view could be permanently
accepted as being absolutely correct and unchallengeable. As one philosopher
put it, "OF COURSE philosophical problems are unsolvable." If you look into
the typical philosophy textbook, you'll find it stated as a truism that
philosophy can never, never achieve the kind of certainty that science has.
So, for Objectivism to triumph in the universities, we would have to do
something far more difficult than getting other philosophers to accept
Objectivist ideas. We would have to get them to renounce the philosophical
relativism that is fundamental to their scholarly culture. (See the *
Newspeak section of Chapter 2 for some thoughts on a similar epistemological
relativism.) That's why the whole approach of gaining credibility in the
universities is futile.
See reference
But why should the best Objectivist thinkers focus on the existing
universities, where our enemies are most entrenched, most intolerant, and
most secure? We should instead be building a whole new intellectual culture
of our own, from the grass roots. The abolition of the Nathaniel Branden
Institute was a tragic error.
The Objectivist university would be an institution in which there would
be respect for the customers. The professor would cease to be an ivory-tower
intellectual. He would be immediately responsive to the real-life practical
needs of his students. A diversity of intellectual interests would be
fostered, and these would reflect REAL needs, needs that people would be
willing to finance for themselves, not whatever passing, subsidized,
intellectual fad exists at the moment. (In any case, with modern computers
it may not be long before the university, as a physical entity, becomes
largely needless.)
The academic opponents of Objectivism are more realistic than its
advocates. They know quite well that in a rational, individualistic, morally
judging, free-market culture they would not be able to dominate the
universities. They would be out of a job, out of prestige, and out on their
ass. Objectivism will win out, not by winning debates, but by filling the
growing intellectual vacuum (both in and out of the university), by offering
practical working solutions where no one else can.
We'll know Objectivism has succeeded when, and only when, thinkers like
Kant and Hegel are considered part, not of philosophy, but of the history of
philosophy; just as the ideas of the alchemists are taught today only as
history of chemistry, not as part of the science of chemistry.

Chapter 2
Thinking

* Tools of Thought
A human being is the only creature with the ability to see the world as
he wants it to be rather than as it actually is. It is this trait that makes
it so difficult for him to recognize reality when he is confronted by it.
This difficulty is compounded by the fact that his mind didn't come with an
instruction manual.
Most people believe that consciousness is some sort of indeterminate
faculty which has no nature, no specific identity and, therefore, no
requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used. Such
people abuse, subvert and starve their consciousness in a manner they would
not dream of applying to their hair, stomach, or toenails. Even among those
who realize that the mind has requirements, there are few who realize also
that thinking is not an instinct. One of the most widespread myths is the
belief that everyone "just knows" how to think and that no learning process
is required. Assuming the knowledge of how to think to be self-evident,
people take their own mental processes as necessarily valid; as not to be
questioned or examined. People do not improve their thinking because it has
not even occurred to them to consider the possibility of doing so. Thus the
most important of human functions is left to blind chance - or worse, to
subversive influences maliciously imposed upon them with the intent of
corrupting their mental functioning. Nothing can be more infamous than
intellectual tyranny; to put shackles on the mind is in some ways vastly
worse than putting chains on the body. An example of such (self-inflicted)
enslavement can be seen in people's willingness to lie, cheat, and fake
reality without any concern for what this does to their own minds and their
own lives. The man who lies chronically makes himself vulnerable to being
deceived because he diminishes his capacity to discriminate truth from
falsehood. If you tell yourself a lie often enough, you'll eventually
convince yourself it's the truth. Then when you come up against difficulties
and dangers, you won't believe in them and thus won't be able to take the
proper precautions against them.

* Language
"Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he
cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics
of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea with a symbol,
be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely
reaction to symbols. When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols
in certain, set fashions - rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the
symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the
phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in
structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we
think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been
poorly chosen, we think not-sanely." ......Robert Heinlein.
The "logic-mathematics" that Heinlein speaks of is NOT an instinctive
bundle of knowledge! It is something that each individual must recognize and
learn, lest he be left floundering in a mire of intellectual chaos.
Our minds contain the world in symbolic form. The explicit awareness of
the nature of those symbols gives us the power to shape the world to the
achievement of our goals.

"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish

thoughts." ......George Orwell.
There is perhaps no better analysis and critique of the corruption of
language than that given by Orwell in his book, "1984."

All that is necessary for language to become corrupt is that those who
use it lose (or fail to acquire) objectivity. Earlier - more primitive -
generations of mankind had objectivity forced upon them by the exigencies of
their life: the hard facts of reality would kill them if they failed for a
moment to recognize and accomodate those facts. Modern man, however, is
greatly sheltered by the nature of technological civilization and the
structure of society. These things provide him with the opportunity to live
as a parasite upon other men, thus minimizing his necessity for dealing
directly with the facts of reality.
Consider, for example, Clinton's description of his 1994 tax law as a
"bill of rights." He does not have the ability to discriminate between a
politically expeditious label (after all, who could be opposed to such a
sacrosanct American tradition as our great "Bill of Rights"?) and the actual
nature of "rights." He lacks objectivity. Thus, he may be perfectly sincere
and totally honest in naming his tax law, but nevertheless his cognitive
deficiency results in the semantic corruption of the concept of rights. Much
of such corruption, associated with Newspeak, is the inevitable consequence
of a mere lack of objectivity.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated,
will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though rarely said, that
uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying intellect.
Just as a currency, through the process of becoming more and more inflated,
has less and less purchasing power, so words, through an analogous process
of inflation, through being used more and more indiscriminately, are
progressively emptied of meaning.
For people who write advertisements, language no longer has any cognitive
meaning at all. They use words simply as tools to manipulate other people's
economic behavior. For example: developers that used to sell houses now sell
homes. Even the word "townhouse", a relatively common term a few years ago,
is falling aside, being replaced by the supposedly more sumptuous sounding
"townhome." There used to be a good, clear, cognitive distinction between a
house and a home. Now, that difference has been altered past the point of
meaning. With thousands of "homes" springing up all over the country, how
can we possibly still attach sentimental meaning to places that we can
REALLY call home?
This phenomenon severely restricts attempts to deal with derivative
concepts also. Consider "homelessness." Attempts to combat homelessness are
almost exclusively directed toward putting the homeless people back into
dwellings. But this is a superficial approach to the real problem, for
houselessness is only one aspect of homelessness. "Home" implies basic
shelter, but it also entails connection to a community, including friends,
family, businesses, organizations that share common values and beliefs, such
as clubs and churches, as well as caretaking institutions.
Having your own home means much more than just having a dwelling. It's
your own special corner of the world. It's the place that warmly welcomes
you at the end of a hard day's work. It's where your kids learn to crawl,
walk, and run. It's not just a place in which to live your life, it's a
cherished part of your life. You can buy or be given a house, but you can't
buy a home. You can only make a home.
Homelessness marks not merely a loss of residence but also a rupture of
community and family ties and spiritual existence. The mere fact that you
live in a house does not entail that you are in a home.

Orwell contends that political language has been corrupted by insincerity

and that the debasement is aided by honest writers who adopt the corrupted
language by default. Many words have become almost meaningless, and to use
them without defining in what sense they are being used is, at best, to
foist that corruption upon the reader; at worst it is to commit outright
fraud.
Corruption of language blunts the edge of critical thought in favor of
timid orthodoxy, a process necessary to both totalitarian ideology and
religious dogma. To control language is to control people's thoughts - and
ultimately to control the people themselves.
Without semantic competence, you have no means of identifying the essence
of either your own ideas or opposing ideas. Integrity becomes dubious at
best, self-contradiction becomes easily possible, and rational persuasion
becomes meaningless. Besides engendering intellectual chaos, incompetence in
language creates a social caste system. Those who can construct well-formed
sentences can think and therefore be independent; those who cannot are more
ignorant, less productive and more easily intimidated and manipulated. Those
who don't (or can't) think for themselves become the slaves of those who do.
The greatest weapon of exploitation, manipulation, and oppression is the
misuse of language. It is only by being aware of the function of language as
a tool of social, economic, and political control that we can begin to fight
those who use language against us.

Words denote concepts - and concepts must be used in specific ways if

they are to serve as tools of knowledge. The science that studies the
methods of combining concepts into coherent groups is grammar. We are able
to recognize, remember and manipulate concepts only if their arrangements
are coherent - only if the sentences we use are grammatical. We are able to
follow a lengthy symbolic presentation because we use words first, then
words organized into clauses, then sentences, and then paragraphs. We have
to focus gradually and in installments, especially when a very complex issue
is being considered.
There may be a dozen concepts in a sentence, and if you just strung them
out at random you couldn't hold them all in your mind at once. But if
several of them are integrated into each clause, and the clauses are
integrated into one proposition, then, and only then, can you hold all the
dozen in your mind.

* Strength And Leverage

I see two major aspects to intellectual competence: one is intelligence
(that which is supposedly measured by an IQ test) and the other is the tools
and procedures by which that intelligence is applied. I call these aspects
Strength and Leverage.
Strength pertains to the innate competence that is genetically built-in
to the nervous system. Is this alterable? Is it enhanceable? Is it even
measureable? I doubt it, but I do not know for sure. My only real knowledge
of this attribute is a relative one - I can see that I possess a greater
ability to perceive, identify and integrate the facts of reality than some
other people do (and, of course, that some other people possess a greater
such ability than I do). When I make comparisons between myself and others I
observe introspectively that there is a difference in fundamental
understanding - a difference which, as far as I can tell, does not depend on
the use of any acquired intellectual tools. I can identify that "fundamental
understanding" only in a very subjective sense. I cannot make a specific
statement explicitly defining it or describing how it works.
Leverage is quite a different thing. It consists of the intellectual
methods by which Strength is applied to achieve an understanding of the
world. Language is by far the first and most fundamental element of
Leverage, followed closely by Mathematics. Some of the other elements are
the Laws of Logic given us by Aristotle, the Scientific Method, the
procedures of the Military Staff Study, and the principles of the philosophy
of Objectivism.
The first and foremost benefit of the application of these tools to one's
life is that it puts you into close cognitive contact with reality. If the
primary function of intelligence is to understand reality, then an
intellectual tool which puts you in contact with reality enhances your life,
and thus is a major benefit to you. Those creatures who find everyday
experience a muddled jumble of events with no regularity and no
predictability are in grave peril. The universe belongs to those who, at
least to some degree, have figured it out.
Most of the elements of Leverage constitute a particular subset of
acquired knowledge: knowledge of an epistemological nature. Knowledge of
"how to think." It is clear that in regard to Leverage there is a great
potential for enhancement of one's intellectual functioning, and, to the
contrary, lack of Leverage or use of mistaken Leverage can seriously inhibit
or even destructively interfere with this functioning.
I believe strongly that the level of one's manifested intellectual
competence can indeed be raised. It is clear to me that the best way, (and,
perhaps, the only way?) to go about this is to improve one's Leverage.

* IQ As A Potential
As you know, there are aptitude tests for many fields of endeavor. They
are tests designed to determine whether or not (or to what extent) you have
a potential ability for a given activity. They can tell you if you have an
aptitude for Mechanics, Mathematics, Gymnastics, Music, Chemistry, Cooking,
or just about any other occupation you might care to consider. I submit that
an IQ test is nothing more or less than an aptitude test for "Thinking." I
would like to draw an analogy between Intellectuality and Music, in order to
shed some light on just what the significance of IQ is.
Consider that in the realm of music there are two things necessary to the
formation of a musician. The first is, of course, an aptitude for this field
of endeavor - what we might call an "M.Q." or musicality quotient,
representing your potential ability to engage successfully in this activity.
And the second is the means by which this potential is actualized. Having
the highest MQ in the world will not automatically result in your being a
good musician. To become one, you must undertake a lengthy period of study
and diligent practice in order to master the procedures involved in
transforming this potential into an actuality. No one will dispute this in
regard to music, but how many realize that the same principle applies to
intellectuality? You have to LEARN how to think, in just the same way that
you have to learn how to make music. And when I say "learn how to think" I
don't mean just "get educated." I don't mean just go to school and acquire a
multitude of facts in a large number of fields of study. One would not
become a musician merely by acquiring wide erudition in the fields of, say,
Geology, Anthropology, Economics or Political Science. No, one must study a
particular set of principles - those pertaining to the field of music. Just
so, to transform an IQ into a practicing intellectual proficiency you have
to study a particular set of principles - epistemological principles. A
person is no more born with an automatic knowledge of how to think than he
is born with an automatic knowledge of how to make music. I'm sure that each
of you is aware that there was a time (maybe, if you are younger than I am,
you can even remember that time) when you first learned the proper
formulation of a syllogism, the nature of an ad hominem argument, or the
pitfalls of the post hoc fallacy. Just as there are proper ways and improper
ways to address your hands to a musical instrument, so there are proper and
improper ways to address your mind to the task of identifying reality. If a
musically untrained person puts his hand to the keyboard of an accordion the
result will be a discordant raucous racket, simply because he is ignorant of
the proper procedures. Likewise, if an epistemologically untrained person
puts his mind to a philosophical problem the result is likely to be a
hideous hodge-podge of insane idiocy - for the same reason. You may have a
very high potential - either MQ or IQ - but before you can actualize that
potential you've got to learn how.

* The Major High-IQ Societies

IQ Annual
%ile required Membership Dues
------ -------- ---------- ------
Triple Nine Society 99.9 150 500 $12
456 Coolidge Ave.
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15228

Intertel 99 136 2000 $20

Box 15580
Lakewood, Colo. 80215

Mensa 98 132 100K $45

201 Main St. Suite 1101
Fort Worth TX 76102
1-800-66MENSA

(This info may be out-of-date. I have not been associated with any of
these groups since the mid-1980s.)

I have been rather disappointed with these people. In examining them I

found that the possession of a high IQ is no guarantee at all of
intellectual competence. Having a high intelligence does not remove a
person's weaknesses, ignorances, prejudices, blind spots, or ambitions; it
just gives him more power and energy to indulge them. An untrained mind has
little control over its own power.
On the other hand, I have known people whose IQs are not very high but
who are much more worthwhile and competent intellectually because they have
well-trained minds and are possessed of cognitive techniques enabling them
to manipulate abstract ideas with much success.
The principles of Objectivism provide an enormously powerful intellectual
tool. The incalculable value of these ideas makes their desirability seem
blatantly obvious - to me, anyway. But I was very sad to discover that other
high-IQ people are quite indifferent - or even hostile - to them. I found
only about two dozen Mensans, half-dozen members of Intertel, and NO ONE
above this level who was interested in applying these principles.
 * Useful Thinking Techniques
For successful goal-achievement, you should have a clear and explicit
statement of your goals and the rationale for them. This provides you with a
firm and continual awareness of the principles that guide and shape the
actions you must take to achieve those goals. It will enable you to live
according to your philosophy by taking the appropriate actions to implement
its principles. In the absence of a solid, explicitly-held ideological
foundation, your principles and thus the consistency of your behavior will
ultimately be compromised. You must be able to clearly visualize a state of
existence in order to fully understand what that state requires of you and
what, if any, benefits you may receive from it.
Implicit knowledge is that which is available to your consciousness but
which you have not conceptualized. Implicit knowledge is not a substitute
for explicit knowledge. Values which you cannot identify, but merely sense
implicitly, are not in your control. You cannot tell what they depend on or
require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. Implicit
knowledge, since it has not been identified, cannot be challenged or
corrected.

I find that there are three levels of clarity to which I can hold an
idea:
The first, and lowest, is just having the thought inside my head,
probably in a rather vague form.
I can force myself to the second level of clarity by making a verbal
statement of the thought. When I have to translate vague, unspecific mental
images into spoken words, the idea becomes more precise and unambiguous. For
this reason I deliberately talk to myself quite frequently - or talk to my
cat (but he rarely finds any of my ideas worth commenting on!)
The third, and highest, level of clarity is reached when I sit down and
put the words into written form. This way they get saved as perceptual
concretes and I can review them and rework them and rearrange them until I
get a really accurate presentation of the idea.
A biographer of Thomas Edison, commenting on Edison's 3,500 notebooks,
remarks that Edison "reveled in his notebook drawings as sheer process, the
life of his mind in full gear. He wrote literally to find out what he was
thinking."

When trying to define a concept, you may find it useful to consider its
opposite and see if it would be appropriate to define the concept in terms
of the negative (or absence) of its opposite. For example: Freedom as the
absence of Slavery - Innocence as the absence of Guilt.

Batting Average - Track Record.

One of the best ways I know of to gain a more precise comprehension of
the world you live in is the process of keeping "batting averages." A good
place to start this process is with the local weather service. Just keep a
daily journal in which you record the weather forecast, and then alongside
it a note of your observations of the weather that actually occurred during
the forecast period. This will give you REAL knowledge of just how useful
the weather forecasts are.
Another place to apply the process is to your favorite economic
forecaster. Be careful - you may discover to your dismay that his advice is
pretty much useless for anything except getting your money into his pocket.
You can turn this process back through time and make some interesting
discoveries. For example, consider the FedGov's forecasts concerning
petroleum supplies:
In 1917, the Interior Department reported that only 27 years of oil
remained. In 1920, the US Geological Survey reported only four years were
left. By 1924 this had changed to six years. An ad in the WSJ (21Jan1976),
placed by the American Electric Power Company, showed a wistful-looking baby
over the caption "By the time he's out of 8th grade America will be out of
oil and gas." The ad quoted US Government figures claiming that "our proven
reserves will only last 12 years."
Claims like these keep Chicken Little busy, but have no other practical
use. The real danger in them is for the gullible people who put their money
where the mouths of the prognosticators are. Don't be gullible - calculate
the batting average of any person or institution that makes forecasts you
consider relevant to your life. This process can be a great help to you in
deciding where to invest your money and your time so as not to waste them.
KEEPING SCORE ON OUR MODERN PROPHETS by Kurt Saxon contains four years of
observations on such people as Jean Dixon. It clearly shows their laughable
record at prophesying.
If you don't keep batting averages, you will end up accepting things by
the process of proof by selected instances.
The most important batting average you can keep is your own.
An important thing to keep in mind is that the records you maintain MUST
be in WRITING, and must be written down immediately as the observed
phenomena occur. You shouldn't trust your memory.

* Memory
Perhaps the gravest and most widespread intellectual flaw is the implicit
belief that one's personal memory is accurate and permanent. In fact, it is
neither. But with a little help from the tool of literacy, it can become
both. Memory is a fickle, deceptive thing - and the memory you should most
mistrust is your own. There are very few people who recognize this flaw and
take the appropriate precautions to overcome it by using literacy as an
adjunct to their fallible memory. Most people have never learned how to
remember, and in the Hindu Land of Endless Paths those poor souls are
condemned to repeat their follies forever, and never gain Nirvana. But
mature people don't have to be reminded anymore, they do know how to
remember.

David Hume: "As memory alone acquaints us with the continuance and extent
of perceptions, it is to be considered, upon that account chiefly, as the
source of personal identity. Had we no memory, we should never have any
notion of that chain of causes and effects which constitute our self or
person."
In order to know your self you must remember your past. You have to
preserve knowledge of the important facts of your life, and you have to
acquire the power to reproduce and coordinate your memories competently.
Only thus can you preserve the continuity of your self - the knowledge of
who you are. This is the function of a journal, and the reason why everyone
should keep one. It fixes - solidifies - your history. You must preserve
your history in writing. You can't hold all the significant information in
your head simultaneously, and you are a pretentious fool if you think you
can.
Einstein: "It is well possible that an individual in retrospect sees a
uniformly systematic development, whereas the actual experience took place
in kaleidoscopic particular situations. The manifoldness of the external
situations and the narrowness of the momentary content of consciousness
bring about a sort of atomizing of the life of every human being."

Of all the aspects of human intellectuality, memory is probably the most

easily and readily improvable. Just a little effort in this direction will
soon produce a considerable increase in your nemnonic ability. (I never can
remember how to spell that word.)
Here are a few techniques I use to improve my memory:
Be literate: a little notebook in the pocket serves as a memory flywheel.
The three levels of cognitive clarity I mentioned above are also three
levels of memory retention.
See reference
I have a little computer game program that tests and improves your short-
term memory for recalling numbers. Send me a 3 1/2 inch floppy, MS-DOS
format, and I will give you this program.
Memorize poems and short stories. By the time you can recite the Rime of
the Ancient Mariner (it takes nigh onto 25 minutes) you will have a middling
good memory.
Get someone to whom you can recite back things you have read. After I
have read the latest SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, he leafs through it and asks me to
describe what's on each page.
These little exercises have given me an enormously powerful ability to
recall things I see and hear. In fact, I have been surprised to discover
that although I did not have an exceptional memory during my youth, I have
actually developed a photographic memory during the past couple decades.
Bear in mind, though, that while you are exercising your memory you must
consult an objective observer. What you must test your memory against are
objectively observable facts, NOT the memory of another person! This is VERY
important! Don't play the "memory game":
Are you listening to me?
Yeah, I'm listening.
Well then tell me what I just said!
Observe the two fallacious assumptions involved in this exchange. First,
he assumes that his recall is better than yours. Second, he assumes that HIS
memory is to be used as a standard of comparison against which YOURS is to
be measured.
If you test your memory against someone else's, you aren't really making
a scientifically valid measurement of your ability. Worse than this is the
psycho-epistemological damage you are inflicting on your mind. Whenever you
play the memory game you are telling your subconscious mind that reality is
to be determined by reference to another person's consciousness. You are
making yourself into a social metaphysician.
It is quite all right to use someone else as an observer in order to
confirm the accuracy of your memory, but NOT as a standard of reference for
your memory.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." - Lewis Carroll

Nietzsche: "I did it, says memory; I couldn't have, says pride - and
remains implacable. Eventually, memory yields."

When you leave you must remember not to go the way you came, for the old
arrows and signs will no longer help.

Bibliography:
THE ART OF CROSS-EXAMINATION by Francis L. Wellman.
Wellman shows how surprisingly unreliable memory frequently is.
THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD by Carl Sagan, 1996, Ballantine Book #345-40946-
9.
In Chapters 8 and 9 Sagan deals with the unreliability of memory, memory
manipulation, fraud, hallucination and fantasies.

* Procedures for Carrying on a Discussion

 The First Law of Debate: Anything is possible, if you don't know what you
are talking about!!
"Discussion among rational people is best conducted as a partnership in
discovering the truth, not as combat or indoctrination. Discussion and
debate are values only if they are means to the discovery of the truth." ...
David Kelley
If a sensible discussion is to occur, the participants must do several
things:
Agree on the subject to be discussed.
Define the terms encompassing this subject.
Identify the principles underlying the various approaches to dealing with
this subject.
Decide, by examining the consequences which ensue from the principles,
which of these approaches is the best one to use.
Determine the best way to implement this approach.
Each participant must make a contribution appropriate to the presentation
the others have made. Each must try to further the investigation.

If you want to make a presentation to a hostile audience, here are some

recommendations:
Your purpose should be merely to make your position known, clearly and
briefly, so that your audience can see what your ideas are. If anyone wants
to learn more about them, the burden of intellectual responsibility lies
upon them to solicit - not upon you to impose. Proselytizing is not really
the libertarian way. As a libertarian, you must recognize the right of the
other person to live his life according to HIS choices, not your choices. No
matter how stupidly foolish you believe those choices to be, it's HIS life -
NOT yours. Don't try to shove your ideas down his throat. We are NOT
Jehovah's Witnesses!
You owe a rational statement only to those who are making an effort to
know. Those who are making an effort NOT to know should not be a concern of
yours. A positive interest is one that says "How can I benefit from this
man's ideas?" A negative interest is one that says "How can I poke holes in
this man's argument?"
Your procedure in such a presentation should be:
To educate only those sincerely interested in learning.
Not to refute contentious assertions nor to correct dogmatic errors nor
to challenge erroneous assumptions.
Not to attempt discussion with intellectually loose people nor those
whose approach involves ridiculing or belittling rationality.

If you want to communicate with dummies you will have to make allowances
for the dummies. And you will usually find that the allowances preclude
effective communication.

* Criticism
The experience of having my essays published, and dealing with the
resulting feedback, has led me to identify several types of criticism:
Irrelevant: Remarks that have no rational justification, do not in any
way apply to the idea being criticized, and contribute nothing to the
subject under discussion. But can this really be called criticism?
Combative: Remarks intended mainly to provoke dispute. This is what I get
from the kind of person who listens only for the purpose of contradicting
me.
Corrective: An analysis that exposes an important flaw in my
presentation, thus clarifying the subject under discussion.
Contributive: Commentary that expands upon the idea presented, furthering
it and widening its applicability.
 In dealing with criticism you should keep clearly in mind the distinction
between a denial and a refutation. A denial is merely a declaration of
rejection. A refutation, on the other hand, is a logical proof that
demonstrates an error.

* The Scientific Method

The cognitive processes required for scientific thought are very
different from those that underlie so-called common sense. This is because
nature is just too complicated to be comprehended by the type of simple,
day-to-day observations, never systematically made, that result in
commonsense explanations for various phenomena. Common sense provides no
more than some raw material required for scientific thinking.
The scientific method is an epistemological technique used to form
scientific concepts. It is comprised of several elements:
1) Recognition of facts that appear to be related, but whose relationship
is unknown.
2) Observation and experimentation to collect data about those facts.
3) Analysis of the data.
4) Formulation of an hypothesis that attempts to explain the
relationship.
5) Testing of the hypothesis against all known evidence.
6) Continual testing as new evidence is obtained.

Some precepts of the Scientific Method:

New and speculative proposals do not warrant consideration as long as the
observed facts are adequately accounted for by the theories that already
exist.
A proposal should not be considered if no credible evidence has been
presented that it has any value. (See the FALSIFIABILITY fallacy.)
Those explanations should be accepted which involve the fewest
assumptions.

Propositions derived by inference from scientific data, and intended to

describe a natural phenomenon:
Assumption - something accepted without proof. It is incorrect to speak
of an assumption as either true or false, since there is no way of proving
it to be either. (If there were, it would no longer be an assumption.) It is
better to consider assumptions as either useful or useless, depending on
whether or not deductions made from them lead to a firmer grasp of reality.
Conjecture - a speculative idea which, although backed by little or no
evidence, can serve as a guide for further investigation.
Hypothesis - a tentative explanation backed by too little evidence to
support a firm chain of cause-and-effect. One formulates a hypothesis being
guided by one's knowledge of fact. The hypothesis should explain the
greatest number of, and/or the most fundamental, aspects of the phenomenon.
Using the hypothesis, one next deduces how entities under certain conditions
should act. Then, if one observes such action and, within the context of
one's knowledge can account for it only by the hypothesis which predicted
it, it follows that the hypothesis has been confirmed. But because we are
not omniscient, that same context of knowledge might give rise to other
hypotheses. This is why we need the process of experimental confirmation.
Theory - a working model supported by a preponderance of the evidence.
Law - a description that has been found to be always invariable under the
same conditions.

Almost every scientifically conducted experiment can, at least ideally,

be reduced to two broad steps: first, determine the variables that affect
the outcome of the experiment; second, set up conditions such that one of
the variables can be altered while the rest are kept constant. From the data
obtained in this way the experimenter can modify his hypothesis as to which
variables matter, in what way they matter, to what degree they matter, and
which don't. Thus his mental image grows closer and closer to an accurate
representation of reality.
Scientific knowledge (to be precise, the progress of scientific
knowledge) is cumulative in nature. You start with a foundation and then you
build upon that foundation. That's why science has progressed to such a
tremendous extent during the past 300 years. If physicists spent all their
time arguing about the validity of the First Law of Thermodynamics, they
would never make any progress at all. And if mathematicians spent all their
time arguing about whether or not 2+2=4 there would never be any progress in
mathematics.
But you must always remember that one of the really important skills of a
scientist is in knowing what things to argue about. Doubting must be VERY
carefully selective!! Its improper application has sometimes been disastrous
for the progress of science. On the one hand there is the impulse to regard
almost NOTHING as being open to question. On the other hand is the impulse
to regard EVERYTHING as being open to question. On the one hand are the
"know it alls" and on the other hand are the "know nothings." Obviously
neither position is true. Humans are neither omniscient nor totally
ignorant.
Doubting is at least as important to the advance of science as is
believing. Moreover, doubting is a serious business that requires extensive
training to be handled properly. People without training in a particular
field do not know what to doubt and what not to doubt; or, to put it
conversely, what to believe and what not to believe. Undemocratic as it may
seem, one man's opinion is NOT necessarily as good as the next man's.
A scientist MUST doubt. It would take much longer for valid theories to
become established if overcredulity on the part of scientists led them to
explore all the blind alleys indicated by newly-presented theories.
Scientific manpower is too limited to investigate every idea that occurs to
everybody. The advance of science depends on scientists in general being
kept firmly oriented to the direction of maximum possible return.
Drawing the line between observation and interpretation is difficult.
It's easy to lose track of your assumptions and fail to notice which
"keystones" in the edifice of your theory are merely soft clay. The triumph
of the scientific method is that over time, through collective effort,
mistakes can be overturned. Science accepts error as something to be
corrected over time.
In contrast to science, belief systems based on magic and religion do not
admit the possibility of being wrong, or of anything being unexplained. Any
question can be answered (however unsatisfying the answer may be to someone
trained in scientific thinking) from within the totally closed system: Why
did Grandma get run over by the cement truck? It was God's will. Or it was
bad karma. Or her dog was having a triple critical biorhythm day. The
essential constraint that separates science from the mystical is
experimentation - a phenomenon notably absent from magic and religion.

Most people act as if the scientific method were disconnected from their
daily lives, and yet a wider awareness of that method of thinking would help
greatly in framing current social debates. Other fields of study should
construct the rigorous ladders of inference that have made scientific fields
so successful. But such intellectual behavior would be suicidal to many
fields.

* The Military Staff Study

 A technique you may find quite useful in dealing concretely with problems
is the Military Staff Study. It is a six-part process:
1) Statement of the problem: One problem only, isolated and precisely
stated; not merely a description of a "bad" situation.
2) Assumptions: Make only those assumptions which are necessary and
justified. One assumption must not conflict with another; if so, prepare a
different study for each.
3) Facts bearing on the problem: A fact is a statement of conditions
known to be true. Don't mix fact and opinion.
4) Discussion: Produce a logical and orderly critical analysis of the
problem through the integration of the facts and the assumptions. If the
facts and the assumptions are shown to conflict, then you must change the
assumptions.
5) Conclusions: Must not be merely a continuation of the discussion. They
must point directly to the need for certain actions.
6) Recommendations: The actions which, if taken, will solve the problem.
They must not pose alternative courses of action, and must be susceptible to
simple approval or disapproval.

Thinking always helps, if one does enough and it's the right kind.
That's why some people make a success of life and others don't. A reasoned
proposal might be overruled by other considerations; some of the noblest of
human acts have been carried out in defiance of reason. It is also quite
true that spectacular blunders occasionally follow in the wake of the
keenest reasoning. But, by and large, clean and orderly thinking justifiably
enjoys a most favorable reputation.

* Notes on the Significance of Intellectual Context

Why is it that so frequently when you are speaking to a person who
believes in authoritarian, statist ideas, that person apears to listen but
does not really hear what you are saying? Governmental Authority is, for
him, an axiomatic concept. He literally cannot see any other context -
cannot conceive of a society which is not founded on coercion - and if you
venture outside his framework of thought, he merely accuses you of
expressing vague generalities. It is as Orwell said it would be: "You will
lose the ability to think certain ideas, and then you will be totally
incapable of ever trying to act on those ideas."
In such a discussion, most people quickly reach a point where they are
not able to respond even when they have the discussion in front of them in
writing. This is because they have reached the boundary of their
intellectual frame of reference and they cannot cope with the questions
without the mental flexibility (or the willingness) required to expand that
frame of reference so as to encompass an area which contains the answers.
They are prisoners of an inadequate reality assessment, and it is usually a
waste of your time to engage them in discussion, simply because they will
find your presentation to be quite literally incomprehensible.
This helps explain why the average journalist cannot get a sentence
straight if it is phrased more subtly than his own mind can make phrases. It
explains also much of the unresolvable controversy in the field of social
science. The assumptions shared by most contemporary social scientists
restrict their analyses to relatively minor consequential details. Questions
dealing with fundamental principles are outside their pale. Their analysis
takes place within an institutional context that is itself taken for
granted: the framework of government control. This profoundly affects how
their questions are framed, and thus studied and answered. This thinking
procedure renders social scientists incapable of questioning much that is
fundamental to their fields, and creates an intellectual barrier which is
one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the furtherance of libertarianism.
 This phenomenon has an obverse side also: I have sometimes been so
befuddled by a question or proposition that I had to stop for a while and
figure out why it seemed so "out of whack." The answer lies in the fact that
its underlying premises are so disparate from mine that it is not at all
amenable to a direct response. I can't answer the question, because it is
overflowing with assumptions that I reject. There are certain questions that
must be themselves questioned - challenged at their root - because they
consist of attempts to smuggle false premises into the mind of of the
listener. "Who created the universe?" is one example. "Have you stopped
beating your wife?" is another.
Ayn Rand had a keen eye for the shared premise underlying false
alternatives. For example: Beneath modern philosophy's false alternatives of
rationalism and empiricism, she recognized their shared assumption that
abstract knowledge of reality cannot be validly derived from perceptual
experience. Her ability to identify fundamentals is what gives Objectivism
much of its intellectual power.

* Faulty Thought Processes

The Readers Digest syndrome.
When I was about 15 years old I subscribed to the Readers Digest. A year
or so later I let my subscription lapse when I came to realize that I was
reading essentially the same sort of stuff over and over again. Five or ten
years later I picked up a another copy and found it to contain just what I
had read when I had been a subscriber. Although I had been growing and
maturing intellectually, developing more powerful cognitive processes which
enabled me to better deal with the problems I faced, the magazine had
remained on the same intellectual level - dealing perpetually in the same
way with the same problems.
An attribute of a small-minded person is that he does not progress
intellectually. This applies equally well to magazines and other social
institutions. If they are not progressing, once you have had a year's worth
of exposure to them, that's all the useful stuff you're ever likely to get.
Any further exposure will be essentially repetitious. Like the Readers
Digest. Or like the Libertarian Party, which today is still struggling to
cope with the same problems it faced at the time of its inception in 1972.
As of March 1995, there were 84 people registered to vote as Libertarian in
Wyoming. That's all the progress the LP had made in 23 years, and yet it
still considers itself to be presenting a viable political alternative.
The hallmark of a fool is not that he makes mistakes, but that he is
making the SAME mistakes today that he was making ten years ago.

We all know that correlation does not imply causation, but is this true
just because we haven't got powerful enough search techniques for sifting
through large statistical databases? No. Mere correlation can never be
proof, because if you don't know what the underlying cause is you can't know
that it will continue to operate. However, this does not mean that
statistical evidence should be ignored. Statistical evidence IS evidence,
and at very least, it can be a basis for hypothesis.

In any argument between two people who hold the same basic principles, it
is the more consistent one who wins. The inconsistent person will present
his ideas in a weak and contradictory form - and thus will create in the
minds of the audience an impression of incompetence, evasion, or cowardice,
while his adversary will appear to possess greater honesty and courage. (See
"Anatomy of Compromise" in CAPITALISM THE UNKNOWN IDEAL.)
Argument is futile when it is directed not toward general principles but
merely toward the specific phenomena which are consequences of those
principles. Perhaps the best examples of this are debates about legalizing
drugs. They usually devolve quickly from a brief and superficial
consideration of the principles underlying the anti-drug laws into a dispute
over the specific means by which the drugs would be distributed if they were
to be legalized. Thus the principles themselves are never fully examined,
and the subjects raised are merely attempts to dilute the agenda of the
discussion.
A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to
reinforce them. If, for the question: "Do you want slavery?" your opponents
manage to substitute the question: "What kind of slavery do you want?" then
they can afford to let you argue indefinitely; they have already won their
point.

Consider a Determinist (or a Solipsist) versus an advocate of Free Will.

The Determinist, to the extent that he adheres to his principle, will be
disinclined to engage in any great mental activity. His motivation to do so
is undermined by his belief that the result of such activity is not subject
to his volition. The free will advocate, however, suffers under no such
handicap and will not thereby be deterred from making the fullest
application of his intellectual faculties of which he is capable.
People who believe that definitions are arbitrary, or are to be accepted
or rejected according to their authoritarian backing, are people for whom
there is no hope of meaningful intellectual interaction. They are in the
same category as the Determinists - but whereas the Determinists believe
that cognition is absolutely fixed and unalterable, these dummies believe
the obverse: that cognition cannot be firmly tied to an objective reality.
Reason is not automatic. If men were the automatons that behaviorists
claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the
amazing nonsense called "behaviorist psychology." So they are wrong from the
start.
To argue against such persons as Determinists, Solipsists, Behaviorists,
those who claim human beings are not rational, or who claim there is no way
to choose between good/bad or right/wrong, is to apply to them a premise
they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their
theories. There is little point in replacing mindless bigotry or dogma with
mindless acceptance, so you should consider those people only long enough to
expose the specific nature of their irrationality. Those who deny reason
cannot be conquered by it. Leave them alone, for they are in a mysterious
mental state which is too lunatic for serious consideration. They have made
a conscious choice to remain ignorant. You should make a conscious choice
not to waste your time on them. Just because they choose to close their eyes
doesn't mean the sun has been turned off, it only means that they are
stumbling blindly in the darkness.

There are certain demands of the ideal, certain claims that a man cannot
put aside without hurt to his soul. ....Ibsen
There are moral issues that are beyond debate and discussion. There is a
point beyond which a man cannot go and still maintain his dignity and self-
respect. There are things a man cannot do without risking damage to his own
soul.
You can do violence to your soul by arguing with someone who asserts:
Success is irrelevant to the process of proof.
Human beings are not rational creatures.
There is no such thing as morality.
I have learned never to argue with such people. Such debate imbues a
false sense of significance. If you debate with him, he acquires a
fraudulent sense of importance in his mind, but his ideas acquire a REAL
importance in YOUR mind.

Thus do the principles one chooses have a considerable influence on the

efficiency of one's thought processes.

* Piagetian Operational Stages

Piagetians contend that children have their views of the world bound up
in concretes. This they call the "concrete operational stage," when children
are generally incapable of imagining a situation with any of its variables
somehow different. Kids at this stage have a lot of difficulty with "what
if" questions. Only sometime during adolescence do children become able to
deal adequately with conceptual abstractions. This is called the "formal
operational stage." It is during this stage that young adults become able to
deal with propositions that are contrary to fact (What if there were no
Federal Reserve Bank?) - to imagine several alternative explanations for the
same phenomenon (What really caused the Great Depression?) - to deal with
metaphor (What is meant by the market's "invisible hand"?) - to understand
that classes are not merely groupings of individual entities but may also be
themselves conceived of as abstract entites (What are those elements that
make up justice? How does justice become an element that makes up something
called freedom?).
Piagetians contend that nearly 50% of the adult population never
adequately learn how to use the capacity for formal operational thought.
Half the population is often bound to the reality of the moment, impotent to
imagine how things might be under different circumstances. Just imagine
yourself at a cocktail party and ask the person you've been randomly thrown
up against, "What if there were no local zoning laws?" and you'll likely get
a blank stare. Press him with, "What if there were no minimum-wage laws?"
and you'll be getting rather close to his threshold of irritability. The
ways of the economic world are pretty uncomplicated for this guy. When he
thinks gasoline prices are too high, he wants someone to MAKE them lower.
When he thinks his salary is too low, he wants someone to MAKE it higher. He
has no notion of conceptual analysis, and is a walking example of what
survives when a mind becomes a victim of infant mortality.
Someone who does not think in principles tends to rely by default on
social customs, and thus does not function independently in practice. The
collectivist ideologies have a concrete model they can use to exemplify
their view of society: the model of the family. Liberals stress the
nurturing role of the family - its unconditional support for every member.
Conservatives stress the authority of the parents in teaching virtue and
enforcing standards of behavior. These aspects of the family are understood
by preconceptual children, and can be grasped in a primitive form by non-
conceptual adults. But there is no comparable form in which it is possible
to grasp the concept of individualism, or any other of the principles of a
free society, because those concepts presuppose the need of adults to
function independently. To those who do not think conceptually, only what is
immediately seen is real. At the level of principles, no ideology can be
understood, much less consistently advocated or practiced, by those who
function non-conceptually. This is why anti-ideological pragmatism is so
popular.

* The Use Of Emotions As Tools Of Cognition

The normal relationship between reason and emotion is harmony, not
conflict. Conflict occurs whenever a man's conscious conclusions contradict
those of his subconscious. When this happens, the conscious ideas may be
correct and the subconscious ones mistaken. Or the reverse may be true: a
man may consciously uphold a mistaken idea, while experiencing a feeling
that clashes with it, a feeling arising from a correct subconscious premise.
In both cases, however, the real clash is between the two ideas. And the
only way to resolve the conflict, to know which side is correct, is to
submit both ideas to the bar of reason. Even if its intellectual root
happens to be true, the feeling itself cannot know or judge this; only the
rational mind can decide questions of truth. Emotions are not tools of
cognition.
There is no alternative to reason as a means of knowledge and no
supplement to it. If you attempt to give emotions such a role, then you are
not engaging in a process of cognition at all. On the contrary, you are
subverting the integrity of your mental processes and invalidating them - by
introducing as their guide non-objective elements. An unanalyzed emotion,
i.e., one whose intellectual roots you have not identified and validated by
a process of reason, is merely a subjective event of your consciousness. It
may be compared to a floating abstraction - a higher-level proposition which
you have not reduced to perceptual data. In other words, it is a mental
state disconnected from reality, a state whose relation to fact you do not
know.
If you seek to think rationally, you must grasp, then deliberately
implement, the distinction between reason and emotion. You must learn the
difference between thought and feeling - between logic and desire - between
percepts and concepts on the one hand, and hopes, wishes, hatreds, loves,
fears on the other. By a continuous process of volitional decision and self-
monitoring, you must ensure that in all your cognitive activities, feeling
is set to the side and is not allowed to direct the course of the inquiry. A
rational inquiry is one directed not by emotion, but by thought - one which
accepts as evidence not any species of passion, but only provable, objective
fact.
The above is not an "anti-emotion" viewpoint. Emotions play an essential
role in human life, and in this capacity they must be felt, nourished,
respected. Without them man could not achieve happiness or even survival: he
would experience no desire, no love, no fear, no motivation, no response to
values. The epistemological point, however, remains true: the role of
emotions, though crucial, is not the discovery of reality. I cast no
aspersion on eating or breathing if I deny that they are means of cognition.
The same applies to feelings.
Objectivism is not against emotions, but emotionalism. Our concern is not
to uphold stoicism or to abet repression, but to identify a division of
mental labor. There is nothing wrong with emotion that accompanies or
follows from an act of thought; this is the natural and proper human
pattern. But there is everything wrong with emotion that seeks to replace
thought by usurping its function.

(The following material is extracted from Lecture #6 of Barbara Branden's

PRINCIPLES OF EFFICIENT THINKING.)
The attempt to use emotions as tools of cognition is a process used by
people whose intellectual focus is on feelings rather than on truth and
knowledge. Their fundamental technique of thinking is to refer to their
emotions rather than their rational faculty. They use reason only as a tool
of rationalization - to justify ideas which have already been accepted on
the basis of their feelings.
Instead of storing conceptual integrations and evaluations in their
subconscious, these people store specific memories of concrete events along
with the emotional responses associated with those events. Then any new
phenomenon which is perceived to be similar to (i.e., has an accidental
resemblance to) the aggregate of stored memories will evoke the associated
emotional response, and thus will be formed a judgment of the new phenomenon
on the basis of associational connections rather than conceptual
integrations. Notice that this process is based on irreducible concretes,
and that no classification according to fundamental distinguishing
characteristics is involved. That aspect of any phenomenon having the most
striking emotional impact is considered to be its defining characteristic.
 Ideas are also stored as concretes: as memories of something heard, read,
or thought. These concretes are not integrated with other concretes, but are
stored as slogans. Conclusions about any subject consist of the memories of
events, plus the corresponding emotions, plus the remembered slogans. People
who function this way are typically unable to define their terms; for them,
the meaning of a word is a jumble of memorized examples, emotional
associations and floating images.
Their primary focus is on the emotional connotations of phenomena. If a
presentation does not arouse strong emotional response in them, it will have
very little effect on them at all. Ideas themselves will have no motivating
influence on them. They will respond not to the cognitive content of an idea
but to the emotional content of its presentation (it is this response that
gives demagogues so much of their following). They do not judge the truth by
its correspondence to reality - they judge reality by its correspondence to
their feelings.
They are psychologically set to grant primacy to their emotions, which
set and direct their perceptions. When necessary, their perceptions are
distorted to fit the emotion, or simply ignored. Only what fits the emotions
is permitted entry into consciousness. Thus they become intellectually self-
blinded.
They make no distinction between emotions and thoughts - they "feel"
their thoughts simply because the thoughts are non-conceptualized. What they
do not do is INITIATE a process of conceptualization. Theirs is a passive,
not an active, consciousness. The end result is the explicit, open reliance
on emotions and the rejection of conceptualization, which, in their minds,
has become a meaningless process.
This is the reason why some men jump to conclusions irrationally. They do
not identify principles, but just act on an emotional response. This also
explains much context-dropping. Without a principled basis of firmly-held
concepts, it is impossible for them to hold an ideational context and relate
specific concretes to that context.

* Introspection
(These ideas on introspection were originated by Edith Packer.)
As Objectivism emphasizes, emotions are not tools of cognition, and they
should not themselves control your behavior. Nevertheless, emotions have
enormous psychological significance.
All emotions are derived from some type of cognition; they have no
independent existence apart from the thoughts, conscious or subconscious,
which underlie them. Emotions are not in conflict with, but are a product
of, the evaluations which underlie them. Emotions are psychosomatic
responses to a perceived object, event, or situation, identified and
appraised in accordance with the perceiver's knowledge and value-judgments.
As these statements imply, every emotion presupposes perception,
identification, and judgment.
The ideas you hold in your conscious mind are fed into your subconscious
mind and act as instructions for its functioning. The emotions that result
from this functioning can reveal its nature to you. Armed with this
knowledge, you can "reprogram" your subconscious by changing the evaluations
made by your conscious mind. Thus the ability of a person to identify and
understand his emotions is crucial to his happiness. Emotions are an
essential means by which we experience ourselves and respond to our
evaluations of the world around us. Emotions are the single most important
signal indicating the nature of our subconsciously-held value-judgments.
Understanding your emotions enables you to get in touch with what is
uniquely you: your individuality.
Life can be experienced to the fullest only if you know yourself, and you
cannot know and understand yourself without a definite commitment to a
conscious policy of introspection. Introspection is a cognitive,
intellectual process directed inward, focusing on and identifying the
internal processes of your consciousness. Just as extrospection is a focus
on the various aspects of the exteral world, so introspection consists of an
awareness of and focus on your intellectual and emotional life. The
requirements of mental health include both: knowledge of both external and
internal reality.
It is important to be aware of the difference between actual
introspection and what is often mistakenly believed to be introspection,
namely the continuous defensive observation of one's behavior and feelings
(usually of anxiety) in anticipation of real or imagined disapproval. Such a
neurotically self-conscious focus amounts to asking "How am I doing?" during
all of one's interactions with other people. This cannot be considered
introspection, because introspection seeks answers to the questions of "What
am I doing?" and "Why am I doing it?" but this process seeks an answer to
the question "What do other people think of what I'm doing?"

* The Six Steps of Introspection

Introspection of emotions has to take place in a series of six steps:
1. Identify the type of emotion or emotions which you are experiencing.
2. Identify the generalized (universal) evaluation underlying each of
those emotions.
3. Identify your personal evaluation - the particular form in which you
hold the universal evaluation.
4. Determine the correctness of the underlying evaluations you have made,
both universal and personal. Discover whether your evaluations are true or
false in light of the facts.
5. If the evaluations underlying your emotions are incorrect, identify
the problems which led you to make the incorrect evaluations.
6. Consciously reinforce correct evaluations in order to correct the
inappropriate thinking methods that arise from your psychological problems.

Keep in mind that each of these steps is an integral part of

introspection and each of them is equally important. Furthermore, each step
is a prerequisite of the next.

* Step 1
Identify the type of emotion or emotions which you are experiencing.
Good questions to ask in order to figure out what type of emotions you
are feeling are: Am I feeling positive or negative emotions or a combination
of both? Do my emotions concern other people or just myself? It may also be
helpful to make a list of the different emotions that you are experiencing
and what you think each is a reaction to. Even people who are completely
inexperienced at introspection will be able to name some emotions if they
try. Do not worry at this point that you do not know all the emotions you
may be experiencing. You will probably discover others as you proceed.

* Step 2
Identify the general (universal) evaluation underlying each of your
emotions.
It is important to know that each emotion has at its base an abstract
evaluation which is the same for everyone who experiences that emotion. As a
result, emotions can be classified on the basis of the kinds of abstact
evaluations that underlie them. Once a person makes a particular kind of
evaluation, the die is cast. From that particular type of evaluation, only
one general type of emotion can follow, and the type of emotion will never
vary from person to person or from time to time, nor does it matter whether
the person undergoing this emotion-generating process is aware of it or not,
or whether the evaluation that gives rise to the emotion is based on facts
or is completely incorrect. The essential relationsbip between the
evaluation and the emotion which follows remains.
For example: if a person consciously or subconsciously concludes that
something in reality poses a threat to his well-being, he will automatically
feel fear. Thus, the man who sees a speeding car bearing down on him will
feel fear. And so will the man who jumps at the sound of a truck backfiring
on a city street, if he thinks it is the sound of a gun which is being fired
near him. The emotion will be of the same type: fear. Only the concretes on
the basis of which the evaluations were made will differ. Thus, the value-
judgment underlying fear will always be something to the effect: "I am in
danger. Something is threatening my physical or psychological safety."
Similarly, if a person concludes, "Some injustice was done to me," he
will automatically feel anger.
It is important to understand clearly that once the appropriate
evaluation is drawn, anger will inevitably follow. Or, conversely, if a
person is feeling anger, he has to realize that at some time in the past he
came to the evaluation, "Some injustice has been done to me."
If you have difficulty identifying the evaluations underlying your
emotions, due to repression or lack of experience in introspection, I
recommend that you ask yourself such questions as: "Do I think some
injustice was done to me?" "Do I evaluate myself as unworthy?" "Do I think I
can never achieve this or that particular value?" If the answer is "Yes" to
all three, then you will know that you must be feeling anger, self-doubt,
and depression.

* Step 3
Identify your personal evaluation - the particular form in which you hold
the universal evaluation.
A good way to distinguish steps two and three is to remember that the
universal evaluation is the abstract evaluation; the personal evaluation is
the concrete form it takes in the case of any particular individual.
For example: individuals differ in what they consider unjust. Suppose
that two people both experience the universal evaluation that some injustice
was done to them. As a result, they both feel angry. But obviously there are
many ways, based on many different concrete experiences, of reaching the
identical universal evaluation and therefore the identical emotion - in this
example, anger. Ms Jones' personal evaluation may be: "My next-door
neighbor, whom I liked and respected, drove her lawnmower through my flower
garden." But Mr. Smith's personal evaluation may be: "My best buddy asked my
girl friend out for a date and is stealing her away from me." Thus, the
personal evaluation will differ from individual to individual, but the
generalized perception of an injustice - and the subsequent emotion of anger
- is the same for all.
A person may have identified the type of emotion he is feeling, and may
even be familiar with the corresponding universal evaluation which underlies
it, but this does not imply that he knows what concrete event triggered it.
What you need to do in step three is to identify the specific experiences
and thoughts that led you, in your individual case, to make the universal
evaluations. Go over the specific events of your recent past and the types
of things you have been thinking about. Even better: write down all the
details in the form of a monologue. Your personal language may lead you to
discover emotions that you had been unaware of. For example, your monologue
may include words expressing hopelessness about your ability to cope with
the world. If you identify this, you may be able to realize that you are
also feeling depressed. If you have written down all the details, such an
identification will be MUCH easier.
Suppose Mr. Smith wakes up in the morning and feels anger and a nagging
feeling which he identifies as self-doubt. He is aware that he is concluding
that someone did him an injustice and that his self-worth is threatened in
some way. But he has no idea what particular concrete triggered these
feelings or why he feels the way he does.
Suppose he discovers that the only unusual event he recalls was that his
boss praised his co-worker, Mr. Lamb, enthusiastically. He can then ask
himself: "Did I think this was an injustice to me, and did this cause me
self-doubt?" As a result, he may come up with the following personal
thoughts: "Yes, that praise of Mr. Lamb was outrageous. I happen to know
that Mr. Lamb wastes hours during work talking about baseball, while I work
my head off. No wonder I feel anger and self-doubt. If this can happen,
there must be something wrong with my boss and with the world, or with me
for not knowing how to deal with it. I can't find justice and will never
find it." As you can see, Mr. Smith has discovered not only what concretes
triggered his emotions, but also how he personally interpreted those
concretes, and how his personal evaluations led to his feelings of anger and
self-doubt.
The identification of personal evaluations may be of great help to
repressed people who do not experience varied and deep emotions.
Technically, emotions as such cannot be repressed. What is repressed are the
evaluations that produce the emotions. Remember, an emotion is a consequence
and cannot come into existence without the underlying cause: your
evaluations. A represser evaluates, but his subconscious does not allow his
evaluations to come into conscious awareness, The result is that he does not
know what certain facts mean to him. He may feel some general discomfort, or
a vague unpleasantness, but in general he will not feel strongly about
things and will not be able to identify the type of emotion he is feeling.
A represser should go over carefully his written account of his recent
past. Then, if he finds anything out of the ordinary, he should ask himself:
"What do I really think about this fact? What do I think an unrepressed
person would feel under the circumstances?" If he does this, he may be
surprised to discover that he in fact leads an active inner life of
appraising concretes which he cannot allow himself to acknowledge, given his
fear of experiencing emotions.
In such a case, a good technique to use is to pretend that each emotion
has a voice, a voice that expresses the thoughts which underlie it.
I hope you can see the importance of discovering your personal
evaluations. It is step three which shows most directly your individual and
personal way of making judgments based on your values and your general
psychology. Therefore, it is crucial to spend sufficient time on this step
to squeeze out every possible concrete detail of the thoughts underlying
your emotions. Knowing your detailed personal evaluations is a prerequisite
to succeeding with step four: judging the correctness of your evaluations.
There is usually much less subconscious resistance to identifying personal
evaluations than there is to admitting their possible incorrectness. Thus,
the more thorough you are in step three, the less chance you will have to
sabotage step four. And most people do try to sabotage step four, whether
they do so consciously or subconsciously.
I must stress the need to work hard at step three, because even
individuals who often introspect will have a tendency to rush through it.
Most people do not believe that their personal evaluations have to be
spelled out in detail. In addition, many individuals often sabotage the
introspective process by immediately damning themselves for emotions they do
not approve of. Evaluating yourself on the basis of what you FEEL is
unwarranted, and it does not help you to change the unwanted emotions. Such
disapproval of your emotions serves only to undercut your further progress
in introspection.

* Step 4
Determine the correctness of the underlying evaluations you have made,
both universal and personal. Discover whether your evaluations are true or
false in light of the facts.
Up to this point, the process has been limited to understanding emotions
in terms of the evaluations that underlie them. We did not question whether
any of these evaluations were correct or not. But it is obvious that a
person can easily make a mistake or misinterpret facts. Usually he can point
to some objective facts supporting his evaluations, but often other
important facts will have been left out of consideration, or filtered and
distorted due to mistaken basic premises. Other neurotic problems can be
operating as well. For example, most people are compartmentalized to some
extent. The most brilliant person, who in his work applies a rigorous policy
of testing his objectivity in evaluating the facts, may apply a totally
different method of evaluating the facts of his personal life. In testing
the correctness of your evaluations, it is important to be aware that you
may feel resistance toward making an objective assessment of the facts. Such
resistance is not a matter of deliberate evasion, but can result from
subconscious feelings of hurt and anger that may cause you difficulty in
seeing the facts objectively.
To check whether your evaluations are true or false, ask yourself such
questions as: Do the facts I have considered support my evaluation? Did I
leave out facts which would be germane to my evaluation? Am I aware of facts
which, if considered, would lead me to draw different evaluations? Am I
resisting acknowledging any facts which would lead me to draw evaluations
opposite to those I have drawn? Are the connections which led me to arrive
at my evaluations logical?
Of course, the more you know about your personal method of thinking, the
more successful you will be in discovering the particular type of question
you need to ask yourself. It is very important that the questions be tailor-
made to fit your specific psychology.
In addition to formulating questions tailor-made to your particular
psycho-epistemology, you should also be inventive in finding solutions to
bad thinking habits you become aware of.
You can prepare for step four of introspection by constructing a table of
concretes you view as threats, with each threat rated on a scale from one to
ten in terms of its seriousness. Then, each time you wish to test the truth
of your personal evaluations of these potential threats, you could ask
yourself: Am I rating this concrete as a ten, when it is in fact only a two,
which I really do know how to handle?
Often, when the problem is not pervasive, relief from negative emotions
can be achieved right at this step. If you can conclude that there is in
fact no threat, your fear and sense of being out of control may subside
immediately.

* Step 5
If the evaluations underlying your emotions are incorrect, identify the
problems which led you to make the incorrect evaluations. (Of course, if you
discover that the underlying evaluations are correct, after you have checked
all the relevant facts, you would stop with step four.)
Step five can be the most difficult one of all. And success in carrying
it out will depend on many factors. More than anything else, it will depend
on the extent of your knowledge of your psychological processes. The more
familiar you are with your core evaluations, and the type of defense
mechanisms you use to counteract your self-doubt, the easier it will be for
you to discover why you have made inappropriate evaluations. (Core
evaluations are basic evaluations that are held subconsciously. They are
fundamental judgments about three areas of everyone's life: self, reality,
and other prople.)
Suppose a person with genuine self-esteem finds himself feeling self-
doubt. He should then ask: "What did I do that I do not think is worthy of
me?" And, having discovered the action he disapproves of, and corrected his
evaluation, he will be able to endure the anxiety until it passes. He will
not permit defense mechanisms to spring into action. Such a person will also
be able to avoid any repetition of the action he judged to be unworthy.
In contrast, a self-doubtful person who discovers an inappropriate action
would be inclined to conclude something to the effect: "Of course, I did
this unworthy thing. It is par for the course with me, given the kind of
person I am." Or, even more likely, such a person will automatically
initiate some defense mechanism, in order to avoid the self-doubt, thereby
inadvertently perpetuating it.
If you know very little about your psychology, then at this point you may
have some real difficulty. You may need to deeply examine your whole
psychology and life-patterns because you need to understand better how you
function and why. You may discover that you are not actually reacting to
your present problem, but to some painful event in your distant past. It may
be that your first love, after a long, close relationship, inexplicably left
you for another man. You may discover that as a result of this painful
experience you made a number of subconscious conclusions, such as: "I'm not
desirable as a man. It's not safe to be in a close romantic relationship,
because it causes me pain and self doubt. I can avoid such suffering by
being in romantic relationships in which I unilaterally set the terms." Thus
you compensate for your masculine self-doubt by continually trying to prove
to yourself that women find you attractive. Any rejection makes you re-
experience the loss that devastated you in the past.
Another example: let us imagine that Mr. Smith is aware of the fact that
in his childhood he concluded that his parents always favored his brother,
and that on this basis one of the core evaluations he developed is that
whenever people have a choice between him and someone else, they will
automatically favor the other individual. Knowing this, Mr. Smith could say
to himself: "This situation probably reminds me of the past painful
incidents with my brother, where I felt pain, anger, and self-doubt. My
evaluations in the present situation are based on my subconsciously held
core evaluation that I automatized a long time ago. I can see how that core
evaluation influences my present interpretation of facts whenever the
situation appears to be similar to the old, painful one with my brother."
How much you can accomplish at this point will depend also on how
important the issue is to you, and how much time you have available.
Obviously, you cannot spend the all the time needed to unravel every
insignificant or minute emotion and its causes. Sometimes, too, the reason
why you made the error in evaluation will be clear to you before you ever
get to this step. For example, you find out later that the friend who kept
you waiting did so because he got into an accident and had no way of
notifying you. In such a case, you would know that you were justified in
your evaluation, but that you were unaware of all the facts.
Even if you are not successful at step five in the beginning, by
persisting at introspection you will gather a lot of factual data which will
at least show you how your psychology operates. And, hopefully, it will lead
you to some explanation of why it operates in that manner. If, during the
course of your life, you have kept a written journal of significant things
that have happened to you, and your responses to those things, you will find
these notes enormously helpful in the process of introspection.

* Step 6
Consciously reinforce correct evaluations in order to correct the
inappropriate thinking methods that arise from your psychological problems.
I have emphasized that the kind of emotions you experience are the result
of the type of universal evaluations you have made. From this, it follows
that if you change these evaluations, the emotions will change. Thus, if you
become convinced while introspecting that no injustice has been done to you,
your feelings of anger will disappear. Your subconscious will automatically
arrange this change for you.
This can happen because your subconscious operates on the basis of a
program established by your conscious mind. Your subconscious does NOT have
the capacity to re-program itself. It is only the conscious mind that is
able to check the appropriateness of the program, and it is only the
conscious mind that can do the re-programming.
Step six is designed to do just that. You should say to yourself at this
point: "I programmed my subconscious inappropriately in this area. It
operates inappropriately and causes me great suffering. I am hereby adopting
a different policy, which will take the place of the incorrect one." You can
say: "I have to accept the responsibility of consciously judging each
separate situation based on the facts."
If you persist in doing this, you can eventually re-program any aspect of
your subconscious.
Probably many of you have had this experience: you realize that your
evaluations of the facts are mistaken, yet even after having understood the
correct evaluation, the old evaluations may subsequently resurface and you
find yourself again in the grip of the resulting inappropriate emotions.
Don't despair. Simply go over all the facts again; reinforce the correct
evaluations by re-asserting your knowledge of the actual facts. If you do
that, your subconscious mind will eventually get the message and the
unwanted emotions will then disappear permanently.
It is important to remember that reprogramming your subconscious mind is
rarely, if ever, an instantaneous process. It takes time, maybe lots of
time, so be patient with yourself.
I might add that repressed people, as a rule, have to reinforce their
commitment to experiencing emotions. They have to convince their
subconscious that there is no need to fear emotions, and give their
subconscious an order to allow its appraisals of concretes to enter
conscious awareness.

* Closing comments
Do not be afraid to introspect. Most people do not discover terrible
things about themselves that they cannot correct. If there is something
wrong in your psychology, it will stay wrong if you do not find out what it
is. If you don't introspect, what is wrong will become more and more
entrenched, undercutting you and causing you to become more unhappy.
Do not judge yourself on the basis of the emotions you feel. It is your
evaluations, which underlie the emotions, that you should be judging. If you
are damning YOURSELF for the emotions you feel, you will change nothing.
Further, be careful not to judge yourself at times when you are
overwhelmed by negative emotions. If you do, you are in the position of
being in the hands of a drunken juror deciding a life and death issue
concerning your life. The fact that you may FEEL you are no good, does not
mean you are no good in fact. Your behavior, not your emotions, is the
deciding evidence. Thus, make sure that your standards for judging your
worth are the standards of a rational and cold sober juror.
Introspection is very difficult for most people. The process has to be
learned. Unfortunately, we were never taught how to do it when we were
young, and now, as adults, we have to teach ourselves. But introspection is
difficult only in the beginning. The more you do it, the easier and less
time-consuming it becomes. If you persist you will get the hang of it. If
you do, it will pay you wonderful dividends. You will get acquainted
intimately with the person that you are. You will discover your good
qualities and will be able to see which qualities you have to change. It
will give you a greater sense of control over your life, because knowing
your emotions will help prevent you from automatically acting on them. A
conscious, consistent commitment to introspection will give you freedom from
self-doubt, and you will become a happier person.
 * Orwell - Newspeak - Brainwashing - Prolefeed
1984 by George Orwell - New American Library (Signet) #451 CY688
This is the most prophetic book of the 20th century. Orwell's concepts of
Newspeak and Prolefeed are indispensable to an understanding of the
development of American culture during the latter half of this century. A
thorough knowledge of Newspeak, as it has been implemented in America, is
the best means by which one can avoid an immense quagmire of faulty
thinking.

* Newspeak
The effect of Newspeak is not to extend but to diminish the range of
thought and to make all other modes of thought impossible, so that an idea
divergent from the prevalent philosophy will be literally unthinkable.
This is done partly by stripping undesirable words of unorthodox
meanings. For example: The word "anarchy" still exists but it can only be
understood as meaning a completely lawless and chaotic state of nihilistic
destruction. It cannot be used in its old sense of "a social condition from
which the institutionalized use of coercive aggression is absent" since
politically such a condition no longer exists even as a concept, and is
therefore nameless.
Another example is "inflation." What people today call inflation is not
an increase in the quantity of money substitutes, but the general rise in
prices and wages which is the inevitable CONSEQUENCE of inflation. This
semantic innovation is by no means harmless. First of all there is no longer
any term available to signify what "inflation" used to signify. It is
impossible to fight an evil which you cannot name. You no longer have the
opportunity to resort to a terminology accepted and understood by the public
when you want to describe the financial policy you are opposed to. You must
enter into a detailed analysis and description of this policy with full
particulars and minute accounts whenever you want to refer to it, and you
must repeat this bothersome procedure in every sentence in which you deal
with this subject. Second, those who wish to fight inflation are diverted in
their struggle away from the fundamental nature of inflation and are forced
to direct their attentions to the consequences. They end up snipping at the
leaves of the weed rather than hacking at the root.
An especially corrupting abuse of language can be seen in the ambiguous
use of the words "think" and "feel." This use equivocates cognitive
assessment with emotional response, and leaves the victim unable to
discriminate between his thoughts and his emotions.
The special function of Newspeak words is to destroy meaning. In Newspeak
it is seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the
perception that it IS heretical; beyond that point the required words are
nonexistent. It would be possible to say, "government is unnecessary," but
this statment could not be sustained by a comprehensible argument, because
the requisite words (such as "anarchy") are not meaningfully available. An
example of a phrase designed to destroy meaning is in this suggestion, made
by a proponent of international trade barriers: "A more accurate name than
the persuasive label 'free trade' - because who can be opposed to freedom? -
is 'deregulated international commerce.'" If accepted, his proposal, that
his adversaries use this mouthful of multi-syllabic obfuscation as the name
of their political goal, would be the first step toward destruction of the
concept "free" in the minds of his opponents. And in the minds of their
audience.
Nowhere is this semantic deception more blatant than in the government's
dishonest descriptions of its own activities, in which words are used merely
as tools to manipulate the social environment.
In 1993, Congress required the Dept. of Health and Human Services to
examine the feasibility of shifting some biological weapons research from
the army to the National Institutes of Health. Thus, under the direction of
the Dept. of Health, the National Institutes of Health will now be engaged
in germ warfare. Orwell was right - "War is Peace" or, more appropriately,
"Health is Death."
Perhaps the most long-lasting and widespread manifestation of the
government's use of another of Big Brother's slogans ("Freedom is Slavery")
is the "selective service."
In Newspeak, certain words are deliberately constructed for political
purposes - words which are intended to impose a desirable mental attitude
upon the person using them and to make it impossible for him to hold any
contrary attitude. This is the explicit goal of the "Politically Correct"
movement.
What a Newspeak user acquires is an outlook similar to that of the
ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other
than his own worshipped "false gods." He did not need to know what these
gods were, and probably the less he knew about them the better for his own
orthodoxy. This sort of orthodoxy was explicitly fostered during the
McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when accusations of "communist!" were
thrown around indiscriminately while no one, neither the accusers nor the
accused, had any idea of what a communist is. Nor did they dare ask
publicly, for fear of being labeled a communist merely for making the
inquiry.
Thomas Szasz coined the very useful word "semanticide" to designate the
murder of language. Semanticide is the ultimate goal of Newspeak.
Many words, such as "freedom," "patriotism," "liberty," etc. have been
appropriated by wanna-be tyrants (especially by Right-wing political
Conservatives) who use those words to designate the opposite of their
historical (and cognitively correct) meanings, thus leaving the majority of
people with no way to distinguish libertarians from our totalitarian
enemies. Conservative zealots claiming to speak in the name of
libertarianism have fomented a dangerous agenda that is corrupting our most
cherished ideals and deceiving others about our fundamental principles.
The only way I can see to combat this dismal situation is to attack it
not on its surface - by making futile attempts to persuade people of the
correct definitions of those critical words - but at its roots, by
renouncing epistemological relativism and asserting the idea that
DEFINITIONS ARE NOT ARBITRARY. Unless your audience realizes this, any
argument you engage in will be merely a verbal battle of wits with your
adversary - the outcome dependent on who can make the most clever use of
phrases that are meaningless in the minds of the audience.
The result of Newspeak is boastful inarticulateness on the part of those
who haven't anything to say, and helplessness on the part of those who have.
"Those who cannot carry a train of consequences in their heads; nor weigh
exactly the preponderancy of contrary proofs and testimonies may be easily
misled to assent to positions that are not probable." ... John Locke
People who can't analyze and dissect their language cannot separate
meaning from words and thus cannot perceive an existence separate from the
words used to describe it. For those people, the Law of Identity is quite
literally meaningless.

* Brainwashing
These are the elements of brainwashing. At least some of them are used,
in greater or lesser intensity, by all authoritarian organizations, and by
anyone attempting to assert psychological dominance.

Get your victim at your mercy.

 Take away his ordinary inputs - his accustomed environment. Isolate him
and deprive him of social support, to develop an intense concern for
himself.
Deprive him of all opportunities for self-expression.
Control his perceptions, with darkness or bright light, or by creating a
barren environment and restricting movement, to fix the victim's attention
on his predicament and to eliminate distractions. Inundate him with strong
and novel sensory experiences.
Subject him to physical degradation, by prevention of personal hygiene
and imposing various other humiliations, so as to reduce the victim to
concern with "animal values."
Induce debilitation and exhaustion, by semi-starvation, exposure, sleep
deprivation and induced illness, so as to weaken the victim's physical and
mental ability to resist.
Demonstrate omnipotence, to suggest the futility of resistance. This is
carried out by such techniques as pretending to take cooperation for granted
or demonstrating complete control over the victim's fate.
Issue threats, to cultivate anxiety, dread and despair.
Enforce trivial demands, to develop a habit of compliance.
Perform occasional indulgences, such as unpredictable favors and
unexpected kindness, to provide motivation for compliance.

* Prolefeed
One element of brainwashing, "control of perceptions," gives rise to the
phenomenon of "Prolefeed." Prolefeed augments Newspeak, in that its effect
is to render people less able to make rationally-based value judgments. In
doing so, it leaves them more receptive to judgments imposed on them by
authority figures. Responsibility for the implementation of Newspeak must
rest mainly with the government, but Prolefeed is the product of the
advertising industry of America. Corporate advertising in America is likely
the largest single psychological project ever undertaken by the human race,
yet its stunning psychological impact remains ignored by mainstream Western
psychologists.
There is nothing unethical in attempting to induce people to purchase
your products, but the techniques the advertising industry has used in
pursuing this goal have had unforeseen results which are psychologically and
intellectually devastating.
Advertising, both commercial and political, has resulted in a merciless
distortion of authentic human needs and desires. The victims learn to
substitute what they are told to want for what are in fact their objective
needs. By the time they reach adulthood, their authentic feelings are so
well buried that they have only the vaguest sense that "something" is
missing from their spiritual life. Having ignored their genuine needs for so
long, their souls are empty, but the emptiness is continually denied. It is
far easier, in the short run, to listen to the commercials, which are always
beckoning, always promising, always assuring that this time, with this
product or this candidate, it will be possible to fulfill the heart's
desire, than to take the initiative of making difficult personal judgments.
Prolefeed is a format of radio and TV programming whose result is
intellectually debilitating. It is a format of information presentation
which, by inducing detrimental psycho-epistemological programming and
deprogramming, results in severe inhibition of cognitive efficiency. The
cognitive debilitation results, in part, from continuous exposure to
unceasing repetition of phrases or melodies which contain just enough
cognitive content to possess a minimum of intelligible meaning, thereby
distracting the mind from self-generated activity, without giving the mind
sufficient content for significant externally-induced activity. Observe,
please, that it is not the CONTENT of the input that induces the debility,
but the FORMAT of its presentation.
 Consider a common phenomenon: there is a radio playing in the background
at the place you are working. In order to concentrate on your work you "tune
out" the radio - you make an alteration in your mental functioning which
renders your conscious mind unaware of the sounds of the radio. Since your
ears (unlike your eyes which can be physically closed to sensory input) are
continually feeding signals to sensory receptors in the brain, all the sound
that enters the ears is transmitted into the brain. Thus there is a part of
your mind that is always aware of this sound. The only way you can "tune
out" the background noise is to erect a barrier between your conscious mind
and that area of the subconscious mind that receives input from your ears, a
barrier that prevents the awareness from getting through. The psycho-
epistemological programming that erects these barriers is one of the most
pernicious aspects of Prolefeed. Not just because it produces the
psychological self-alienation of a divided mind, but because it goes further
by inflicting a profound impairment of judgment, an impairment resulting
from the conflict of the subconsciously acquired prolefeed information with
consciously derived value-decisions.
Frequent instantaneous shifts of subject matter - e.g., interrupting
programs with commercial messages - inhibit the mental function of
integration and diminish the attention span of the victim, thus promoting
schizophrenia. Such interruptions immediately following an information
presentation can inhibit the victim from consciously evaluating the
information. Thus he will be more likely to subconsciously accept it as
truth, and will be left in a condition wherein the ideas in his mind have
not been critically examined. Without firm awareness of its truth value, he
will experience a nebulous state of uncertainty regarding his knowledge.
We're bombarded with advertising, so we learn to tune it out. All that
advertising is like a steady chattering noise in our eyes and ears. In order
to function, we have to make ourselves deliberately blind and deaf to that
part of our environment. The advertisers know that we do this, so they
increase the size, color, intensity, volume, and repetitions of their ads.
They give us more, better, and different ads. And we try even harder to tune
them out. Commercials are designed to catch your attention and instill
remembrance, an increasingly difficult process because its effects dampen
its effectiveness. The din eventually gets painful because it is cumulative.
People unable to hear one another speak raise their voices - which
encourages their neighbors, who can't hear themselves speak, to shout -
which makes their neighbors, who can't hear themselves shout, scream.
Eventually we are so tuned out that we can no longer see the sky, the stars,
the souls of our lovers, and the reality of the world we live in.
Such programming causes severe value heirarchy distortions. It does this
by presenting mundane things as having supreme importance. Consider an
advertisement showing a man about to bite into a hamburger. His facial
expression clearly and blatantly portrays the idea that this hamburger is
the greatest thing ever to enter his life. One wonders how he contemplates
his wife when he goes home from work at night. After he has displayed such
an attitude toward a hamburger, what could he have left to display toward
her?
Being continually bombarded with the notion that each product - whether
it be a hamburger, chewing gum, the latest model chevy, or a political
candidate - is a sine qua non of the utmost value and importance, is a
process that severely distorts, and even destroys, any rational value
heirarchy and leaves the victim in a judgmental vacuum, lacking a sensible
means to evaluate the phenomena which are IN FACT important to his life.
Years of value-depravation crush all emotions, all hope, leaving the victims
with eyes that have stopped seeing, ears that have stopped hearing, and
souls that have stopped living a long time ago. It is truly the twilight of
the gods.
(Personally, I don't watch TV because I know that someday I'm gonna drop
dead, and when I do I don't want my last experience on earth to have been a
TV commercial.)

It is no mere coincidence that the rise of popular radio and TV

programming in the 1950s and its widespread availability (the transistor was
invented in 1948) immediately preceeded the plunge of the SAT scores
reported by American high-school students from 1963 onward. (See Chapter 11)
Prolefeed has had a devastating effect on American society. Mammoth
quantities of brutally superficial distractions bombard and fill the heads
of today's youth, resulting all too often in a complete inability to express
anything even remotely seeming to ensue from a rational thought process.
Children grow up in an environment of commercial and political lies and
manipulations that is tantamount to cultural child abuse.
See reference
But while you are contemplating lugubriously the weltanschauung of
Orwell's book, keep this in mind: the world Orwell depicts can have only a
limited actualization. For this reason: the men in the white coats KNOW what
is real. They HAVE to know. Without those men, there could be no
technological civilization - there would be only barbarism. NO society rises
above barbarism except by recognition of the Facts of Reality by someone who
is instrumental in the conduct of society. This is why no matter what the
State decrees, someone HAS to know reality: the scientists who conceive
material wealth; the engineers who translate those conceptions into existing
mechanisms; the mechanics who maintain this technology. These people have to
be in cognitive contact with objective reality. That cognitive contact is an
unconditional prerequisite to the existence of a technological civilization,
and it is a continual barrier to government omnipotence.
And here you can see one of the major contributions of Objectivism: Rand
has made philosophically EXPLICIT the function of the men in the white coats
(who are only briefly and tangentially referred to by Orwell). This explicit
depiction carries within it the seed of destruction for Statism.

* Hallmarks of a Cult
Cultists are socially alienated people who huddle together in a
collective, united by allegiance to a non-conventional artistic or
intellectual movement based on dogma set forth by its promulgator, whom they
adore as a "father figure." Observe that the ideas they espouse can be
either true or false - they must only be non-conventional. (If the ideas
ever become accepted by a wide enough audience, they will no longer be
referred to as "cultist" but as "mainstream.")
They believe that Armageddon is nigh - that profound, revolutionary,
world-shaking changes are about to occur.
They believe that the road to Salvation lies only through their belief
system, and are excruciatingly jealous, often reserving their worst
invective, not for their real enemies, but for those with whom they
essentially agree save for minor ideological coloration.
They have a completely unrealistic expectation that their unknown and/or
unpopular ideas will shortly triumph in society.
They over-emphasize their significance and greatly over-exaggerate the
effects of their activities, claiming that what they're doing has
revolutionary importance for society.
This mindset does not change over time. They are still saying today the
same things about pending Armageddon and the imminent social acceptance of
their ideas that they were saying 20 years ago.

What happens to a cult over time?

1) It preserves its ideological purity, but to do so it must become
rigidly dogmatic. But then perceptive people eventually become aware of its
flaws and withdraw from participation. The cult gradually becomes comprised
solely of narrow-minded, inward-focused bigots. This is what has happened
to the Randites.
2) It dilutes its ideological purity in the attempt to acquire more
adherents. But then it eventually becomes indistinguishable from other
belief systems, and stops attracting new recruits. This is what has happened
to the LP - it is becoming merely another variant of political conservatism.

* The Philosophical Chameleon

THE EVENING NEWS by Arthur Hailey (Dell book #20851) contains a very good
description of the "Stockholm Syndrome." Hailey mentions Patty Hearst as an
example of that syndrome, and I found it interesting to observe that he
mentions only the FIRST of her two conversions. I have never seen anyone at
all refer to her SECOND conversion. That seems to be completely invisible to
all other students of this phenomenon.
The name I apply to this syndrome is neither "Stockholm" nor "Hearst,"
however. I refer to it as the "Philosophical Chameleon" syndrome.
Most people have no firmly-fixed principles of their own but merely
"adopt" the philosophy of whatever "significant other(s)" are most
influential in their immediate social environment. I do not fully understand
why people behave this way, but I have no doubt that what Nathaniel Branden
described as "social metaphysics" has a great deal to do with it, and that
it rests ultimately on what Branden identified as the failure to choose to
think.
Its occurrence, in a rather milder form than that manifested either in
Stockholm or by Ms. Hearst, is actually quite widespread. The milder form of
chameleonism (milder, because it does not involve one's fundamental
philosophical principles but merely his superficial behavior) can be
observed quite frequently - when people do things for no other reason than
that somebody suggested it without their noticing the suggestion. For
example: in handing out leaflets to students, you will observe that if one
of them passes by you and refuses the printed sheet, and makes a little
gesture of negation, then the next person walking along, if he or she has
noticed, will do the same thing. Whole strings of people will, one after the
other, make virtually identical gestures and pass by without accepting the
lealet unless you take some action to break the chain, such as turning away
briefly, or rearranging your papers for a moment. Or unless a more strong-
minded person comes along and breaks the chain of behavior with her own
actions.
Notice customers at the counter of a fast-food restaurant. If the first
one up just asks for, let's say, "a Whataburger", most people behind her
will likewise order a generic item from the posted menu. But let one
individual qualify her order, and say something like: "Oh, yeah, could you
hold the mustard and give me extra pickles on that Whataburger," and every
single customer behind her will make requests for custom changes in the menu
item as well - all without consciously realizing why.
Apparently a large amount of human behavior is carried out with only
partial involvement of the higher centers of judgment, and while this has no
sinister consequences most of the time, when people "choose" their religion,
political parties and candidates, beliefs about race, or stands on freedom,
they are unfortunately very likely to be behaving like a chameleon. Thus you
will see a man assent to conservative ideas while he is conversing with a
Republican, and then just a few days later avow quite the opposite liberal
principles while in a discussion with a Democrat. But no deliberate
deception is involved - the man is merely taking on the political "color" of
his immediate social environment.
 Chapter 3
THE IMPORTANCE OF CORRECT
DEFINITIONS

* On the Importance of Correct Definitions

"Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he
cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics
of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea with a symbol,
be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely
reaction to symbols. When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols
in certain, set fashions - rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the
symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the
phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in
structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we
think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been
poorly chosen, we think not-sanely." ......Robert Heinlein.

A definition is a statement designed to "identify the specific meaning of

a concept, isolate the facts of reality to which the concept refers and of
which the concept is a mental integration." (Jan63 - 3) It serves "to keep a
concept distinct from all others, to keep it connected to a specific group
of existents" (Jul67 - 9), or, as Harry Browne so aptly put it: "to draw a
sharp line between what IS a certain thing and what isn't." "The purpose of
defining one's terms is to afford oneself the inestimable benefit of knowing
what one is talking about." (Jan63 - 3)
(References are to various issues of THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER.)

If one does not scrupulously afford oneself this benefit, the facts of
reality will, sooner or later, correct one's error.
Obviously, there are some mistaken definitions that will be corrected
immediately as they are acted upon. If, for example, you define a hot stove
as a chair, your mistake will be immediately and warmly chastised. There are
other mistakes, however, that will not be so quickly righted. If you
improperly identify an onion seed as a carrot seed, your mistake will not be
corrected for weeks or even months. In the meantime you will have dug your
garden, planted your seed, fertilized it, watered it, and carefully
cultivated it until harvest time. Only then will you uncover your error, but
by then you will have wasted a great deal of time and energy in the pursuit
of an improper course of action, and you will then also be stuck with the
consequences of your mistake: eating onions instead of carrots until next
spring.
Some mistakes will take even longer to be rectified. The more abstract
the concept, the less immediately will reality show you your error.
If you incorrectly define marriage, the tragic result may be a divorce
court - but this "setting right" of the situation may not come about until
after years of domestic suffering. If you mistakenly define the principles
of business management, you will eventually find yourself in a bankruptcy
court; but again, it may take decades of toil and effort before the facts of
reality catch up with you. And finally, if a group of men establishing a new
country mistakenly define the practice of freedom, two centuries later their
grandchildren may wake up one morning to find themselves in a concentration
camp.
 Let thy words be keen heeders of truth, for truth is no heeder of words.

* How to Make a Definition

The basic structure of a definition was first identified by Aristotle,
and it was he who gave us the proper procedure for making a definition:
Place the class of entity you wish to define in a wider class called a
genus, all members of which share common characteristics. (e.g., Man is a
living being.) Then add a qualification to the statement of inclusion which
differentiates the class to be defined from all the other members of the
wider class. (Man is a rational living being.)
For a precise and detailed account of the cognitive process involved, see
Ayn Rand's INTRODUCTION TO OBJECTIVIST EPISTEMOLOGY. I recommend also David
Kelley's THE ART OF REASONING for further explanation.
There are several corollary rules for carrying out this procedure:
Rule of Equivalence: A definition must be true of every member of the
class being defined and only of members of that class.
Rule of Fundamentality: A definition must refer to the fundamental
distinguishing characteristic of the thing being defined (else you will be
committing the fallacy of "definition by non-essentials"). The definitive
characteristic must be that which is a cause, not an effect: that which
makes a thing what it is and differentiates it from all other things - that
without which it would not be the kind of thing which it is.
Rule of Non-Circularity: A definition must not contain any concept which,
to be understood, presupposes the definition. An example of circularity is:
"Democracy is a system of government which uses democratic procedures."
Rule of Non-Negativity: A definition must tell what the thing IS rather
than what it is NOT. Exceptions are those concepts which are inherently
negative in meaning, such as orphan or bachelor. But note that a positive
concept is always presupposed by such negative terms.
Rule of Context: All known distinguishing aspects must be considered. The
definition must account for all presently held knowledge.
Rule of Clarity: A definition must not be obscure, metaphorical or poetic
but must clearly state a literal and exact meaning. For example: "Truth is
beauty" is a lovely poetic statement, but it is NOT a definition.

Many words are vague insofar as they apply to characteristics which may
be possessed in varying degrees. It is impossible to draw a sharp line
between those who are bald and those who are not. It is impossible to define
precisely the concept of baldness. But the characteristic according to which
people distinguish between those who are bald and those who are not IS open
to a precise definition: it is the presence or the absence of hair on the
head of a person. This is a clear and unambiguous characteristic which is
established by observation and expressed by propositions about existence.
What is vague is merely the determination of the point at which non-baldness
turns into baldness. People may disagree with regard to the determination of
this point, but their disagreement refers merely to the quantitative
interpretation of the phenomenon that gives a useful meaning to the word
baldness.

A false definition of Rational Selfishness is that everything everyone

does every moment throughout life is selfish. All this does is define
"selfishness" in a way that is not helpful at all, because it makes
"selfishness" all-inclusive. A word is a tool for delimiting one area of
thought from others. The word becomes useless if it is defined to include
everything. The word "everything" already serves that purpose quite well; we
don't need a synonym.
 Ostensive definitions are those which establish directly, by an appeal to
experience, the relationship between a word and that to which it refers.
Ostensive definitions define primaries which cannot be placed into a genus
and differentiated. Examples are sensory primaries like color, roughness,
bitterness, and warmth; or metaphysical primaries such as Existence. One
cannot place Existence into a wider class of entities.

One of the worst consequences of faulty definitions is that you will be

confused every time you have to compare and relate concepts. If you haven't
conceptualized according to fundamentals, but instead by some superficial
characteristics, then when you need to compare your concepts, for the
purpose of making moral or ethical judgments, you'll be in real trouble.

A definition must distinguish between essences and labels. The essences

of entities are not arbitrary, as are the verbal labels by which we
symbolize the entities. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet -
because giving the rose another name would not make it another entity. A
definition is not an arbitrary construct, but the identification of a
natural phenomenon. For example: we cannot arbitrarily define "gravity". It
is a phenomenon that we must discover. Once we understand it we can then
define the WORD "gravity" based on the discovery. Defining a term is not a
matter of defining it for MYself or for YOURself, but of making an
identification that leads to a truthful UNDERSTANDING of the phenomenon that
has been defined.

* Concept Reduction (from Leonard Peikoff)

Knowledge has a hierarchical structure. A hierarchy of knowledge means a
body of concepts and conclusions ranked in order of logical dependence,
according to each item's distance from the base of the structure - the
perceptual data with which cognition begins. The concept of "hierarchy" in
this sense is epistemological, not metaphysical.
The existence of a cognitive hierarchy does not preclude the existence of
cognitive options. For example: "organism" is a higher-level concept, which
one can reach only after one has conceptualized in appropriate stages a wide
variety of its instances. But there is no reason why one must reach it
through "cat," "dog," "rosebush," rather than, say, through "horse," "bird,"
"orange tree." Similarly, a man could not discover the law of gravitation
without extensive study and conceptualization of more elementary facts about
motion; but nothing in epistemology requires that the culminating insight
flow from the fall of an apple, as against many other possibilities. A
higher-level item is dependent on the grasp of an appropriate series of
earlier items; but that series is not necessarily unique in content.
The concept of "hierarchy" applies whenever a given cognitive level
cannot be reached or understood without a certain kind of prerequisite. A
hierarchy is a type of context in which the simpler data make the more
complex data possible.
The epistemological responsibility imposed on man by the fact that
knowledge is contextual is the need of integration. The responsibility
imposed by the fact that knowledge is hierarchical is the need of reduction.
In fact, men can try to move to higher levels of cognition without
properly understanding the intermediate material. They can do so through
many causes, such as impatience, anti-effort, or simple error. By far the
most important cause, however, is the fact that many men are content to use
the concepts and conclusions of other men without understanding the steps
that led to them. Such men attempt to deal with higher levels of a complex
structure without having established the requisite base. As a result, their
mental activity consists in building confusion on confusion, instead of
knowledge on knowledge. In such a mind, the chain relating higher-level
content to perceptual reality is broken; the individual's conceptual
structure floats in the air, detached from facts and from cognition.
Context-keeping is indispensable if men are to keep their ideas connected
to reality. This is where the process of reduction becomes necessary.
Reduction is the means of connecting an advanced concept to reality by
traveling backwards through the hierarchical structure involved in its
formation. Reduction is the process of starting with a higher-level
cognitive item and identifying in logical sequence the intermediate steps
that relate it to perceptual data. Since there are often options in the
detail of a learning process, one need not necessarily retrace the
particular steps one initially happened to take; what one must retrace is
the essential logical structure.
As an example of reduction, let us take the higher-level concept
"friend," and identify at least some of the intermediate concepts linking it
to perceptual reality. The process of reduction consists in asking
repeatedly: what depends on what? In other words: what does one have to know
in order to reach and understand a given step in concept formation?
We must begin with a definition. A "friend" designates a person in a
certain kind of human relationship, in contrast with an acquaintance, a
stranger, or an enemy. In essence, the relationship involves mutual
knowledge, esteem and affection; as a result, the individuals take pleasure
in each other's company, communicate with a high degree of intimacy, and
display a mutual benevolence, each sincerely wishing the other well. To be
able to identify such a complex relationship, one must obviously have formed
many earlier concepts, such as "man," "knowledge," "pleasure." Let us focus
on a central one here, the concept "esteem."
Again we ask: what does this concept depend on? "Esteem" designates a
certain kind of favorable opinion or appraisal; one man "esteems" another
when he recognizes certain character traits or qualities in the other which
he estimates as being of significant (moral) value. To grasp such a concept,
therefore, one must first know many concepts that come still earlier,
including, beneath all, the concept "value."
The same root is presupposed by the concept "affection." "Affection" is
an emotional response that derives from esteem, i.e., from the recognition
of one's values in the character of another. If one had not yet reached the
concept "value" in any terms, he might very well feel something for another
man, but he would be unable to identify the feeling as "affection."
Now let us take another step. How does one reduce the concept "value"?
"Value" is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. What earlier concepts
does this presuppose? Among other things, an individual must first learn
that man is a being capable of acting to gain various objects, i.e., he must
grasp the concept "purpose"; and he must also learn that man has the power
of selection among various purposes, i.e., he must grasp the concept
"choice." Without these concepts, a child cannot form any normative
abstractions. such as "good" and "evil," "desirable" and "undesirable,"
"value" and "disvalue."
One can observe men pursuing various purposes - moving to a table in
order to eat a meal, lying down on a bed in order to sleep, etc. - although
one cannot conceptualize "purpose" until the various elementary entities and
actions involved have first been conceptualized. And one can observe and
identify the act of choice introspectively, once one has processed
sufficient existential data to have reached the stage of forming and
distinguishing introspective concepts. The final steps backwards, in short,
do bring us eventually to first-level concepts, such as "table," "bed,"
"man." At this point, the reduction has been completed. It ends when we the
level of ostensive concepts, which we define by directly pointing to the
entity.
To sum up, here are the elements of the logical chain we have been
identifying, this time in ascending order: "Men have to choose among various
purposes by means of their values. This fact generates certain kinds of
mutual estimates and emotions, including esteem and affection, which are the
basis for a certain kind of human relation, friendship."
Now what are the advantages of knowing such a chain? Part of the answer
is: self-protection.
For example, if someone were to say to you now: "Man is determined,
'choice' is a myth, no one can help anything he does, so we should all have
compassion and be friendly to one another." Your immediate reply would be:
"`Friendly?' How can you use that term?" The concept "friendship," rests on
the concept "choice." If determinism is true and "choice" is a myth, then
there can be no such higher-level abstractions as "value," or "affection,"
or "friendship." In short, now that you know the conceptual roots of
"friendship," - the chain linking it to the facts of reality - you know the
rules of its proper use and you can spot any egregious misuse. You can thus
guard the clarity - the identity - of the concept in your own mind.
Or if a man tells you: "I disagree with your ideas, I object to your
desires, I disapprove of your associates, your actions, your choices, but
we're friends anyway, because I'm criticizing you for your own good and I
like you just the same," (a claim that is not so uncommon as you might
think, especially among relatives) you would immediately reply: "If you
reject everything about me, how can you like me? For what attributes? What
meaning does `friendship' have once you detach it from the concept of
`values'?"
Errors of this kind are common. The fallacy involved was identified for
the first time by Nathaniel Branden. He called it the fallacy of the "stolen
concept." The fallacy consists in using a higher-level concept while denying
or ignoring its hierarchical roots. i.e.. one or more of the earlier
concepts on which it logically depends. This is the intellectual equivalent
of standing on the fourtieth floor of a skyscraper while dynamiting the
first thirty-nine. The higher-level concept - "friendship," in the above
examples - is "stolen," because the individual involved has no logical right
to use it. He is an epistemological parasite: he seizes, without
understanding, a term created and made possible by other men, who DO observe
the necessary hierarchical structure.
The reason that stolen concepts are so prevalent is that most people
(even most philosophers) have no idea of the "roots" of a concept. They
treat every concept as a primary, as a first-level abstraction, which means:
they tear the concept from any place in a hierarchy, and thereby detach it
from reality. Thereafter, its use is subject to nothing but caprice or
unthinking habit, with no objective guidelines for the mind to follow. The
result is confusion, contradiction, and the conversion of language into mere
verbiage.
The antidote to this cognitive poision is the process of reduction.
Reduction completes the job of definition by taking you from the initial
definition through the definitions of the next lower level, and then of the
next lower, until you reach the direct perception of reality. This is the
only means by which the initial definition itself can be made fully clear.
Pseudo-concepts cannot be reduced to observational data - and this is the
proof that such concepts are invalid. Invalid concepts are words that
represent attempts to integrate errors, contradictions or false
propositions, such as concepts originating in mysticism (e.g., "ghost,"
"god," "gremlin") - or words without specific definitions which can mean
anything to anyone, such as modern anti-concepts like "extremism,"
"McCarthyism," and "isolationism". Any such concept, or alleged concept, is
inherently detached from reality and invalidates every proposition or
process of thought in which it is used as a cognitive assertion.
What is the test of an invalid concept? The fact that it cannot be
reduced to the perceptual level. In other words: nothing in reality gives
rise to the concept. The test is not simply that the referent is
unobservable. Science, for instance, regularly refers to atoms, genes, x-
rays, and other such phenomena. But in these cases one can identify the
objective evidence supporting the concepts. One can define the sequence by
which men were led from observations step by step to a series of
conclusions, which were ultimately integrated into new concepts to designate
hitherto unknown entities. In regard to the key terms of religion, by
contrast, this is precisely what cannot be done. The referents of "god,"
"angel," and "devil" are not only unobservable; the terms themselves cannot
be connected by any process to the perceptual level. This is the proof that
such concepts are invalid.
Reduction is necessary in regard to all higher-level thinking.
Propositions too (if non-axiomatic) must be brought step by step to the
perceptual level. They are based on antecedent cognitions in the chain of
evidence that led to them - going back ultimately to direct observation.
To a mind that does not grasp this chain, a higher-level proposition is
arbitrary, non-contextual, non-objective, i.e., detached from reality and
from the requirements of human cognition. This is precisely why proof of an
idea is necessary. Proof is a form of reduction. The conclusion to be proved
is a higher-level cognition, whose link to reality lies in its premises;
which eventually lead back to the perceptual level. Proof, in other words,
is a form of retracing the hierarchical steps of cognition. (As with
conceptual reduction, so with proof: the process identifies the essential
links in the chain, the necessary logical structure relating a given content
to observational data.)
For example, it is not an axiom that "man has property rights." Property
rights are a consequence of a man's right to life: which latter we can
establish only if we know the nature and value of man's life; which
presupposes, among other things, that objective value-judgments are
possible; which presupposes that objective knowledge is possible; which
depends on a certain relation between man's mind and reality, i.e., between
consciousness and existence. If you do not know and conform to this kind of
structure, you can neither defend property rights nor define the concept nor
apply it properly.
Proof, therefore, is not a process of deriving a conclusion from
arbitrary premises, nor even from arbitrarily selected true premises. Proof
is the process of establishing a conclusion by identifying the proper
hierarchy of its premises, and by following backward the order of logical
dependence, terminating with the directly perceptual.

* Certainty
Certainty is a state of mind in which a person perceives a correlation
between his mental images and Reality. It is a judgment made within the
context of a state of knowledge. The knowledge need not be total - but must
be sufficient to ensure that the judgment is valid.
Observe that this is a philosophically neutral definition: An objectivist
achieves a state of certainty when he has modified his mental images to
bring them into accord with reality. A subjectivist achieves certainty when
he has modified his perceived reality to bring it into accord with his
mental images.
Observe also that this definition allows for degrees of certainty -
certainty need not be absolute: the closer the degree of correlation between
the mental image and reality, the higher the degree of certainty
experienced. Absolute certainty would correspond to a complete congruency
between the image and reality. And the complete absence of certainty would
correspond to a state wherein there was no mental image at all of the aspect
of reality under consideration - a state of complete ignorance.

Certainty is not an unconditional prerequisite to life's activities. One

can go through life without being certain of many things: You are uncertain
every time you go hunting or fishing. You are uncertain when you plant a
garden, when you look for a word in the dictionary (one of my grumbles is in
not finding the word at all - or finding it accompanied by a grossly
inadequate definition, such as the word "certainty"), when you go to town -
with or without your umbrella (although in this last example, I am tempted
to say that there is a kind of "negative certainty" involved!)
A "reasonable expectation" is sufficient to cope with a vast number of
situations.

Are there things about which we MUST be certain?

Yes, I believe there are two such things:
1. The Axiomatic Concepts. These are the foundation of human knowledge,
and thus are the foundation of all subsets of human knowledge, including
certainty. As Aristotle remarked, in considering Axiomatic Concepts: "For a
principle which everyone must have who understands anything that is, is not
a hypothesis.... such a principle is the most certain of all."
2. Rationality. This is the ability of the human mind to perceive and
understand Reality. One of the facts of reality relevant to this context is
the fact that human beings are neither omniscient nor infallible, and thus
to ground the concept of certainty on either or both of these unwarranted
notions is to demand something that does not exist in reality.
Although certainty is required in regard to these things, that certainty
is NOT the product of an act of faith! Ayn Rand pointed out that they cannot
be escaped, that they are implicit in all knowledge, and must be accepted
and used even in any attempt to deny them.
In the real world, certainty is rarely a Boolean phenomenon: it is seldom
the case that you have either absolute certainty or total doubt about
something. Those who attempt to impose such an alternative on the idea of
certainty are implicitly assuming that a human being must be both omniscient
and infallible. They assert that to have ABSOLUTE certainty about something,
one must have TOTAL knowledge of that thing, and that to have absolute
CERTAINTY, there must be no room for the slightest error in one's judgment.
Neither omniscience nor infallibility are attributes possessed by human
beings.

The statement "There is no such thing as absolute certainty" - or any

variation of this statement - manifests the fallacy of self-exclusion: The
statement itself is intended to be absolutely certain.

Kant divided the world into two domains: the domain of phenomena and the
domain of noumena. Phenomena, he claimed, are events as perceived by the
human mind - they are sensations. Noumena are the causes of phenomena - they
are the so-called things-in-themselves, the objects that really exist. Kant
concluded that human beings can never know the noumena directly: noumena are
the sources of the signals that act on our senses, and we can perceive only
the signals, not the sources. According to Kant, then, we cannot ever really
know anything definite about the noumena.
But when he says "We cannot know anything definite about them" he is
saying something definite about them: that their essential nature is such as
to preclude our having definite knowledge of that nature. But Kant's
statement itself explicitly asserts such definite knowledge, and is thus
another example of the fallacy of self-exclusion.

The notion of certainty has its roots in the process of concept

formation. As Rand has observed "A concept is a mental integration of two or
more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their
particular measurements omitted." To form a concept, a man does not have to
make the particular measurements - nor even know how to make the
measurements - "he merely has to observe the element of similarity," and
recognize that "the relevant measurements must exist in SOME quantity, but
may exist in ANY quantity."
"Similarity is grasped perceptually; in observing it, man is not and does
not have to be aware of the fact that it involves a matter of measurement.
It is the task of science to identify that fact." (Quotes are from
INTRODUCTION TO OBJECTIVIST EPISTEMOLOGY, Chapter 2, which contains an
extended account of the nature of the measurement process.)
Note that similarity is grasped perceptually and that the integration is
of percepts. As David Kelley has pointed out, the percepts are DIRECT links
between Existence and Consciousness. There can be no doubt about the reality
of the percepts: they are indeed certain. And here, in the percepts, is the
foundation of certainty. The integration of the percepts is the first active
behavior that a consciousness performs (the receipt of sensations and their
integration into percepts are essentially passive processes).
Here are some examples:
When I go hunting - my certainty lies in the knowledge that food animals
do exist and can be obtained through my efforts. My uncertainty lies in not
knowing the precise location of the animals and not knowing the exact
actions needed to obtain them.
When I plant a garden - my certainty lies in the knowledge that food
plants can be grown. My uncertainty lies in not knowing exactly what
conditions are required to grow a particular plant in a particular place.
When I look for a word in the dictionary - my certainty lies in the
knowledge that words exist and that they can be defined. My uncertainty lies
in not knowing if the particular word I want is in a particular place and
has been given a suitable definition.
When I go to town - I am certain that it does rain. But I am uncertain as
to whether it will rain at a particular location at a particular time.
This notion applies even in the realm of Quantum Physics: I am certain
that electrons emit photons, but I am uncertain about the emission of a
photon by a particular electron at a particular time. (It is the Probability
Amplitude that describes this emission.)
With regard to Rationality - my certainty lies in the knowledge that my
mind can function as an accurate identifier of reality. But I may be
uncertain about the accuracy of a particular application of my mind to a
specific identification. My safety lies in carefully reducing the specific
identification to the precise perceptual concretes upon which it is founded.
The percepts are certain, and if I have correctly built my identification
upon them then it too will be certain.

"Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of

certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none ABSOLUTELY
certain."
Now we can see the flaw in this contention: the word "statements"
implicitly subsumes both aspects of concept-formation. When the "statements"
are about the particular measureable characteristics of phenomena, then they
are open to uncertainty. But when the "statements" are integrated percepts
of the phenomena, then they are certain.

"If certainty is unattainable, how can we decide how close we are to it,
which is what a probability estimate is?"
In this question the word "certainty" means "infallably exact precision
in measurement." There is no such thing - the world just isn't built this
way. This is an improper definition of "certainty." A probability estimate
is fundamentally not a statement about reality but a statement about my
knowledge of reality. Reality is not probable - it is fact.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
When Bertrand Russell said this, he should have put "I think" at the end
of it.
The flaw in Russell's remark lies in the implicit meaning of "certain of
themselves." The fools and fanatics cause trouble not because of their
certainty, but because of their social behavior. It is wrong to blame
certainty per se for the choices and actions of people who assert certainty.
That's rather like blaming guns for murder. Guns don't kill people - people
kill people.

Certainty "creates confidence in one's course of action as an already

established fact. It provides the basis for progress into new areas
unencountered previously." This notion is critically important to the
development of man's cognitive behavior; the basic certainty of the
elemental act of conceptualizing lies at the root of all his subsequent
conscious behavior. A great number of man's concepts are derived not
directly from perceptual concretes, but from the integration of previously
created concepts (the process Rand calls "abstraction from abstractions").
If the previously created concepts were not "already established facts"
there would be no way to build reliably upon them, and man would be
restricted to living a cognitive life not much higher than that of the
lesser animals: restricted to a merely perceptual awareness of the world.

I believe it is possible for a person to live without certainty - but

only without his own inner certainty. Doing so, he goes through life as an
intellectual, moral and spiritual parasite: a parasite on other people who
DO possess certainty. As Branden has observed, the fundamental act of a
human being is the choice "to think - or not to think." The act of concept-
formation lies at the base of all other human behavior. The conviction of
certainty regarding this act is a prerequisite to all thought. If you don't
think, you can stay alive only by being a parasite on the thinking of
others.

* Probability
There is an important distinction to be made between two uses of the term
"Probable."

1. It is used to express a judgment about the occurrence of a phenomenon:

"I'll probably go to town this afternoon."
"The ice-cream parlor will quite likely be out of strawberry again."
"The next president will surely be a varmint criminal."
"It is more probable that the next president will be a varmint criminal
than that the ice-cream parlor will be out of strawberry."
In each case what is expressed is a surmise or conjecture - a statement
of my judgment about a situation. Such judgments are not precisely
quantifiable, but are combinations of my ignorance, my partial knowledge,
and my extrapolations from previous experience.

2. It is used to express knowledge about the frequency of occurrence of a

phenomenon:
"The probability of a coin falling heads-up is 1/2"
"The probability of dice showing 12 is 1/36"
"It is more probable that a coin will fall heads-up than that the dice
will show 12."
These cases are not statements of uncertainty. They are statements
expressing exact and certain knowledge - certain because the statements are
based directly on perceptual observations of the facts of Reality. They are
descriptions of reality with as much underlying certainty as the statement
"2 plus 2 make 4."

No probability can be attached to a unique event; that is, an event that

belongs to a class where there is only one member and no prior ones.

The difference between probability and likelihood: Probability is a

precise measurement of the occurrence of a phenomenon resulting from
scientific laws. Likelihood denotes the occurrence of a phenomenon resulting
from conscious choice. Thus probability can be expressed with mathematical
precision - likelihood can be expressed only in terms of "greater" or
"lesser."

* Expense
"At taxpayers' expense"
That is a frequently-heard term nowadays, and whether the word used is
"expense" or "cost" the same meaning is intended. I believe it is a wrong
meaning, and that the term is a cruel misrepresentation of the facts.

The statement has two implications:

That a transfer of wealth has occurred from person A to person B in the
form of a payment for phenomenon C.
That if C had not occurred, the wealth would have remained in the
possession of A.
Neither of these implications is factual.

Consider a specific example: The government contracts with Daddy Warbucks

Corp. to provide the army with a New Gun. The gun turns out to be poorly
designed and will not work. During a congressional hearing to investigate
the multi-million dollar boondoggle, congressman Flatula is heard to declare
"This whole mess was done at taxpayers' expense!"
The implication is that the Taxpayer paid Daddy Warbucks for the New Gun.
But this is not the case. Daddy Warbucks received payment from the
accounting office of the Department of Defense - he got a cheque from the
government for $Mega. And too, if this particular contract had never been
issued (and the New Gun had never been manufactured) the $Mega would have
stayed, not in the pocket of the Taxpayer but in the coffers of the
government.
In fact, the whole scheme was done at government expense. The fact that
the government got its money by robbing a selected group of people does not
in ANY way implicate those people in the actions of the government.

Consider a personal example: If you are robbed of $100 by a hoodlum, and

the hoodlum subsequently uses part of that money to finance an abortion for
his girlfriend, can it be said that this abortion occurred at your expense?
Did you participate in the abortion? No, you did not. It was performed by
a quack doctor of whose very existence you were completely unaware.
Did you finance the abortion? No, you did not. The doctor received his
payment from the hoodlum. The doctor didn't know where the hoodlum got the
money, or even that you exist.
Did you condone the abortion? No, you did not. You didn't even KNOW about
the abortion!

There is absolutely no reasonable way, in either of these examples, that

the third party (the taxpayer in the first case, and you personally in the
second case) can be construed as a participant, unless he knows about and
sanctions the behavior of the other two parties.

And here we see the underlying motivation of those who use this phrase
"at taxpayers' expense": the desire to impose upon YOU personally the moral
culpability of sanctioning the behavior of the government and the people who
deal with it. What they say, in effect, is that because you are the victim
of an act of robbery (taxation) you are therefore responsible morally for
the manner in which the robber uses the money he has stolen from you.

This same viciousness can be observed in another assertion I encounter

frequently when I chide people for using the word "we" when referring to the
actions of the government. They reply with "Well, you're a taxpayer too!"
The fact that I am a victim is being used as justification for assigning
to me moral culpability for the behavior of the thief. I call this the
GRATUITOUS INCULPATION fallacy.

You might chastise me for attributing to the people who use these
arguments a motivation they do not intend. And by and large you are right:
they do not intend to perpetrate an evil, but that IN FACT is what they are
doing. I call this the "Road to Hell" syndrome. In fact, their intentions do
not matter; it is only the consequences of their behavior that matter - the
consequences that actually have an effect in the world. The most wicked
people are those who sincerely believe that what they are doing is good. If
you wish to know the true nature of someone who uses the statements and
arguments I presented above, merely describe to him why those statements and
arguments are in fact evil. And then see if he abandons them.

* To Be
Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary: "to have an objective existence:
have reality or actuality."

Here, "to be" is defined by referring to the concept of existence. This

is a more-or-less adequate definition of the term, but it does not convey
the genuine fundamentality of the idea of existence.

Consider what the function of a definition is. A proper definition will

describe the fundamental nature of a term - in the process using other terms
which are fundamental to the first term. For example: "orphan" would be
defined by using the term "parent". But "parent" could easily be defined
without reference to the term "orphan" at all, because the idea of "parent"
is fundamental to the idea of "orphan" - not the other way around. To define
"parent" we must refer to terms that are fundamental to it, such as
"sexually mature lifeform" - and so on, down the ladder of fundamentality.
Thus we define Z in terms of Y. Y in terms of X. X in terms of W... D in
terms of C. C in terms of B. B in terms of A. But do we then define A in
terms of Z? No. The attic rests on the main floor. The main floor rests on
the basement. The basement rests on the foundation. And the foundation rests
on bedrock. But the bedrock does not rest on the attic. Sooner or later, an
ultimate fundamentality is reached. In building a house, that ultimate
fundamentality is the bedrock. In physics, that ultimate fundamentality is
the First Law of Thermodynamics. In epistemology that ultimate
fundamentality is known as an Axiomatic Concept. An axiomatic concept can be
described, it can be explained, but it cannot be "defined" simply because
there are no terms which are fundamental to it. An axiomatic concept is a
term which MUST (by virtue of its very nature) be accepted and used in the
act of defining any and all other terms. Indeed, one of the primary
distinguishing characteristics of an axiomatic concept is the fact that it
must be accepted and used even in any attempt to deny it! It is inescapable.

The three axiomatic concepts are Existence, Identity, and Consciousness.

 That the world exists is an idea which is inherent, implicitly or
explicitly, in ALL other ideas. That things which exist are what they are
(have an identity) is also such an idea. And that YOU have a consciousness,
which recognizes (or, if you wish, denies) this existence and identity, is
another fundamental - which you accept and use in the process of any
cognitive endeavor. Which is to say that you accept and use your
consciousness in any act of consciousness.

"To be" is a verbal expression which asserts the fact of existence.

* References
Diogenes: "That you are a man, he will know when he sees you; whether a
good or bad one, he will know if he has any skill in discerning the good and
the bad. But if he has none, he will never know, though I write to him a
thousand times."

A reference is a method of obtaining information about another person.

A, being unacquainted with C, and wishing to make a judgment about him,
has two means of doing so: by direct observation and consultation or by
referring to another person's observations, in the form of a reference
provided by B, an acquaintance of C. B, however, may or may not have a
previous acquaintance with A. If A knows B then there is some justification
in his asking B for information about C, because A will have made an
estimate of the validity of B's powers of observation and judgment, and will
therefore be able to make some valuation of the reference. If A does not
know B then it is certainly not advisable for him to place much, if any,
weight on the information provided by B. After all, C is certainly not going
to select a reference source who would say bad things about him! If A
accepts a reference from a person with whom he is not acquainted, he has
gained no useful information about C, because the most undesirable people
can usually provide the most impeccable references.
To ask for a reference is, at best, of very limited usefulness; at worst
it is an intellectual cop-out. If I want to know what kind of person you are
I will make my own observations and base upon them my own judgment, I won't
pass the buck to someone else.

* Envy
If life on earth is, as Marx asserted, a zero-sum game, then a virulent
envy must inevitably be the result. Anyone who works harder, gets ahead, and
becomes better off, must be doing so at the expense of those who do not.
In a free market, where men earn their wealth and distinction by trading
their skills and achievements, a man's long-range failure, like his long-
range success, is an objective reflection of his ability. It is precisely
this inexorable rule of capitalism - "to each according to his ability" -
that wounds the self-esteem of the marxist and engenders the widespread
hatred for capitalism.
But there is an even worse aspect to envy when it is the motive of a man
who is willing to make himself worse off in order to bring another down to
his level. Do not fool yourself by thinking that altruists are motivated by
compassion for the suffering: they are motivated by hatred for the
successful. To be rational is to be successful in dealing with reality. Thus
is explained much of the existing hatred for rationality. But altruism has
no power over its victims except by their own consent, which means: by their
acceptance of guilt for the crime of living and of producing values - of
being successful.
The envy today's intellectuals feel is not the plausibly healthy desire
to attain what others have attained, but an ugly pleasure in seeing others
lose what they have attained. Envy is not the desire to emulate the
achievements of others, nor is it primarily the desire to steal other
people's values; it is, rather, the desire to obliterate those values. The
envier has little interest in acquiring the other person's possessions for
himself. He would like to see the other person robbed, dispossessed,
stripped, humiliated or hurt. His ideas are not ideas in favor of anything,
but are a means of expressing his hatred of knowldge, of achievement, of
happiness, of man - his political views are an expression of his more
fundamental spiritual nihilism.

* Instinct
70/Aug/10 The unnamed but automatized connections in the mind.
AS-1013 62/Oct/43 An unerring and automatic form of knowledge.
A largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a
complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without the
involvment of reason.
Scientists who use the term "instinct" never define it, and rarely even
attempt to do so. The conclusion I derive from all their usages is that
instinct means "behavior for which I am not able to adduce any other cause."
Nathaniel Branden (PSE-23): "There is no such thing. There are 3
categories in terms of which animal behavior can be explained: 1. Actions
which are reflexes. 2. Actions which are guided directly by an animal's
pleasure-pain sensory apparatus and which involve the faculty of
consciousness but not a process of learning - such as moving toward warmth.
3. Actions which are the result of learning. Behavior that has not been
traced to one of these categories or to some combination of them has not
been explained."

Philosophers have long debated the causes of human behavior: heredity or

environment? Are heroes and villains made or born? Objectivists know that
nature and nurture are only part of the answer - two-thirds, to be exact.
The remaining third is individual free will. This is to say that man is
capable of making choices which are causal primaries. The fundamental act of
free will is the choice: to think or not to think. If you do not choose the
former, then you revert to heredity and environment by default. They'll call
the tune if you don't call it for yourself. Everybody is motivated by some
continually shifting mixture of the three factors, different for each of us,
at each minute in our lives. In terms of human behavior, this is the basis
for all causation. History isn't determined by some mysterious impersonal
machinery, but by people deciding to use their minds or sloughing off that
decision.

Most psychologists ignore the mind's role in mediating the links between
genes and human behavior. Hormones, while not exercising absolute control
over behavior, can assert a substantial influence over behavior. If the
creature's volitional consciousness then cooperates with this influence, the
result could be the manifestation of complex behavior. Another thing to
consider is the propensity for self-assertion: a baby grasps because that is
the natural function-potential of its hand, just as eyes see, legs walk, and
a mind thinks.

You can't pick and choose with instincts: you have to take the lot. You
can't allow Venus into the Pantheon and bolt the door on Mars. And once you
take on such things as "fighting", "territorial imperative" and "rank
order", you are in a messy quagmire of terms that have little, if any,
correspondence with reality.
Watching the behavior of the professional psychologists - bonding,
bickering, preening, flirting and engaging in mututal rhetorical grooming -
one must concur with their basic premise: they are all animals, descendants
of a vast lineage of replicators sprung from primordial pond scum.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1992, contains a fascinating essay by Ronald

Melzack entitled PHANTOM LIMBS. This essay presents the best case I have
ever seen for a phenomenon that might be called "instinct" although
surprisingly, the word "instinct" does not appear in the essay.
************* from Melzack ********
People who have lost an arm or a leg often perceive the limb as though it
is still there. Such a phantom can feel wet, or it can itch, which can be
extremely distressing, although scratching the apparent site of discomfort
can actually relieve the annoyance sometimes. Some paraplegics complain that
their legs make continuous cycling movements, producing painful fatigue,
even though the patient's actual legs are lying immobile on the bed.
The brain contains a network of neurons, that, in addition to responding
to sensory stimulation, continuously generates a characteristic pattern of
impulses indicating that the body is intact and unequivocally one's own. If
such a matrix operated in the absence of sensory inputs from the periphery
of the body, it would create the impression of having a limb even when that
limb has been removed.
Phantom seeing and hearing, like phantom limbs, are also generated by the
brain in the absence of sensory input. People whose vision has been impaired
by cataracts or by the loss of a portion of the visual processing system in
the brain sometimes report highly detailed visual experiences.
Phantom sights and sounds occur when the brain loses its normal input
from a sensory system. In the absence of input, cells in the central nervous
system become more active. The brain's intrinsic mechanisms transform that
neuronal activity into meaningful experiences.
The parietal lobe has been shown to be essential to the sense of self -
to the recognition of the self and to the evaluation of sensory signals.
Patients who have suffered a lesion of the parietal lobe in one hemisphere
have been known to push one of their own legs out of a hospital bed because
they were convinced it belonged to a stranger.
When sensory signals from the periphery reach the brain, they pass
through several systems in parallel. As the signals are analyzed,
information about them is shared among the various systems and converted
into an integrated output, which is sent to other parts of the brain.
Somewhere in the brain the output is transformed into a conscious
perception.
As a system analyzes sensory information, it imprints its characteristic
neurosignature on the output. The specific neurosignature of an individual
would be determined by the pattern of connectivity among neurons in the
system - that is, by such factors as which neurons are connected to one
another and by the number, types and strengths of the synapses.
When sensory input activates two brain cells simultaneously, synapses
between the cells form stronger connections. Eventually the process gives
rise to whole assemblies of linked neurons, so that a signal going into one
part of an assembly spreads through the rest, even if the assembly extends
across broad areas of the brain.
The connections of this neuromatrix are primarily determined not by
experience but by the genes. The matrix, though, could later be sculpted by
experience, which would add or delete, strengthen or weaken, existing
synapses. I think the matrix is largely prewired because many people who
were born without an arm or a leg do nonetheless experience a vivid phantom.
Under normal circumstances, then, the myriad qualities of sensation
people experience emerge from variations in sensory input. This input is
both analyzed and shaped into complex experiences of sensation and self by
the larely prewired neuromatrix. Yet even in the absence of external
stimuli, much the same range of experiences can be generated by other
signals passing through the neuromatrix - such as those produced by the
spontaneous firing of neurons in the matrix itself or the spinal cord or the
periphery. Regardless of the source of the input to the matrix, the result
would be the same: rapid spread of the signals throughout the matrix and
perception of a limb located within a unitary self, even when the actual
limb is gone.
******** end of Melzak *******

It seems my Tabula may not be entirely Rasa.

* Luck
Luck means to prosper or succeed through chance or good fortune.
Lucky, fortunate, happy, providential, mean meeting with unforseen
success. Lucky stresses the agency of chance in bringing about a favorable
result. Fortunate suggests being rewarded beyond one's deserts. Happy
combines the implications of lucky and fortunate with a stress on being
blessed. Providential implies the help or intervention of a higher power.

"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate

preparation to cope with a statistical universe. 'Good luck' follows careful
preparation; 'bad luck' comes from sloppiness." ... Heinlein
"Every scientist hopes for the good fortune to recognize one of nature's
suprises and the good sense to make the most out of it." ... Robert Hazen
Luck is merely professionalism and attention to detail, it's your
awareness of everything that is going on around you; it's how well you know
and understand your environment and your own limitations. Luck is the sum
total of your abilities. You make your own luck. If you think your luck is
running low, you'd better get busy and make some more.
"Luck favors the prepared mind." ... Pasteur
Lucky people tend to be people who give luck a chance to happen. Why were
you at that place? Why were you doing what you were doing? If that is luck,
then it is luck every time a batter hits a ball.

When Napoleon's eagle eye flashed down the list of officers proposed for
promotion to generals, he used to scribble in the margin of a name: "Is he
lucky?"

* Standard vs Purpose - Man qua Man - to Survive or to Flourish

A standard is the basis upon which rests or which makes possible the
existence of a purpose. The two things, while related, are not identical and
should not be confused with one another.
Consider a house. Its standard is the foundation which it is built upon.
Its purpose is the function of providing shelter for people. You can see
that it could not fulfill its purpose without having its standard; but
observe also that its standard is not the reason for its existence.
Now consider a man. His standard is his life - the life which is
manifested in his biological mechanism. His purpose is also his life - but
here "life" is used in a different sense, meaning the process of achieving
values. I will refer to these two different aspects of life by the terms B-
life and V-life. In the Objectivist writings there is considerable emphasis
on the idea that "man's life is the standard of values." (Here is meant B-
life.) There is also much emphasis placed on the idea that "man's life qua
man" (V-life) is the purpose of man's existence. Unfortunately, there is too
little attention paid to differentiating between the two quite different
aspects of the term "life" which are being considered. The result is that
many people think in terms of B-life when they should be using the term V-
life. An example is the man who claims that, if faced with a terrible
situation in which he had to choose between saving his own life or saving
his wife's (or child's) life, he would, according to the principles of
Objectivism, have to save his own life, because, after all, Objectivism
tells him that his own biological existence is the most important value he
can hold, doesn't it? This is surely not what Objectivism implies, nor is it
what Rand means to say. You will recall Galt's words to Dagny at the time
when he is about to be captured:
"But if they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other,
they will have you on a torture rack.... At the first mention of a threat to
you, I will kill myself.... I do not care to see you enduring a drawn-out
murder. There will be no values for me to seek after that - and I do not
care to exist without values."
This same motivation can be observed in the final scenes of Hugo's
TOILERS OF THE SEA. Both Galt and Gilliatt realized quite well that his
purpose in living is the achievement of values, not merely the continuance
of his physical biological processes.

Given the choice to live, the extremes, of course, are "subsist" and
"flourish." An apparent ambiguity in the Objectivist morality arises from
attempts to interpret the idea of "man's life" as meaning "mere literal
existence" or "subsistence" on the one hand versus "flourish" (as in
"survive as man qua man") on the other hand. The choice "to live" implies
the choice of all the things that characterize a HUMAN life, the only kind
of life we are able to choose, if we are to be human.
In fact, a morality designed specifically to show man how to flourish is
a mistaken thing to ask for, since every human being is a specifically
distinct and different entity. "Flourishing" for a particular life means
applying the basic principles derived from "survival" morality to any of an
infinite number of possible contexts.
If Ayn Rand were to have discovered the physics of baseball, we would be
wrong to criticize her by exclaiming, "But she says nothing about how to be
a good shortstop or a good catcher's mitt manufacturer or a good baseball
card collector." There is, in fact, no way for her to do this. Individuals
with these specific interests must figure out the specific techniques for
themselves, using their power of reason. Those who want more than basic
moral principles need to consult technical manuals, self help books and
other sources of special information, rather than fooling themselves into
thinking that success in life comes from philosophical hairsplitting.
To demand a morality for flourishing is to demand: "Tell me what to do!
Give me not merely principles, but all the specific rules - give me the
recipe for success so I can avoid having to choose for myself - so I can
avoid the effort of having to think about how to apply principles to my own
specific situation." It amounts to an attempt to escape from the requirement
that an individual must make his own choices and accept responsibility for
his own life and success.
You are the person that YOU choose to be, and the "purpose" of your life
is what YOU choose for it to be. You can't get these things from any
external source. Given the Objectivist (Biocentric) precept that volition is
a first cause, you must CHOOSE to invest your life with purpose, else you
will become (by default) what Rand so aptly described as the most
contemptible of all people: the man without a purpose.
Just as you must choose the values that invest your SELF with purpose, so
you must also invest your personal relationships with appropriate internal
value. You must be explicitly aware of the value that accompanies each of
your relationships - of the importance that lies within them. This is
especially true of sex. Since sex is the source of the greatest physical
pleasure available to a human being, you must be punctilious in choosing the
value of the people you have sex with, lest you cheapen yourself
spiritually. This explains why promiscuity is a bad practice: it associates
very high physical pleasure with low (or non-existent) spiritual value.

Flourishing and investiture: Is your life a field of weeds, or a

cultivated garden of blossoming flowers?

* Nonsense
That which is expressed in a way that I find incomprehensible.
In considering "what is nonsense?" I began with the notion that nonsense
is something that manifests a denial of the Law of Identity. This would
define it as a metaphysical concept. But then, how can I identify nonsense
when I encounter it? Oh sure, some things I can see immediately as nonsense.
They are a subset of the things that I can understand. But what of other
things which I cannot understand? Like the Tensor Calculus - might that be
nonsense? I have no way of determining. And the conundrum cannot be resolved
by reference to higher level intellects either. For example: The IDEA of my
little computer would have been nonsense to Archimedes (I suppose the
computer itself would have been magic to him), thus it is clear that a
perfectly sensible idea can be regarded as nonsense - even to someone
endowed with the highest level of intellectual ability. Therefore, if it is
considered as a metaphysical concept, there is no way that "nonsense" can be
precisely identified. This leads me to believe that it can only be
accurately considered as an epistemological concept. It then becomes
relative to the person who is making the identification. Thus, just as one
man's meat is another man's poison, one man's sense can be another man's
nonsense. As the Red Queen said: "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like,
but I've heard nonsense compared with which that would be as sensible as a
dictionary!"

* Compromise
A compromise is an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual
concessions. But this means that both parties agree upon some fundamental
principle which serves as a basis for the adjustment. It is only in regard
to concretes or particulars implementing a mutually accepted basic principle
that compromise can occur. A compromise is a negotiated adjustment of the
quantity of some phenomenon, thus a compromise cannot be applied between two
disparate phenomena. There cannot be a compromise between a phenomenon and
its negation. For example, between theft and non-theft. If I want to steal
$10 from you and I respond to your protest by suggesting that we
"compromise" and I will steal only $5 - this is no compromise! It is
relinquishment, by you, of your principle of non-theft - and acceptance,
again by you, of my principle of theft. Once you have accepted the principle
of theft, then we can indeed compromise - on how much theft you will be
subjected to.
Compromise is possible only on terms of equality - that is, between
ability and ability (though one man's ability may be greater than
another's), not between ability and incompetence, nor between intelligence
and stupidity, nor between trade and theft. Compromise must be between
equals in kind, which might differ in degree, but it can't be between
opposite kinds.
You can compromise between 5 lbs and 7 lbs, but you can't compromise
between 5 lbs and 3 gallons.
 Chapter 4
ECONOMICS FROM AN OBJECTIVIST
VIEWPOINT

* Objective vs Subjective Economic Value

The economic ideology of the feudal system was contained in the phrases
"fair price" and "just wage." Prices and wages were seen as ethical
judgments of worth while supply and demand were viewed as economically
irrelevant. The modern idea of prices and wages as pragmatic devices for
allocating resources, implying no ethical judgment, came into existence only
during the Renaissance. Under the feudal system the economic influence of
supply and demand on prices arose only in the worst possible times: during
famine or war. And the steep rises in prices during those times were
considered an outrage perpetrated by the sellers who set them. People had
not yet learned that you can't get something for nothing. Most still have
not learned this today.
For many years men sought in vain for some objective standard of value, a
"fair" price, a "just" wage, an unvarying measure of the intrinsic worth of
an object or service. But no such measure exists, simply because "value" has
no meaning other than in relation to living beings; the value of a thing is
always relative to a particular person, not to any characteristic of an
inanimate object.
The most commonly proposed answer to their quest was that the exchange
value of a product is the amount of time put into the making of it. For
instance, if a baker worked an hour to bake a loaf of bread, anyone else
should be willing to give up an hour's work for that bread. But this scheme
leaves the baker with no way to decide how much of his time to devote to
baking bread rather than cakes or tarts. Thus this "objective value" idea
always led to economic nonsense - and it continues to do so today. The
Marxian definition of value is absurd: all the work you care to add will not
turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, with zero value.
Likewise, unskillful work can easily subtract value: an incompetent cook can
turn wholesome dough and fresh apples, valuable already, into an inedible
mess with a value of zero.
Eventually it was deduced (by Carl Menger) that the exchange value of a
product is simply whatever anyone else will give for it in a voluntary
trade. In a voluntary trade, each participant evaluates, in terms of his own
personal scale of values, what he gives up and compares this with what he
receives. The ratio at which these items compare can then become the basis
for a price - the only possible realistic price. In this way the personal
choices of each individual participant, all balancing against each other,
comprise the dynamic flow of commerce which we know as the free market.
Menger showed that the free market is just free people making free choices
about their own values. From this was derived the concept of the market as
an information system, and the realization that the evaluations underlying
economic choices are of a subjective nature which makes impossible any
objective measurement of the motivations underlying them.
The related phenomenon of "cost" is also inherently linked to choice. It
is that which the choice-maker gives up when he selects one alternative
rather than another. Cost consists of his own evaluation of the benefit that
he anticipates having to forego as a result of his choice.

* History
The failure of Charlemagne's successors to establish a consolidated
regime in Western Europe and the eventual disintegration of real political
power into the hands of a multitude of local barons resulted in a vacuum of
centralized authority. With the decline of the feudal system at the end of
the Middle Ages, the absence of centralized political power left an emerging
merchant class with the opportunity to establish the commercial institutions
which were the foundation of the industrial world we live in today. The
prerequisite for the birth of these economic endeavors was the existence of
a wide realm within which trade could be conducted with freedom from
coercion by political authorities. This freedom also opened the door to the
extensive development of towns and cities, some of which were virtually
independent political entities outside the feudal system.
During the 16th through the 18th centuries, maritime trade with overseas
markets was at once a major field of economic growth and an area intractably
resistant to medieval principles of political control. The efforts of the
emerging nation-states to control maritime commerce lacked the universal
recognition necessary to confer legitimacy and were, on the contrary,
competing, contradictory, and mutually self-defeating.
The political/economic situation in China was quite a bit different. The
Imperial Examination determined entry into the bureaucracy and thus assured
the continuation of a centralized elite, drawing into itself the best brains
of each generation. The basic ideology of the mandarinate was opposed to the
value-systems of the merchants. Capital accumulation in Chinese society
could indeed occur, but the application of it to permanently productive
industrial enterprises was strongly inhibited by the scholar-bureaucrats, as
indeed was any other social action which might threaten their supremacy. It
may not be a coincidence that modern Japan, which led in adapting Western
institutions to its economy, grew out of a politically decentralized feudal
society.
For the European governments, the timing was wrong; they came to power
too late to prevent the rise of capitalism, and their only recourse for
expressing statist values was a gradual, Fabian assertion of authority over
the aspects of capitalism not too mercurial to elude their grasp.

* The Corporate Enterprise

The conduct of economic affairs over time periods of substantial length
required the emergence of an independent economic organism, above and beyond
the individuals engaged in economic activity. The huge enterprises
(railroads, steel mills, factories) that evolved during the Industrial
Revolution required the tying up of capital in amounts, and over periods of
time, unprecedented in medieval commerce. The life of the assets and the
time needed to recover the investment often exceeded the life expectancy of
the mere mortals charged with their management.
The two great authorities of the Middle Ages were the feudal aristocracy
and the Church. Neither produced the relationships of trust and confidence
needed for long-term economic association. To the medieval merchant,
accustomed to keeping his wealth protected against the hazards of political
extortion or war, a tie-up of capital for a period far beyond the range of
foresight would have seemed insane. But gradually, appreciable numbers of
these merchants (those who invested in corporations) came to believe that
other businessmen (those who managed the corporations) were honest,
diligent, and could be trusted. As this trust developed, many business
transactions that had formerly occurred in separate ways in various distinct
ventures came to be included in one conceptual unit, the corporate
enterprise: the publicly-held corporation with marketable stock.
Such trust presupposes a widely shared sense of business ethics, and that
sense of business ethics could hardly have been inherited from the teachings
of the Catholic Church or from the feudal aristocracy. The contempt which
the clergy and the aristocracy felt for the merchant class could only have
encouraged the merchants to develop a code of honor based on punctilious
business relationships - a behavior strikingly absent from the aristocratic
code and emphasizing the profound difference between the two.

* Political Power vs Economic Power

All political systems rest upon the foundation of theft. The ultimate
source of political power is the weapon which is used to commit the act of
theft (called taxation) that provides the wealth of the state. The
distinction between politics and economics is the distinction between the
power to coerce and the power to produce. Politics is also characterized by
other types of coercion than the theft of wealth, but it is this act of
theft that constitutes the economic foundation of political systems, whereas
other forms of economic activity (excluding non-governmental theft) rest on
the production of wealth rather than its expropriation.
On the one hand lies economic power, exercised by means of a positive: by
offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value. On the other hand
is political power, exercised by means of a negative: by the threat of
punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is
values; the government's tool is fear.
The power of a politician is the power to impose punishment on people who
fail to obey his commands. To the extent that he can grant rewards, those
rewards consist of expropriated wealth.
The power of a businessman is the power to grant rewards (in the form of
produced wealth) to people who cooperate with him. His only power to punish
is the power to withhold the rewards. The businessman must produce something
consumers are willing to buy at a price that consumers are willing to pay,
and he must compete for the favor of the consumers in a market with other
businessmen offering similar goods or services. He must persuade consumers
to buy his product, while the politician can coerce them into buying
something whether they want it or not.
Under government there are winners and there are losers. Unlike the free
market, for every beneficiary of government action there is a victim. The
values of the winners are imposed upon the losers, and the losers are
powerless to reject them. But in a free market, majorities and minorities
can both win, because a free market is not a zero-sum institution. In a
market it is possible for numerous large and powerful economic interests to
coexist and prosper in the same economic territory.
If you believe that government should do this or that, enacting laws
against drugs, pornography, homosexuality, etc., keep in mind that
government acts through coercion or threat of coercion. If you want the
government to tax other people for your pet project, you are in effect
holding a sword over those people and forcing them to pay for the
implementation of your ideas. You don't wield the sword yourself, but the
government agent wields it on your behalf. Remember too, that it is a
double-edged sword: if the government can coerce others in order to achieve
your goals, it can also coerce you in order to promote someone else's goals.
Any scheme to loot "the other fellow" can work only if there are enough
productive people around for each to be somebody else's "other fellow."
There is so little clarity in either economic or political analysis
because in the minds of most people the two are all muddled up together and
when people speak of "power" they make no distinction between the power to
coerce and the power to produce.
Underlying politics is human choice. Underlying economics are the facts
of reality (you WILL starve if somebody doesn't produce food for you).
Politics can never be a science, but economics must be. The attempt to fuse
these two disparate realms together is an attempt to assert dominance over
(economic) reality by one's (political) hopes, wishes, whims or fears.

For man to achieve a human state of life and civilization, three

conditions are necessary: freedom, capitalism, and a rational code of
ethical principles to guide his social behavior. To men who use reason and
are free to interact cooperatively, nature gives more and more. To those who
turn away from reason, are not free, or who interact destructively, it gives
less and less.
With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the first two of
these conditions were achieved, to a considerable extent. The result was the
transformation of the world. It was the people of the USA, with a government
too small and weak to significantly inhibit economic activity, who
implemented the principle of laissez-faire capitalism - of free trade in a
free market - to the greatest extent. In America, prior to the 20th century,
men's productive activities were predominantly left free of governmental
restrictions. The result was the creation, in the brief period of a century
and a half, of a standard of living unequaled by the sum total of mankind's
development up to that time. Capitalism - and civilization - are declining
because men failed to achieve the third condition necessary for a human
state of existence: a rational code of ethics appropriate to man's nature.
It is the principled foundation for such a code that Ayn Rand has provided.
Most people today have not learned to distinguish between government
wealth transfers and wealth earned in a free market. This ignorance, coupled
with Christianity's inherent aversion to commerce, induces people to feel
envy when others become rich through market activity. The consequence of
this envy is a clamor for increasing government intervention in the
marketplace. But that intervention is always counterproductive, causing more
problems than it was intended to solve. The line which divides the realm of
wealth from the realm of poverty is roughly that which divides freely
produced and marketed goods and services from government controlled
activities. The solution to economic problems caused by government does not
lie in devoting still more wealth to an institution inherently unfit to be a
producer.
The bottom line is that, just as people can use a TV without
understanding anything about how it works, America has become wealthy but
Americans don't know why. And in their ignorance they are destroying the
economic foundations that made their wealth possible.
Much of the rest of the world suffers from a related form of
shortsightedness. The belief that the wealth of the West springs from its
factory system gives rise to an impulse in the countries of the Third World
to equip themselves with the trappings of modern technology - an impulse
exemplified by the Soviet Union's five-year plans a half-century ago. The
severely limited success of these ventures results from their lack of
appropriate economic foundations. In the West, the development of commercial
relationships preceded the rise of modern industrial institutions by many
years. Western economies had been growing with striking success for more
than a century before the large industrial corporations emerged. This
growth, and its concomitant capital accumulation, were the foundation for
the subsequent immense corporate enterprises.

* Property
* What is property?
* The right to property
 * Why must we recognize property rights?
* Philosophical underpinnings
* Ownership
* John Locke on Property
* Some questions about the Lockean thesis
* Intellectual Property - Information as Property
* Some false arguments
* Digital information
* Bibliography

* What is property?
Property is wealth produced or acquired without coercing others. Any
object which requires the application of human knowledge and action in order
to become of use to mankind, becomes property by virtue of (and by right of)
those who apply the knowledge and effort.

* The right to property

The right to property is the social condition in which one is able to
take the actions necessary to create or to justly acquire property and to
make exclusive use of it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that other
people have any obligation to provide the objects or the actions.

* Why must we recognize property rights?

Is not quite a valid question. The proper question is: "Why must we
establish a social institution which ensures property rights?"
All action takes place on a piece of real estate and employs some
physical object. In the absence of criteria for non-conflicting ownership
and behavior, men could not know who owns what objects, or which actions are
consistent with this ownership and with the rights of other people.
The question "Why should people respect the rights of others?" amounts to
the questions: "Why should people respect the facts of reality?" or "Why
should people be rational?" But these are circular questions which presume
their own answer. The concept "why" is applicable only to that which is
already rational.
Since I have chosen to be rational, the questions do not apply to me; the
logical consequences of my choice are the determinators of my behavior.
Since the thief has chosen to be a thief, the questions do not apply to
him; he is not amenable to reasons. And THAT'S why we need a suitable social
institution!

It is sometimes claimed that "The reason we need property rights is that

we do not live in the Garden of Eden, where everything is in infinite
abundance. Rather, some things are by their nature scarce, which means that
there can be conflicts between individuals over who gets to consume and
control various scarce goods. Because of the possibility of such conflicts
and the necessity of humans using physical goods to survive in the world, we
must have a system of property rights that solve such conflicts by
allocating specific scarce goods to specific individuals."
Much modern ethics implicitly assumes that a fusion of Christian Original
Sin and Marxist zero-sum economics leads inevitably to inherent conflicts of
interest and the need for sacrifice. A frequent result is the thesis
(presented above) that scarcity is the basis of property rights. This
fallacious view regards rights as a function of material conditions rather
than as being inherent in human nature. There is no "reason" for "needing"
property rights. Rights exist, they are not created. The proper subject for
discussion is not a reason for needing them, it is the correct
identification of them and the reasons why we must recognize them.

* Philosophical underpinnings

Leonard Peikoff:
It is not an axiom that "man has property rights." Property rights are a
consequence of a man's right to life: which latter we can establish only if
we know the nature and value of man's life; which presupposes, among other
things, that objective value-judgments are possible; which presupposes that
objective knowledge is possible; which depends on a certain relation between
man's mind and reality, i.e., between consciousness and existence. If you do
not know and conform to this kind of structure, you can neither defend
property rights nor define the concept nor apply it properly.

David Kelley:
Property rights exist because man needs to support his life by the use of
his reason. His primary task is to create values that satisfy human needs,
rather than merely relying on what he finds in nature, as animals do.
Therefore the essential basis of property rights lies in the necessity of
creating values.

Life, Liberty, and Property. These three are so bound together as to be

essentially one right. To allow a man his life, but to deny him his liberty,
is to take from him all that makes life worth being lived. To allow him his
liberty, but to take from him his property, is to deny him all that makes
life able to be lived. Depriving a man of property is depriving him of the
means by which he maintains his life. This is why the right to property is
as important as the right to life.

See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the nature of rights.

See reference

* Ownership

Ownership is the rightfully acquired ability to use and dispose of

property. A person justly owns whatever he has acquired without violating
the principles of justice in acquisition and justice in transfer.

There are two forms of control over property:

Possession with ownership is the Prescriptive (Normative) form of
control.
Possession without ownership is the Descriptive (Positive) form.

The act of asserting ownership is a contextual process, depending on the

nature of the society in which ownership is asserted. For example - if I put
a fence around something, and put labels on the fence, then I will have
noticeably separated that which I own from that which I do not own. But such
a separation would be meaningless in a society of illiterate barbarians who
did not recognize the significance of the fence.
Security of ownership is contingent on the recognition by my community
that I am the rightful owner, a recognition that will be based on whatever
are this community's institutionalized procedures for securing ownership. If
the social institutions of my community are not founded on the principles
expounded above by Mr. Kelley and Mr. Peikoff, then there will be, in
effect, no ownership.
If I held the property by force only, that would be mere possession, not
ownership. It is ownership only when I am able to remain in peaceful
possession. Thus ownership is more than mere possession. It's possession
which is protected by social institutions that implement property rights.

The multiple uses of property may be controlled separately by different

people, contrary to Von Mises' definition that implicitly assumes ownership
must involve controlling ALL the functions of a thing. Many manifestations
of ownership consist of shared or delegated control. Nonetheless, that which
is controlled IS owned property. Ownership can be vested in groups as well
as in individuals.

It is sometimes claimed that the idea of self-ownership is vulnerable to

the charge of circularity, because the concept of ownership presupposes a
relationship between an owner and that which is owned.
But if I do not own myself, who does/can own me? I possess my self. This
possession can be negated only by destroying me.

* John Locke on Property

"Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet
every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but
himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are
properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath
provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it
something of his own, and thereby makes it his property.
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the
apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated
them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then,
when did they begin to be his? When he digested? or when he ate? or when he
boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And 'tis
plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could.... And
will any one say he had no right to those acorns or apples he thus
appropriated, because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them
his? Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in
common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved,
notwithstanding the plenty God had given him....'tis the taking any part of
what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in, which
begins the property, without which the common is of no use."

* Some questions about the Lockean thesis

"Locke argues that mixing labor with the unowned will convert it to the
owned - without specifying what kind or quality of labor per material is
necessary."
What is necessary is to mix in enough labor to "remove it out of the
state nature leaves it in." When I have done this, I will have made my
property observably distinct from the unowned.

"If you take a boat out to sea and catch fish, the fish are properly
yours, since you used your labor to get them, but mixing your labor with
that part of the ocean does not make the ocean itself yours."
But it is not the ocean I have mixed my labor with - it is the fish. If I
were to gather in some of the ocean water and run it thru a desalinizer (or
in any other manner distinctly separate it from the unowned), then it would
indeed be mine.

"If you go to a forest, the fruit you pluck is properly yours, but this
does not give you title to the trees."
True enough, but it's not the trees I claim - only the fruit that I have
picked. The trees are indeed mine if it was I who planted and nourished
them. And again they are mine if I cut them down and process them into
boards.

"The land under a building is not properly yours even though the building
is."
If the land under my house is not mine, then whose is it? And by what
right can he claim ownership if I cannot?
It's all right with me if I don't own the land that my house sits on - as
long as no one else owns it either. Thus no one would have the right to
deprive me of its use.

"What claim do you have to water that flows across your land? Or to the
wind which blows over it?"
Although while they are on/above your land you may have a rightful claim
to them, and what you take out belongs to you, just like taking salt out of
the sea or fish out of a river, you surely have no right to sully the water
or wind which flow OFF your land and onto someone else's land. What flows
beyond your land becomes the property of someone else. You would be dumping
your junk onto your neighbor's property. You have no right to stink up your
neighbor's home by burning trash in your backyard.

"The stuff you take out of the land is yours, but not the space the stuff
was located in."
If I dig a gravel pit, the gravel I manufacture is my property. I do not
make any claim to the resulting empty space (the hole), unless I put some
manufactured object into it. But if the space be not mine, then whose is it?

"If you farm a plot of land, how much, if any, of that land is your
property?"
Surely the crop I harvest is mine. But since I have mixed my labor with
the top several inches of the land, is not that top layer my property?
"How far down shall this owned layer descend? As far as the reach of the
plow? As far as the dampness of the irrigation? As far as the penetration of
the roots? And what of the space above the farm? Do you own any of it, and
if so, how far up?"
The notion that laboring on the land gives one ownership of the land
itself does seem flawed. Would it perhaps be more acceptable to assert that
laboring in a certain location gives one ownership of the SPACE associated
with that location? If a man transforms raw land into a farm should he not
then be entitled to the space occupied by the farm? I am not sure that this
idea of "space" (by which I mean "liebensraum") is a valid distinction from
the land itself. My concern is not with the land itself but rather with the
notion of liebensraum - a place to go, a space to be, a location to live in,
play in, work in.

* Intellectual Property - Information as Property

Jerry Pournelle: "We're all agreed that information piracy is a growing

problem, and there appears to be no ready solution for it. I admit to being
a bit scared, since I make my living from intellectual property, and that's
becoming hard to impossible to protect. In a very real sense, we're all
going to have to depend on ethics - and the last I heard, that isn't even
being taught in the schools any longer."
Pournelle identifies a critically important fact: the problem of
information as property cannot be solved "out of context," that is, outside
the general context of the social institutions that shape our culture.
Before such problems can be fully solved, society must be restructured away
from institutions of government and toward ethically rational social
institutions.

You will frequently hear the claim that intangibles such as ideas are the
exact opposite of a scarce good: one person may learn of and use another's
idea without diminishing his possession and use of the idea. As Thomas
Jefferson wrote, "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction
himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives
light without darkening me."
But if the idea can be used without the owner's consent, that does in
fact diminish his ownership of the idea. Ownership means "exclusive control
over the use of the thing." A consequence of this loss of control is that if
the idea has potential economic value (such as Tom's serpentine walls) then
the loss of control over that idea will deprive Tom of some of his potential
income.
Unless the owner's exclusive control over the use of his property is
ensured, the right of ownership can be, and surely will be, violated.
We must keep in mind that property rights protect the security of one's
control over his property, not its value, since value is dependent on what
others are willing to pay for it. For example, your house may be more
valuable on the market if your neighbor has a nice flower garden, but you do
not have a right to this value, and your neighbor has every right to dig up
his garden even if it reduces the value of your property.

* Some false arguments

Following are some arguments derived from the erroneous notion that
scarcity is the basis of property rights. I think they can be more easily
recognized and better understood with a grasp of the principles I have
presented.

Property has traditionally been something that can be transferred from

place to place or person to person. Theft could thus be defined as depriving
the owner of the use thereof. But in an electronic environment, although a
piece of software or a component of a data base may be valuable, the
intruder who accesses it without authorization is not depriving the owner of
its use, although he may well be making the product less valuable to its
owner.
Knowledge is the only product that is not subject to diminishing returns.
You can give software away over and over again, and you still have it. This
loaves-and-fishes quality of information has no place among the parables of
traditional capitalism. Our culture's economic system gets its axioms from
the idea of property, but whereas property is by nature scarce, information
has no inherent scarcity, consequently traditional economic ideas do not
adequately encompass the phenomenon of "information as property."
Contrary to the proverbial wisdom, in a digital universe you can eat your
cake and have it, too. You can keep your original but still digest it on
your own terms: alter it, reformat it, transform its components, and, at the
end of this process, the original can be summoned back with a keystroke. And
because digital code is replicable without material cost, you can also give
your cake away.
Printed books created the modern idea of intellectual property because
they were fixed in form and difficult to replicate. One could therefore sell
and own them, and the livelihoods of printer and author could be sustained.
This copyright structure collapses when we introduce the changeable digital
signal. We will have to invent another scaffolding to fit the new literacy.
When books, in electronic form, cost a fraction of a dollar to reproduce but
are priced as high as small appliances, be assured that a change is not too
far in the future. Publishers, film companies and broadcasters will have to
find new ways to cope with a distinctly different environment from the one
that existed in the past. How are those publishers who recognize that their
commodity is information, not sheets of paper, to make money? Traditional
publishers have been involved in printing for so long that they have
forgotten that they are a branch of the information and entertainment
industries, and not the wood pulp and paper industry.

One suggested alternative:

The seller puts her titles on a disk in encrypted form, locking each
title with a separate RSA key. She duplicates these disks in small batches,
changing the keys after each batch, then sells the disks at retail. The
customer decides, from the promos on each disk, which titles he wants. Over
the phone, the customer can provide the job lot number, the titles desired,
and his credit card number. The seller then gives him the appropriate
decryption key.
In considering such schemes, keep in mind that most people pirate for one
of two reasons: a large cost difference or a large convenience difference.
Therefore it's not enough for the legal copy to be reasonably priced, it
must also be convenient.

* Digital information
Printed documents are fixed snapshots of changing ideas; they limit the
content of communications to the fixed paper on which they are stored. But
in electronic form, documents can become fluid raw material for computer
literati who can extract, catalogue and rearrange the ideas presented.
Electronic technology can separate the message from the medium so that we
can access the message wherever, whenever and in whatever form we want.
Computer programs, like living organisms, evolve. So do ideas. They can
do so most readily, however, only in the peculiar ecosystem of electronic
technology where human designers and users, coupled with computers, provide
the environment essential to breeding, modification and reproduction.
Thomas Jefferson's response to a charge of plagiarism: "My goal is not to
be original, but to be comprehensive and accurate."
Ben Franklin, commenting on a preacher who had been accused of stealing
sermons: "I stuck by him, however, as I rather approv'd his giving us good
sermons compos'd by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, tho' the
latter was the practice of our common teachers."

* Bibliography

THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER

April 1964 - The property status of the radio spectrum
May 1964 - Patents and Copyrights

MARKET FOR LIBERTY by Morris and Linda Tannehill

pg11 How property rights and human rights are an integrated phenomenon.
pg55 the Lockean description of property.

CAPITALISM THE UNKNOWN IDEAL by Rand et al

Rights
Economic "rights"
The nature and validation of property

FOR A NEW LIBERTY by Murray Rothbard

The right to self ownership
 Property rights
Property rights and freedom of the press
Property rights in land

LIBERTARIANISM by John Hospers

Collective ownership
Public ownership
Property rights

LIBERTARIANISM IN ONE LESSON by David Bergland

pg12 Property
pg19 Property rights

* Capitalism
In thinking about capitalism I started by considering all the definitions
I could find. None of them, not even the one derived by the Randites, seemed
fundamentally valid. They all try to distinguish among supposedly different
forms of economic behavior, but actually just make spurious distinctions
based on the type of social organization in which economic behavior occurs.
I had also been thinking about the fundamental nature of rationality, and
I observed that there is a connection between wealth-creation and
rationality: before you can create material wealth you must know and
understand at least something about reality. I realized that rationality and
wealth-creation are two correlative aspects of human behavior. Rationality
is the means by which man uses his mind to know and understand reality.
Wealth-creation is the means by which man manipulates reality to fulfill the
physical requirements of his existence. Rationality and wealth-creation go
hand-in-hand and both are fundamental requirements of man's life.

One of the distinctive differences between man and the other animals is
his much greater ability to conduct his behavior with reference to time
periods of substantial length. From this observation there arises a useful,
if not precisely specifiable, distinction to be made between two general
categories of wealth-creation - a distinction which ensues from man's
ability to act through time: is the wealth to be consumed immediately, or is
it to be used later on to produce more wealth? If it is to be used later on,
as a tool for the creation of more wealth, then it can be called "capital"
and the process can be called "capitalism." Thus I will use the term to
mean: "The process of using wealth not for immediate consumption but for the
creation of more wealth." Conducting wealth-producing activities
deliberately through time is the essence of capitalism. If you save your
wealth and use it to create more wealth, you are doing capitalism. If you
merely consume the wealth you are not doing capitalism.
Observe that capitalism is not a Boolean phenomenon. All human cultures
practice at least a tiny bit of capitalism - even if it's only the
manufacture of stone knives and arrowheads. The economic development of a
culture depends on the extent to which this practice is implemented. A
society can have more or less of it. The more it has (i.e., the more that
wealth is accumulated through time) the more the society will prosper.
Capitalism can be as small as flaking one flint knifeblade. Or it can be as
huge as General Motors and IBM.
Observe also that this definition is politically neutral. It doesn't
matter WHO does capitalism - nor WHY they do it. It only matters that the
act is performed. Capitalism is an economic tool, like a hammer. Anyone can
use a hammer: a Libertarian, a Fascist, a Communist. From a strictly
economic point of view, in considering only the production of wealth, the
political philosophy of the person who uses the hammer doesn't matter. All
that matters economically is how efficiently he uses the hammer. If he uses
it well, wealth will be created; if he uses it inefficiently, less (or no)
wealth will be produced. Thus the term "State Capitalism" actually makes
sense: a government CAN implement the procedures of capitalism. This will
help explain why such dismal systems as the Soviet Union do not collapse
outright, and why a mixed economy like the USA can muddle along for quite a
while.
You can see now why I must disagree with Rand. She always equated
capitalism with the political system of her preference, but to do so
deprives us of a valuable concept that can be applied to economic behavior
regardless of the political context in which that behavior occurs. It also
deprives us of a valuable cognitive distinction: that between economics and
politics.
The phenomenon Rand spoke of should properly be called "laissez-faire
capitalism." That is, capitalism practiced in the context of a more-or-less
free market. Although this is certainly the most efficient social context
for the practice of capitalism, it is not the only political context in
which capitalism can be implemented.

* Wealth
Wealth is the result of transforming naturally existing entities into
material that enables the achievement of human values.
That wealth consists merely of possessing money is a popular
misconception which arises from the primary function of money: as the
measure of value. But real wealth consists in what is produced and consumed:
the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. Yet so powerful
is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who
at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of
their reasoning and erroneously equate being rich with being wealthy.
A result of this error is that each man sees that if he personally had
more money he could buy more things, and thus if he had twice as much money
he could buy twice as many things; he would be "worth" twice as much. And to
many the conclusion seems obvious that if the government merely issued more
money and distributed it to everybody, we should all be that much more
wealthy. What they do not see is that such a course of action would merely
destroy commerce.

* The Need For Money

A stable currency that has real long-term value is an absolute
prerequisite to the establishment and maintenance of an economically
successful society. This is especially true with regard to a technologically
sophisticated society. Whereas it is possible to maintain a simple agrarian
society on a barter basis, barter will NOT suffice in an economy that
produces king-size beds or is comprised of large industrial institutions.
One of the most significant factors in the failure of a national economy
to develop, and also a major contributor to the decline of an economy, is
the lack of a medium for the measured exchange of wealth.
Even if people are permitted to freely produce wealth, there can be very
little rise in the general standard of living if they cannot exchange that
wealth in any transactions more sophisticated than simple barter. To do so,
they must have available a secure means of measuring the relative value
(relative to each other individual's personal goals) of their products. This
is the function of money.
There are fundamental reasons why gold and silver were the first money
media. Nevertheless, every time a government seizes control of money, the
media are changed and eventually the money's value is destroyed. In almost
all nations today, money is based on the empty promise of a government
rather than on the firm foundation of a known and durable commodity (such as
gold or silver). And throughout the world today, inflation is everywhere
destroying the possibility of long-term investments in wealth-generating
commerce.

For a magnificent description of the function of money, see "The Root Of

All Evil" speech in ATLAS SHRUGGED, Part 2, Chapter 2.

* The Evolution of Money and the Nature of inflation

Excerpted from the book HOW YOU CAN PROFIT FROM THE COMING DEVALUATION by
Harry Browne:
If you were to find yourself alone on an isolated island, you would have
no need for a medium of exchange. There would be no one with whom to
exchange.
You would go to work, as necessary, to produce the things you needed for
your survival. You would produce some things that you would want to consume
immediately, and you would probably produce other things to be stored for
later consumption.
You might also produce some other things that would be called "capital
goods" - things that make further production easier. But you would only
produce when you believed it would lead ultimately to something you wanted.
Let's suppose now that there was one other person on the island with you.
Each of you has his own area of the island and each of you is producing for
himself.
Sooner or later, you would probably begin exchanging things with each
other. Perhaps you have produced more than you need of something he hasn't
produced, and vice versa. You exchange your surplus with each other - and
both of you profit thereby.
Obviously, you won't trade your production for something you have no use
for. Why bother working if your efforts don't eventually bring you something
you can use? You'll trade only for those things you want to use now or can
store for use at a later date.
And here we have a very important rule at work: You only produce and
exchange when you believe it will lead ultimately to something you want.
But now let's suppose there are 100 people on the island - each with his
own area. You will still have to produce to survive; there's no way to avoid
that. But exchanges will probably take place on a much wider basis. In fact,
it will be only a matter of time until a "specialization of labor" develops.
That's where an individual no longer produces everything for himself.
Instead, he concentrates on the production of only one or two items - and
then trades his production with others for the products and services he
wants.
These trades with others are called direct exchange - the trading of some
of your property for another commodity you intend to use yourself. This is
also called barter - trading without money.
But, eventually, you find yourself in a position where you're willing to
accept in exchange an item you don't intend to use.
Suppose you have butter and you're looking for wheat. I have wheat, but
I'm not looking for butter. Instead, I need corn. So you go find a third
person who has corn and is looking for butter. You trade your butter for his
corn. Then you come back to me and trade the corn for my wheat.
You have what you want; but it took two exchanges to get it.
This is the beginning of indirect exchange - the trading of one thing for
something you don't intend to use yourself.
For example, one day Jones the nail-maker walks into the store of Smith
the furniture-maker. Jones opens the conversation with, "Smith, I need a new
workbench. I'll give you 2000 nails to make one for me."
"Sorry," says Smith, "I have all the nails I'll need for a while. Come
back in about six months."
Jones goes on, "But I need the workbench now! Look, you're bound to use
those nails eventually. But, even in the meantime, you can probably trade
them to someone else for something you need. I'm always getting offers of
trades from people wanting nails. They're a lot easier to exchange than
furniture."
"You have a point there, I do seem to have a lot of trouble exchanging
kingsize beds for clothes. This way, I'd use only as many nails as I need
for each purchase... well, okay - I'll try anything once."
So he accepts the nails and makes the workbench for Jones. And then he
goes out to find products for which he can exchange the nails.
And, lo and behold, it works! He finds that trades are much easier to
make. As a result, he enjoys life a lot more with a few nails in his pocket.
He can stop at a store and trade for anything he wants to - without having
to arrange an elaborate, long-term furniture purchase with the storekeeper.
In fact, he merely points out to the merchant the advantages of nails as
a trading medium in the same way that Jones pointed them out to him. And the
final argument is that you can always use the nails sometime in the future;
they won't lose their value. And if you don't use them, someone will.
The merchant realizes this; and so he accepts the nails, confident that
he can use them or trade them for what he wants.
So nails have become money. And what is money?
Money is a commodity that is accepted in exchange by an individual who
intends to trade it for something else.
Money is a commodity, just like anything else that's traded in the
marketplace. What distinguishes a money commodity from other commodities is
the intention of the person to keep it only until he trades it to someone
else. It's only a means to a further exchange for that person.
Not everyone intends to trade it, however. Some people receive the money
commodity, intending to use it for its own natural purpose (in this case,
nails for construction purposes).
And this brings us to the key word in the definition of money: accepted.
The commodity can become money only when an individual accepts it - when
someone's willing to take it, confident that he can trade it ultimately for
what he wants.
But why gold and silver?
There are five main attributes of gold and silver that give individuals
good reason to accept these commodities confidently:
1. They are durable. They can be stored for long periods of time, if
necessary, without perishing.
2. They are easily divisible. As we saw, it was easier to exchange nails
than furniture because you could divide a supply of nails into small
purchases. And gold and silver can be broken into smaller pieces or used as
dust - without harming their inherent value in any way.
3. They are convenient to handle. Their naturally high market values make
it possible to work with small quantities. Wood wouldn't do - because you
would need so much of it to be worth a desired item that it would be
inconvenient to carry and exchange.
4. They are consistent in quality. One ounce of gold is as good as any
other ounce of the same fineness.
5. They have accepted value. They are used for such things as jewelry,
dental work, electronics, art objects, ornamentation. soldering,
photography, and other purposes. That previously determined value also tells
you how much gold and silver are worth in relationship to other commodities.
If the money commodity didn't have that separate value, you couldn't
confidently accept it in trade for what you have produced, for you wouldn't
know the worth of what you received.
One enterprising fellow notices that individuals waste a lot of time
measuring gold dust in exchange for their drinks at the bar. So he opens a
mint. He buys raw gold or silver and converts the metal into coins. He
stamps the coins with his name and the amount of gold in the coin. If an
individual trusts the coin-maker, he will probably prefer to use the coin.
Its recognizable weight makes it easier than measuring gold dust. Another
ambitious chap opens a warehouse. "Bring your gold to me," he says. "I'll
store it for you in my theft-proof vault. I'll give you a receipt for it, so
you can claim it any time you want it. I only charge a small fee for the
service of storing it for you." This means you can now keep your gold in a
safe warehouse - rather than carrying it around or leaving it at home where
it could be stolen. And as the use of the warehouse beomes more widespread,
and the integrity of the warehouseman becomes known, the receipts can serve
an additional purpose. You can exchange the receipts themselves. Why bother
going to the warehouse to get your gold, only to trade it to someone who
will probably take it back to the same warehouse for safekeeping? Instead,
you simply hand over the receipt to him.
At this important stage in the evolution of the money system, we must
remind ourselves of an important point: It is the gold that is the money;
the paper receipts are not money! Gold is money because it's a commodity
with accepted value and is convenient to use in exchange. Paper could NOT be
useful as money because the relative ease with which it is produced makes it
inexpensive by nature; you'd have to use tons of it to obtain the same
result served by a few ounces of gold. The paper takes on value only as it
can be exchanged for gold. If the warehouse were to refuse to make the gold
available, the receipt would eventually be worthless. It's similar to
storing furniture. You can't sit on a furniture receipt; you can only
exchange it for something to sit on. The paper receipts are not money; they
are money substitutes.
Along with the normal paper receipts, it is possible to have tokens. A
token is a money substitute in metallic form, rather than in paper. The
present U.S. copper-nickel tokens are a good example. These are not coins,
since there is no significant inherent value in them (perhaps two cents
worth of metal in a quarter). Like paper receipts, they can only have
lasting, constant value if they can be readily exhanged for something of
real value.
Suppose you left your gold on deposit at the bank (warehouse) and
received a receipt that you intended to spend in the marketplace. And
suppose the dishonest banker issued a second receipt for the same gold to
someone else. Two people are now trying to spend the same gold at the same
time. You now have inflation - two receipts for the same supply of gold. One
consequence of this would be the well-known "run on the bank." As soon as
anyone became suspicious that the banker was doing this, he'd get jittery
about his own money. If very many people became suspicious, you'd have a run
on the bank. And those who arrived there last would be out of luck - if the
bank really were cheating on the receipts. If it weren't, everyone would get
his gold and the bank's honesty would be proven. This would probably result
in increased business for the bank. An honest bank would not have to fear a
run. So let's coin another definition of inflation, one more to the point:
Inflation is the counterfeiting of money substitutes.
Suppose you and I form a partnership, a company that prints paper
receipts. We print 1000 new $20 bills. Then we go to Seattle where we are
not known to anyone. We start spending the bills and are immediately praised
by the local merchants and the newspapers. They proclaim that it is a great
thing for Seattle that we have come to town, for we're bringing prosperity
to a city that was in a recession. Two weeks later, we leave town with
$20000 worth of goods. The townspeople bid us a grateful farewell for all
the business we have brought to them, It's obvious the WE have benefited
from the situation. We traded paper dollars with NO real value for products
that HAVE real value. Assuming that no one ever learns our little secret,
has our gain actually hurt anyone else? In other words, does anyone ever pay
for our benefits? The merchants who received the counterfeit bills did not
lose. They could pass the bills on to others for things they wanted. We
gained; the merchants didn't lose. Apparently no one lost. But we've
overlooked a few people. Not just a few, in fact. We've overlooked everyone
else in Seattle. For everyone else will lose in order to make this gain
possible. We can see this easily as we imagine our car leaving Seattle -
loaded with goods removed from Seattle's marketplace. We leave Seattle's
residents with less property than they had before we came. There will be
fewer goods available to divide up among the people there. In exchange, they
received additional money substitutes that will circulate in the community.
But money substitutes are not wealth. This simply means there are now MORE
money substitutes to pay for FEWER goods and services. Since the money
supply has gone up and the goods and services have decreased, the result can
only be higher prices in Seattle. The price increase will be irregular.
Those who get their hands on the counterfeit money first will gain from it;
for they'll have extra spending money, and prices will not have gone up yet.
But as those extra money substitutes pass through the community, they will
bid prices upward. The other people in the marketplace will be paying for
our gain - and they will do that through the higher prices they pay for each
product.
Suppose our arrival and departure were not noticed. In other words, no
one was aware that an extra $20000 was suddenly coming into circulation. The
individual merchants who received our $20 bills would have no reason to
suppose that there was anything unusual or temporary about the increase in
business. They would simply suppose that their long-standing promotional
efforts were finally paying off - that success was on its way at last. They
would most likely hire extra clerks to handle the increased business, maybe
order a new sign and a better paint job for the store. And they would
enlarge their inventories to meet the increased demand, of which we appeared
to be an example. But as soon as it became evident that the sudden dose of
new business was purely temporary, they would have to retract their
expansion plans. They would lay off the extra clerks and cancel the orders
for remodeling. The painter who was to have done the remodeling would, in
turn, have to fire his new helpers. And what would he do with all the extra
paint he had ordered? The net result throughout the area would be a state of
gloom. Everyone would have extra commitments to pay off and shelves full of
undesired stock - all because an illusory boom caused businessmen to gear up
to a demand that never really existed. Would you call that a recession? Yes,
indeed.
Inflation is an increase in money substitutes above the stock of real
money in storage; the counterfeiting of paper money. Inflation simply means
there are more paper money receipts in circulation than there is real money
with which to back them up. As we've seen, this will cause prices to go up.
But rising prices are not inflation; they are an effect of inflation.
* End of excerpts from Browne.

* The Effects of Inflation

A hard-money standard is an integral part of a system of free enterprise,
of good faith and law, of promise-keeping and the sanctity of contract. It
is this system - and the confidence to which it gave rise - that is being
destroyed by inflation.
Like every other tax, inflation acts to strongly influence the business
policies we all must follow. But unlike specific and knowable taxes,
inflation cannot be compensated for because it cannot be quantitatively
specified in advance. It discourages prudence and thrift. It encourages
squandering, gambling, and reckless waste of all kinds. It often makes it
more profitable to speculate than to produce. It tears apart the whole
fabric of stable economic relationships. Its inexcusable injustices drive
men toward desperate remedies, leading them to demand totalitarian controls,
thus planting the seeds of fascism and communism. It ends invariably in
bitter disillusion and collapse. Between 1963 and 1973, of 40 countries
whose inflation rate reached 15%, 38 abolished their democratic institutions
in one way or another.
At first glance, you might think that inflation affects only the money
supply, but the more you look at it the more convinced you will become that
it is all-pervasive in its pernicious effects. In 1985, parents spent 40%
less time with their children than they had spent in 1965. This is an
excellent example of the insidious side-effects of inflation. Government
inflation of the money supply confiscates the nation's wealth; thus working
people are forced to spend more time earning money in order to maintain
their standard of living. This of course leaves them with less time to spend
with their children. I become more and more sympathetic with that majority
of Germans who, when surveyed as to which was worse - WorldWar1 or the
subsequent runaway inflation - replied, "the inflation was much worse than
the war!"

Money substitutes are certificates of debt against the true wealth of an

economy. As those substitutes decline in value, foreign holders of the paper
may begin to unload it in exchange for other kinds of paper, thus starting
an avalanche of similar domestic unloading in which a national debt
(intended to be a legacy bequeathed to your children and grandchildren)
would have to be paid NOW - or repudiated. In either case, the dollar would
become worthless.
The politicians have seized the wealth of the nation, and given the
nation back a mortgage on itself. This seizure is not merely the theft of
wealth, it is the theft of your children's opportunity, of their future, of
their hope.
If your next-door neighbor told you he was kiting checks drafted on your
personal account, you think maybe you might get upset about it?

As Mises observed, the transition from Money to Wallpaper has five steps:
1. The paper is exchangeable for a specified amount of Au or Ag
2. The paper is exchangeable for N dollars in Au or Ag
3. The paper is N dollars - exchangeable for a specified number of
another nation's bills.
4. The paper is N dollars - exchangeable at the open market rate
(whatever you can sucker some poor fool into trading for it).
5. Katastrophenbausse.

There were numerous internal checkpoints in Brazil, but our guide advised
us that a tip of five million cruzeiros would suffice to pass us without
difficulty. A one-dollar bill would suffice even more.

Hungary's 1946 inflation rate was so bad there aren't any words to
describe it: 4.6 x 10 to the 30th power.

* Foundations
Believe it or not, economists do not know what they know. That is, with
regard to various aspects of their field, economists cannot say "these
aspects are what we know to be true, and those aspects we know little or
nothing about." If a discipline after centuries of intellectual activity
still does not know what it knows, it cannot be said to be in good
condition, or based on a solid foundation. In spite of this admitted
ignorance, economists have for generations debated the merits of specific
implementations of their theories, frequently using abstract mathematical
models whose essential flaw is that they have little relevance to actual
human behavior. In line with this, the vigor with which each different model
is advocated by its proponents is frequently inversely proportional to the
amount of empirical evidence that it is correct.
As an example, here is a selection from a recent debate between two
economists:
"Miron of Boston University points out that the behavior of indicators
other than GNP appears to support Romer's position. 'Gordon has only done
GNP,' he says. 'Christie's case is on firmer, broader ground.' Although
Gordon denies the charge, Miron argues that a significant part of Gordon's
newfound volatility in the old numbers comes not from including
transportation and construction but from his choice of a particular price
index to convert nominal dollar figures to 'real' GNP. The index in question
was intended to convert consumer prices from current to constant terms, but
Gordon uses it to adjust commodity prices instead. According to Gordon's
published data, the choice of index could account for almost half of the
difference between his figures and Romer's. There is no clear consensus on
who is right. And regardless of who carries the current debate, the old
mainstream dogma of a stabilized modern economy is in trouble. Although
Romer and Gordon differ, says J. Bradford De Long of Harvard University,
their views are much closer to each other's than either one is to the view
of the past that economists treasured as recently as five years ago."
Such nonsensical antics would be laughably ridiculous except for the
harrowing fact that politicians distill their policies from the proposals of
these economists, whilst the economists are distilling their proposals from
fantasy. As Herman Daly, a senior economist with the World Bank, eloquently
observed: "My major concern about my profession today is that our
disciplinary preference for logically beautiful results over factually
grounded policies has reached such fanatical proportions that we economists
have become dangerous to the earth and its inhabitants."
If one insists on analyzing an imaginary problem which has no real-world
equivalent, it may be appropriate to use an analytical model which has no
real-world application. By the same token, if a model is designed to deal
with real-world situations, it may not be able to handle purely imaginary
problems. In either case, a solution is meaningless. But these "meaningless"
solutions do indeed have real-world consequences when they are implemented
through political coercion. A thief who presumed to justify his theft by
saying that he was really helping his victims by his spending, thus giving
retail trade a needed boost, would be slapped down without delay. But when
this same idiocy is clothed in Keynesian mathematical equations and
impressive references to the "multiplier effect," it carries far more
conviction with a public that has been bamboozled into accepting the
"mystique" that conventional economics is a valid tool of analysis.
In the 1989 edition of his famous textbook, ECONOMICS, Samuelson
described the Soviet Union as being proof that, contrary to what many
skeptics believe, a socialist economy can function and even thrive.
Statements such as this show a contempt for truth that would turn Paul
Goebbels green with envy. The fact that they are not considered an
embarrassment by the economics profession speaks of the fatuity of that
profession. But such statements, which tell us nothing about the real
economic world, may tell us something about the minds of the people who make
them. Many of the most dogmatic and fanatical socialists are not interested
in personal wealth and live in self-imposed poverty. They think that
asceticism is noble and virtuous (otherwise they wouldn't practice it
themselves), and believing that it is virtuous, they want everyone else to
live the same way. This is one reason why socialists never get discouraged
if their ideology doesn't work (that is, doesn't produce prosperity). THEY
NEVER REALLY WANTED IT TO. As long as socialism mandates self-sacrifice and
forestalls prosperity, its most zealous advocates will keep proclaiming it a
success.
 Commenting on economic "bubbles," Samuelson admits that "in all the
arsenal of economic theory we have absolutely no way of predicting how long
such a bubble will last." Well, anyone who takes a close look at "the
arsenal of economic theory" will readily observe it to be so filled with
fallacy that the world envisioned by Samuelson and his colleagues bears
little correspondence to the world of reality. No wonder it has so little
predictive power. Keynesian economics is unable to provide a theory that can
even describe, let alone explain, observed economic reality and experience.
If economists really knew what they are talking about, the Soviet Union
never would have collapsed.
The economists and politicians are living in some kind of fantasy world,
while the rest of us must live with the reality of the wreckage they are
creating.
Another manifestation of unreal economic analysis can be seen in Ayn
Rand's quasi-deification of industrialists as being men of punctilious
ethical scruple and rigorous logical acumen. In fact, businessmen are just
like many other people: stupid, shortsighted, and as quick to make use of
coercion if they think it will serve their purpose. In a free marketplace
they would have an ethically useful function, but the trouble is, and always
has been, that there is no FREE marketplace. Societies have always been
based on institutionalized coercion, and the people (including businessmen)
accept this as natural social behavior. This acceptance is ingrained on many
mental levels and during the entire life of the citizen, so it should be no
surprise to see it exhibited by businessmen.

In spite of these gross flaws, economic theory lives on, surviving

largely because there are some fundamental truths about the human condition
that call for principled explanation. First enunciated in THE WEALTH OF
NATIONS, these truths are:
1) The overwhelming majority of people are naturally and unswervingly
interested in improving their material condition.
2) Repression of this natural desire leads only to impoverished
societies.
3) When this natural desire is allowed sufficient expression so that
commercial transactions are widespread, everyone does eventually indeed
improve his condition, however unequally in extent or time.
This is not all we need to know, but it is what we DO know, and it is
surely not asking too much of economic theory that in its passion for
sophisticated methodology it not ignore this knowlege. But it does.

* Bootstrap Economics
The Bootstrap Effect
An economy will rise to the highest level of wealth creation that is
possible to it, subject to three restraints:
1. Limitation of natural resources.
2. Paucity of knowledge.
3. Politically-imposed restrictions.

The solar system, considered in its entirety, contains a sufficiency of

natural resources to provide the human race with an unlimited supply of
wealth. During the past 300 years Man has acquired enough knowledge of
technological processes and economic institutions to convert those natural
resources into that unlimited supply of wealth. Thus mankind is now in a
position to raise its standard of living to an unlimited height, and would
indeed do so if not for the third restraint. It is politically-imposed
restrictions alone that prevent this.
The overwhelming majority of human beings are concerned each to increase
his own standard of living, and to the extent that it is possible each will
act to do so. In fact, to the extent that it is possible each DOES act to do
so, unless he is inhibited by law from doing so. Each individual person is
continually looking for a way to improve his personal standard of living -
continually looking for a way to circumvent ANY obstacles that are placed in
his path. The aggregate expression of all of these individual concerns
results in what I call the Bootstrap Effect. Everywhere within an economic
system the people who perform economic actions will raise the level of
wealth creation of that system. And they will continue to raise it until
they can find no way of raising it any further. Until they are balked by
some restriction. If that restriction is removed, the individual people to
whom it had been a barrier will now perceive a possibility to further raise
their own personal standard of living - and will commence to do so.
Increasing the general level of wealth creation until they encounter another
obstacle. And if there are no obstacles, there is no limit to the height to
which people will push their standard of living.

* Economic Calculations
A grave deficiency in any centralized economic system results from
inadequacy of information. The controlling authorities in a centralized
system are never able to obtain a comprehensive and accurate depiction of
the society under their command.
Government data is often meaningless on its own terms and almost always
misrepresents the nature of an economy. For example: one man spends to build
a bridge, another to destroy it. Does it make sense to sum these two
expenditures together into a "GNP"? Incompatible plans do not add up to some
kind of "super-plan" nor does spending on them add up to an aggregate
reflecting total productivity of any kind whatever.
Also, government expenditures are always considered to be a productive
contribution to the economy. But in fact government is a drain, and hence
its expenditures should be subtracted from any aggregate of productivity.
All figures on economic performance are false in one way or another, each
compounding itself on the others until the economic forecasts generated by
the state are as fictitious as a list of Nixon's virtues. About the only
thing the government's economic indicators truthfully indicate is that the
market has ceased to function properly. It has ceased to function properly
because the natural regulating mechanisms have been severely crippled by
government interference.
One function of prices is to guide the factors of production so as to
apportion the relative output of thousands of different commodities in
accordance with demand. No bureaucrat, no matter how brilliant, can solve
this problem arbitrarily. An example of the problem can be seen in The
Guffey Act of 1937, which forbade the sale of coal at less than certain
minimum prices fixed by government. Though Congress had started out to fix
"the" price of coal, the government soon found itself (because of different
sizes, thousands of mines, and shipments to thousands of different
destinations by rail, truck, ship and barge) fixing 350,000 separate prices
for coal.
Prices provide suppliers with signals of what consumers want, and
relative prices are an important source of information - they represent the
relative value of alternative uses of resources. Willingness to pay a high
price typically means that the producer is doing a good job of providing for
consumers. If that high price generates high profits, then the producer is
able to obtain more of the resources and produce more of the desired
commodity. By allocating resources on the basis of willingness to pay, the
market results in resources being allocated to the highest valued uses,
because those who are willing to pay the price clearly value the use of the
product more than those who are unwilling to pay. As a result, resources are
guided toward their most desired uses.
 But a government-controlled economy does not use this source of
information when determining how to allocate its resources, and thus the
flow of profit does not act as a channel directing resources toward the most
desirable uses. When a bureaucrat makes a mistake in regulating your
affairs, he does not receive any feedback, in the form of personal economic
loss, to alert him to his error. You receive all the feedback, but you are
not in a position of control, so you cannot correct the error.
Hayek calls the implicit decision structure underlying the market the
Extended Order. Nobody designed it, nobody fully understands it, and no one
knows a fracton of what it "knows." As Leonard Read pointed out, there is
not a person living who has the complete knowledge required to manufacture a
simple thing like a pencil. Yet the extended order knows how to make
pencils, laptop computers, nuclear-magnetic-resonance body scanners, and
hundreds of thousands of other products. It also knows where and when they
are required and in what quantity. It was the failure to comprehend this
phenomenon, more than anything else, that was the chief intellectal flaw in
Marxism and all its philosophical progeny. An ethical point here is that the
thousands of people whose unwitting cooperation has made our options viable,
have put forward their respective contributions voluntarily. Admittedly,
they have agreed only to the terms of their individual transactions, but
since that is their only point of contact with the rest of the extended
order, their involvement has been a genuine case of unanimous consent.
"Regulating the market" is actually regulating people - preventing them
from making trades which they otherwise would have made, or forcing them to
make trades they would not have made. The market is a network of trade
relationships, and a relationship can only be regulated by regulating the
persons involved in it. Thus price control is people control.
Being imperfect, man does indeed need a regulating mechanism, but free
enterprise does this admirably. Competition enables the businessman to
continually check his ideas against his economic environment to see whether
what he believes (and does) really works. If it doesn't, then either he goes
under or, if he is clever, he will change his ways and go on to meet the
competition's challenge. Unfortunately, government is not regulated by
competition. Hence, no plan that government puts into operation can be
tested by a competitor. Thus an error in government policy is almost never
eradicated, except by revolution, war, or depression. Market competition is
far less painful.

* Agriculture in China: An example of central control vs individual

control
Taken from SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine, November 1996.
Since 1949, when the Communists took power, China's agricultural
practices and system of property ownership have undergone several turbulent
changes. Before the revolution, many Chinese farmers were poor tenants who
tilled fields owned by wealthy landlords. Soon after Mao Tse-tung's peasant
army conquered China, however, the government confiscated the holdings
oflandlords and wealthy farmers and distributed the property among all
farming households on an egalitarian basis. The new landowning families
operated small, independent farms and sold their harvest on an open market.
For the first time in recent Chinese history, the dream of "land to the
tillers" was a reality. Farmers responded to the new system with
extraordinary zeal: grain production went up by about 15 kilograms per
person each year between 1949 and 1955.
In the 1950s, under the influence of the Soviet system, Mao became imbued
with the ambition to build a powerful nation under a planned economic
system. As a result, China gradually began to collectivize its agriculture.
The government encouraged farmers to form groups known as mutual aid teams
in the early 1950s; these teams consisted of no more than 10 households and
served to coordinate the farming practices of the members. Property rights
did not change, however - each family retained ownership of its plot. Later,
during 1956 and 1957, the government further consolidated farms into
agricultural collectives, each one with as many as 300 households. In this
case, members actually had to surrender most of their land to the
collective, although they could keep small private plots for growing food
for the family.
The process of collectivization culminated in 1958, when the agricultural
collectives merged into huge communes. These communes, each with an average
size of about 4,000 families, took sole ownership of all property, including
the private plots. All the farmers worked together on the land, receiving
pay for time spent in the field, no matter how little they accomplished. And
everyone shared the excess harvest. Under this system, none of the farmers
had an individual stake in the land, so few cared about making improvements
- in effect, the communes severed farmers from their land.
The result of collective farming was disastrous: in perhaps the world's
worst famine, an estimated 30 million Chinese died between 1959 and 1962.
The communal farms simply did not generate enough food for the country. In
the 1960s the government broke up the communes into more manageable units.
But collective farming continued on a smaller scale through the late 1970s,
when some Chinese leaders started to rethink its viability.
The brainchild born of this rethinking was the policy known as the
Household Responsibility System. This policy divided the collective land
among individual households, creating a nation of small family farmers. The
collective, however, maintained official ownership of the property.
Initially, the farmers' rights to the land were to be valid for up to three
years, but in 1984 the Communist Party ordered local officials to extend
contracts to 15 years. In return for the right to work the land, farmers had
to sell a small portion of their crops to the state at a fixed price. But
they could keep the rest of their harvest, either to consume or to sell for
a profit. The system clearly encouraged farmers to become more efficient:
between 1980 and 1984, grain production increased by 16.2 kilograms per
person each year, up from an annual average increase of 1.3 kilograms per
person between 1955 and 1980.

* The Tragedy of the Commons

If 100 or less sheep graze a certain pasture, the grass will continue to
replenish itself, but if more than 100 sheep graze the land, the grass will
diminish and ultimately vanish. Suppose the land is owned in common by ten
shepherds each of whom has ten sheep. If one shepherd acquires an additional
sheep he will see himself as 10% better off, and will see the pasture as
being only 1% worse off. Naturally, each shepherd will consider it to be in
his self-interest to increase his flock, but in the long run this is to the
detriment of all.
The sensible solution to this problem lies in private ownership: each of
the shepherds should own a tenth of the land. Then if he acquires one more
sheep, he will immediately see that his pasture will be 10% worse off.
Murray Rothbard, in FOR A NEW LIBERTY:
"In the East, the 160 acres granted free to homesteading farmers on
government land constituted a viable technological unit for farming in a
wetter climate. But in the dry climate of the West, no successful cattle or
sheep ranch could be organized on a mere 160 acres. But the federal
government refused to expand the 160-acre unit to allow the homesteading of
larger cattle ranches. Hence the open range, on which private cattle and
sheep owners were able to roam unchecked on government-owned pasture land.
But this meant that no one owned the pasture, the land itself; it was
therefore to the economic advantage of every cattle or sheep owner to graze
the land and use up the grass as quickly as possible, otherwise the grass
would be grazed by some other sheep or cattle owner. The result of this
tragically shortsighted refusal to allow private property in grazing land
itself was an overgrazing of the land ... and the failure of anyone to
restore or replant the grass.... Hence the overgrazing of the West, and the
onset of the dust bowl. Hence also the illegal attempts by numerous
cattlemen, farmers, and sheepmen... to fence off the land into private
property - and the range wars that often followed."
Again we can see that the establishment of private property rather than
government-owned "commons" could have avoided these difficulties.
The fact that government asserts domain over the air is what makes air
pollution a "tragedy of the commons" problem. In this case, the problem is
exacerbated by attempts on the part of the government to dictate specific
solutions to the problem, rather than solving it by means of some market-
oriented method of pollution control such as:
Measure the amount of pollution being emitted and assess a quantity fine
(e.g., $2/Kg/day). Gradually raise the amount of this fine, and continue to
do so until the pollution falls to an acceptable level. Thus all the choices
regarding production, handling and disposal of the pollutant would remain
within the ambit of voluntary behavior rather than being expressed through
fascist controls.
Another place in which the tragedy of the commons rears its ugly head is
in the American judicial system. Its staggering backload of cases, resulting
in years of delay in the clearing of trials, results in great part from its
being a government-owned "commons" phenomenon.

* The Public Goods Problem

Adam Smith, in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, remarked on "those public
institutions and those public works, which though they may be in the highest
degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that
the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number
of individuals, and which it, therefore, cannot be expected that any
individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain."
Remember the lighthouse, that legendary "public good" which your
professor discussed in Economics 101? Though socially valuable, the
lighthouse supposedly cannot be provided by the free market because it
contains costs that cannot be reflected in the market price. Thus it is
claimed that ships will benefit from the light without paying for the
service. Therefore, since the lighthouse owner can't exclude free riders, it
will be unprofitable to provide the lighhouse at all. However, your
professor no doubt did not tell you that long before economists developed
the theory of public goods and market failure, private entrepreneurs were
building and operating profitable lighthouses throughout England.
Another example, which you have all experienced:
As I was chewing on my sandwich, a couple of girls came over and plugged
the jukebox. When the music started, the boys began bouncing a little,
obviously enjoying the rhythm, and the girls chatted away as they had been
doing before. I realized that I had just witnessed a mirocosm of the "public
goods" situation. Everybody was enjoying the music but only two had paid.
They hadn't gone around shaking people down for their "fair share"; they
hadn't insisted that the music be supplied for nothing; they hadn't even
asked for contributions. The girls supplied everyone with a valuable good
because they wanted it themselves.
In the year 6 AD the emperor Augustus (Julius Caesar's stepson) made a
change in the Rome Fire Brigade. He got rid of the slaves and hired freemen
in their place. He immediately discovered a tremendous improvement in the
Brigade's performance and concluded that whereas slaves don't really give a
damn, people who are free WANT to put out fires in their community.
 The Public Goods fallacy assumes that people should - and indeed do -
only produce goods and services from which non-paying others cannot benefit.
Yet, think of deodorants, nice hair cuts, attractive clothing, pretty front
lawns, grand architecture, etc., etc., etc. These all provide uncompensated
benefits to others. When the voluntary, self-interested efforts of some
people create free-rider benefits for others, that is a concrete instance of
the harmony of men's interests, and should be celebrated and welcomed as
such. Living in a civilized society NECESSARILY involves being a free-rider.
One cannot help benefiting indirectly from the work of people who have a
greater productive ability than one's own. This is neither a cause for
regret nor a compromise of independence or responsibility; on the contrary,
it is one of the most important benefits of living in a civilized society.

* Fascism-Communism
There is no fundamental distinction between these two forms of society.
They are merely two variants of Socialism - the means by which government
asserts control over the economic affairs of individuals. The fundamental
characteristic distinguishing among markets is whether your behavior is
controlled by your own choices or by someone else's choices. Under both
fascism and communism - or, for that matter, under ANY form of government -
you are not free to guide your behavior according to your own choices. The
only questions which differentiate forms of government are to what degree
you are enslaved, and in what manner the enslavement is imposed.
Fascism: Under this system, many major choices regarding the operation of
businesses are made by government, but the individual who operates each
enterprise receives his income from the profits of the business. This is
centralized planning with decentralized execution of the plan.
In America, these are usually fascist operations: Bus companies,
Airlines, Truck lines, Radio and TV stations, Banks, Private elementary and
secondary schools.
Communism: Under this system, all the business decisions are made by
government, and the people operating the enterprise are government employees
who receive their income from the government. A communist government
expropriates all businesses and operates them as departments of the
government. This is centralized planning AND centralized execution of the
plan. The centralized execution is in the form of precise, all-inclusive
doctrine.
In America, these are communist operations: Highway maintenance, Public
Schools, Utility companies such as most water systems, and sometimes
electric systems, Police (except private police companies, which are
fascist).

What the pseudo-libertarians tout as "privatization" is quite often

merely the conversion of a portion of a communist operation over to a
fascist context.

Under fascism, the people are led to believe that they are working for
themselves, even though in fact they are not. Under communism, they know
they are not working for themselves. That is why fascism is less incompetent
than communism. In fact, the level of efficiency of an economic system is a
direct consequence of the degree to which the individuals who control
specific economic activities are free to implement their own choices, and
are acting in a context in which their own personal income is dependent on
their own personal choices. This explains why communism is the least
efficient of these systems, fascism is somewhat more efficient, and a free
market is the most efficient of all. Only a free market demands competence.
Authoritarian regimes place obedience above all other considerations.
 I distinguish some other controls from the above categories of fascism
and communism since these controls are not primarily oriented toward
governing business operations but are intended as general restrictions on
individual personal behavior. These are such things as driver's licenses,
marriage and divorce laws, customs and immigration regulations.
Registration of vehicles, business licenses, building permits, land
titles (deeds) and land tax are in yet another category - they are the
government's assertion of eminent domain - the assertion that government is
the ultimate owner of all property, and that the individual can make use of
that property only with permission from the government.
Of course all these are also means by which government obtains some of
its revenue.

* Marx
In Marxist economics it is assumed that there is a finite amount of goods
and services available in the marketplace. This is simply wrong. Is there a
limit to the number of songs that can be created? Are the number of computer
programs to be written finite? Are ideas about economics itself finite? (If
so, what is the validity of the internal self-referential logic of Marx's
idea that economic ideas are finite?) No, there is potentially an infinite
supply of goods and services.
According to Marx, no clear line can be drawn between economic and
political processes. In his scheme, the forces of material production are a
superhuman entity independent of the will and actions of individual men.
Industrial production and wealth, he asserts, are not to be attributed to
any individual's creative thought or action, but are a free gift of nature.
Such gifts multiply automatically across time through the intervention of
impersonal agencies called Science, Technology and Progress, and each man is
morally entitled to his fair share of these gifts. Only the State can
achieve social justice by wresting wealth from the hands of the vile, greedy
rich, who have appropriated more than their fair share, and by
redistributing it fairly among the virtuous, non-greedy poor. This is the
underlying rationale of the Welfare State.
Because the use of coercion to confiscate wealth benefits one group ONLY
at the expense of another, Marxists are led to the belief that life must be
viewed as a zero-sum process in which original wealth-creation is ignored or
even denied. (But then, how could Marx have originally created his ideas?)
Inherent in this ideology is the view that the economic resources of the
society must be monopolized in order to prevent certain other people from
satisfying their own economic wants. This reflects the "zero-sum" assumption
that economic resources and economic output are fixed - a national pie to be
distributed by the state. But this coercive redistribution of wealth
undercuts the very process that produced the wealth in the first place, thus
Marxist societies inevitably end up impoverished. Under Marxist economics it
is inevitable that some must starve so that others can eat.
When a theory invariably achieves only the opposite of its alleged goals,
yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that the theory is
not a conviction or an ideal, but a spurious rationalization.
In a free market, a man's long-range failure, like his long-range
success, is an objective reflection of his ability and his usefulness. It is
precisely this inexorable rule of capitalism - "to each according to his
ability" - that threatens the self-esteem of the Marxist, engendering his
intense hatred for the free market. Ironically, the most passionately voiced
charge against laissez-faire is that it is an unjust system. The man who
hates and fears a free market does not confess that what he really resents
is precisely the implacable justice of this market. The driving motive of
the irrational policies of Marxism is the desire to destroy the hated system
which rewards men according to their abilities, and to substitute one which
will give to the frustrated mediocrities according to their needs.
Their Marxism is a wonderful tool that gives them an answer for
everything - even an answer for the failures of Marxism. A Marxist writes:
"The method of analysis Marx used to understand social domination and
conflict is the most powerful way of understanding the very failures of his
theory." But how can a theory that has failed be used to understand itself?
Thus there is no possibility of controverting the committed Marxist. His
Marxism makes him invulnerable to argument.

* The Luddite Phenomenon

It is often not the widely diffused gain resulting from a new technology
that most forcibly strikes even the disinterested observer, but the
immediately obvious concentrated loss. The new machines' increased output of
shoes, at lower cost to everyone, is ignored; what is seen is a group of
cobblers thrown out of work.
The great bulk of people infinitely prefer the continuance of a problem
which they cannot explain to an explanation which they cannot understand.
The opposition to innovation entails a desire to live in narrow-minded
ignorance. Luddites are merely one type of hard-core conservatives.

* Liability
There is a current trend toward legislation, and court precedent, that
virtually insures that every real or imagined social ill will find its way
into the courtroom for resolution.
In his book LIABILITY, Peter Huber looks at the origin and consequences
of this kind of litigation. He observes that because of "a wholesale shift
from consent to coercion in the law of accidents (and) a shift from
individual to group responsibility ....the number of tort suits filed has
increased steadily for over two decades. So has the probability that any
given suit will conclude in an award. And the average size of awards has
grown more rapidly still." This cancer on capitalism results in a severe
threat to fundamental features of our economic system, such as technological
innovation and the sanctity of contracts. As examples, he observes that
liability accounts for 30% of the price of a stepladder, 95% of the price of
vaccines, and 1/3rd the cost of a small airplane. The threat of liability
suits and/or the cost of insurance has orphaned more than 500 drugs that are
invaluable for treating rare but serious diseases.
Fifty years ago, such liability litigation would not have been conceived.
Twentyfive years ago, it would have been laughed out of court. Today it is
seriously considered, and the really scary aspect is this: there is NO WAY
to tell in advance what the ruling of the court will be. The courts are not
bound by any semblance of rationality or any adherence to the principle of
Justice, and yet they exercise total dominion over the economic life of the
country.

* Productivity
The productivity potential of the American people was enormously enhanced
by the practice of capitalism during its first hundred years, when
government was too small to seriously hinder personal freedom. But as
government grows larger and consumes more and more resources, a continually
growing share of that productivity potential must be devoted to the
maintenance of government.
Computers have enabled a tremendous productivity boost since the 1970s,
but no matter how much more wealth per capita improved technology makes
possible, there is always something to soak up the surplus and condemn
ordinary people to a lifetime of labor. No matter how much productivity
increases, people never seem to work less, only differently (harder!). The
government is consuming, at an accelerated pace, the productivity potential
of the country.
Jerry Pournelle: "It looks to me as if our choices are very limited:
increase productivity, or have a declining standard of living. Or both.
Unfortunately, most increases in productivity are eaten by new measures,
such as the Clean Air Act. It's my opinion that most of the productivity
increases made possible by small computers have disappeared into increased
regulations."
Another thing that has kept the government alive while the federal debt
curve goes up is that it is confiscating much of the wealth produced by the
women who have liberated themselves since the 1960s.

* Fair Trade
The American businesses that have been losing ground to Japan should be
calling for more freedom - and occasionally a few of them have. But in the
main their response has been: "Shackle the Japanese, as we are shackled."
They have been calling for tariffs, import quotas, and every form of
protectionist legislation as the answer to foreign competition. Instead of
saying, "Free us up so that we can compete," they have been running to
Washington, crying, "Make it illegal for Americans to buy foreign goods."
One propaganda device of these businessmen is the claim that they are all
in favor of free trade - so long as it is "fair."
In this context, there is no such thing us "unfair" trade. The so-called
"unfairness" here is not to the merchant nor to the consumer, but to a third
party who objects to the transaction. This is an act of extreme
presumptuousness. A third party has no right to intervene in a transaction
between a willing buyer and a willing seller, especially not when the third
party's complaint is that it is "unfair" to HIM that you, the buyer, are
being offered such a bargain. What is he saying, if not that he has a right
to your trade, your money, your time and effort, your life? It is an
approach we might expect of a medieval baron upset by someone trading with
his serfs. That sort of feudalism is what many American businessmen and
labor unions are trying to put over on you in the name of Americanism.
The proper answer to such complaints is a venerable and very American
retort which should be taken literally: "Mind your own business!"
Another protectionist scam uses the metaphor of competing "on a level
playing field." It is very important to recognize that business is not a
game or a sport. In sports, the goals achieved - the touchdowns, homeruns,
knockouts - have no utilitarian value. Sports are activities whose meaning
lies only in the displays of athletic excellence they call forth. Their
entire value is in the how, rather than the what. In business activity the
opposite is true. The how matters not at all, only the what. Consumers care
not a whit how astoundingly adept are the maneuvers accomplished in the
factory by an auto worker or how brilliant was the strategy of the company's
marketing director. All that matters is the utilitarian outcome: how good is
the product for our intended use? The metaphor of "a level playing field"
has no meaning in business - unless it means an open marketplace without
force or fraud, where everyone competes under conditions of free trade by
voluntary consent. But open competition is precisely what the level-fielders
are opposed to. They want to hobble the foreign runners in the race, to
hobble them either by force (tariffs) or fraud (conning Americans into
believing that buying foreign products damages our economy).
Note the power of the connotations of words: The Japanese are engaging in
"dumping," we are told. But what is being "dumped" on us are inexpensive,
high quality products. Their dumping consists of reducing the price below
what we would have to pay for American products. This is also known as
"underselling" and is considered a big plus when done domestically by
American businesses. How many commercials have you heard that say "we are
cheapest," "we will beat any offer," "guaranteed lowest price," etc. They
are "dumping" savings on us. The "dumping" actually consists of showering us
with wealth.

* The Gross National Product

The Gross National Product is proposed as a measure of our economic
prosperity. But is it?
If I wash my car, the only effect on the GNP is the cost of the water and
soap that I use. Suppose that I give the neighbor kid $5 to wash my car. In
this case, the GNP is increased by the cost for the water and soap, plus the
$5 I give the neighbor kid. But is the economy really more productive if I
give the neighbor kid $5 than if I wash my own car?
When I get my shirt washed at a laundry for $1, the GNP is increased by
$1. Suppose I marry my laundress and then no longer pay cash to her for
washing my shirt. Is the economy more prosperous in the first case than the
second?
I go to my dentist and get a root canal. He charges me $300, and the GNP
is increased by $300. Then he hires me to paint his house and pays me $300.
Now the GNP is up $600. Now suppose that instead of paying him cash, I agree
to paint his house in exchange for the root canal. No cash changes hands.
The GNP is $600 less than if we had paid each other cash rather than
bartered. Is the economy more prosperous if we pass the $300 back and forth
than if we barter?
This suggests a simple way to increase the GNP. All we need do is get
Congress to pass a law mandating that every person in this country shine the
shoes of exactly one other individual, charge him $20,000 for shining his
shoes, and exempt such shoe-shine fees from taxation. The income of each
individual in the United States would go up by $20,000. The GNP would
double! But each individual would be left with the same amount of money as
before; each would have done a trivial amount of labor; each would have had
a trivial service performed for him. That's all. Would anyone be better off
in the wake of such a doubling of the GNP?

Chapter 5
RIGHTS AND FREEDOM
* Natural Rights
Consider the conditions which are required by man's nature for his proper
survival. Everything in the universe has a nature, and therefore there are
proper and improper ways of interacting with those things - proper and
improper ways of living in the world. By "proper survival" I mean a state of
existence which maximizes the opportunity of each person to manifest his
values in the external world. Man's survival qua man includes the terms,
methods, conditions, and goals required for the survival of a rational being
through the whole of his lifespan - in all those aspects of existence which
are open to his choice and which are requisite for his flourishing.
There are several categories of these conditions - Physical, Chemical and
Social, to name some. In the physical realm we can easily observe that there
are several conditions which must prevail if a man is to remain alive. An
example is the fact that he must maintain a certain environmental
temperature range, outside of which he would either freeze or roast. If for
any reason this environmental condition ceases to prevail, man's proper
survival comes to a quick and drastic end. We can see other physical
conditions necessary as well, such as a continual accomodation to the force
of gravity. In the chemical realm also we observe necessary conditions: the
existence of an oxygen gas environment, the avoidance from diet of certain
chemicals (cyanide, arsenic, strychnine) and the inclusion of certain other
chemicals (ascorbic acid). This last case is a good example of the fact that
these conditions are necessary for man's PROPER survival, for without the
inclusion of an adequate amount of vitamin C, life will not come to the same
sort of immediate and drastic end as it would from the elimination of the
oxygen gas environment. Nonetheless without the vitamin C man is not in a
state of PROPER survival, even though his life does continue on a limited
and retarded level. (He merely subsists, he does not flourish.)
Also demonstrated is the fact that nature-imposed requirements are of two
kinds. It does not suffice for you merely to avoid doing the wrong things -
it is also necessary that you do the right things. You don't get scurvy
because you did something wrong, you get it because you didn't do something
right.

The point I am trying to make is that there are certain conditions

arising from man's nature - unavoidable, uncompromising and absolutely
necessary conditions - which must be accomodated in order for him to
continue in a proper state of existence. Although this assertion is easily
seen to be indisputable in man's physical and chemical life, I contend that
it is equally, though perhaps not so obviously, indisputable in man's social
life.
There are certain conditions of SOCIAL existence which are necessary for
man's proper survival. Conditions which, unlike the physical and chemical
conditions, prevail only when man lives in a social environment.
Obviously, when a man lives alone in the wilderness, or on a desert
island, the physical and chemical conditions prevail just as much as they do
when he lives in New York City or Tokyo. However, when he lives in society
there are other conditions which prevail as well, conditions resulting from
his interaction with other men. Just as he must accomodate interaction with
a physical universe and with a chemical universe, so when he lives in a
society he must accomodate the conditions of a social universe - a universe
consisting of the relationships with other men in his environment. There is
a name for this set of conditions. It is RIGHTS.
Rights spring from the need of the individual to be free in a social
context. They are the conditions of social existence required by man's
nature for his proper survival. Proper survival means, among other things,
life in a society from which coercion is absent.
Man is a being of a specific nature; his life is contingent on specific
courses of behavior. To live, man must choose to engage in rational and
productive action. But he is also a social being, and since some men
unfortunately choose to interfere violently with rational and productive
action, it is therefore necessary for peaceful men to derive precepts for
social behavior which allow each individual to maintain his own life free
from force and fraud. These social precepts are identifications of human
rights.
Consider the most obvious example: the right to life. If the society were
composed exclusively of murderers, the "proper survival" of each individual
man, and therefore of the society, would come to an immediate and drastic
end. It is clear that "life" is an unavoidable precondition of social
interaction. If you kill everyone you meet, presently there will be no one
left for you to meet anymore. There would no longer be a social existence at
all, for the simple reason that one of the conditions prerequisite to that
existence had been violated. That condition is the right to life.
 Another example: the right to property. (Depriving people of property is
depriving them of the means by which they live. This is why the right to
property is as important as the right to life.) One of the major reasons for
social cooperation among men is the material benefit to be gained by each
man from trade with other men. Both trade and the division of labor are
devices for the production and exchange of property, and as you can observe
from your own experience there is much less incentive to produce or exchange
if you do not have the assurance of being secure in your ownership of the
property involved. This security in ownership is the right to property. To
the extent that this right is violated, by that much will be diminished the
incentive of each man to maintain the economic basis of society.
To recognize and enforce the rights of individuals is to recognize and
enforce the conditions of proper social survival: the conditions that permit
human energy to work effectively to satisfy human needs.
Life, Liberty, and Property. These three are so bound together as to be
essentially one right. To allow a man his life, but to deny him his liberty,
is to take from him all that makes life worth living. To allow him his
liberty, but to take from him his property, is to deny him all that makes
life able to be lived, for a man cannot live without property.
See Chapter 4 for a further discussion of property.
See reference

See Chapter 8 for a further discussion of rights

See reference

A right must be something inherent in the nature of man and reality,

something that is applicable to his situation at any time and in any age.
The right of self ownership, of defending one's life and property, is
clearly that sort of right: it can apply to Neanderthal cavemen, in modern
Calcutta, or in the contemporary USA. Such a right is independent of time or
place. But a "right" to a job or to three meals a day or to twelve years of
schooling is not the same phenomenon. Suppose that such things CANNOT exist,
as was true in Neanderthal days or in modern Calcutta. To speak of rights as
something which can only be accomodated in modern industrial conditions is
not to speak of natural rights at all, but of figments of the imagination.
Such "rights" are not embodied in the nature of man, but require for their
fulfillment the existence of a group of exploited people who are coerced
into providing them.
"I have a right to speak freely" can hold true no matter how many people
there are, but "I have a right to a comfortable income" can be asserted only
when there are enough other people in society to provide it. If there are
not enough givers and too many takers, the principle becomes impossible to
apply.
One way to consider these issues is through the realization that rights
impose no obligations on other men except of a prohibitive nature. Each man
is obliged only to AVOID the violation of the rights of other men (including
making any contribution to their oppression). He has no obligation to
provide other men with the means of accomodating rights. Thus there is no
such thing as the "right" to an education (self-education is a moral
imperative but it imposes no ethical obligations) or the "right" to a job
(every man must be free to engage in productive activity according to his
own choices, but this does not give him a claim to the use of another's
property). Rights are not a claim to affirmative action imposed by some men
on others, therefore any condition which contains such a claim cannot be a
right. Most of these so-called "rights" resemble the "right" of someone who
wants to be a concert pianist - but who does not want to practice, or even
learn to play.
The right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-
generated action. A man has the right to support his life by his own work
but this does not mean that others must provide him with food, clothing,
shelter or any other necessity of life.
The right to property means the right to take the economic actions
necessary to earn property and to use it and to dispose of it; it does not
mean that others must provide the property.
The right to free speech means the right to express ideas without danger
of suppression, interference or punitive action by government. It does not
mean that others must provide the means through which to express one's
ideas.
Thus, for any man to claim the "right" to violate the rights of another
man is a contradiction in terms (a denial of the Law of Identity). Such a
claim proposes to violate human nature in order to save human nature. One
cannot claim that a condition of proper human survival necessitates the
negation of a condition of proper human survival. Therefore there can be no
rights to rob, enslave, or murder. Such "rights" are merely stolen concepts.
You cannot say "man has inalienable rights except in cold weather and on
every second Tuesday," just as you cannot say "man has inalienable rights
except in an emergency" or "man's rights cannot be violated except for good
purpose." There are no rights to the work or property of others because this
would be a claim on the lives of others - a demand for slavery.
Many argue that rights cease to exist in emergencies, and that one may
kill with impunity because one simply has no choice.
This error arises in part from the fact that they shortsightedly address
the relationship in a limited context - only during the emergency - rather
than during its full temporal context. Human relationships commence at the
time that the parties commence dealing with each other, not at the time that
the emergency arises.
Emergencies neither abrogate the existence of rights nor alter the nature
or the content of rights. It is during disasters that rights are most
significant for they enable the afflicted individuals to cooperate in
combating the disaster and working toward a return to normalcy. Furthermore,
knowing that the violation of rights is an unacceptable option will induce
people to focus on productive solutions. The "malevolent universe" attitude
discourages one from ever entering a theater or traveling on a ship, or
attempting to colonize the moon.
Your recognition of an inalienable right of another man is not a
compromise between two rights, his and yours, but a line of division that
preserves both rights intact.
We can see now that rights are not something that an individual
"possesses" and that can be granted to him or taken away from him. They are
conditions of existence which can be protected, ignored, or violated - with
accompanying beneficial or detrimental results to men living in a social
context.
Rights are social conditions required for the existence of human society.
Just as violation of the physical and chemical conditions required for
individual well-being inevitably results in a deranged individual, violation
of social conditions - rights - will inevitably result in a deranged
society.

A difficult question is that of the ethical status of retaliation and

self-defense. (See Chapter 6) If one person violates rights, is the
situation rectified by another doing likewise? Do two wrongs make a right?
See reference
The foundation of all human behavior - both moral and ethical - lies in
the Law of Identity. Proper behavior is that which is consistent with this
Law; improper behavior is that which attempts to contradict this Law. I
asserted above that the violation of rights involves a contradiction of the
Law of Identity. It is consistent, however, to take an action which
eliminates such a contradiction, even if that action, when considered out of
context, could itself be a negation of the Law of Identity. In ethics, as in
the propositional calculus, one negative cancels out another. (I find it
personally distasteful, but I can see no way to avoid the conclusion that
two wrongs do indeed make a right.) Thus to lie to a man who is trying to
rob you, or to kill a man, when defending your own life against his
aggression, are ethically legitimate (i.e., logically consistent) actions.
Even if this argument is accepted, there still remains the question of
degree. Would it be proper to kill a man who has merely stolen an apple? The
principle I have described above would make it seem so, but surely such a
degree of retaliation would be repugnant to a civilized person.
The issue of degree must be dealt with in the context of value-balancing.
As Rand has shown, there are rational means of establishing value
hierarchies, and it is with reference to such hierarchies that the proper
degree of retaliation for particular aggressive actions should be
determined. This determination is one of the proper functions of a code of
law, and here you can see the major reason why an explicitly formulated
framework of justice must lie at the foundation of any social organization.
If the determination of "degree of retaliation" is left to the personal
judgment of the individuals involved, or to the multitude of their hired (or
elected) agencies, then it is very unlikely that widespread adherence to
rationally-derived principles of justice would exist in society. This would
hardly be a suitable context for the ensurance of rights.
A closely related problem is the punishment of criminals. If criminals
have intrinsic rights to life, liberty and property, then are not capital
punishment, incarceration, and fines violations of the criminals' rights? If
this is the case, then the implication is that there is no ethical
difference between committing a crime and punishing a criminal.
This seems to be a plausible argument, but observe that it is based on
the assumption that the concepts of life, liberty, and property include the
notions of life, liberty, and property maintained AT THE EXPENSE OF THE
INNOCENT - which is precisely how the criminal views those rights.
Restitution (instead of punishment) for much criminal behavior has two
important beneficial consequences for social order: 1) it ameliorates the
condition of the victim and tends to reduce his desire for violent revenge,
and 2) it offers the offender the opportunity to restore his place in
society. Indeed, the creation of punishment law appears to have increased
social disorder precisely because punishment law precludes both of these
alternatives.

There is a conflict between natural law (the theory that man's rights are
inherent in his nature and exist independently of government law) and legal
positivism (the theory that government law itself is the sole basis for
man's rights).
The legal positivist thesis is that "man's ability to contract, and
thereby offer consent, is made possible only by the establishment of a
government which can define the rules and enforce the rights that make
consent possible in a social context in the first place."
However, if this were true it would be impossible for a government to be
established by any means that involve contract and consent, which,
supposedly, cannot exist prior to the establishment of the government. In
general, if rights do not exist until after a government has been
established, then there can be no right to establish a government. So by
what principled means could government be started? And since there are many
and contradictory government theses about the nature of rights, which
government is to be considered the determinator of correct ethics?
Furthermore, if there were no natural rights - no independently-existing
ethical principles - then there could be no standard for judging the
legitimacy or efficacy of government-made laws - no means by which the
behavior of government could itself be evaluated.
A government is comprised of a group of people. None of these individual
people acquires, by virtue of membership in that group, any intellectual
abilities that he did not previously possess. Therefore any rules that are
determined by government could as well have been determined by the
cooperative association of those same individuals acting non-governmentally.
In the legal positivist thesis, "government" is a stolen concept.

The idea of "man's proper survival" means not merely those conditions
which apply to individual people, but also those conditions which apply to
cultures.
A society whose members are not willing to act to preserve their rights
will not survive.
To ensure the proper survival of a culture there are several things that
must be done:
1) Prevent the establishment of authoritarian institutions.
2) Transmit to your children rational moral and ethical principles.
3) Teach your children the importance of moral/ethical autonomy. Teach
them to reject all attempts to induce them to accept any judgment other than
their own regarding the propriety of their behavior - that if they judge an
action to be wrong, then they must not do it, no matter who tells them to do
it.

* There is no such Thing as Freedom

There are three aspects to the idea of freedom: Physical, Psychological
and Social.
In physical terms, freedom - or the lack of it - refers to the
constraints imposed by the laws of nature. For example: you are not free to
flap your arms and fly through the sky. You are not free to breathe water,
like a fish. This is not the sort of freedom I am going to talk about.
In psychological terms freedom refers to the constraints you may impose
upon yourself because of your state of mind. For example: you may not be
free to get a broken tooth fixed, simply because you dread going to a
dentist. You may not be free to learn how to ski, simply because of your
lack of self-confidence. This too, is not the sort of freedom I will deal
with in this essay.
It is freedom in the context of interacting with other people that is my
concern. I will try to make a precise statement of just what that kind of
freedom is.
Consider these pairs of terms:

Light - Darkness
Sound - Silence
Heat - Cold
Slavery - Freedom

Let us examine the first of these pairs, light - darkness. Light is

defined as electromagnetic radiation in a certain range of wavelengths. As
such, we can easily understand and deal with the characteristics of light.
We can measure stronger or weaker lights in terms of candlepower or lumens.
We can identify different wavelengths of light and call them colors. We can
produce light by means of light bulbs and torches. Light is a real existing
thing. What then is darkness? Darkness is not a real existing thing. It is
merely a term of convenience which we apply to a situation from which light
is absent. You will observe that there are no units of measurement for
darkness. There are not greater or lesser darknesses (what is greater or
lesser in this context is the amount of light present) nor are there
different characteristics of darkness - there is only one kind of darkness
and that is the complete absence of light. So long as there is any light at
all present we cannot truthfully say that we have darkness but rather that
we have a greater or lesser degree of illumination.
Now consider the second pair, sound - silence. Sound is defined as a
certain sort of motion of the air. Sound comes in various degrees, namely
louder and softer. It comes also in various types, namely of a higher or
lower pitch. As with light, you can see (or rather, hear) that sound is a
real existing thing. Silence, however, is not. It is merely a term of
convenience which we apply to a situation from which sound is absent. And as
with darkness, there is only one degree of silence, the complete absence of
sound. So long as there is any sound present at all we cannot speak of
silence but rather of more or less noise.
Now on to the third pair, heat - cold. Heat is a manifestation of the
molecular energy in an object. We can make a measurement of heat by means of
a thermometer and we can see (or feel) that heat comes in various degrees of
temperature, and thereby we know that this energy content is a real existing
thing. So what is cold? Cold is the absence of heat. Cold is not a real
thing. You might now be tempted to say: "Humbug! I know cold is real. My
refrigerator makes my milk cold. I know this because I drink the cold milk."
Well, your refrigerator does not put cold into the milk. What it does is to
take heat out of the milk. The refrigerator is a "heat pump" which pumps the
heat from the inside of the box to the outside. (You can feel the heat
coming off of the radiator on the back of the refrigerator.) You will note
that we have thermometers for measuring heat, but there is no device for
measuring cold. You will note that heat is measured in degrees (fahrenheit
or centigrade), but there is no unit of measurement which indicates
coldness. Strictly speaking, there is only one degree of cold, and that is
absolute zero, the point at which all the heat has been removed from an
object. So you can see that it is not cold that is a real existing thing,
but rather heat.
Now consider the fourth pair of terms, slavery - freedom. Keeping in mind
the previous three distinctions I made, let us see what, in this context, is
the real existing thing and what is merely a term used to indicate an
absence. Consider that we can take a man and by the application of physical
force we can compel him to submit to our will. We can also compel him to
submit by threatening him with force. We can bind a man in chains; we can
lock him in a cage. Or we can threaten to deprive him of his property, his
liberty, or even his life. And thus we can force him to submit to our will.
Surely you recognize this as the imposition of slavery. And you can see that
slavery is a real existing state of affairs. There are degrees of slavery:
some men are completely enslaved, such as negroes in the pre-civil-war
South. Other men are more or less enslaved according to the amount of force
or threat of force to which they are subjected. So, if slavery is a real
existing thing, what then is freedom? Is it not a real thing? After all, men
have been willing to fight for it and to die for it all through history. Do
they fight and even die for a nothing? For a notion that does not exist in
reality? Is it not true that a man will go out and fight against tyranny,
and when he has destroyed the tyrant does he not smile and say, "Now I have
freedom!"? Doesn't he have something that he did not have before? Namely
freedom? Well, let us see what he does have and what he does not have.
Before, when he was living under the tyranny, there was imposed upon him a
force or a threat of force, to which he was compelled to submit. Then, when
he fought, his objective was to destroy the tyrant. When he fought he did
not take some thing away from the tyrant; rather, he destroyed the thing
that the tyrant had used against him. The thing destroyed was the tyrant's
ability to compel. And then, after his success, when he said, "Now I have
freedom!" did he possess any real thing as a result of his fight? Obviously
not. No real existing thing has come into his possession which he did not
previously possess. What has changed is that he is now living in a different
situation. Whereas before there was force now there is not. And this
situation is what he calls freedom. Freedom is the absence of slavery.
Freedom is not a real existing thing, it is rather the term we apply to a
situation from which compulsion is absent.
I want now to make the most critically important point of my essay. I
have maintained that darkness, silence, cold and freedom are not real
existing things. What I have said is true. But what I have said, if not
properly understood, can be fatally misleading. Consider one more example of
the same nature as those I have illustrated: You can pluck a rock out of the
ground, leaving a hole, and you can say that it is the rock that is the real
thing and that the hole is merely the absence of the rock and therefore not
real. That is the frame of reference I have used throughout this essay, and
it is correct, as far as it goes. But it is certainly not complete. Just as
you might stumble over the rock and break your leg, so you might fall into
the hole and break your leg. Your relationship to the hole, you see, is a
rather important situation. Even though we may consider the hole as being
merely the absence of the rock, it certainly does have relevance to your
life. And although I have said that darkness, silence, cold and freedom are
merely absences, I do not mean to deny their relevance to life. The absence
of light which is a blind man's darkness is crucially important. The absence
of sound which is a deaf man's silence is very relevant. The absence of heat
which is a dead man's cold is undeniably significant. And the absence of
slavery which means the freedom of Man is the basis of all human progress.

Chapter 6
THE ETHICS UNDERLYING SOCIAL
STRUCTURE

Thoreau might have written only yesterday about our government

today.
What makes his commentary so timeless in its application is that he saw
beneath the superficial manifestations of government to its underlying
principles of operation.
What is important is to define the condition toward which the human
community should be advancing. To set the social goals toward which the men
and women of good will should strive; the general relationships that should
exist between human beings. To produce a schematic for civilized life, a set
of instructions. This is the intent of my writings on Ethics.

* Some Ethical Concepts Defined

term: genus: differentia:

ethics human behavior interpersonal

libertarianism political principle voluntary
statism political principle coercive
anarchy political structure voluntary
 government political structure coercive

Ethics is the study of interpersonal human behavior. There are several

such forms of behavior: sexual, economic, and political, to name a few. In
each of these behaviors an interaction occurs between two or more people. In
sexual behavior, for example, the interaction involves erotic stimulation.
In economic behavior the interaction involves material wealth. And in
political behavior the interaction involves human liberty. In each case
there are two fundamental manners in which the interaction can transpire:
coercively or voluntarily. In sex I would define these as rape vs consensual
sex. In economics I would define them as theft vs trade. And in politics I
would define them as statism vs libertarianism.
Libertarianism is the statement of a political principle. As John Hospers
described it:
"a philosophy of personal liberty - the liberty of each person to live
according to his own choices, provided that he does not attempt to coerce
others and thus prevent them from living according to their choices.
Libertarians hold this to be an inalienable right of man; thus,
libertarianism represents a total commitment to the concept of individual
rights."
Libertarianism, as a political philosophy, is concerned with the
appropriate use of force. It asks one question: Under what conditions is the
use of force justified? And it gives one answer: only in response to the
prior use of force.
The opposite of libertarianism is statism, the principle that it is
proper for the community (or a selected subgroup thereof) to compel the
behavior of its individual members.
Anarchy is a narrower term, contained within the context of
libertarianism, and referring to the social institution by means of which
the principle of libertarianism shall be implemented.
Government is the social institution by means of which the principle of
statism is implemented. In practice throughout history, the fundamental
distinguishing characteristic of government has been that it is an
institution comprised of the strongest gang of aggressors in a particular
area at a particular time. Government is not itself a principle but is the
institutionalization of an ethical principle. The gang of bandits becomes a
government when it establishes an institution for the purpose of
implementing its principle of coercion.
Consider that when people live together in a society, that is, a group in
which interactions can take place among all the members, there must be
institutionalized a set of ethical standards of behavior designed to inhibit
actions which would result in the violation of freedom. This is the
ostensible (but NOT historical) purpose of a legal system.
A society can have either non-aggression or coercion as its standard of
behavior. In accordance with the first alternative, the social institution
(legal system) for implementing that standard of behavior will be an
anarchy. On the other hand, if coercion is the standard of behavior then a
government will be the implementing institution.
An anarchic society is not a Utopia in which the inititation of violence
is impossible. Rather, it is a society which does not institutionalize the
initiation of force and in which there are means for dealing with aggression
justly when it does occur. The absence of government does not mean the
absence of violence. It simply means the absence of an official, legal,
institutionalized tool for its imposition.
A statist society is one in which aggression is institutionalized.

* Philosophy Underlies Society

Philosophical principles are food for the mind in just the same sense
that there is food for the body. It is not necessary that you eat poison to
be sick - is suffices merely that you fail to eat the proper food. For
example, you will suffer if you fail to eat vitamin C. In just the same way,
an individual person - or a social organization - will suffer not only if it
implements wicked philosophical principles, but also if it simply fails to
implement proper philosophical principles.
In the case of an individual, that failure can occur when a person takes
actions based on his principles. To the extent that the principles do not
correspond to reality, the actions he takes will fail to achieve beneficial
values. Thus it is that a philosophical failure will have destructive
consequences in reality.
In the case of a society, the danger arises from the fact that there will
always be individuals whose personal beliefs lead them to perform actions
which violate rights. Wicked people are drawn toward the state because the
state is able to "socialize" the costs of persecution and thereby save them
the expense (or potential danger) of implementing their wickedness. Many
individuals would use their positions wickedly if they could. However, the
institutional arrangements within which people perform their tasks determine
whether or not such abuses can be carried out. If social institutions fail
to accomodate this fact, the actions of those individuals will be
detrimental to the society. Further, the deliberate institutionalization of
rights-violating behavior (e.g., government) is akin to the dietary failure
of actually eating poison. Thus it is that a philosophical failure will have
destructive consequences in social reality.
Society doesn't function because government intervenes occasionally to
resolve disputes. Rather, the vast majority of people depend on continuing
relationships wherein it's customary to keep one's word, treat others with
respect, and comply with mutually beneficial norms. These privately-
developed norms are the glue which holds society together, by and large in
spite of the interference of government.
Here are examples of two different norms, each of which produces a
completely different type of ethical behavior, depending on the acceptance
or rejection of government interference in an interpersonal relationship:
Consider a man and a woman who have lived together in a state of intimacy
for 20 years. At the end of that time, they decide that the best thing for
them to do would be to go their separate ways and each live independently of
the other. So what happens? Each hires a lawyer, goes to court, and attempts
to induce the government to use its coercive power against the other. This
sort of divorce occurs so frequently that it is considered a natural
process, always to be expected, even inevitable. But in fact there is
nothing natural, expectable, or inevitable about this arrangement. It is
simply the result of a mistaken cultural norm which is easily corrected by a
fundamental alteration in the individuals' perspective on government.
Consider a man and a woman who have lived together in a state of intimacy
for 20 years. At the end of that time, they decide that the best thing for
them to do would be to go their separate ways and each live independently of
the other. In this case, it would be unthinkable for them to go through the
above described legal process. Why unthinkable? Well, don't you see, they
are not husband and wife, but father and daughter (or mother and son).
You see, people CAN live peaceful, productive, and cooperative lives -
once they cease to regard government as an acceptable arbiter of their
interpersonal relationships. The Hutterite sect of Christianity, which has
existed for over 400 years, has never experienced an act of murder by one of
its members.
Many people consider philosophy to be very largely an affair of acquiring
and then displaying certain clever techniques of logico-linguistic
proficiency. Or they seem to want a philosophy resembling the multiplication
table or the periodic table of the elements. They want it to be such that
all philosophy is mechanistically determinate. So that whenever faced with
an alternative they can simply consult this "look-up" table and thereby be
relieved of the necessity of intellectual effort. They want an answer to
every question - even before it has been asked. Maybe what they really don't
want is the recognition of personal responsibility. They want a philosophy
that takes this burden off their shoulders. Responsibility must come from
within, as a commitment to one's own values, rather than from the outside,
as a duty to God, family, or community. Responsibility in action flows from
a sense of self-ownership - motivation by values rather than duties - and
independence of mind. The perspective of personal moral responsibility for
one's actions is being abandoned - it has nearly been culturally lost - and
the result is what you see in everyday's newspaper headlines: mayhem and
brutality.

* Foundation of Law
A natural law is a necessity imposed on an entity by the entity's nature.
It is a cause which mandates an effect: appropriate behavior. The law arises
from the interaction of the facts of the entity's nature with other facts of
reality: its environment. A natural law is practical - it must always "work"
- because it relates to things as they really are.
While it is generally recognized that man's physical and even his mental
nature are subject to the rule of natural law, it is just as generally
assumed that the area of ethics is completely outside the scope of natural
law. This assumption is held tacitly, rather than being identifed and
defended, simply because it CAN'T be rationally defended. It is quite
foolish to assert that man is a being with a specific nature and therefore
subject to the rule of principles derived from that nature in all areas
except his dealings with other men. Do men cease to have a specific nature
when they come into relationship with other men? Of course not! Natural law
does indeed apply to human relationships, and it is just as objective,
universal, and inescapable in this area as in any other. The proof of this
is that actions have consequences - in the area of human relations as surely
as in the area of human medicine. No matter how cleverly a man schemes, he
will suffer if he insists on acting in a manner which contradicts the nature
of human existence. The consequences may not be immediate, and they may not
be readily apparent, but they are inescapable.
The law of supply and demand, and all other market laws, are really
natural laws, derived from the nature and needs of man. The fact that market
laws are natural laws explains why a free market works and a controlled-
market doesn't: natural law is always practical - it always "works."
Thus man-made law must be identified rather than invented or decreed, as
is the case with government legislation. Law is necessary for the survival
and development of individual liberty, but decreed legislation is its
nemesis.
"True law is right reason, consonant with nature, diffused among all men,
constant, eternal." .... Cicero
Arbitrary legislation destroys the very certainty that we seek from
natural law: People can never be certain that the legislation in force today
will be in force tomorrow. As a result, they are prevented not only from
freely deciding how to behave but also from foreseeing the legal effects of
their daily behavior.
Legislation also often disrupts established inter-personal conventions
that have hitherto been voluntarily accepted and held to by individuals.
Even the possibility of nullifying these conventions tends to induce people
to fail to rely on any existing conventions or to keep any accepted
agreements, no matter how they may have come into existence.

Man's only duty is to respect others' rights and man's only right over
others is the enforcement of that duty.
 A free society exists when people recognize, as a social, collective
rule, that individuals have the right to own property and to use their
bodies and minds as each sees fit. Their recognition of this right consists
in their accepting a duty not to interfere with these free actions of
individuals. This social rule has the enormous advantage of being the only
collective rule compatible with individual freedom and autonomy. This is the
only rational way in which society can cope with the problem posed by
nonagreement about "The Good."
Every bit of human progress has happened for a single, simple reason: the
elevation of the status of the individual. Each time civilization has
stumbled into another age that is a little better, a bit more enlightened,
than the ones before it, it's because people respected other people as
individuals. When they haven't, those have been the times of slipping
backward.
One of America's greatest shortcomings is that almost everything nowadays
is geared against the individual and in favor of the big institutions - big
corporations, big unions, big banking, big government. So not only does an
individual have trouble getting ahead and staying there, he often has
difficulty merely in surviving. And whenever bad things happen - inflation,
devaluation, depression, shortages, higher taxes, even wars - it isn't so
much the big institutions which get hurt, it's the individual, all the time.
More and more, individuals are being deprived of the power of decision,
and being allowed only the power of choice among the things government
permits. The more you depend on government, the more limited those choices
become. What must be reinstated is the opportunity for the individual to
make decisions that count. Small wonder that many people in big cities seem
so despairing: nothing in view indicates any care for what the individual
thinks or desires.
Hitler: "The individual must finally come to realize that his own ego is
of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the
position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the
nation as a whole... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will
are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an
individual."

* Stateolatry
The opposite of libertarianism is statism, the principle that it is
proper for the community (or a selected subgroup thereof) to compel the
behavior of its individual members.
The most firmly held myth in the world today is that society cannot
possibly exist without government. This myth is as decisive as belief in God
was for the people of Medieval European Society. This myth is held so firmly
and fundamentally by many people that they are entirely unaware even that
they hold it.
The stateolatrist is so devout a statist that he views government as an
object of religious worship. He regards government as being the ultimate
foundation of morality and ethics, and as an absolute prerequisite to
civilized human existence. He is unable to conceive that the time could ever
come when government will fade into an anonymity as deep as that of its
humblest subjects. He is one manifestation of what Eric Hoffer described as
a "True Believer."
A hallmark of the stateolatrist is the inability to perceive the
fundamental similarity between government viciousness and criminal
viciousness. He is not merely a patriot who loves his country, he is so
overwhelmed by his devotion that he cannot see the reality of government.

PATRIOT GAMES by Tom Clancy is a remarkable book. Not for the story
itself, but for what it shows about the mentality of the author. Never have
I seen such a blatant display of the stateolatrist syndrome. Clancy, who is
an excellent writer and storyteller, portrays with great clarity the nature
of terrorist behavior and the exactly identical nature of government
behavior, but then distinguishes between them with such a transparent film
of verbal gloss that in many places I laughed out loud with amazement.
Clancy's writing is an unparalleled example of a devout statist who is
totally self-blinded to the fundamental identicality of terrorism and
government.
In describing terrorists, one of Clancy's characters remarks:
"They don't relate to the people around them as being real people. They
see them as objects, and since they're only objects, whatever happens to
them is not important. Once I met a man who killed four people and didn't
bat an eye; but he cried like a baby when we told him his cat died. People
like that don't even understand why they get sent to prison; they really
don't understand. Those are the scary ones."
Clancy would be appalled at the idea that this same description could be
applied to the FBI and the BATF "terrorists" guilty of the Waco massacre.
For another good illustration of this syndrome see Heinlein's CITIZEN OF
THE GALAXY, pg 180. Here you can see someone to whom government is so
unquestionably pervasive that he describes human culture without reference
to it, just as you might describe society without reference to the air we
breathe.
Everyone is so immersed in the context of statism that no one really
knows the other alternative. Even though the governments of the former
Soviet Union might WANT to establish a free market, they simply do not know
what it is. Most people do not realize they could even HAVE any control over
their own economic situation. Because life is so wrapped up in bureaucracy
and law no one has any idea that government could be circumvented. So long
as people cannot perceive alternatives for comparison they will never even
become aware that they are oppressed. They will not only lack any impulse to
rebel, they will lack even the power of grasping that the world could be
other than what it is.
It is as Orwell said it would be: "You will lose the ability to think
certain ideas, and then you will be totally incapable of ever trying to act
on those ideas."
The only way out of this statist situation is for people someday to
realize that governments are NOT necessary for civilization - that in fact
governments are an impediment to civilization. When the day comes that
enough people are disillusioned with government, government will simply
cease to exist. It will go the way of Alchemy, Phrenology, the Flat Earth,
and other similar errors that were eventually discarded as being useless.
This is why I do not think anarchism to be utopian. Today it is only a
dream, a dream that will not soon come true, but if the idea is preserved it
will be used in the future.
Consider this: all government is founded upon Lies. But a lie will not
fit a fact. It will only fit another lie derived for the purpose. Therefore
the life of a lie, and of government, is simply a question of time. Nothing
but truth is immortal: 99.9 percent of all the laws ever passed by
governments have vanished from the society of mankind. But Aristotle's laws
of logic, Archimedes' laws of buoyancy, and Euclid's laws of geometry
persevere immutably.

* Miscellaneous Ethical Topics

* Voting
Here are the best arguments I could find - both for and against voting:
 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience):
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a
slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral
questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters
is not staked, I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not
vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it
to the majority. Its obligation, therefore never exceeds that of expediency.
Even voting FOR THE RIGHT is DOING nothing for it. It is only expressing to
men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the
right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of
the majority. There is but litttle virtue in the actions of masses of men."
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the
eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have
other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it
practically his support.... Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper
merely, but your whole influence."

Voting is an indicator of personal intellectual and moral inadequacy:

anyone whose memory is strong enough to recall what was said during the last
election - and what was subsequently done by the winning candidates - will
realize full well the fraudulence and futility of electoral politics. You
advocated an undertaking you didn't fully understand. You were a participant
in an activity you failed to supervise. You did not check on the behavior of
a man whom you knew from experience to be a liar, and you permitted that man
to screw around with the most dangerous technology in human history. I'd say
you shirked your responsibility.

In America, voting is an all-or-nothing proposition: you either win or

you lose. If you can get 51% of the vote, you get 100% of the power. No
matter whether an office is filled by an 80% voter turnout or by a 15% voter
turnout, the new office holder has the full power of his office. If you are
on the losing side - the minority - you get nothing. The alternative
presented to the voter is absolutely exclusive: the selection of one TOTALLY
precludes the other.
There is a conflict in voting which is not found in the market. Market
choices conflict only in the sense that buying a given good leaves you LESS
money (not NO money) to purchase other goods. While you can buy some
pretzels and some pizza, you can't vote for some Bush and some Clinton. In a
market, the individual is never placed in the position of being a dissenting
(and powerless) minority.

Democracy is the opportunity to choose among rulers none of whom you

want, and the obligation to accept the ones you end up with.
Voting is just a method of choosing oppressors. Every time you step into
a voting booth you license a potential killer or thief. From the perspective
of either political party, there is no area of human activity that is
outside the sphere of government encroachment.
Some advocates of voting, when faced with the accusation that they are
perpetrating this evil, will counter with the assertion that your means of
control over the situation is to exercise your right to vote, and that if
you don't do so, you have no right to complain about the situation ("If you
don't vote, don't complain!" is what they say). Consider the nature of the
demand they are laying on you: your alternative is either to participate in
the wickedness (by voting) or refuse to participate and thus be condemned to
submit in silent acquiescence to being victimized by the wickedness.
In fact, only those who do NOT vote have a legitimate moral right to
complain: they are the only ones who give no sanction or support to their
persecutors.
 Imagine a neighborhood in which two bullies dominate and intimidate
everyone. But they're democratic-minded bullies: they allow all (well,
almost all) the neighbors to vote every four years in an election to
determine which of the bullies will be empowered to possess a big stick and
for the next four years to rule the neighborhood, beating and robbing all
the residents. Now imagine that one poor persecuted resident complains about
being beaten and robbed, and in response is told: "Well, if you don't like
bully D then next time express your preference for bully R - but unless you
choose one of these bullies, you have no right to complain about being
beaten and robbed."
Such a demand for willing self-immolation is an act of inexcuseable
viciousness - worse even than the beating and robbing!

To commit a crime by proxy is to have someone else impose your will for
you. The most convenient and frequent manner of committing acts of harm by
proxy is to use government to commit the crimes you want done. All you have
to do is vote for whichever criminal promises to use force in the way you
wish. The very act of voting is an attempt on the part of voters to delegate
to another person a power that they could not justly possess themselves.
When you vote you participate in the selection of an officeholder. Thus
you acquire responsibility for his subsequent behavior - regardless of who
holds the office. Your participation is your concession that there should
indeed BE elected officials with the power of coercion. In voting, you give
your sanction to the institution that enables the officials to coerce. Even
though you may not approve of the particular officials who attain office,
you do approve of the enabling institution. Government is based on coercion,
but individuals should not have the authority to coerce others, and
therefore they should not put themselves in a position to delegate such
authority to third parties, which is the essence of voting.

There is plenty of mass-media crowing about the "high voter turnout"

(about 55% - that's high?), as an "affirmation of the system," and a "strong
endorsement of democracy." Nobody mentions the message of the 45%
abstention.

It is often said that refusal to vote means that one is left with no
voice at all, but that implies that having a voice in the proceedings of
government is proper and desirable.
An authoritarian activity is one which forces, directly or indirectly,
someone else to do something. But voting in itself does not do this. Only
voting for authoritarian candidates (including the lesser of evils, which is
still an evil) or for authoritarian policies is authoritarianism.
Voting AGAINST tax increases, measures to increase government controls,
and voting FOR libertarians truly committed to total liberty cannot be
authoritarian. Voting for freedom or against coercion does not delegate
power to another; just the opposite.
If someone is applying coercion against me, I'll resist by any means
available, even means provided by the coercer himself.

When you vote, you are devoting a part of your time and energy to making
a contribution to the political system. Your participation constitutes that
contribution, regardless of the intent of, or specific form of, that
participation. Like they say, it doesn't matter who you vote for, as long as
you vote.
Voting is not an expression of power, but an admission of powerlessness,
since it cannot do otherwise than reaffirm the government's supposed
legitimacy. Participation in electoral politics serves to legitimize the
entire political process and the existence of government. If people did not
vote, the democratic theory of government would lose its legitimacy and
politicians would have to justify their rule on the basis of something other
than the alleged consent of the governed. This, hopefully, would make the
true nature of the State more obvious to the governed. And such a revelation
might have the potential to motivate people to challenge or evade government
interference and coercion.
If you consider voting to be acceptable, then you must consider it
acceptable for the winning candidates to hold power in a coercive
government. The ultimate political issue is that of the Individual vs. the
State. But the voter, by virtue of his behavior, has already cast his lot
with the State.
Each candidate would use the State in a different way - but each would
use the State. Obviously, this is a game in which only the State can win. By
playing the game, you demonstrate your conviction that the game should be
played.
If voting could have kept this totalitarianism from happening, we
wouldn't have the police-state we have got, because people are forever
voting and they've certainly had enough opportunities to stop it or turn it
aside if that was possible. On the contrary, it is the process of voting
that has made it possible.

Suppose you are in airplane which gets hijacked and the hijacker says, "I
will kill you all unless you vote that you want to be set free."
Unfortunately, over 50% of the passengers are anarchists who are opposed to
voting, so they refuse to vote, and all the passengers are killed. In this
case, by refusing to vote, they indirectly contribute to the death of the
minority that would have survived if they had been the majority. Not voting
in this case is authoritarian.
Not voting constitutes an implicit declaration to the winner that "I
don't care what the outcome is." We are all living in a society hijacked by
the rulers. If we can vote for less coercion but refuse, we implicitly
endorse coercion. The fact is, when we are hijacked, as we are, or under
terrorist rule or subject to any authoritarians, we ARE involved, and a
refusal to voice a yea or nay can itself further authoritarian rule.
[This is a fundamentally collectivist argument - it assumes that the
victim is in some way responsible for the behavior of the criminal. It is
not the responsibility of the non-voters to save the voters from their own
folly.]

Back during the Vietnam era, the protestors used to say "What if they
gave a war and nobody came?" That represents only a superficial analysis of
the political system. A more fundamental analysis is represented by the
question "What if they gave an election and nobody came?" (But then,
Australia has a solution to that!)

Voting would make ME feel like a swim in the sewer. It would leave me
with a sense of moral pollution.

John Galt (Part3, Chapter8):

"It's the attempt of your betters to beat you on YOUR terms that has
allowed your kind to get away with it for centuries. Which one of us would
succeed, if I were to compete with you for control over your musclemen? ....
I'd perish and what you'd win would be what you've always won in the past: a
postponement, one more stay of execution, for another year - or month -
bought at the price of whatever hope and effort might still be squeezed out
of the best of the human remnants left around you, including me."

From Ayn Rand's notes for ATLAS SHRUGGED:

By accepting his decisions, which she knows to be wrong, then by helping
him to carry out bad ideas well, she only helps him to run the railroad
badly and thus contradicts and defeats her own purpose, which was to run it
well. She postpones the natural consequences of his bad decisions and thus
leaves him free and gives him the means to do more damage to the railroad by
more bad decisions, and worse ones. A bad thing well done is more dangerous
and disastrous than a bad thing badly done. For example: an efficient
robbery is worse for the victim than an inefficient one.

* Majority Rule - Democracy

In America, it is claimed, we have "majority rule." Just what do we have
in fact?
To find out, let us analyze a recent presidential election. I chose the
Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964 because the winner of that election
received the greatest plurality of votes of any recent (during the past
half-century) election: Johnson received 61% of the votes cast. But was this
landslide victory an expression of "majority rule"? I think not.
Certainly Johnson can be said to represent a majority of the voters - 61%
is, after all, almost two-thirds. But when you consider the total number of
eligible voters you discover that Johnson represents only 37% of them (they
didn't all choose to vote, you see). So Johnson represents only a bit over
one-third of the voting-age population of the country. That can hardly be
said to be a majority!
But even this is not a fair assessment of the situation. Johnson was,
after all, not merely president over those who chose to vote for him. And he
was not merely president over those who were qualified to vote. He was
president over EVERYBODY! And out of that "everybody" how many actually
expressed a choice to have Johnson as their president? 22%. Yeah, only about
one person in five chose Johnson.
As I said, I deliberately picked this election as an example. Any other
recent election shows even more strikingly that this so-called "majority" is
a quite small fraction of the population.
The notion of "majority rule" is hogwash!

Shortly after the 1964 election I realized that the American electoral
process contains a fundamental flaw. When you vote, the only choice you have
is to vote FOR one candidate or FOR another candidate. There is no way you
can vote AGAINST any candidate. There is no "NO" choice on the ballot, only
"YES" choices. This realization was one of the things that turned me off to
the idea of politics. You have no doubt heard (many times) of a disgruntled
voter going to the polls to choose "the lesser of two evils." I realized
that the lesser of two evils is still an evil, and to express a preference
for that evil is to don the cloak of moral culpability for his subsequent
behavior.
I observed with interest a peculiar electoral quirk during the 1976
elections. The LP, after the expenditure of an enormous amount of time,
energy and money, was able to get "None of the above" placed on the ballot
in Nevada. Thus there were three options available to the Nevada electorate
when they went into the polling booth to elect their congressman: the
Democrat, the Republican, and None of the Above. The outcome of this
election was very interesting: the Democrat received 23% of the votes, the
Republican received 29%, and NOTA received a whopping 47%. Can you guess
what happened? Very simple: the Republican went to Washington as the
congressman from Nevada. As of 1990, NOTA is still on the ballot in Nevada,
and the winner of every election is that PERSON who gains the greatest
number of votes. Votes cast for NOTA are simply wasted.
It is intrinsic to the American Constitution that there MUST be a
government. The people CANNOT choose "No Government" - that is not provided
for in the Constitution. Sure, the Declaration of Independence observes the
right of the people to "alter or abolish" their government, but the
Declaration of Independence is not a legal document.
I found it fascinating to watch the first post-Soviet general elections
in Russia. They had an explicit choice on their ballots: Yes or No for any
(and all) particular candidates. Such a large number of the Communist
candidates (who ran unopposed) received a preponderance of "No" votes that
run-off elections were held a couple weeks later. Those "No" votes were
indeed counted - unlike the NOTA votes in Nevada.
I found it fascinating also to watch the subsequent Hungarian elections,
which were held with the stipulation that unless at least 51% of the voting
population did participate, the elections would be invalid. The Hungarian
government has at least a more acute sense of "majority" than does the
American government. In a recent election for the Fremont County, Wyoming
government, only 13% of the population voted, and yet the government
selected by a portion of that tiny percentage does indeed rule Fremont
County. Some "majority rule" that is!!

American voter turnout as percent of voting age population, during

national off-year elections:
1966 47.9
1970 47.9
1974 38.9
1978 45.9
1982 48.5
1986 46.0
1990 45.0

Since 1972, when 18-year-olds first went to the polls, their election
participation has steadily declined. In 1990 less than 19% of the 18 to 20
age group voted.

The majority is invariably wrong. Consider the fact that every major
breakthrough in man's understanding of the world has always been greeted
with indifference or opposition by the majority. When private individuals in
18th century England introduced the "barbaric" practice of innoculating
against smallpox, the majority, including virtually the entire medical
profession, was appalled. Advances are made by individuals or by small
groups of cooperating people who OVERCOME majority opinion or indifference.
The fact that the majority is invariably wrong has interesting implications
for the concept of democracy - a system which means, in fact, State control
of the individual and his property in accordance with the supposed wishes of
the majority. In a word, where majority rules, progress stops. The goal of
free men should not be majority rule at all but self-rule, a society in
which not political action but individual action prevails.
Political freedom for the individual has become a charming legend from
the early years of the Republic when individual liberty - rather than the
will of the majority - was actually considered the core of democracy.
Nowadays, acceptance of the legitimacy of individual autonomy is a
contradiction wholly intolerable to the democratic ideology. Under a
democracy, when a man looks into a mirror he sees one ten-millionth of a
tyrant, and one whole slave.

Some of the devastating consequences of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy

can be observed in the phrase "we are the government," where the useful
collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over
the naked exploitative reality of political life. The government does not in
any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people. But even if it
did, crime is still crime, no matter how many citizens agree to the
aggression. There is nothing sacrosanct about the majority; the lynch mob,
too, is the majority in its own domain.
 A black African guerilla, commenting on democracy:
"Vote, what is a vote? I don't have a vote in Mozambique. They don't have
the vote in Zambia or Zimbabwe or Angola or Tanzania. Nobody has the vote in
Africa, except perhaps once in a man's life to elect a president-for-life
and a one-party government. Vote? You can't eat a vote. You can't dress in a
vote, or ride to work on it. For two thousand rand a month and a full belly
you can have my vote."

* Assisted Suicide
Is it right to help someone to destroy himself?
Yes. He has a right to live his life - or end it - according to HIS
choices, nobody else's.
But how about selling him cigarettes, or booze, or other destructive
drugs?
The moral duty of a human being is to choose to live according to his
nature. The best such choices are those that enhance his nature - not those
that degrade his nature. It would not be ethically improper to sell him
drugs, but it would not be the decent thing to do. By "decent" vs "indecent"
I mean actions that contribute to another person's choices to enhance vs
debilitate his nature as a human being. Death is a normal, natural
phenomenon. Under the appropriate conditions it is proper to end a life. It
is not proper to contribute to its degeneracy.
He is responsible for how he uses the stuff he buys. You acquire ethical
culpability only if you know he is going to use the stuff to injure other
people.

* Abortion
One of the major issues of the day is the argument about Abortion. By and
large, the discussion is merely a diatribe of emotional invective,
containing very little in the way of factual analysis (see the remarks
below, by George Bush).
I will make not a moral or ethical evaluation but merely a factual
presentation upon which can be based whatever evaluation you choose to draw
from your own set of moral principles. (Personally, I am opposed to
abortion, but I am even MORE opposed to laws which forbid abortions.)

Many arguments are based on the contention that a fetus is a human being,
and is therefore possessed of the right to life. This is the "Human Rights"
argument.
There are six points of development at which a fetus can be claimed to
acquire the status of "human being." Any argument from this premise must
choose and justify one of these points:
1. Fertilization
2. Implantation in the uterine wall
3. Brain-wave activity
4. Quickening (when the woman becomes aware of the fetus' movement)
5. Viability (when the fetus can be withdrawn and survive)
6. Birth

Related to this is the "potentiality" argument:

Let us not confuse a potentiality with an actuality. The most you can say
about a fetus is that it is a potential human being. What you have at the
moment of conception, and for some time thereafter, is not a human being,
and so destroying it is not murder. If we forbid a woman who desires it the
right to have an abortion, we are sacrificing the actual--the adult woman--
for the sake of the potential--the fetus.
 Some argue that whether or not the fetus is a human being, it is not a
"person" i.e., is not possessed of the complex of psychological
characteristics that distinguishes any one human being from all others - in
short, that the fetus, although a human being, does not yet have a soul.
Aquinas, rejecting the notion of a "fertilized-egg = person" equivalence
observed that "the body alone is begotten by sexual procreation, and that
after the formation of the body the soul is created and infused."

Others argue that even if the fetus is a human being, it is a parasite

and therefore does not possess human rights. This is the "Parasite"
argument:
What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite
within some other human being's body? The fetus does not have any right to
be fed and nourished, because such a right would make the woman its slave.
The only means of refusal is to expel the fetus. What the woman is doing in
an abortion is causing an unwanted parasite within her body to be ejected
from it. (This can be extended to include euthanasia for seriously ill
adults and dependent elderly people, as well as all those whose continued
existence requires material support provided by other people.)
This argument is countered with the assertion that parasitism is a
perfectly natural phenomenon (Mankind is itself a parasite upon the earth)
and therefore parasites do indeed have rights - the fetus has as much right
inside its mother as does man on mother earth. Both are in their natural
habitat.

And there is the "Infanticide" argument - the contention that a live,

born child cannot in principle be distinguished from a viable late-term
fetus: they both have an unconditional need for material support. Therefore,
if abortion is acceptable, so also must be infanticide.

There is also the "Supersession" argument - that the rights of the woman
supersede any rights possessed by the fetus:
Does not a woman have a primary right to her own life? The right to
determine the circumstances of her own body?

The "Contractual Obligation" argument:

Conception and pregnancy are foreseeable consequences of even careful
sex. By willfully causing a fetus to exist, parents implicitly recognize its
need for support; it's a package deal. When parents mutually enable their
sperm and ova to join, the parents are not enslaved - they have volunteered.
And its rebuff, the "Choiceless" argument:
How is it that the fetus, which is an entity incapable of making choices,
can be said to be a participant in that - or any - contract?

When couples who both carry the mutation for Tay-Sachs disease decide to
have children, they typically elect to have prenatal testing. If a fetus has
the disease, they usually abort it rather than give birth to a child who
would succumb within five years to a slow and horribly painful death.
Because it is always so uniformly hideous in its progression, extremely few
people believe a child afflicted with Tay-Sachs should be brought into the
world.

Scientific American, April 1996, contains an essay on frozen embryos.

"Test-tube" embryos, in the two- to eight-cell stage of development, are
placed in liquid nitrogen and kept in suspended animation until needed by
couples for subsequent attempts at in vitro fertilization. As the number of
frozen embryos grows (there are about a million worldwide) it has become
obvious that a sizable number of them will never be required. The essay
makes three references to cryopreservation being "fraught with ethical and
philosophical complications" but makes no specific mention of just what
these complications might be. (See this chapter's section on * Profound
Ethical Concerns)
See reference

The view of the Religious Right, as expressed by George Bush (LA TIMES,
12/12/88): "Well, it (may) appear to be a double standard to some, but I,
that's my position, and it's, we don't have the time to philosophically
discuss it here, but... we're going to opt on the side of life, and that is,
that is the, that really is the underlying part of this for me. You know, I
mentioned, and with, really from the heart, this concept of going across the
river to this little church and watching one of our children, adopted kid,
be baptized. And that made for me, and it was very emotional for me. It
helped me in reaching a very personal view of this question. And I don't
know."

Also to be considered are the inevitable practical results of anti-

abortion laws, since in the legal context created by such laws many
abortionists are dangerous and disreputable practitioners resorted to by
desperate people.
As many as 60 million abortions are performed annually, at least 50% of
them clandestinely in the 100 or so countries where the procedure is
illegal.
Unsafe abortions account for between 105 and 168 maternal deaths for
every 100K births in the Thirld World countries. This constitutes between
25% and 40% of all maternal mortality.
Every year, in six of the Latin American countries where the practice is
illegal, about 2.8 million women have abortions and half a million are
hospitalized for related complications.
In the USA, the abortion rate for Catholic women is 29% higher than that
of Protestant women. A study in Boston and Long Island showed that 66% of
women having their first abortions are young, single Catholics opting for
abortions rather than sinning repeatedly by using birth control. 70% of
those who have a second abortion are Catholic.
Each year in the USA, out of a total of approximately 6.4 million
pregnant women, 1.6 million choose to have an abortion. About half of all
women in the USA will choose to have an abortion at some time in their life.

* Ethics as Black-and-White
Moral principles are requirements of man's survival proved by reference
to the most fundamental aspects of his existence and to the deepest premises
of philosophy. They are life-or-death absolutes. But while the standard and
the principles of ethics (and morality) are black-and-white - as black-and-
white as are the laws of nature - the personal judgments, choices and
actions through which an individual realizes those abstract principles are
matters of degree.

* Honesty vs Dishonesty
There are times when a lie is not only ethically justifiable but is
actually morally obligatory. "What?! What?!" I hear you croak. "Is this guy
out of his mind?" Well, let me explain. Imagine that you set out to go
downtown having in your left pocket $10 and in your right pocket $100. As
you are trudging along the street a hoodlum snatches you into an alley,
claps his revolver (a Quickfire Arms Corp. Saturday Night Special) up gainst
the side of your pretty little head and wheezes softly into your ear:
"Allright, Cutie, your money or your life!" So you, trembling in fear and
terror, reach into the left pocket and produce the ten-spot. "Arrgh!! He
gasps, wafting into your nostril the stench of cheap Sicilian wine, "Izzis
alla dough ya got, kid?" I maintain that at this point your answer not only
COULD morally be "yes," but that it actually SHOULD be "yes" and that if you
answer "no" you are behaving in an immoral, self-destructive fashion.
Under ordinary circumstances a lie is an attempt to coerce someone - that
is, an attempt to separate him (without his consent) from some rightfully
achieved value. In the context of my little story, the lie is not a
coercion. Your money is not the hoodlum's rightfully achieved value, and you
have NO ethical obligation toward him. Your only moral obligation is to
extricate yourself from the situation in the least self-destructive manner
possible. Thus we see that a lie can be a perfectly proper act to protect a
value against an injustice; not a desire to gain a value by faking reality,
but a fully contextual recognition of the relevant facts of reality.

* Crime - The Criminal Mentality

Richard Adams, in his book WATERSHIP DOWN, made a profoundly important
identification of a connection between the individual and the group - the
connection that explains why people will do things when in a group context
that they would never do when acting as individuals:
"The current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves
primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as
individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without
conscious thought or will."
This is the psychological phenomenon that accounts for the clearly
distinct difference between the behavior of "individual man" and that of
"group man." How a man will behave in a social context depends very much on
his self-image.
An animal is an animal by nature. It has no choice in the matter. But a
human being must, by nature, CHOOSE to be a human. The necessity of choice
arises from the structure of his cognitive apparatus. A part of this choice
is, as an individual, to choose to think - and, as a member of a society, to
choose to live by the non-aggression principle. One can not claim to be
fully human unless one acts from the base of non-coercion.
The Objectivist stand is quite clear:
"The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may
INITIATE the use of physical force against others. No man - or group or
society or government - has the right to assume the role of a criminal and
initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man." (From "The
Objectivist Ethics," in THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS.)

There are really only two kinds of people in the world: those who bother
other people without provocation and those who don't.
It is the initiation of force that distinguishes criminal from non-
criminal behavior, and it is the acceptance or rejection of the non-
aggression principle that distinguishes a civilized human being from a
savage; a libertarian from a statist. This helps to explain why the State
cannot respect - it can only fear. Animals do not have the attribute of
respect.
The Hindu religion approaches this distinction in its famous "beetle
test": as you are walking along the road, will you break stride to avoid
stepping on a beetle, or will you merely crush it and walk on?
Branden maintains that the fundamental moral "sin" is the failure to
choose to think (see THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM, chapter 4). I would draw
a parallel to this contention in the field of ethics and maintain that the
fundamental ethical "sin" is the failure to choose to judge. I mean
specifically failing to make judgments about the ethical propriety of your
own behavior, and instead allowing yourself to become merely an instrument
of someone else's will. Rand observed that the most contemptible man is the
man without a purpose. I believe the most evil man is the man who allows his
purpose to be determined by others. He makes no ethical judgments about his
behavior, but falls into the default of having his ethos determined by
someone else. This is the man who implements in practice the ideas proposed
by men who would otherwise be impotent. Without this man, Hitler would have
been nothing more than a house painter.
The most widespread excuse for this failure is the claim that "I was only
doing my job." I call this the "Nuremberg Defense" as it was the most common
defense offered by the Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials.
Whenever you hear this claim, what you are hearing is an attempt to justify
ethical viciousness on the grounds that the perpetrator has abandoned his
own judgment and accepted the propriety of acting according to the judgment
of someone else.
The Nuremberg Defense tries to divorce choice from action and thus avoid
the assignment of guilt. The man who makes the choice tries to absolve
himself from guilt by claiming "but I didn't DO anything," and the man who
performs the action tries to absolve himself from guilt by claiming "but I
didn't make any choice." When each has thus eliminated guilt from his
considerations, both together are capable of a completely unlimited scope of
wickedness. This "default of judgment" phenomenon lies at the base of all
government police agencies and all military organizations. Without this
default, the Hitlers of the world would each have to do his own murders
personally, and would not be able to act through a social institution
comprised of people trained to accept any judgment - any choice - governing
their behavior. Any judgment, that is, except their own.
The vast majority of the human race are secretly kind-hearted and shrink
from infliciting pain, but in a society where viciousness is
institutionalized they don't dare to assert themselves. One kind-hearted
creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally participates in
iniquities which revolt both of them. "In fear of what others might report
about you, you stoned the woman although your heart revolted at the act."
Hitler: "I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement
exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor
mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable
barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most
dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down. This is a
tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result
will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty."
But this process works only with "group man." It does not work at all
with the individualist. The individualist is the person who has a higher
allegiance to his own conscience than to the rules others set down for him.
The individualist thinks and judges independently, valuing nothing higher
than the sovereignty of his own intellect. He does not allow others to
determine his ethos. He is not the sort of chaff that makes good fodder for
a tyranny.

Those who believe that might is right must always perceive themselves as
mighty.

The Criminal Mentality:

If two men had walked down Fifth Avenue in March 1933, and one of them
had a pint of whiskey in his pocket and the other had a hundred dollars in
gold coins, the one with the whiskey would have been considered a criminal
and the one with the gold an honest citizen. If these two men, like Rip van
Winkle, slept for a year and then walked back up Fifth Avenue, the man with
the whiskey would have been considered an honest citizen and the one with
the gold coins a criminal.
I call this the Rip van Winkle phenomenon. It is useful in understanding
"psychological" analyses of crime. Any definition of "crime" that is founded
on government edict cannot ascribe a psychological basis for crime, because
nothing about the psychology of either of the two men changed during the
course of their nap. If, however, the definition is based on a fundamental
principle, then it will have to recognize the criminal nature of much of
government behavior: tax collectors as thieves - business licenses as
extortion.
If the definition of crime includes victimless activities, then the
analysis must account for the Rip van Winkle phenomenon. If the definition
does NOT include victimless activities, then the analysis must consider as
criminals those people who enforce victimless crime laws.
Either the distinction between crime and non-crime is one of arbitrary
edict, in which case it does not exist in principle, or analysts are looking
at the wrong people because they do not examine the government's acts of
coercion and ignore the fact that half the prison population are merely
lawbreakers, not criminals.

* Hate Crimes
A function of a criminal justice system should be to protect potential
victims by incarcerating the convicted criminal as long as he is likely to
repeat his crime. Here group hate is relevant. Someone who hates and kills a
cheating lover or an abusive boss does not necessarily have a motive for
killing anyone else. In many cases such a person can be safely released once
the requirements of punishment and deterrence have been satisfied. In
contrast, someone who kills because he hates all homosexuals has a proven
motive to kill and kill again. Releasing him puts innocent people in danger
of their lives. The proper function of "hate laws' is to guide the courts
and parole boards in reconciling justice for the criminal with safety for
potential victims.

* Conspiracy
I regard all conspiracy theories with a great deal of skepticism. Keep in
mind that the president of the USA (Richard Nixon), with all the power
available to him, could not cover up a simple second-story burglary. Is it
really likely that any of the so-called "conspirators" are intelligent
enough and/or competent enough to perpetuate the globe-girdling conspiracies
and cover-ups that are attributed to them? I think not.

If a field of study is dominated by the premise of collectivism - the

premise that the group (rather than the individual) is the basic unit of
analysis - then investigators in that field will tend to perceive conspiracy
where in fact there exist only individuals behaving in similar manners.
There is no conspiracy - it is merely the case that the fundamental beliefs
of the people involved are similar, therefore their attitudes and behavior
are similar. (Thus you won't find a priest in an abortion clinic, or an
atheist in a convent.)
The fact that many individuals with similar interests tend to advocate
roughly the same solutions to the same problems should be neither surprising
nor puzzling. Each is merely advocating what he sees to be obvious remedies
to the problems he perceives. There is no deliberate conspiracy involved in
this behavior. It seems like a conspiracy simply because many people acting
in accord with the same principle will all behave in a similar manner. But
it is a mistake to assume from this similarity of behavior that there exists
a collusion. Their cooperation results not from a conspiracy of men, but
from a similarity of basic premises - and the power directing it is logic:
if, when faced with a practical problem, some men point to a course of
action logically necessitated by certain basic premises, those who share the
premises will rush to follow that course of action.
But practical problems merely confront man with the need for action; they
do not determine what the action will be. It is the predominant philosophy
(of a man or of a country) that determines the action. For example: Hunger
will impel a man to take some kind of action - but it will not dictate
precisely what that action should be. The man's knowledge and ideas will be
the governing factors in what he chooses to eat. Another example: Loneliness
doesn't tell you who you need, only that someone is missing. It is up to you
to define the emptiness of your soul, and make an appropriate choice of
companions.
America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was confronted with
the need for social change. The most influential set of ideas in the minds
of the men who implemented change was the philosophy of John Locke. America
was ideologically ripe for Jefferson. The intellectual groundwork had been
prepared by half a century of education in Lockean philosophy.
On the other hand, although the post-WorldWar1 situation in Germany
necessitated some kind of major changes in the country's institutions, it
was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that governed the type of changes.
Germany was ideologically ripe for Hitler. The intellectual groundwork had
been prepared by a century of education in Kantian philosophy.
If one knows the principles behind a given phenomenon, one can predict
the direction it will take and its ultimate results. If you know a man's
convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant
philosophy of a society, you can predict its course.
For the great majority of men the influence of philosophy is indirect and
unrecognized. But that influence is real.

It is important to remember that social institutions do not have goals.

Only individual human beings have goals; political and cultural institutions
merely provide a framework enabling the participating individuals to pursue
their commonly-held goals. Institutions provide the incentives,
opportunities and constraints that structure the behavior of goal-seeking
individuals, but the institutions do not possess goals of their own.

* What is a Slave?
I see two fundamental distinguishing characteristics of a slave:
1. He is compelled to do whatever his master commands him to do.
2. He is forbidden to do anything without having permission, explicit or
implicit, from his master.
I will leave it as an exercise for you to determine to what extent these
two characteristics describe your own situation. Keep this in mind: Just as
the truly damned are those who are happy in hell, so the truly enslaved are
those who believe their enslavement is freedom.

* Profound Ethical Concerns

(See SIMPLISTIC-COMPLEXITY in the FALLACYS file)
See reference
You will frequently hear people claim that certain issues are fraught
with "profound ethical concerns." Issues such as research using fetal
tissue, DNA manipulation, organ transplants, etc. Watch carefully and you
will see that either they don't specify those concerns, or the concerns they
do name are simply irrelevant.

Here is an example of a rare instance wherein a proponent of such

"profound ethical concerns" actually makes a sensible statement of the
concerns he imagines:
Gene therapy raises profound ethical concerns. For instance:
 1. Should therapy be applied simply to improve one's offspring, not only
to prevent an inherited disease?
[He implies that the elimination of an evil, "an inherited disease," is
perhaps acceptable, but the implementation of a positive good, "to improve
one's offspring," is of questionable propriety. Why does he object to a
good?]
2. Who would be empowered to decide?
[Here he clearly implies that someone is to have the authority ensuing
from "empowerment." Why must such an authority exist? Who, after all, is
"empowered" to decide which people shall be permitted to wear shoes?]
3. Is society willing to risk introducing changes into the gene pool that
may ultimately prove detrimental to the species?
[In fact, Yes. Not only does the willingness exist, but the perpetuation
of such detrimental genes is actually legally compelled by implementation of
medical techniques that preserve the existence of severely retarded people.]
4. Do we have the right to tamper with human evolution?
[Everyone who ever selects his/her spouse on the basis of "He would make
a good father" or "She would make a good mother" is "tampering" with human
evolution. Why does he object to this selectivity?]

Here is another good example:

As artificial livers emerge into common medical use, they raise difficult
ethical issues.
1. Is it ethical to deny a liver to someone who has cirrhosis in order to
transplant it into a hepatitis victim who would have died but for an
artificial liver device? After all, the hepatitis victim may recover
spontaneously, whereas the cirrhotic patient almost certainly will not.
2. Is it ethical to refuse to put a dying patient on an artificial liver
when there is a good chance that she will revive only enough to require a
new liver?
[What this ethicist ignores is the fact that the artificial liver is a
piece of property and the resolution of these "difficult ethical issues" can
be accomplished by the simple application of property rights.]

These are by far the most comprehensive assertions of the "profound

ethical concerns" syndrome I have ever seen. Usually no precise ethical
applications are specified at all. I can conclude only that the people who
make this assertion have a strongly-felt objection to the action under
consideration, but they have no rational arguments to support their
feelings, so the only attack they can make is an unsubstantiated one.
Perhaps their hand-wringing over such matters as genetic engineering and
other new technologies is often the result of ignorance about the basic
scientific principles underlying the new techniques. The problem seems to be
that, while plastic surgery and education are understood by the ethicists,
the basic facts of the science that makes genetic engineering a possibility
are not. Thus, in typical fear of the unknown, a hue and cry against the new
technology is raised.

* Charity - Egalitarianism - Welfarism

"Millions are given each year to charities which help crippled children,
old people, blind people and all kinds of disabled unfortunates; which is a
perfectly worthy cause. But, on the other hand, has anyone given much
thought to the crying, desperate need of helping the exact opposite type of
human beings - the able, the fit, the talented and unusual ones crushed by
purely material circumstances? That idea of hardships being good for
character and of a talent always being able to break through is an old
fallacy. A talented person has to eat as much as a misfit. A talented person
needs sympathy, understanding and intelligent guidance MORE than a misfit.
And the question arises: who is more worthy of help - the subnormal or the
above-normal? Who is more valuable to humanity? Which of the two types is
more valuable to himself? Which of the two suffers more acutely: the misfit,
who doesn't know what he is missing, or the talented one who knows it only
too well? I have no quarrel with those who help the disabled. But if only
one tenth of the money given to help them were given to help potential
talent - much greater things would be accomplished in the spirit of a much
higher type of charity. Talent DOES NOT survive all obstacles. In fact, in
the face of hardships, talent is the first one to perish; the rarest plants
are usually the most fragile. Are talented people born with tough skins?
Hardly. In fact, the more talent one possesses the more sensitive one is, as
a rule. And if there is a more tragic figure than a sensitive, worthwhile
person facing life without money - I don't know where it can be found." ....
Ayn Rand

Here is an appropriate response to a plea for charity:

Tax bills continue to take more of my time, hard work and earnings each
year. Because of this, I have less to contribute to the cause of charity. In
light of this increasing burden of taxation, I have decided to make
contributions only to those organizations which do not receive any funds
from government agencies. Since organizations which do receive such funding
already benefit from my involuntary contributions, I believe that I have
provided sufficient support to them. If your organization is one which I
identify as being free of tax dollar dependency, you can look forward to a
contribution from me in the near future. Otherwise, good wishes and enjoy my
tax money.

In considering which organizations to support, it would be a good idea if

you contribute not on the basis of NEED, but on the basis of PROMISE. Ask
which organizations have the greatest potential for achieving goals that you
deem to be of value.
In the case of an individual, "If you choose to help a man who suffers,
do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, or of the
fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is a trade, and his virtue
is the payment for your help."... Ayn Rand

When Menon, a Hindu, arrived in Delhi in 1947, he discovered that every

rupee he owned had been stolen. He approached an elderly, distinguished
Sikh, explained his plight and asked for a loan of 15 rupees to cover his
train fare. The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so
that he could pay it back, the Sikh said, "No. Until the day you die, you
will always give that sum to any honest man who asks your help." Almost 30
years later, just six weeks before his death, a beggar came to the Menon
family home in Bangalore. Menon sent his daughter for his wallet, took out
fifteen rupees, and gave it to the man. He was still repaying his debt.

Demands for "social justice" take two different forms, which can be
called egalitarianism and welfarism. The difference in these two conceptions
of social justice is the difference between relative and absolute levels of
well-being.
Egalitarians are concerned with RELATIVE well-being. According to
egalitarianism, the wealth produced by a society must be distributed fairly
- it is unjust for some people to earn fifteen, or fifty, or a hundred times
as much income as others, and since laissez-faire permits and encourages
these disparities in income and wealth, it is therefore unjust. The hallmark
of egalitarians is the way they use statistics to describe the distribution
of income. In 1989, for example, the top 20 percent of U.S. households on
the income scale earned 45 percent of total income, whereas the bottom 20
percent earned only 4 percent of total income. The goal of egalitarianism is
to reduce this disparity; greater equality is always regarded as a gain in
social justice. Egalitarians have often said that of two societies they
prefer the one in which wealth is more evenly distributed, even if that
society's overall standard of living is lower, Thus egalitarians tend to
favor government measures, such as progressive taxation, which aim to
redistribute wealth across the entire income scale, not merely at the
bottom. They also tend to support the nationalization of goods such as
education and medicine, taking them off the market entirely and making them
available to everyone more or less equally.
The welfarist, on the other hand, has a much more absolutist view of
social justice. He demands that people have access to a certain absolute
minimum standard of living. As long as this floor or "safety net" exists, it
does not matter to the welfarist how much wealth anyone else has, or how
great the disparities are between rich and poor. Welfarists are primarily
interested in programs that benefit people who are below a certain level of
poverty, or who are sick, out of work, or deprived in some other way.
To the welfarist, rights are conceived as rights to possess and enjoy
certain goods, regardless of one's actions; they are rights to have the
goods provided by others if one cannot provide them oneself. Accordingly,
welfare rights impose positive obligations on other people. If I have a
right to food, someone has an obligation to grow it. If I cannot pay for it,
someone has an obligation to buy it for me... etc. From an ethical
standpoint, the essence of welfarism is the premise that the need of one
individual is a claim on other individuals. The claim is an unchosen
obligation arising from the mere fact of his need. The ethics of welfarism
does not assert an absolute right to pursue the satisfaction of human needs.
The "right" asserted is, rather, a conditional one: those who DO succeed in
creating wealth may do so only on condition that others are allowed to share
that wealth. The goal is not so much to benefit the needy as to bind the
able. The implicit assumption is that a creative person's ability and
initiative are social assets, which may be exercised only on condition that
they are aimed at the service of others.
The egalitarian arrives at the same principle as the welfarist, but by a
different logical route. The ethical framework of the egalitarian is defined
by reference to justice rather than rights - by the idea that people are to
be treated differently only if they differ in some MORALLY (not
economically) relevant way. The most common position is a presumption in
favor of equal outcomes, and that any departure from equality must be
justified by its benefits to other people (as opposed to its benefits to the
individual who created the departure). But we can see that this is the same
principle that lies at the basis of welfare rights: the principle that the
productive individual may enjoy the fruits of his efforts only on condition
that those efforts benefit other people as well.
Both of these social schemes rest on the premise that individual ability
is a social asset - that the individual must regard himself as a means to
the ends of others. And here we come to the crux of the matter. In
respecting the rights of other people, I recognize that they are "ends in
themselves," and that I may not treat them merely as means to my own
satisfaction, in the way that I treat inanimate objects. Why then is it not
equally moral for me to regard myself as an "end in myself"? Why should I
not refuse, out of respect for my own dignity as a moral being, to regard
myself as a means to the ends of others? An honorable person does not offer
his needs as a claim on others; he offers an exchange of value as the basis
of any relationship. Nor does he accept an unchosen obligation to serve the
needs of others. No one who values his own life can accept an unchosen,
open-ended responsibility to be his brother's keeper. The principle of trade
is the only basis on which humans can deal with each other as independent
equals rather than as objects of property.
The only social constraint laissez-faire imposes is the requirement that
those who wish the services of others must offer value in return; that no
one may use the State to forcibly expropriate what others have produced, nor
claim a right to compel others to serve him involuntarily.
"What about someone who is poor, disabled, or otherwise unable to support
himself?" This is a valid question to ask, as long as it is not the PRIMARY
question asked about a social system. There is no ground in a rational
ethics for considering the poor and the sick to be the foundation of
society, or for regarding their needs as primary. It is in fact self-
defeating to think that the primary goal of a society should be the
treatment it gives its least productive members. We must remember that the
needs of the poor and the sick CANNOT be met unless someone chooses to
produce the means of meeting those needs. Thus the social prerequisites of
creativity and productivity MUST be accomodated FIRST if charity is to exist
at all.

* Coerced Compassion
Consider the vast majority of those who turn to police power to remedy
distress. Every one of them will say they act purely because of their
concern, their compassion, for those on the lower rung of life's ladder. Can
they not trust their own compassion to express itself? Apparently not, for
it seems, when they turn to government, they are insisting that they must be
forced to do that which they claim they already want to do. An absurdity!
People who want to control other people's lives never want to pay for the
privilege. What they usually expect is to be paid for the "service" they
impose upon their victims. What they never recognize is that the individuals
who are forced by government regulation to act against their own interests
are the very "public" which is supposed to benefit from the government
controls.
In any case, if you are going to do good for someone, it really should be
THEIR idea of good, not yours. In all cases, it should be the other person
who initiates the interaction - by asserting THEIR perception of their own
good.

Why was it necessary to have laws to FORCE racists to practice racism?

After all, the employers, landowners, businessmen, etc., were overwhelmingly
from the dominant group and were free to segregate and discriminate on their
own. The answer is that the voluntary structure of economic incentives works
against this behavior. As long as producers and consumers are free to act
spontaneously in the context of a free market, there are economic costs for
discriminating against minorities. There are likewise economic rewards for
avoiding discriminatory practices.

* Effect of Social Complexity on Statism

One reason socialism must always fail is that any society large enough to
be economically and technologically civilized is too large and complex to be
contained within the minds of any subgroup. The competence of government
began to decline precipitously after the First World War as society's
technological complexity began to increase exponentially. It will be the
final irony of the statist system that, once headless after a catastrophic
collapse, it will be unable to save itself. The centralized control of all
aspects of the country will prevent people from asking the questions that
must be answered before any organized recovery can begin.

* Dual Ideologies
The claim that countries which call themselves capitalist are guilty of
misdescription reflects the fact that politicians use dual ideologies -
those that actually guide their actions and those that are used as
instruments of deception in waging social conflict. The theory of a
political system is almost always its surface ideology, and it may be a
deeply, if not necessarily intentionally, deceptive facade.
People almost automatically assume that the goal of a political system is
to advance the welfare of at least a majority of the population. But this is
because some such goal is almost universally propounded in surface
ideologies, and, being credulous, they allow themselves to be taken in by
the surface ideology and never perceive the real motives that actually guide
the behavior of the state.
Much of the government's "crime-prevention" behavior can be explained by
the idea that the State has forbidden to the individual the practice of
wrongdoing, not because it desires to abolish wrongdoing, but because the
State desires to monopolize it.

* Hallmarks of a Conservative
The hallmark of a conservative is the phrase "too much." If you press him
until you can get him to identify the core of his social philosophy, you
will find that it is founded on a statement containing some variation of the
phrase "too much." He is not fundamentally opposed to slavery, just what he
perceives to be "too much" slavery. He is not fundamentally opposed to
government interference in private lives, just "an excessive amount" of
interference. He is not fundamentally opposed to tyranny, just a level of
tyranny that is "far beyond" what he judges acceptable. I call this the "too
much" syndrome, or the "uncalibrated quantification" fallacy.
An excellent example is the following quote from FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton
and Rose Friedman (page 61):
"Some restrictions on our freedom are necessary to avoid other, still
worse, restrictions. However, we have gone far beyond that point."
But consider that the distinction between an acceptable level of
restriction and an unacceptable level is an arbitrary one, because such a
distinction is based on a mere variation in quantity rather than a
difference in quality. The "point" the Friedmans refer to is an undefinable
position. To such people there is no wall between freedom and tyranny, just
a fuzzy line in their imagination. Such a mind-set inevitably leads to the
acceptance of tyranny, because to the man who holds it, first one thing
doesn't seem too wrong, then another thing doesn't seem too wrong. And
eventually nothing doesn't seem wrong. He has nowhere to draw a line.
Ben Franklin wrote in 1766 that "if Parliament has the right to take from
us one penny in the pound, where is the line drawn that bounds that right,
and what shall hinder their calling whenever they please for the other 19
shillings and eleven pence?"
The very best way to distinguish between a conservative and a libertarian
is to observe the presence or absence of the uncalibrated quantification
fallacy in his ideas. The libertarian is opposed to ALL tyranny, not just
"too much" tyranny. The conservative thinks he can make some compromise
between freedom and tyranny, but his belief that there is a happy middle
somewhere in between is wrong. That is not how compromise works. (See
Chapter 3)
See reference

A second characteristic by which a conservative can be recognized is his

reliance on religion. Almost all conservatives have religious belief as a
major foundation stone of all aspects of their philosophy. A noticeable
exception are the Randites, who are both conservative and atheist. But they
are atheists who have a god named Government.

A third characteristic by which a conservative can be recognized is that

politically, he is an "anti-". If you ask him what his political philosophy
is, he will usually reply that he is an anti-communist. This is what makes
conservatives attractive to philosophically superficial libertarians. Such
libertarians (who are themselves opposed to communism) see no deeper than
the "anti-communist" label presented by the conservative and conclude that
the conservative is their philosophical ally.
The libertarians have the idea that to be allies it is not necessary to
have a noble goal in commmon, but only to have a common enemy; that if your
ally defines himself only as an "anti-" you can use him without fear that he
will corrupt your purpose. Sometimes this can be true: an ally of
convenience, who merely shares a common enemy rather than a common goal, can
be useful - if you're careful. You have a big advantage: he knows only what
he DOESN'T want -you know what you DO want. But the flaw in applying this
idea lies in the philosophical superficiality of the libertarians. They do
not probe beneath the surface label of the conservative to observe that
fundamentally what he is FOR is the imposition of some form of coercive
social institution. This mistake on the part of the libertarians is what has
resulted in their being co-opted by the conservatives.

If morality consisted of social customs and traditions to which

individuals must conform, rather than principles which they grasp and accept
by means of reason, then it would be vital for a society to maintain a high
degree of uniformity in customs and traditions. This explains why the
conservatives are such strong advocates of immigration limits. An influx of
people with different customs and traditions poses a severe threat to the
conservative notion of morality.

The conservative believes that achievement of values is OK, as long as

you don't ENJOY that achievement - too much. (If you enjoy your achievement
too much you commit the Christian sin of Pride.) This points out a seeming
similarity between Objectivism and conservatism: they both approve the
achievement of values. But to equate the two philosophies on the basis of
this observation would be grossly superficial. It would be to equate
opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics.
Conservatives always make this equating when they claim to be Objectivists
or libertarians. In fact, the Objectivist and conservative theses on the
fundamental nature of, and the purpose of, human values differ greatly.

* Libertarian Foreign Policy

Robert Ringer: "I am in favor of complete freedom of trade between
companies and people throughout the world, but not under the umbrella of
political partnerships between governments."
Thus a proper libertarian policy toward trade relations (a foreign
policy, as expressed by a free society) should be: We will trade with
individual people or with private companies, but we will not engage in any
exchange which is subject to the control of a government.

* The Ethical Carnivore

The man who eats meat but who won't kill an animal is often described as
an immoral person who condones a wickedness by enjoying the result of it. He
is accused of being equally guilty of the wickedness.
This label of "immoral" smacks of original sin. In fact, it is simply
impossible to live in America today without taking advantage of knowledge
that was gained by experiments (many of them quite horrifying) performed on
animals. Much of chemistry, and almost all of medicine, rest on such
research.
For example, here is a note from a researcher on nervous systems:
 "Some mammals (such as the common laboratory rat) can have their entire
forebrain excised and are still able to walk, run and even maintain their
balance to some extent. Although they move with a robotic stride, without
making any attempt to avoid obstacles placed in their path, these animals
are fully able to operate their leg muscles and to coordinate their steps."
Personally, I would find it completely impossible to conduct such
experiments. Yet I study and learn from the results of them, with the
explicit knowledge of how those results were obtained. Although this
knowledge makes me feel depressed, it does not make me feel guilty. I have
eaten the Apple, and I must live with it. Am I a hypocrite?

Jeremy Bentham: What insuperable line prevents humans from extending

moral regard to animals? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they
talk? but, Can they suffer?
Infants and the mentally ill do not possess the attributes of "normal" or
"typical" humans, but are not left out of the realm of rights. Why then omit
animals? If there is something one would not do to a severely incapacitated
child, then neither should one do it to an animal that would suffer as much.
A scientist who did cancer studies on mice recounts that whenever he had
doubts about his work, he had only to think about the terminally ill
patients in the children's ward.

Veterinarians are particularly sensitive to the ethical problems of

dealing with animals - love of animals, after all, was what brought most of
them into the field. Vets point out that their job is not to prolong life
but to reduce the suffering of as many animals as possible. Human medicine,
they aver, is in many ways more heartless: "We're allowed to give suffering
animals euthanasia, but physicians are required by law to keep their
patients alive no matter what the cost."

Sooner or later man will be going outside the solar system. Sooner or
later we will meet types of intelligent life much higher than our own, yet
in forms completely alien. And when that time comes, the treatment man
receives from his superiors may well depend upon the way he has behaved
toward the other creatures of his own world.

Sagesse oblige.

* Voluntary vs Coercive - Trade vs Theft

As a starting point, here are some dictionary definitions:
Voluntary:
Acting on one's own initiative.
Controlled by or subject to individual volition.
Proceeding from the will or from one's own choice or consent.
Resulting from one's own free choice; given or done of one's own free
will; freely chosen or undertaken. Self-determining.
Acting willingly and without constraint or legal obligation or other
external compulsion.

Synonyms: deliberate, intentional, spontaneous, willful, willing.

Deliberate implies full consciousness of the nature of one's act and its
consequences.
Intentional stresses an awareness of an end to be achieved.
Spontaneous refers to behavior that seems wholly unpremeditated, a
natural response and a true reflection of one's feelings.
Willful often implies headstrong persistence in a self-determined course
of action.
Willing suggests acceding to a course proposed by another, without
reluctance or even eagerly.

Coercion: A relationship in which a person is subjected to physical force

(or the threat of it) in order to compel him to submit to the choices of
another person. The separation of a person from his rightfully achieved
values without his voluntary consent. Any course of action calculated to
inflict physical injury, regardless of whether or not the action succeeds in
its intent.

Fraud: Obtaining material values without their owner's consent under

false pretenses or false promises. Receiving values then refusing to pay for
them and thus keeping them by force (by physical possession) not by right,
and without the consent of their owner.

What bothers me about such concepts as "willingness" or "voluntary" is

that they can be identified only by examining the contents of a person's
mind. But this is not possible; hence my attempts to define them in terms
which are objectively verifiable, such as the observable result of a choice
and the observable conditions of the context within which that choice
occurs.
How can the existence of willingness be determined? A man with a gun to
his head (or whose values are indirectly threatened) will most likely ASSERT
willingness, but does his assertion really signify the existence of
willingness?
To determine whether or not something is voluntary, we should examine two
things: the person's behavior (both word and deed) and the context within
which that behavior occurs - including the temporal context: the person may
be operating under a threat laid on him in the past, and which is not to be
manifest until sometime in the future.
The concept "voluntary" cannot apply to any context in which coercion
occurs as part of the relevant environment. If a person's behavior is
mandated, regardless of her personal choice, then her behavior cannot
properly be labeled voluntary. No contract - whether direct, indirect, or
implied - is valid if it is coercively imposed, or if it is acquiesced to by
default within a context of coercion. Meaningful consent does not exist
under these conditions.

The fundamental distinguishing characteristic which separates the two

categories is the relevance of choice to the preservation of values.
For example: If I put a gun to your head and demand your money, the
situation is such that your choice has no relevance: you lose a value no
matter how you choose. Either your money or your life.
If your choice is to give me the money, then you lose the money.
On the other hand, if your choice is NOT to give me the money, then you
still lose the money - and your life, too.
No matter how you choose, you lose. That's what makes the situation
coercive.
If a person's choice is NOT relevant to the loss or non-loss of a value
then the transfer is a theft. If the person's choice IS relevant, then the
transfer is a trade.
There is a situation in which choice seems to be relevant, but
nonetheless the transfer cannot be termed a trade: when the transfer occurs
within a context of deception. This is fraud.
In considering the nature of deception, we must keep in mind that rights
impose no obligations on other men except of a prohibitive nature. Rights
are not a claim to affirmative action. Each man is obliged only to AVOID the
violation of the rights of other men. Therefore, in my dealings with others:
I have no obligation to convince them of anything.
I have no obligation to educate them about anything.
 My only obligation is to refrain from telling them anything I know to be
untrue.

Nozick proposes three conditions for a just transaction:

1. It must be freely entered into by both parties.
2. There must be no deception on either side.
3. The goods traded must have been justly acquired - that is, acquired in
circumstances that accord with the first two conditions.
His third condition raises a critically important idea: the problem of
trade cannot be solved "out of context," that is, outside the general
context of the social institutions that shape our culture. Before such
problems can be fully solved, society must be restructured away from
institutions of government and toward ethically rational institutions.

Keynes described aggregate demand management as "the one kind of

compulsion of which the effect is to enlarge liberty."
Edmund Burke wrote, "Liberty too must be limited in order to be
possessed."
Rousseau, in The Social Contract: "Men must be forced to be free."
Page 3 of the 1993 IRS form 1040A starts out with this statement: "Thank
you for making this nation's tax system the most effective system of
voluntary compliance in the world."
The words "liberty," "freedom," "voluntary," etc. have been appropriated
by would-be tyrants who use those words to designate the opposite of their
cognitively correct meanings, thus leaving the majority of people with no
way to distinguish libertarians from our totalitarian enemies. The only way
I can see to combat this dismal situation is to attack it not on its
surface, by making futile attempts to persuade people of the correct
definitions of those critical words, but at its roots, by presenting the
notion that "Definitions Are Not Arbitrary". Unless your audience realizes
this, any argument you engage in will be merely a verbal battle of wits with
your adversary - the outcome dependent on who can make the most clever use
of eloquent phrases which are nevertheless meaningless in the minds of the
audience.

Governments can be contended to be not coercive only if it is assumed

that they own all the land under their jurisdiction. In which case, property
and property rights are based on force, and only governments own property.

In some cases, it is claimed that my behavior must be voluntary because I

do not exercise the alternative of departing from the social context in
which the behavior occurs. (America: love it or leave it!) But by what right
does my oppressor demand the abandonment of MY homeland as the price I must
pay to get HIS coercive government off my back?
I take my motive from Thoreau, who stated: "Know all men by these
presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of
any incorporated society which I have not joined.... If I had known how to
name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies
which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete
list."

Gulliver's Travels: "They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft,
and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that
care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's
goods from thieves, but honesty has no defense against superior cunning; and
since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying
and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived
at, or hath not law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and
the knave gets the advantage."
 Solon believed that "being seduced into wrong was as bad as being forced,
and that between deceit and necessity, flattery and compulsion, there was
little difference, since both may equally suspend the exercise of reason."

* Self-Defense
Libertarianism is not a pacifist philosophy.
There are two very different kinds of force: one is coercive or
aggressive force - that which is initiated against other people, and the
second is retaliatory or defensive force - that which is used to protect
human rights. Libertarians oppose only the first of these.
The Objectivist stand is quite clear:
"The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may
INITIATE the use of physical force against others. No man - or group or
society or government - has the right to assume the role of a criminal and
initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man." (From "The
Objectivist Ethics," in THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS.)
Thus we are not opposed to force when it is used in self-defense. In
fact, we recognize the inevitable necessity of such force: it is necessary
to use defensive force to preserve civilized life against those who embrace
the use of coercive force.

Compare the appalling behavior of government with the plausible

alternative of self-defense:
Private handguns are successfully used for self-defense 645K times each
year. Ninety-nine percent of the times when a private citizen uses a gun to
prevent a rape, robbery or burglary, no one is shot.
Women use guns over 400 times per day to defend themselves against
rapists. The Federal Justice Department found that of 32K attempted rapes,
32% were actually committed. But when the woman was armed with a gun or
knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually committed. In 1966 a
highly publicized safety course taught women in Orlando Florida how to use
guns. Orlando's rape rate declined 88% during 1967.
In 1982 the city of Kennesaw Georgia passed a law allowing heads of
households to keep a weapon in the house. Ten years later, the residential
burglary rate was 72% lower than it had been in 1981.
Since the passage of Florida's concealed-carry law in 1987, over 258K
people have received permits to carry guns. Of those 258K, only 18 have used
their guns to commit a crime. The homicide rate in Florida has fallen 22%
during that time. A similar Georgia law, passed in 1976, was followed by a
21% drop in its homicide rate.
A gun kept at home is 216 times more likely to be used for defense
against a criminal than to cause the death of an innocent member of the
household.
Each year, more criminals are lawfully shot by private citizens than are
shot by police. But fewer than 2% of gun owners ever kill someone
unlawfully.
Eleven percent of people who are shot by police are innocent of a crime.
Two percent of people who are shot by private citizens are innocent of a
crime.
In 1985 the National Institute for Justice reported that 57% of the
felons polled claimed that they were more worried about meeting an armed
citizen than they were about encountering the police.
Society is safer when criminals don't know who's armed.

A society where peaceful citizens are armed is far more likely to be one
where Good Samaritans will flourish. But take away people's guns, and the
public - disastrously for the victims - will tend to leave the matter to the
police. In a recent survey, no less that 81% of the Samaritans polled were
owners of guns. If we wish to encourage a society where citizens come to the
aid of neighbors in distress, we must not strip them of the actual power to
do something effective. Surely it is the height of absurdity to disarm the
peaceful public and then, as is quite common, to denounce them for apathy.
Even worse are the insidious consequences of the denial, by law, of
individual self-responsibility and self-authority. In a society where the
individual is forbidden to act freely on his own authority within his own
personal sphere of influence, a sense of apathy MUST be the inevitable
result - both a local apathy, regarding his interpersonal relationships, and
a more generalized apathy, regarding his community. People who are prevented
from solving their own problems will not solve the problems of their cities,
either.
As Kropotkin put it in his book MUTUAL AID:
"In proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the
citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.
Under the theory of the all-protecting State the bystander need not intrude:
it is the policeman's business to interfere, or not. All that a respectable
citizen has to do now is to pay the poor tax and to let the starving starve.
The result is, that the theory which maintains that men can, and must, seek
their own happiness in a disregard of other people's wants is now triumphant
all round. It is the religion of the day, and to doubt of its efficacy is to
be a dangerous Utopian."

Government will always be opposed to self-defense. The government insists

on a monopoly of force because any force not under the government's control
poses a potential threat to the government. Thus self-defense must be
outlawed.

* Preemptive Force
Preemptive force is defensive force applied before an aggression actually
occurs. Within the context of the libertarian ethic of non-aggression, how -
if at all - can the use of preemptive force be justified? Must you wait
until your assailant actually shoots you before you can take any forceful
action to prevent your death?
If an ethical principle requires you to abstain from self-defense, can
that principle be valid? Can any philosophy whose practice results in the
death of the body or the spirit be moral or correct? As Rand pointed out,
the only valid morality is one that is life sustaining rather than life
negating.

The significance of Time:

Man cannot live range-of-the-moment. He needs to support his life by the
continuous use of reason. He must make correct identifications of reality
which can then serve to guide his behavior through time.
"'Man's survival qua man' means the terms, methods, conditions and goals
required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his
lifespan...." (Rand, in THE OBJECTVIST ETHICS)
Man is obliged, by his nature as a rational being, to take account of the
future.

The point in time at which an event occurs is not philosophically

fundamental. It is the principled nature of the event that you must consider
in order to properly evaluate it. To be philosophically comprehensive you
must judge the event on the basis of the underlying principles manifested
therein. You must adhere to the principled distinction between coercion and
self-defense, whether the defensive force takes place before or after the
coercion. You must remember that when you defend yourself you are not
fighting for control over your enemy, you are not fighting to compel your
enemy's behavior, you are not fighting to separate him from a rightfully-
achieved value, you are fighting only to PREVENT your enemy from coercing in
the future. You are fighting for the preservation of your rights, your
freedom, and your life through time.

In my discussion of Rights (in Chapter 5) I claimed that the foundation

of all human behavior - both moral and ethical - lies in the Law of
Identity. Proper behavior is that which is consistent with this Law;
improper behavior is that which attempts to contradict it. The violation of
rights involves a contradiction of the Law of Identity. However, it is
consistent to take an action which eliminates such a contradiction, even if
that action, when considered out of context, could itself be a negation of
the Law of Identity. In ethics, as in the propositional calculus, one
negative cancels out another. (I find it personally distasteful, but I can
see no way to avoid the conclusion that two wrongs do indeed make a right.)
Thus to lie to a man who is trying to rob you, or to kill a man, when
defending your own life against his aggression, are ethically legitimate
(i.e., logically consistent) actions.
See reference
To limit your response would be a form of the pacifist thesis: the self-
destructive notion that you must restrict YOUR behavior while your enemy
places no restrictions on his. If there is a general principle involved, it
must apply to both parties, not merely to one (you). Your enemy enters the
relationship operating on the principle of coercion. If you cling to an
unrealistic principle of non-aggression that prevents you from defending
yourself against his coercion, then your enemy will always have the
advantage of you and you will be destroyed. Such behavior cannot be
ethically proper.

Threat:
Consider forceful action in response not to previous coercion, but in
response to the threat of coercion. If we consider threat to have the same
status as coercion itself, then the use of preemptive force is justified.
If someone is pointing a gun at you, it can be argued that this in itself
constitutes the initiation of force, because it is certainly an effective
form of coercion - even though he has not (yet) pulled the trigger. And
therefore if you use force against him you are reacting defensively, not
initiating.
When a man threatens you by asserting an intent to coerce, and has
available the means to coerce, then you have a right to believe he means to
do what he says. If he SAYS it, you HAVE to believe he MEANS it. The
alternative is to place yourself in a value-destructive situation.

A good illustration of this problem appears in THE PROBABILITY BROACH by

L. Neil Smith. The scene on pages 218 to 220 depicts an application of the
principle of non-aggression that precludes preemptive defensive actions on
the part of the intended victims.

* Rules vs Principles

A PRINCIPLE is a general and fundamental truth that can be used as a

standard of judgment in deciding conduct or choice.

A RULE, usually a precept adopted or enacted, is (or should be) the

specific application of a principle.
A rule is a self-contained prescription about concrete actions or
situations, telling you what to do or how to do it. In contrast to
principles, rules are specific and limited in scope, prescribing a
particular type of action in a particular situation. Because they are so
specific, no set of rules could possibly cover every situation and action to
which the corresponding principle applies.
Rules are formulated for specific contexts, but because humans are not
omniscient they can never fully specify the parameters of that context. As a
result, rules almost always have exceptions and they often conflict with one
another. Someone trying to follow rules without the benefit of broader
principles will have no way to determine when he is faced with an exception,
or how to resolve conflicts among rules.
By contrast, a principle gives us comprehensive guidance across a vast
number of circumstances that could not be covered by even a very long list
of discrete rules, and it tells us how to identify exceptions to the rules.
Properly formulated, a principle states the relationship between an action
and a goal. It is a statement of cause-and-effect, and thus a principle has
no exceptions.

To appreciate the problem, consider the Ten Commandments.

Leaving aside the first few, which deal with the worship of God, the list
is not unreasonable, as far as it goes. It's generally a good idea to honor
your parents, and not to steal, kill, commit adultery, bear false witness,
etc. But these rules hardly cover the whole of life. Honoring your parents
is normally a matter of justice as well as affection: giving them what they
are due for having given you life and nurture. But the fourth commandment
has exceptions: some parents treat their children with such cruelty or
neglect that no honor is due them; quite the contrary. But the commandment
gives us no guidance on this point. The principle of justice does.

Because it is so abstract, a principle must be applied to a particular

situation by the exercise of judgment, taking into account the specific
parameters of the situation.
The exercise of judgment cannot be eliminated from human life, and the
attempt to do so by erecting a detailed network of rules always has
destructive consequences in public as well as private affairs.

Unless rules are anchored in principles, they cannot be rationally

justified, and will be experienced by individualists as externally-imposed
constraints - limitations on their pursuit of happiness.
To be non-arbitrary, a moral code must be validated by reference to a
fundamental fact - an ultimate good to which all other goals of action are
the means. For Objectivism, that ultimate good is the individual's own life.
Moral principles identify the requirements for living successfully, given
man's basic needs and capacities: Production is a virtue because it provides
for our needs. Conceptual knowledge is a value because it makes production
possible. Rationality is a virtue because it is the only way to acquire and
maintain a conceptual grasp of reality. Honesty and integrity are virtues
because they are the only way of keeping one's actions tied to one's grasp
of reality.

A critic of rational ethics complained:

"If an ethical principle requires me to abstain from self-defense in
certain cases, then those cases constitute a reductio ad absurdum of said
principle, and I won't apply it to them. In fact, for any imaginable
principle, one can devise scenarios in which it will give absurd results and
must be abandoned. Thus it's impossible to devise principles of ethics which
will always work."
Principles of natural law (such as Archimedes' principles of buoyancy)
cannot be carried to such "reductio ad absurdum." They ALWAYS work. What
does this say about so-called ethical "principles" which CAN? It says that
they are not principles at all, but merely arbitrary rules.
 The refusal, or inability, to distinguish between rules and principles is
a manifestation of the concrete-bound mentality that Barbara Branden
analyzed in her lectures PRINCIPLES OF EFFICIENT THINKING.

Chapter 7
Government
My critique of government is based on the idea that there exist
ethical
principles which are external to government - i.e., which exist
independently of government. Many statists assert the opposite idea: that
there are no such independently-existing principles, and that government is
necessary for (among other things) the creation of ethical principles.
The flaw in their argument is that if there were no independently-
existing ethical principles then there would be no principles according to
which a government could be established, and no means by which the behavior
of government could itself be judged. Since the ostensible purpose of law is
to protect rights, if there are no natural rights then there can be no
standard for judging the legitimacy or efficacy of government-made laws.
(See Chapter 5 * Natural Rights)
See reference
When a social metaphysician (an individual who holds the consciousnesses
of other people, not objective reality, as his ultimate frame-of-reference)
becomes a politician, he aquires the coercive power to impose his decrees
upon other people. This is his way of manipulating "reality." Here you see a
psychological explanation for the attitude held by many stateolatrists: that
the government is the ultimate foundation for morality, ethics, and law.
This also helps explain why many tyrants have the certainty that their
decrees actually do constitute reality, and why those tyrants are often
quite literally incapable of perceiving any inherent contradictions in their
laws. In their minds, the law IS reality. But if government were actually
the foundation of morality, if social justice did in fact spring from law,
then laws would in fact create the social justice which they are ostensively
intended to create. The existence of widespread injustice proves this
statist thesis to be wrong. The practical implementation of that idea, by
both fascist and communist States, has resulted in the most horrendous
atrocities the world has ever endured.

* Government defined
We must keep firmly in mind the essential difference between governments
and other agencies that deal in force. A government intends to profit from
the initiation of force. A private agency (including a protection agency)
intends to profit from trade. A government uses force to gain values. A
private protection agency uses trade to gain values. Both deal in force, but
the government uses it offensively whereas the private agency uses it
defensively.
This is also true of law. Government institutions of law have a purpose
different from that of the institutions of common law. Common law and its
institutions facilitate voluntary interactions; government law and its
institutions implement involuntary interactions.
Not only is it the case that government intends to profit from the
initiation of force, government is structured in such a way that its
functioning can ONLY result from the initiation of force. Without taxation,
government could not function. This is the reason why government cannot
mitigate failure without also eliminating opportunities for success.

A critique of the Randian view:

Rand defined government as "an institution that holds the exclusive power
to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area. A
government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force
under objective control."
Attempting to circumvent its implications for coercion, others expand on
this definition by claiming that in a free society the government is
prohibited by a constitution from initiating force.
Barbara Branden makes perhaps the best presentation of the Randian view
of government. She claims that government is
"a social agency that performs the task of formulating and enforcing the
laws of a country. The concept does not entail that a function of that
political body will be the initiation of force. But because it is true that
a factual function of government IS the initiation of some extent of force,
people fail to grasp the possibility of an alternative to that factual
function. They fail to separate the concrete from the abstraction. They have
failed to differentiate some particular instances of government from the
abstraction as such."
There are several flaws in these notions:
If, as Rand claims, the institution has exclusive power, how can it be
prevented from aggressing since, being exclusive, there can be no
restraining power to stand against it? The initiation of force cannot in any
way be prevented except by bringing to bear against it an equal or greater
force. But if government holds exclusive power, then there cannot exist any
greater force, and thus government cannot be limited in the use of its
force. As used by Rand, the concepts of "exclusive" and "objective control"
preclude one another.
The constitutionalists make the mistake of confounding the notion of
"prohibit" with the notion of "prevent." It is quite obvious that to forbid
some action is by no means to prevent that action, and the idea that a
document can, of itself, pose a restraint on the behavior of an organization
of men possessed with weapons of destruction, is simply absurd. The only
thing that can counter the power of a gun is another gun. A written
constitution won't stop a policeman's bullet, no matter how vigorously you
wave it, nor how vociferously you assert its provisions. As Mao Tse Tung
taught, "All government power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Thus it
follows that all anti-government power MUST also grow out of the barrel of a
gun.
The abstraction that Barbara Branden comments on is not an abstraction
from perceivable concretes - there is not now and never has been a
government that did not aggress against its subjects. It is not "some
particular instances of government" that manifest this attribute, it is ALL
instances of government that do so. The aggression is a universal and
FUNDAMENTAL characteristic of ALL governments. It is universal because every
government, to be territorially exclusive, must compel every person within
its domain to acquiesce in its sovereignty. It is fundamental because that
acquiescence underlies all the other functions of government. Aggression is
therefore a definitive characteristic in forming the concept "government."
It is not epistemologically proper to hypothesize a non-existent concrete (a
government without aggression) and subsume it within an abstraction. Barbara
restricts the abstraction to an unjustifiably narrow set of particulars, and
in so doing creates not a valid concept but a fiction.
To speak of a government that does not aggress is like talking about a
vegetarian cat. This is a phenomenon that you can IMAGINE, but it is not
something that exists in reality. This view of government is rather like the
belief in cold fusion or the planarpophagous view of memory transfer.
We must perceive things as they are, not as we might want them to be.
The word "government" has an easily discernable meaning which can be seen
by anyone who looks deeply enough into the factual nature of its fundamental
distinguishing characteristic. To think about, and talk sensibly about, a
phenomenon which does NOT share that fundamental distinguishing
characteristic, we should select a verbal label different from the one that
is already applied to the entity which DOES possess it. Thus it is improper
to use the word "government" in the way the Randites use it.
If we could institutionalize non-aggression we could not properly call it
"government."
Nock made a distinction between the State and Government:
"Government is an agency with strictly limited powers, devoted to
protecting individual rights to life, liberty and property. The State, on
the other hand, is an offshoot of government that develops when some people
capture the machinery of government and pervert it, using its powers not to
protect rights, but to violate them, to exploit people by confiscating their
wealth, regulating their activities, and subjugating them whenever necessary
to enhance its own illicit power."
This distinction is spurious. "Government," as Nock describes it, is
something that has never existed. The State is not an offshoot of government
- something that develops from the corruption of government - the State is
in fact the only one of the two institutions described by Nock that has
existed in history. Except for some private agencies, limited in scope and
subsumed by the State, there has in fact never been what Nock calls a
Government.
A conceptual distinction can be made between the coercive institution I
have described above as "government" and the more general notion of "the
means by which order is maintained in a society" (the means may not
necessarily be a government). Some people would use "state" to denote the
first and "government" to denote the second, but this would be ambiguous -
for communication - in view of the widespread equivalence between the words
"state" and "government," so I will use "state" and "government"
synonymously, and use "governance" to denote the idea of "a means by which
order is maintained in a society."
Coercive power is that which defines government and makes government
different from any other social institution. All other differences between
states and other institutions flow from this fundamental characteristic.
Thus the proper definition of government is "the strongest gang of
aggressors in a particular area at a particular time."

* Descriptions of Government
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force." ... George
Washington
Gandhi: "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized
form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it
can never be weaned from violence, to which it owes its very existence."
Mencken: "The typical lawmaker of today is a man devoid of principle - a
mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be
applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or
cannibalism." [Or infanticide, as we have seen in Philadelphia and Waco.]
Lane: "The nation is nothing at all but simple force. Not in a single
nation are the people of one race, one history, one culture, nor the same
political opinion or religious faith. They are simply human beings of all
kinds, penned inside frontiers which mean nothing whatever but military
force."
The essential characteristic of States and quasi-States (e.g., the PLO
and the IRA) is that they initiate force to implement their policies.
Viewing the State all through history, we can see no way to differentiate
the activities of its administrators from those of a professional criminal
class. Thus there are no ethical differences between a hoodlum protection
racket and a State, save scale, sophistication, and success in conning the
victims into acceptance of its behavior.
Rand was wrong about the government's desire to maintain a semblance of
morality. Although I believe such a desire existed in the past (until the
last half of the 20th century), a "semblance of morality" implies that there
exists a moral principle which is external to the government and which the
government considers itself under obligation to abide by. Such a
consideration is impossible within a context in which all morality is
derived from the government.

* Corruption in Government
When I attribute some purpose to government, I do not mean to imply that
individual people who are members of government explicitly hold that purpose
as their personal objective. This is quite frequently NOT the case at all!
What I am attempting to do is explain the consequences of government in
terms of institutionalized behavior whose implementation results in those
consequences. Just as no one really INTENDS to kill himself when he begins
to be an alcoholic, nevertheless his behavior has that as its consequence.
The only choice a man has is what actions he will take. He has no choice
about the consequences of those actions. They are rigidly determined by the
law of cause-and-effect. By the Law of Identity.
Being merely human, a percentage of bureaucrats can be expected to be
corrupt, thus as the number of bureaucrats increases there will be more
corruption. By the same token, increased legislated criminalization means
that more property rights are controlled by government, thus there comes to
be greater scope for corruption. The more severe are the legal constraints
on private markets, the more valuable become the rights controlled by
government, thus the reward for corruption increases.
"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ
of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness
cultivate." ... Thomas Jefferson
Police corruption occurs in those areas where entrepreneurs would supply
voluntary services to consumers, but where the government has decreed that
those services are illegal: drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. Where
gambling, for example, is outlawed, the law places into the hands of the
police the power to sell the privilege of engaging in the gambling business.
In short, it is as if the police were empowered to issue special licenses
for these activities, and then proceeded to sell these unofficial licenses
at whatever price the traffic will bear. Whether consciously or not, the
government proceeds as follows: first it outlaws certain businesses, then
the police sell to would-be entrepreneurs the privilege of engaging in those
businesses.
This is one area in which the most frequently-heard apologia for
government is quite true: government is necessary to create the
infrastructure upon which rests other social behavior. As well as providing
the legal infrastructure for police corruption, for the immigration horror
stories, for the drug war violence, and for countless other ills, the
government also provides the infrastructure for more general moral and
ethical wickedness, through the teachings in its compulsory education
program (see Chapter 11), and through the examples of its own vicious
behavior: young people who base their ethos on government are getting their
examples from the Rodney King video.
See reference
Be that as it may, given the unfortunate and unjust laws, the police
corruption described above may be highly beneficial to society. Society may
be better off if corruption induces police to ignore many of the victimless
crimes, thus leaving police resources available to prevent real crimes.
Ignoring many laws, such as housing codes and oil import restrictions, would
improve social welfare. In a number of countries, there would be virtually
no trade or industry at all in the absence of the "corruption" that
nullifies government prohibitions.
But how sane is the moral foundation of an institution that requires the
corruption of its members to achieve beneficial ends?
As I try to make clear in my writings, I oppose government not only for
what it is and what it does, but also for what it makes possible. Getting
rid of government would not directly eliminate all the ills of the world,
but it would free people to eliminate those ills themselves - "to take out
their own garbage" as I put it. The elimination of those ills is something
that government has clearly failed to do.

* The Real Function of Government

Have you ever wondered just what the government is REALLY doing while it
is claiming to "serve and protect"? In 1971, the FBI office in Media, Pa. (a
suburb of Philadelphia) was raided and a large quantity of documents seized.
This raid was considered so important by the FBI that it closed about half
its offices throughout the country, concentrating its resources in the
remainder so as to provide for greater secrecy in its operations. An
analysis of the seized documents was subsequently published in the Los
Angeles Free Press, 24Dec71:
40% surveillance of political groups
30% internal administrative matters
15% "ordinary" crime
7% military AWOLs and deserters
7% draft resisters
1% organized crime

Governments all behave in fundamentally the same manner, regardless of

what they say their politics are. Perhaps they might be more accurately
perceived as big machines that do what they are programmed to do rather than
as bunches of people. A culture develops within government that is
completely dominated by the advocates of government action. From
constituents to lobbyists to journalists, the lawmakers very rarely, or
never, come in contact with anyone who advocates government INaction. Every
employee at every level of every government department is affected and all
those expensive people think they have to DO SOMETHING to justify their
salaries, and every action is another interference with freedom, keeping
people from doing what they want to do or making them do things they don't
want to do. A bureaucrat dreads being accused of doing nothing - he has to
do something to make it look like he's DOING SOMETHING - so he will
continually proliferate rules. One result is that the American court system
is drowning in the avalanche of legal pollution that could appropriately be
called hyperleges.
Government pours forth a continuous stream of legislation, forcing pro-
freedom groups to spend time, energy and money defending old gains rather
than reaching for new ones.

If we view crimes as being behaviors that conflict with the interests of

the segments of society that have the power to shape government law, then we
realize that the government merely tries to balance the demands of
conflicting interest groups, and to discriminate among them on the basis of
their relative electoral power in order to determine who gains and who
loses.
 A primary function of government is to act as a mechanism to take wealth
from some and transfer it to others. Governments protect individuals'
property against the depredations of others as a shepherd protects his sheep
from shearing by others. But against their own government, individuals have
to protect their accumulated wealth as best they can themselves.

Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a

circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the
outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who
cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the
politician throws fifty cents down in front of one of the people, who is
overjoyed at the windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different
person. After a hundred rounds, everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty
cents richer, and happy. And the politician walks off with fifty bucks in
his pocket!
The modern welfare state is merely a complicated arrangement by which
nobody pays for the education of his own children, but everybody pays for
the education of everybody else's children; by which nobody pays his own
medical bills, but everybody pays everybody else's medical bills; by which
nobody provides for his own old-age security, but everybody pays for
everybody else's old-age security; and so on.

Those who claim that government, bad though it may be, is an absolute
necessity for protecting people against crime, must explain the fact that
for every 1000 crimes the American police are aware of, only one criminal is
ever sentenced to prison.
Nor does government protect people against foreign aggression - on the
contrary, it coerces the people (by means of what is euphemistically called
"selective service") into protecting and preserving the government's own
existence.

* What Government Responds to

For many years I had a vague, non-specific realization that government in
America is somehow fundamentally different from most other governments. But
I could not specify precisely what that difference is founded on. I believed
there to be a much stronger connection between government and the public
here in America than in other countries, but I could not identify the nature
of that connection. Then, when the passage of Proposition 13 in California
in 1978 (by a margin of 2 to 1 at the polls) touched off a nationwide run of
similar legislation in other states, I came to realize just how it is that
the government is responsive to "the people." I now believe that elected
officials base (sometimes, but not always, explicitly) their behavior on
WHAT THEY PERCEIVE TO BE THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE VOTERS. In this
statement I use three terms very carefully and deliberately: perception,
will, and majority (not the majority of the whole population, but the
majority of the voters).
Most political behavior is not based on the will of the majority, but is
based on what the politician PERCEIVES to be the will of the majority. (This
explains the influence of lobbyists and other pressure groups.) Of course,
this does not account for ALL political behavior - a lot of it is
straightforwardly venal, and much is intended simply to increase the power
of government. But in almost all situations where the issue under
consideration is the subject of considerable publicity, the politician will
do what he THINKS the MAJORITY of the voters WANT him to do. I believe there
are no limits to this. None whatsoever. They believe that God's Ultimate
Truth is engraved upon the impermanent stone of political polls, and, as
Mencken observed, they would, if they thought it politically expedient,
legislate infanticide just as readily as they voted in Prohibition and the
War on Drugs.
This thesis leads to an answer to the question: "Why don't politicians
understand principles?" If my argument is correct, then it is an immediate
conclusion that politicians CANNOT have principles (except the one that I
have attributed to them). Any man who insists on shaping his behavior by
reference to ethical or moral principles, rather than electoral pragmatism,
would probably not get elected. If his insistence on principle were to be
adamant while he was in office, he would surely not get re-elected. Thus I
see a selection process in action - a process which ensures that politicians
will not be the sort of people who understand and act on principles.
The notion that politicians refer to "accepted religious principles" has
considerable merit too. If the politician cannot see, clearly and
explicitly, the will of the majority, he will act by default, as it were. He
will consult whatever set of "principles" he holds implicitly, usually some
set of religious ethics or, lacking that, a collection of cliches and
platitudes.

* Political Intentions are Irrelevant

The State makes promises to its citizens that it cannot even try to
fulfill without employing means that frustrate their own ends. As the gap
widens between promise and fulfillment, perceptive and honest people in the
political system tend to dissociate themselves from the process, leaving it
to those who are unscrupulous enough to accept and practice fraud. As the
State extends its power, increasingly callous practices are required of
increasingly callous people. The worst get on top, and try to stay there.
Politicians have to be wicked: the requirements of office are such that no
benevolent mind could meet them. Once a man has chosen to become part of the
State, it is the nature of the institution that determines the context
within which he functions, and controls the ways in which he can function -
regardless of his intentions. A pernicious system is not made less so by its
adherents' intentions that it do good.
For example, police training systematically presents the idea that it is
right to force others to obey orders. Thus individuals who become police are
subjected to gradual changes in themselves which, like the motion of the
hands on a clock, may be difficult to see at any particular moment, but
which are nonetheless inexorably cumulative. A man or woman of only
moderately authoritarian tendencies at the time of first entering the police
force soon begins to accelerate down the path to savagery. Perhaps the first
time he witnesses fellow officers beating up a suspect, the new recruit is
astonished and horrified. But he says nothing because so many officers with
greater experience and authority accept the violence. The next time, the new
recruit looks the other way and feels terribly upset. By the third time, he
merely thinks: "Oh no, not this cruelty again." By the twentieth or the
thirtieth time, the no-longer-rookie cop is accustomed to seeing such
injustice, and after many years on the force, such a man or woman thinks
nothing of performing such acts. But nowhere along the line could the cop
see himself turning into a bully. He sees himself as civilized, but a
policeman is civilized only so long as those under his authority act in such
a way as not to arouse his innate savagery. Remember, no one can initially
become a policeman unless he has already accepted the basic premise that
coercion is ethically proper. His willingness to enforce victimless crimes
is the direct proof that he is non-libertarian.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. What this means is
that brutality affects the tyrant, too. Once a person becomes accustomed to
it, that person's mind changes, becoming farther and farther dissociated
from reality. Eventually, the trappings of tyranny become an inherent part
of his nature in a process so gradual and seemingly so logical that he
hardly knows what has taken place. He IS what he's done over the years.
When a dog urinates on a fire hydrant, he's not committing vandalism.
He's just being a dog.
No matter how well-meaning the individual policeman may be, the
parameters of the institution in which he functions compel upon him this
alternative: to accept the conditions of the institution or to withdraw from
participation in it. Part of "accept the conditions of the institution,"
whether it is a police institution or a military institution, is the
requirement that the participant renounce his own moral autonomy, abandon
his own sense of ethical judgment and allow himself to become the instrument
of the judgments of his superiors: he must sell his soul. Once he has done
this there are no limits to the wickedness he is capable of. He has lost
that dimension of the spirit which defined his humanity.
"When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of
public duties they lead their country by a short route to chaos."... Sir
Thomas More.
And after he has done it for a sufficient length of time, he will become
so immersed in the life that no other alternative will be conceiveable to
him. "When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be
possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours."... Adolph
Hitler.
Many men have no honor, but at least it is possible for an individual man
to have honor. It is not possible for a government to have honor, simply
because no one within it can keep his honor while continuing to condone and
participate in the dishonorable behavior that is an inevitable concomitant
of government.
Every individual who begins working within the political system in an
effort to accomplish anything enlarges the system by his own presence. This
is always true, even when the intent of the activist is the reduction of
government.
Success in the free market rewards the virtues of thrift, hard work, and
far-sighted entrepreneurship. Success in politics, on the other hand,
rewards the ethical vices of demagogy, mendacity, and expertise in the
wielding of terror and coercion. The politician's job consists in
sacrificing some men to others. Thus, no matter what choices he makes, they
cannot be just. Proceeding from an unjust basis, he can have no rational
standards by which to judge. Hence, the good people - from any rational
point of view - will tend to rise to the top in a free society, while
ethical scum will tend to rise to the top of a statist system.
The idea that the Libertarian Party can effect any changes in the
performance of government is based on an incorrect assumption: that there
can be honest, sane and benevolent people among members of the government.
Even if a man desires very strongly to accomplish some good and beneficial
end, he cannot do it through means which are fundamentally evil and, by
acting via these evil means, he makes himself immoral REGARDLESS OF HIS
INTENTIONS. It is as impossible for an honest and just man to participate in
government as for an atheist to become an archbishop. Or a priest to become
an abortionist. In each case, the alternatives differ in terms of
fundamental principles so opposed that there is no possibility of overlap.
The purpose of becoming a politician is to compel your values on other
people. Although you can become a political candidate for the purpose of
using the election process as a means of education, you cannot use a
political office except by means of coercion. That is simply not possible.
Throughout the history of government, there has been one thing only that
has tied government behavior to the facts of reality: the necessities of
military action. When you are making guns and bombs, you HAVE to know what
reality is. Without this compelling link to reality, all government behavior
would be totally insane. Even with it, most government behavior is
irrational at best - madness otherwise.
 * Failures and Contradictions of Government
There are many who claim that without government there would exist much
more suffering and distress. In response to this manifestation of the
"WouldChuck" fallacy I can only say that I am honest enough to admit that I
do not know how much suffering and distress there would be without
government. All I can do is point out some of the more blatant examples of
how much suffering and distress there are WITH government, and observe that
under the plausible pretext of protecting person and property, governments
have spread wholesale misery, destruction, and death all over the earth
where peace and security might otherwise have prevailed. They have shed more
blood, committed more crimes, tortures, and murders in struggles with each
other and with their subjects than society would or could have suffered in
the absence of all governments whatever.
Here I want to present just a few examples of how government fails in
practice. If you read the newspapers and newsmagazines regularly, you will
quickly see that these examples are merely tiny drops in the huge bucket of
government's incompetence and viciousness.

One of the unintended consequences of tyranny is that it forcibly

stultifies creative endeavor. The object of a tyrant is to control
everything in his domain. He cannot control something which he does not
understand, therefore all things which he does not understand must be
forbidden.
As was very clearly explained to me one day by a local sheriff, he has
not only the legal authority, but a legal mandate to interdict anything that
HE considers to be unusual behavior. There I was, faced by an armed thug
with an IQ of probably about 90 (maybe 95 on a good day), demanding that I
give him an account, comprehensible to HIM, of my behavior. My behavior is
generated by the choices and decisions of a mind whose IQ is 70 points
higher than his, and yet that behavior must, by authority of law and force
of arms, be subsumed within HIS cretinous intellectual frame of reference.
The "unintended consequence" of this situation, and of tyranny in general,
is that genius is constrained to function within the limited scope of
mediocrity. Thus your society is forcibly deprived of a chemist, a
mechanical engineer, a computer programmer (merely a few of the endeavors I
have turned my mind to over the years) and, as you have seen from the
reading of MYBOOK, a somewhat bungling philosopher. What you DO get is only
what the thug finds comprehensible: a dishwasher and a janitor. And that,
ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what you DID get for the last 14 years of
my working life. Think about this next time you step into a voting booth.
Think about this next time you send a cheque to the IRS. How many creative
minds does your tyrannous government turn off, directly or indirectly -
intentionally or unintentionally?
The worst failing of tyranny is that it does not acknowledge the
existence of human experience beyond the scope of its own ideas. Thus the
greater the tyranny, the more impoverished the society, because it is
restricted to that which lies within the frame-of-reference of the tyrant.
Freedom MUST be preserved! Not for the multitude who do not want it, but
for the few who must have it in order to exercise their creativity.

The most notable examples (because they do not crop up periodically, but
are continuous in their manifestation) of the incompetence of government are
health-care in America and the environmental laws.
America has suffered a health-care crisis ever since government began
passing laws regulating the medical profession. Every health care law ever
passed has succeeded only in shifting the problems from one area to another
- not in eliminating the problems, many of which have been caused by the
laws that were intended to relieve them.
America has suffered an environmental crisis ever since government began
passing laws intended to preserve the environment. Every environmental law
ever passed has succeeded only in shifting the problems from one area to
another - not in eliminating the problems, many of which have been caused by
the laws that were intended to relieve them.

Scientific American, March 1995, contains an essay describing the effects

of The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, telling how,
"in typical fashion, the lawmakers gave little forethought to the social and
economic consequences of the act." Some of its consequences run "directly
contrary to the ideal that motivated NAGPRA in the first place." In 1992, C.
Timothy McKeown of the Department of the Interior stated that he would feel
the department had done its job if all parties [to the act] were
dissatisfied.

Consider the requirements of the Gramm-Rudman law. And their actual

effect on the federal budget deficit. Gramm-Rudman was not the first attempt
to balance the budget, only the best-publicized. Anyone who has kept track
of the legal mandates of these laws, and their subsequent actual effects,
knows that the government's batting average in this area is precisely zero.
Are you sure you would want to invest any money on the assumption that the
present (1995) debate on balancing the budget over the next seven years has
any significance whatsoever? Don't be a fool. The federal budget will never
be balanced, and the federal debt will never be paid.

The Minimum Wage: The first thing that happens when a law is passed that
no one shall be paid less than $3 for an hour's work is that no one who
cannot produce the equivalent of $3 an hour for his employer can be employed
at all. You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for
anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive the employee of the
right to earn the amount that his abilities would permit him to earn, while
the employer is deprived even of the moderate services that the employee is
capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage the government substitutes
unemployment.

The December, 1991, issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an excellent

example of the precept that government is grossly inefficient at best, and
counterproductive at worst.
An essay on "Homelessness in America" touts government as the only
effective means of coping with the problem, and presents as an ideal remedy
"a joint effort started in 1989 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and
HUD. Under the Homeless Families Program, nine cities, including Atlanta,
Baltimore and Denver, will receive a projected $600,000 grant each over five
years to implement services for homeless families. The program also makes
available 1,200 Section 8 certificates, public housing assistance funds,
worth about $35 million over five years.... To date, the initiative has
helped more than 100 homeless families move from emergency shelters to
permanent housing."
What you see here is the government providing 100 dwellings, but when you
look slightly deeper you observe that in so doing, the government
expropriated enough wealth to have provided 160 houses. How so? Well,
consider that during the two-year period "to date," this project had spent
over 16 megabucks to provide those 100 homes. (That comes to $160K per
dwelling.) But this occurred at a time during which the average cost of a
new house in America was less than $100K. The 16 Megabucks, if spent by
private builders, would have provided 160 dwellings. The more the government
spends on housing, the fewer houses there will be in relation to the number
that could have existed without government intervention.
 Robert Heinlein once remarked: "Ten-dollar hamburgers? Brother, we are
headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger; for the barter-only hamburger. But
this is only an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there is
plenty of hamburger."
So far there is still plenty of housing and hamburger in America (at
least in comparison with countries where housing and food production are
completely controlled by government). But as government intervention in the
economy becomes more and more pervasive, the economy will become less and
less able to provide these (and other) necessities of life. And the fewer
houses produced, the more people will clamor for the government to "do
something about the problem of homelessness!" And every time it does
something, there will be still fewer houses produced, simply because
government is not the solution - government is the problem.
(For a more thorough account of the effects of government on the housing
market read THE FEDERAL BULLDOZER by Martin Anderson.)

That same issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an article on America's

Wetlands. In its attempt to preserve these ecological areas, the federal
government has implemented several programs, including the 1972 Clean Water
Act and the 1985 Swampbuster program. In spite of these schemes, some 300K
acres of wetlands are lost every year, and the Department of the Interior
estimates that less than half of America's original wetlands still exist.
The government's latest effort, the l991 Wetlands Guidelines, was used to
evaluate 22 of Washington State's recognized wetlands. To the surprise of
the scientists, only four of the 22 wetlands would still be so classified
under the new rules. Many experts say the document is filled with
inconsistencies and loopholes that could lead to the loss of designation for
half of the nation's remaining wetlands. There are also several other bills
pending in Congress that would alter the definition and relative value of
wetlands. Each agency involved in wetlands management - the Army Corps of
Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Sevice, the Soil Conservation Service and
the Environmental Protection Agency - uses different guidelines to define a
wetland.
Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan, when asked to define 'wetlands'
responded:
"I take the position that there are certain kinds of vegetation that are
common in wetlands, pussy willows or whatever the name is. That's one way
you can tell, and then if it's wet."
Here we see a situation worse even than the housing debacle described
above. At least in the area of houses, there are SOME dwellings constructed
as a result of the government's policies, even though the government's
behavior in this area is grossly inefficient. But in its dealing with
wetlands, the government is actually counterproductive. The more it passes
laws and creates agencies, the more the wetlands vanish.

The automotive industry's anticorrosion treatments produce a zinc-rich

sludge that in the past was sent to a smelter to recover the zinc and return
it to the industry. But a decade ago regulations began listing such
wastewater treatment sludges as hazardous. The unintended consequence is
that the smelters can no longer receive the sludge, because it has become,
in name, a hazardous material, and the regulatory requirements for accepting
it are too severe. The zinc-rich sludge is redirected to landfills, thereby
increasing costs for automobile manufacturers and producing a waste disposal
problem for future generations. This situation clearly illustrates what is a
serious problem: well-meant environmental regulations, because they put up
high barriers to reuse, often have the bizarre effect of increasing both the
amount of waste created and the amount to be disposed. They might more
accurately be viewed as anti-recycling regulations.
 The imposition of restraints on Japanese automobile imports to the USA
during the 1980s shifted the composition of those imports away from small
cars and towards larger cars, as the Japanese attempted to increase their
revenues without increasing the number of units they sold. Yet larger cars
are relatively fuel inefficient. Thus the protective efforts of the US
government had the unforeseen consequences of increasing the average amount
fuel used and pollution produced by imported cars.

The police cannot prevent crimes, rarely solve crimes - or even find out
about them - and certainly do very little to rehabilitate criminals. Worse
yet, once they have the training they naturally want to use it, and they see
one of the safest ways of doing so in the enforcement of victimless crime
laws.
As of 1990, the San Francisco police will no longer investigate
burglaries where the value of goods stolen is under $10K. Nor will they
investigate bad-check cases if the amount is under $2K. In 1988 they
investigated only 26% of all violent crimes reported - but they spent 73
million dollars waging the drug war.
The Dade County police respond to only 2 out of 7 calls for help from
their citizens.

The Savings and Loan industry is going down the tubes, US Banks are
failing in record numbers, the FDIC is running out of money, loans are hard
to come by even for the most creditworthy borrowers, and the economy merely
creeps along despite remarkably low interest rates. Welcome to the latest
banking crisis - in this era of central banking which was supposed to
prevent such things. During more naive days, nearly everyone imagined that
private banks were inherently unstable and that financial crises could be
averted only through the good graces of wise regulators. Recent events make
it quite clear that government intervention itself is a key source of
instability.
The Federal Reserve governors base their hunches about inflationary
pressures - and the actions required to stifle them - on selected economic
indicators, but the indicators they monitor reflect the fact that inflation
is a sequential process: it shows up first in wholesale prices, then in
retail prices, then in wages. So by the time wages begin rising, it is too
late for the Fed's actions to affect the primary cause of the phenomenon
they are trying to deal with.

President Clinton has continually argued that because of a flaw in the

free-market (sic) system, US companies invest so little in long-term
research that they risk losing their technological edge to overseas
competitors. But a long-term view of research investment will readily show
that it is the fickleness of government intervention that so upsets the
field. Politicians tend to be shortsighted by their very nature. Issues that
don't affect their electoral prospects tend to drop out of their
consideration. The usual rule of thumb is: out of congressional sight and
interest, out of budget.
The Superconducting SuperCollider had a price tag of $12G. It was
canceled by Congress in 1993 after about $2G had been spent - a worst of
both worlds outcome.
As power shifted across the aisles of Congress after the 1994 elections,
supporters of the Advanced Technology Program felt a chill creep into
discussions of the program's future, which can no longer be taken for
granted. Even its present is under debate. Congress is also threatening
major changes in NIST's growth. But in the late 1980s it was Congress that
had actively pushed for government promotion of commercial research.
The rise of statism has seen a general economic thrust away from far-
sightedness and the building of capital and toward destructive looting of
the stock of capital for short-term profit. The increasing scope of law-
making, and its associated transfers of property rights from private
individuals to government, undermines the private property arrangements that
support a free market system. This process creates considerable uncertainty
about the future value of those private rights that have not yet been seized
by government. When resource owners are relatively uncertain about their
continued ownership of those resources, they tend to use them up relatively
rapidly and have less incentive to enhance future production capabilities.
Thus resources will be overused and underproduced. Even for statist-minded
businessmen, the inevitable erosion of confidence in the future that results
from the government's continual policy reversals, irresolution in the face
of electoral whims, and stifling bureaucracy, makes long-term business
planning impossible.

Ask yourself what products and services are currently least satisfactory
and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary
and secondary schooling (one of the government's greatest failures is the
public school system), police protection, sewage disposal, and railroad
passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which
products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household
appliances, TV and radio sets, computers, supermarkets and shopping centers
would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by
government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are
all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement.
Yet the public has been persuaded that private enterprise produces shoddy
products, that we need ever more government employees to keep business from
foisting off unsafe products at outrageous prices on us poor ignorant and
vulnerable consumers. What the government refers to as "Fair Trade" consists
largely of the government devising new ways to protect consumers against the
scourge of low prices and high quality.

Regulation of economic activity is often justified and upheld by the

courts on the fictitious grounds that a laissez-faire economy inevitably
leads to "excesses" and "abuses," necessitating regulation which amounts to
prior restraint upon private freedom of action; yet similar attempts at
prior restraint of government action are routinely struck down, even as
judges cite the resulting excesses and abuses as a small price to pay for
"freedom."

In every session of all the legislatures of America, programs to solve

the nation's debt, create jobs, and remedy social problems are launched with
great fanfare and wonderful speeches. But then, when no one is looking, the
politicians go back to their offices and the promises are forgotten.
Although the scenarios that triggered the programs are frequently
discredited, the bureaucracy permanently retains all the power it
accumulated through the legislation that created the programs.
With such great fanfare and wonderful speeches, the Humphrey-Hawkins
"full employment" bill was enacted in 1978 (when the unemployment rate was
6.1%). It set a national goal of reducing unemployment to 4% by 1983. In
1983 the unemployment rate was 9.6%.
In 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state to force children to
go to school, the literacy rate in that state was 98%. Today, after nearly
150 years of compulsory government schooling, the literacy rate is 91%

Many government institutions, intended to help people deal with

emergencies, start on small budgets. As the years go by the bureaucrats who
run these agencies want to rise in professional standing. They make
connections with congressmen; they find reasons to appropriate more money;
they hire more people. They rise, become more powerful, and the more these
agencies grow the more they clamor for money and personnel. Meanwhile the
budget deficit grows from the spending orgy. The public rebels, and the
competition gets ugly. Now money goes to who screams the loudest in the
halls of government. To get the government's attention, they must have
something scary to scream about, so they create an atmosphere of fear. Now
that a "terrible doom" is around the next corner, science sidesteps the
caution of peer review and jumps to science-by-press-release. The public is
left, not with an understanding, but with an emotion.
Because those in favor of a government subsidy have much at stake, their
lobbying efforts will be intensive and well financed. To the individual
taxpayer, however, the impact will be at most a few dollars a year.
Accordingly, opposition is usually muted and dispersed. In concert with the
lobbyist is the politician. Being human, he seeks a measure of personal
importance, prestige and influence. Thus his interests are not served by
minimizing the role of the state, but by maximizing the role of the
institution of which he is a part. He will have a natural inclination to
insist that increased regulation is the appropriate remedy for any social
problem. And so, year by year and decade by decade, the bureaucracy grows
larger and larger, and the tax burden builds higher and higher.
Totalitarians eventually gain the advantage, and it is merely a matter of
time before freedom is extinguished.
As the problems created by partial controls multiply, there is a logical
extension of partial controls to universal controls and it is here that the
full and horrible price of abandoning free market principles is made
explicit. Productive capacity and the incentive to work decline continually;
and therefore the government is eventually led to seize control over all
production and distribution.
Even when the people become aware that the government is hideously
bloated, they have little incentive to curtail it. On the one hand, people
don't have the foggiest understanding of "spontaneous order," i.e., that
problems can be solved by unplanned processes that are not the result of any
controlling authority's specific intentions or conscious designs. (The
economic process by means of which everyone is provided with shoes is an
example of such a "spontaneous order" phenomenon.) On the other hand, people
don't understand that many of the social problems they face are the result
of past government actions, and that the only real solution for them is an
indirect one, to wit: to repeal earlier programs and let individuals take
care of things themselves.

The argument that the functions of government law are the assignment of
property rights and the protection of those rights is a dishonest argument.
Government governs by means of mediating wealth transfers, imposing behavior
controls, and protecting (and expanding) its institutions. But don't expect
honesty from government: in June of 1984, the Supreme Court ruled
unanimously that prosecutors need not honor plea-bargain agreements. The
Court maintained that as long as a plea-bargain agreement is "voluntarily
accepted by a suspect with full awareness of the consequences," prosecutors
are not bound to abide by it.
It seems that the more open and forthright the government is, the less
obliged it is to be honest!

How well do delinquency treatment programs reduce recidivism? On average,

45% of program participants are rearrested, versus 50% of those left to
their own devices. Programs that concentrate on teaching job skills and
rewarding pro-social attitudes cut rearrest rates to about 35%. "Scared
Straight" and "Boot Camp" programs actually tend to increase recidivism
slightly. Some of the seemingly best ideas have led to worsening of the
behavior of those subjected to the ideas. Locking kids up will not reduce
crime and may eventually make the problem worse.
 One study tracked 10K males, born in Philadelphia in 1945, for 27 years;
it found that just 6% of them committed 71% of the homicides, 73% of the
rapes and 69% of the aggravated assaults attributed to the entire group.
If one were to predict that every boy in the study who was arrested early
would go on to commit violent crimes, one would be wrong more than 65% of
the time. Those so misidentified are known as false positives. All
delinquency prediction models consist of about 50% false positives.

Just how violent is the American workplace? A report in the WSJ (13Oct94)
reveals that 59 employees were killed by co-workers in 1993, out of a total
national workforce of 121 million people. That is one in 2 million. The
National Weather Service puts the odds of getting struck by lightning at one
in 600K.
A series of overblown news reports, widely misinterpreted research and an
emerging army of consultants have driven companies to a fear of their own
workers that is unjustified. Executives are scared to death, but they're
scared of the wrong thing.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the USA, the per capita loss to
crime each year is $5760. But this pales in comparison to the $20470 that
you could put into your pocket each year if government were abolished. (You
can calculate this amount by summing up the total revenues of all federal,
state, and local governments, then dividing that sum by the number of non-
government working people. The figures above are for the year 1990.)

There are always the types who insist on running the show but who
wouldn't lift a finger to take out the garbage. Freedom means, in part, that
we'll all have to learn to take out our own garbage, since in a free society
no one will have the means to compel others to do it for us. Freedom makes
demands on people. That's why government is so highly considered - it makes
"the other fellow" do the work. One reason government in America is being
pressured to create a socialized medical system is that such a system lets
the government take care of another worry. An anarchist looks after him or
herself. Too many people in this world can't and won't. They will look for a
savior, a dictator or a committee to do the work, and will cheerfully make
any sacrifice in order to be saved and cared for.
But the government answer has not worked; it will not work; it can not
work. Unfortunately, the workable solutions are not permitted by government.
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. You can see the
disastrous symptoms of this disease in the faces of the people. In their
eyes you can see the flame of hope slowly dying, drowned by the harsh
reality of survival in modern America as the nation sinks into the swamp of
fascist tyranny.

* Government Murders During the 20th Century

In Millions (thru 1985)

War 35.7 (battle deaths: WW1 9 WW2 15)

Non-war 150.5
Total 186.2 = 5% of earth's population during that period.
This averages out to be one murder every 15 seconds.
Communist governments: 126.2
Fascist governments: 23.4
Democratic governments: .9
This distinction among government types, although certainly useful for
deciding where you should choose to live, is seen to be somewhat spurious
when you consider that the Italian massacre of the Libyans must be
attributed to Fascism - but the French massacre of the Algerians must be
attributed to Democracy. I really doubt that it made any difference to the
dead Arabs who considered themselves neither Libyan nor Algerian, fascist
nor democratic.
Communists don't scare me; communist governments scare me, but the
frightful thing is the government, not the communist. The Hutterite sect of
Christianity, whose beliefs consist of pure and absolute communism, has
existed for over 400 years, and during that time there has never been a
murder by one of its members.
Keep in mind that this little expose of government murders includes only
those people who were directly murdered by governments. It does not take
into account the tens of millions who died in the deliberately-caused
famines in the Soviet Union (8 million during the 1920s) and China (30
million during the 1950s). Nor does it count those poor unfortunates
repatriated by the Allied governments in Operation Keelhaul. Nor does it
encompass all the damage and suffering caused by enslavement, property
seizure and income theft that are perpetrated on a regular basis by ALL
governments.
Every minute 30 children die of hunger and disease. But during that same
minute government spends the equivalent of 1.7 million dollars on war - war
that is more and more directed against civilians: During WW1 civilians
represented only 15% of all fatalities. By the end of WW2 the percentage had
risen to 65%, including Holocaust casualties. In today's (1995) hostilities,
more than 90% of all of those injured in war are civilians.
As Ayn Rand was fond of saying, the enormous population growth of the
capitalist societies during the 19th century should of itself induce any
life-loving person to embrace capitalism. Well, the perpetration of 186
million murders should of itself induce any life-loving person to reject
government.
You have been told all your life that the police serve the people, that
they are the guardians of civilization. During a recent one-year period
(1986), these were the rates of murders committed by police in various
American cities: (the government does not call these "murders," but they are
killings by the police, in the line of duty, of innocent civilians who are
not suspected of any crime. No prosecutions ensue from these incidents.)
Dallas .924 per 100K of the population (9)
Los Angeles .743 (22)
Denver .700 (4)
Houston .462 (8)
NYC .185 (14)
The numbers in ( ) are the actual number of people murdered that year.
Dallas and LA have the two highest rates of all cities in the country. I
do not know how the other listed cities rank, and these are the only data I
have. (The FBI does not keep track of these numbers.)
The census bureau classifies the USA urban population as being 167M, or
74% of the total. Urban is considered to be communities of 50K or more. I
assume that most of the murders occur in urban areas and so I use the 167M
as a population base for these two extrapolations:
1. Using the lowest murder rate available (.185) there would be just over
300 murders per year nationwide.
2. Using the average of all the murder rates (.603) there would be just
over 1000 murders per year nationwide.
It is probably safe to assume that at least one poor citizen is being
murdered by the police every day somewhere in the country. Contrast this
with the rate at which police are being murdered: just over 100 per year.
These statistics ARE kept by the FBI - and widely publicized. In fact there
is a national day of mourning observed for murdered police - it is in May
each year.
You might ask "Who are these poor people?" (Keep in mind that police do
not accidently kill people; when a policeman takes out his gun and shoots
it, he is TRYING to kill somebody. When a civilian performs the same action,
it IS considered by the government to be an act of murder.) They range from
a 5-year-old boy in Stanton CA to a 70-year-old woman in Dallas. They
include an entire family of 11 people (including 4 children) who were
DELIBERATELY burned to death in Philadelphia by the city police department,
who held off the fire department until the fire had done its grisly work.
This happened in May of 1985. After a two-year investigation, the city
government announced that "no laws had been broken" by anyone involved. And
mayor Goode boasted (yes, it was actually a boast!) that "the city
government is more powerful now than it was then."
During the decade of the 1960s the Philadelphia city police murdered its
citizens at the average rate of one per week (2.5 per 100K on an annual
basis). This caused such a scandal that it provoked an investigation by the
Federal Justice Department and the city cleaned up its act a little bit even
though there were no indictments.
And if deliberately (and legally) burning children to death does not
convince you of the viciousness of government, what would?
If you are a decent and benevolent person, you ought to believe in
something different from what has killed so many people, and espouse an
ethics that human beings could actually live by, and work for it to become
real.

* The War On Drugs

In view of the furor over "crime" in America, it is rather enlightening
to peruse some of the actual measurements of this "crime." These data come
from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1992 edition, pages 180
thru 195. They clearly show the results of the Republican (Reagan/Bush)
regime's emphasis on fighting drug use.

Total number of criminal offenses known to the police:

1980 13.4million 1990 14.4million a rise of 7%

Drug arrest rates (per 100K population)

1980 256 1985 346 1989 527 a rise of 106%

Tried in U.S. District Courts:

Marijuana 1980 2thousand 1990 5thousand a rise of 150%
Other drugs 1980 3thousand 1990 13thousand a rise of 333%

Sentenced to prison in U.S. District Courts:

1980 Total 14thousand Drugs 4thousand
1990 Total 28thousand Drugs 14thousand
a rise of 100% a rise of 250%

Observe that half the sentences nowadays are for drug crimes and that the
number of drug sentences today equals the total number of sentences for ALL
crimes in 1980.
For every 1000 non-drug arrests made by the police, three criminals get
sentenced to prison. For every 1000 drug arrests, 16 are sent to prison.

An examination of the breakdown of the "Total number of criminal

offenses" reveals that many categories of violent crime changed little
during the 1980s. In fact, the increase in the total population of America
has resulted in a per capita DECLINE in several of these rates:
Total of offenses known: -2.2%
Murder: -7.8%
Total property crime: -4.9%
Burglary: -26.6%
 An analysis of these numbers reveals clearly that there is indeed a
"crime wave" sweeping America. But it is not murderers and burglars who are
responsible - it is people puffing the wrong kind of cigarettes who are
overloading the nation's prisons. The FedGov's response - putting more
police onto the streets and pouring more money into the coffers of local
law-enforcement agencies - is counterproductive: it can only exacerbate the
situation because it will lead to a more vigorous and thorough enforcement
of the Drug Laws.

Some measures of the insanity of the Drug War:

The morphine required for a $100 fix from a dirty needle in a back alley
could be purchased from the local drugstore for just $1, if not for the
anti-drug laws. In 1973, John Hospers calculated that two-thirds of the
violent crime in New York City would quite simply and quietly disappear
overnight if all the drug laws were repealed, since that is the proportion
of the crime that is caused by addicts who need the money for a fix. Half
the prisoners in the Texas state prison system are there for violation of
drug laws, NOT for violent crimes! How peculiar that the government does not
blame the obesity of fat persons on the merchants who sell them food, but it
does blame the drug habits of addicts on the merchants who sell them drugs.
On the positive side, it is clear that government itself would benefit
from a change in drug policy: reclassifying marijuana possession from a
felony to a misdemeanor reduced the felony caseload of the Los Angeles
police by 25%.
You might think that sooner or later the government would realize the
insane idiocy of its policy on drugs. But keep this in mind: although
Prohibition lasted only 14 years, the Drug War has continued for over two
generations with no sign of abating. Remember also that the Nazis did not
abandon their persecution of the Jews, even when the manpower involved was
critically needed to defend the gates of Berlin itself. Thus there is no
reason to surmise the government will cease its insanity short of out-and-
out social collapse.
I see another rationale for the government not only to continue this
insanity, but to amplify it: An American's enthusiasm for law and order is
directly proportional to the degree to which he believes his personal safety
and livelihood are threatened. When the perceived threat grows, so does his
willingness to be policed. If the average American can be led to believe,
through the government's stridently minatory propaganda about drug use, that
these "rabidly crazed" marijuana puffers (remember the movie, Reefer
Madness?) pose a horrifying threat, then an increasingly alarmed public will
demand that every federal, state, and local police resource be augmented to
combat the "narco-terrorists." This is good news for police budgets
nationwide.
It's asking a lot of a politician to defy a political culture that treats
speaking reasonably about the pros and cons of legalizing drugs as if it
were on a par with speaking reasonably about the pros and cons of
infanticide.
Nor do I see hope in attempts to elicit public discussion of the issue.
Discussion is futile when directed not toward general principles but merely
toward the specific phenomena which are consequences of those principles.
This precept becomes eminently clear during debates about legalizing drugs.
They invariably degenerate from a very brief and superficial mention of the
underlying principles into lengthy disputes over the specific means that
would be used for distributing the drugs if they were to be legalized. But
these disputes always assume the existence of a Controlling Authority that
would have jurisdiction over drugs.
A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to
reinforce them. If, for the question: "Do you want slavery?" your opponents
manage to substitute the question: "What kind of slavery do you want?" then
they can afford to let you argue indefinitely; they have already won their
point. Thus do the proponents of statism set the terms of the debate by
swindling the advocates of Freedom into an implicit acceptance of the
statist premise. If you allow them to get away with this, they will
eventually end up setting the terms for everyone's life. But that is the
ultimate goal of the State: to set the terms for everyone's life.

There are other, less widely-known, aspects of the government's drug

policy that have severely detrimental effects on American society:
The FDA doesn't want anybody to be killed by medicines (that would look
bad for the FDA's record) but they don't care how many people die of
diseases resulting from the government's prevention of the development and
sale of medicines.
Put yourself in the position of an FDA official charged with approving or
disapproving a new drug. You can make two very different mistakes:
1. Approve a drug that turns out to be dangerous.
2. Refuse approval of a drug that would have been beneficial.
If you make the first mistake you will become infamous. If you make the
second mistake, nobody will ever know it. Thus, with the best will in the
world, you will inevitably tend to delay or reject any and every new drug.
You will compel the drug companies to Shrug.
An examination of the therapeutic significance of drugs that are
forbidden in the US but are available elsewhere in the world, such as in
France, reveals this in action.
And in those instances where the approved drug turns out to be a bummer
(such as Thalidomide), not only do the drug companies have a vested interest
in concealing this (as the tobacco companies did for decades) but even the
FDA has a vested interest in looking to justify its original decision to
approve the drug.

As many as 95% of cancer patients can get relief if properly medicated.

Tragically, many continue to suffer needlessly. A 1993 study found that 85%
of the physicians who treat cancer patients provided inadequate relief for
the majority of those in pain. What accounts for the astonishing gap between
the degree of relief that is possible and the suffering that still persists
in reality? Sadly, the effort to improve the management of pain has been
enormously restricted by the war on drugs. The years of antidrug campaigns
have left both the public and health care professionalds with greatly
exaggerated fears about the risks of opioids, which are still the most
effective known painkillers.
Many studies have shown that the medical use of analgesic drugs is safe
and does not cause psychological addiction in those who had not previously
shown such a tendency. Even when patients can administer the drug themselves
with bedside pumps they rarely deliver more than they need to suppress their
pain. Those who receive opioids may become physically dependent - that is,
the drug must be withdrawn slowly to prevent the physical effects of
withdrawal - but this state is very different from true addiction, which is
characterized by constant craving and compulsive drug-seeking behavior.

The psychiatric profession is also deeply affected:

To therapists, the addict needs help to solve a problem, the problem
being that he uses a drug of which they disapprove. But to the addict, the
only problem is how to get the drugs he wants. He doesn't see himself as
"sick," and he doesn't want "treatment." Authorities who are intervening to
control his behavior react as tyrants always do - whether they be central
planners trying to make their citizens conform to some national plan, or
foreign policy planners trying to control people in other countries - by
getting angry with the people who don't appreciate the intervention of
"experts" into their lives. The victimizers, in short, blame the victims.
They demand the right to enforce their ideas at the point of a gun, that is:
through the power of government. And this IS a problem.
The principle role of medical, and especially psychiatric, professionals
in the administration and enforcment of chemical statism is to act as double
agents - helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining
self-medication as a disease, and helping the people to bear their
privations by supplying them with drugs. This is a major national tragedy
whose very existence has so far remained unrecognized, and whose
consequences may be devastating. (See Chapter 12 - Dictatorship American
Style.
See reference)
Consider that the tranquilizer Valium is the most widely-prescribed drug
in the USA. Its sale is a multi-billion dollar business. Suppose something
happened that resulted in the cessation of its distribution (and also that
of other similar drugs). What would be the effect on all those stressed
people whose mental stability depends on such drugs? Kurt Saxon maintains
that this might well be the most devastating result of a collapse of our
economy. All those neurotics might go crazy and destroy everything in their
environment.

It is laws which create much of social context - the Prohibition laws

created the "Alcohol War" context. Today's Drug laws create today's "Heroin
War" context. Unjust laws are creating a deeply divided and corrupt society,
where the appearance of orthodoxy is everything, and intelligence, humanity
and common sense count for almost nothing.
If a man long afficted by a toxic chemical suffers sudden convulsions and
then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the
immediate cause of the death, so long as one remembers the ultimate cause.
The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology.
Throughout history, rulers have picked on various scapegoats to divert
attention from the results of their policies, including Jews, Christians,
eccentrics and now drug users. If drugs were really so terrible why were
they completely legal between 1776 and 1914 - without serious social
problems? It is not the drug that is the problem, but the ideology of
government.
Edmund Burke observed that "it is ordered in the eternal constitution of
things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge
their fetters." Nor can men of infantile minds and childish habits be free.
Their state-induced passions forge their fetters.
Governments cause pain, misery and suffering by passing laws, and then
point to that same pain, misery and suffering (which were caused by the
laws) as the reason the laws are necessary - and even why the laws should be
more strongly enforced! Nowhere is this spurious chain of "cause and effect"
more devastatingly manifest than in the War on Drugs. The real cause of
immigration and drug-war horror stories is the enforcement of anti-
immigration and anti-drug laws, not the people forced into dangerous and
degrading circumstances by those laws. (When was the last time you read
about armed thugs doing battle over the distribution of Aspirin or Valium?)
 Chapter 8
BEYOND GOVERNMENT
* Limited Government
Everyone wants "less" government. But in most cases, all they want is to
get rid only of the part that they don't like. Would it be possible to place
universal restrictions on a government so as to make it a truly limited
government? In view of the fundamental characteristics of government
(especially its demand for exclusivity), effective limitations are clearly
impossible. A "limited government" would not, in fact, BE a government, but
would instead be the equivalent of a private police force. Regardless of
what it is called, any organization with the potential of implementing force
MUST be structured in a way that provides genuine protection for those who
are subject to its power.
Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers did not include in the Constitution a
provision that would have made it a criminal offense for the government to
interfere with the lawful behavior of a free citizen. That would have made a
tremendous difference in the form of our society. The revolt against England
should not have gone so far as to reject many eminently sensible provisions
of the British scheme of government. Such as the Coroner's Jury, by which
police behavior is subject to citizens' evaluation.

In the final scene of ATLAS SHRUGGED, Rand makes this proposal for an
amendment to the Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and
trade."
An extension of this might provide a more sweeping limitation:
"Government shall have no authority whatsoever over the freedom of
production, transportation, communication, and trade."

Another broad restriction could be patterned on the Ninth Amendment:

"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain activities which are
forbidden to government, shall not be construed to permit the government any
activity not specifically designated by the Constitution. Government shall
have ONLY the authority which this Constitution specifically grants to it.
Any attempt to exceed this specified authority shall constitute criminal
behavior."

Here are two other suggestions that might have good effect:
Government shall pass no law that has not arisen directly from the
populace via a ballot-initiative process.
It is forbidden for government to possess information about any
specifiable individual person who is not a convicted criminal or a
government employee.

In any attempt to protect people against oppression, it is necessary to

enact laws which specify punishments for criminal behavior.
If a constitution were to provide for genuine protection against
government oppression, then that constitution would have to contain
penalties for its own violation - provisions that would make it a criminal
offense for anyone in government to violate the constitution. And also
provisions that would punish the government for making any laws that violate
the rights of the citizens (e.g., victimless-crime laws) or for in any way
exceeding the authority granted to it by the constitution.
Immediately the question arises: How could such violations be judged?
 * Jury
Libertarians argue that the only proper functions of government are to
provide Police, Courts and Military. Admittedly, these are indeed necessary
social functions, but there is another function equally, if not more,
important to a civilized society. This function is the protection of
individual citizens against government oppression.
This is a function that CANNOT be performed by government! There must be
an independent procedure for judging government behavior and for
adjudicating disputes between citizens and government - something other than
the presently-existing court procedures. After all, the courts are
themselves a part of the government, and when a citizen is mistreated by the
government he has no redress except to take his case to the very government
which mistreated him. But as John Locke observed, "Any man so unjust as to
do his neighbor an injury will scarce be so just as to condemn himself for
it."
The "balance of power" in our Constitution sets each branch of government
to be a counterforce against each of the other branches of government. What
this "balance of power" does NOT do is provide a check on the power the
government has over the freedom of the individual citizens. No effective
check - merely unenforceable prohibitions.
I suggest that there should be an institution to provide such a check,
and I see the jury as a likely basis for such an institution. I would set
the jury up as an entity as separate from government as possible, and
designed to act as an independent judge of government. (In fact, I would
like to see the Jury established as the fundamental institution of
governance.)
The principle of Jury Nullification should be incorporated into the
function of the jury, and that principle should be extended to include these
features:
Any conflict between an individual and the government, or any charge of
misconduct against the government, shall be resolved by jury.
Juries shall be selected by lottery (and ONLY by lot) from a panel of
volunteers, none of whom shall be a member of government, a registered
voter, or a lawyer.
All jury members shall receive a copy of the constitution (which shall
itself contain a detailed description of the function of a jury) and a copy
of the law which authorized the government's behavior in the conflict under
consideration.
Although the government (in the person of the Judge or the Prosecutor)
shall be permitted to advise the jury, the jury shall in no way be obliged
to follow that advice. (It might be a good idea also to abolish most of the
functions of a judge, a position which has grown to be more that of a
dictator than a mediator. Perhaps the function of Jury Foreman should be
extended to encompass any necessary judgeship functions. Such an arrangement
appears to work quite well in the operation of the Supreme Court, which
might itself be considered as a 9-member jury.)
Nullification of a law shall repeal the law - permanently. Nullification
shall also immediately and permanently remove from office all those
legislators who sponsored the law, render ineligible for re-election all
those legislators who voted for the law, and subject to criminal prosecution
all armed members of government who implemented the law.
To enforce these provisions, there shall be established a force of Jury
Marshals (financed by some means completely independent of government
control - perhaps by fines imposed by juries on government agencies) whose
jurisdiction shall extend only to members of government. Control over the
Jury Marshals shall be exercised only by a jury.
In a more anarchist arrangement, the jury shall appoint a Marshall and he
shall select a posse from a panel of armed volunteers. This group shall
carry out the verdict of the jury, and the posse shall be dissolved
immediately afterwards.
It will be objected that these ideas on the Jury are not absolutely
guaranteed to infallibly ensure peace on earth. Of course they can't. But no
scheme for governance can possibly result in a greater degree of death and
destruction than government has and continues to perpetrate.

Legislatures are founded on the assumption that there is a need for the
continual production of rules to govern the lives of the citizens. Is this a
valid assumption? Is it really necessary for you to have over a million laws
in order to be able to go down to the corner store and buy a loaf of bread?
(No exaggeration: in 1992 it was calculated that among the Federal, State
and Local governments, every American citizen lives under the shroud of more
than a million laws. On January 1, 1996, one thousand new laws went into
effect in the state of California.)
America is drowning in an avalanche of legal pollution that could
appropriately be called hyperleges. But hyperleges is inevitable under the
present legal system: it is the natural function of a congress to pass laws,
just as it is the natural function of flies to make maggots. We have
legislatures at the federal, state and local levels whose only function is
to create laws, thus the inevitable result of 200 years of legislative
function MUST be a plethora of laws. After two centuries, what could you
expect but that the American court system would be drowning in laws? This is
a situation that can only get worse as time passes and congresses keep
performing their natural function.
These laws are the structure of the culture of our society. It is
universally observed that this culture is deteriorating - that there is more
crime and less personal safety than there used to be in this country. But
have the people themselves changed all that much? Are you yourself any less
civilized than your grandparents were? I really don't think individual
people have changed; what HAS changed is the social context in which we
live. We have thousands, if not millions, more laws than our grandparents
had. But we are people, just as our grandparents were. The difference is not
in the people, but in the rules which limit our individual choices and
govern our social interactions.
Eventually civilization will be destroyed in a crazy welter of laws,
taxes, regulations, and the endless proliferation of government into all
phases of human activity. Proof is overwhelming that governments are not
going to stop short at some point and quit implementing new laws. In reality
they're going to continue just as always, passing new ones at the rate of
tens of thousands per year. Can this go on indefinitely? Or is there a
finite number of things that can possibly be regulated? Personally, I'm glad
I won't live long enough to find out.
Why do we need all these laws that the congresses have laid upon us
during the past 200 years? Why, exactly, do we need an institution that
continually creates laws?
What IS needed are guidelines for applying a basic social principle.
Suppose we had no legislatures, no congresses, no senates, no councils - in
short, no gangs of goons continually passing laws supposedly "for the good
of the people." Suppose the implementation of the principle were to arise
spontaneously from the people themselves in the form of jury verdicts.
If each jury verdict were delivered in writing, and included the
principled rationale for that verdict, then the collected verdicts of all
the juries could constitute the "body of law" of the community and provide
guidelines for applying the principle, just as today we consult Supreme
Court cases for legal guidance, and refer to the Common Law, which is made
up of legal principles enunciated by judges in particular cases, and then
followed as precedent.
But notice that there is nothing binding in this corpus. Each individual
jury can decide each individual case solely according to its interpretation
of the principle.
Through such an extension of the function of the Jury, we would truly
have a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

* Government is a Mistake
Clearly, the suggestions I offer are not a comprehensive formula for the
establishment of a limited government, but I do think they contain the major
elements that any such formula must incorporate.
But should limited government be the libertarian goal? I think not! ANY
government, no matter how it is constructed, is by its fundamental nature an
evil institution - because the essence of the concept "government" is
coercion. I believe the very idea "government" is a mistake. In the same
category (but with much more devastating consequences) as "flat earth" and
the "geocentric cosmology."
There was once a time when men believed the earth to be flat. As long as
they held to this belief, they could not successfully navigate over long
distances. Only when they had abandoned this belief could they advance and
extend civilization over all the planet.
There was also once a time when men believed the earth to be the center
of the universe. As long as they held to this belief, they were restricted
to a very limited and inaccurate view of reality. Only when they had
abandoned this belief could they acquire a comprehensive knowledge of the
cosmos.
Today, men believe that civilization is impossible without government,
and they give their highest loyalty to their nation. This mistaken belief
has spread misery, famine, and the wholesale destruction of war all over the
earth. Someday in the future, when people stop lying to themselves about the
nature of government, they will achieve the greatness of soul to see a
higher loyalty: reality. They will then recognize the mistake, and
government will be abandoned just as other mistakes have been abandoned. The
scourge of nationalism will recede into history, like other diseases and
errors that have been conquered by advancing knowledge. Only then will it be
possible for men to live together in peace and security.
But the mere removal of government, although a necessary prerequisite for
the existence of social sanity, will not suffice to bring it about. The
absence of a negative doesn't equal the presence of a positive. We can see
evidence of this in Yugoslavia and the regions of ethnic strife in the
former Soviet Union. Just as in the application of any other beneficial
moral or ethical principle, it is necessary to LEARN how to implement social
health. The world has had freedom only by default, never by design. If there
is to be any hope for civilization in the future, a rational social
structure must be created.
The structures of the social institutions, the institutional contexts in
which individuals interact, evolve. I want to present what I believe will be
the next step in this process of evolution by suggesting an alternative to
government, an alternative which would in fact perform the valuable social
function that government merely claims to perform. I will present the
fundamental principle which is accepted by all libertarians, show that even
in a purely anarchic society there would be a need for an explicitly stated
code of behavior, and present an approach to the problems of formulating
such a code.

* Anarchism
Arguments against anarchism:

James A. Kuffel:
 Jurisprudence is difficult and complex, and it is farfetched to assume
"competing governments" would deduce exactly the same "laws" in all areas,
not to say in one. Imagine the consequences of various "governments"
attempting to apply different "laws" within the same territory....Equality
before THE law would be impossible, that is, justice would be impossible.
Government may function improperly, taking invasive action on a large scale.
But, as a corollary, it is the only form of organized force which can ensure
the protection of rights on a large scale.
[Kuffel is attacking a straw man. It is not only "farfetched" to assume
different governments would promulgate the same laws, it is obviously false
- as you can easily see by observing the governments throughout the world
today. One need not "imagine" the consequences of various governments'
attempts to apply different laws - one need only observe the plethora of
civil wars continually being waged. To equate Justice with "equality before
the law" is absurd. Justice and Law are only accidentally (and rarely)
related. Government not only "may" function improperly - it always does! And
in fact it has NEVER ensured the protection of rights on a large scale. But
in any case, the argument Kuffel attributes to anarchists is NOT what
anarchists propose! We conceive proper laws as being enunciations of
principles of justice, not as being - as Kuffel implies - the arbitrary
pronouncements of a government.]

Don Ernsberger:
While driving home from work one day, my wife was sideswiped by a
motorist who was in a hurry to return home. After taking her car to the
garage for an estimate, she notified the insurance company (Nationwide) that
it would cost some $112 to repair the minor damages. It was then that we
realized to our horror that the other driver was insured by Allstate
insurance - a rival firm. Demanding that our rights be protected, we pleaded
for action. Nationwide dispatched a squadron of crack troops to the home of
the guilty driver. He, true to form, certainly did not permit rival agents
to enter his home as he distrusted Nationwide. He was able to hold the
Nationwide units at bay for the several hours that it took for Allstate
troops to arrive. Now the two rival firms faced each other across a
battleline. In the conflict which followed, seven were killed and twelve
wounded - but Nationwide carried the day. Out of the charred ruins of his
home the $112 was recovered and we were repayed.
[When did you ever hear of Pinkerton facing off in a gun-battle with
Wackenhut? But in 1861 two rival GOVERNMENTS faced each other across a
battleline, and the result was half a million deaths.]

Ron Heiner:
Each party may attempt to secure the services of whatever court would
favor his point of view and, consequently, there would be the emergence of
courts seeking clients some of whom hold different, antagonistic beliefs and
viewpoints (there might even emerge courts soliciting individuals with
certain religious, political, and moral views along with courts emphasizing
different principles in tort, liability, and contract disputes). The
conflicting parties could also look for protection agencies which would
enforce their views and opinions. Now if one argues that the protection
agencies would force the disputants to abide by the agreements with and the
decisions of the private courts, then one is no longer describing a system
of voluntary interaction but rather a system of coercive interaction
comprised of agencies with the power to defy the wishes of their clients (or
coerce individuals who are not clients who have for some reason antagonized
other individuals who hired these agencies).
[This is an excellent description of the inter-relationships of federal,
state and local courts, each with its own sheriffs and marshals, and we saw
it implemented in practice during the civil rights strife of the 1960s.]
 John Hospers:
As for the courts, it seems to me that they would be inclined to render
the most popular verdicts - that is, those that would gain the arbitration
agency the most paid members - and the most popular decisions aren't
necessarily the most just ones.
[As for the elected judges, it seems to me that they would be inclined to
render the most popular verdicts - that is, those that would gain the judge
the most votes - and the most popular decisions aren't necessarily the most
just ones. (See the movie "Miracle on 34th Street" for an excellent
fictional portrayal of this phenomenon.)]

Arguments against competing defense agencies overlook the fact that there
is a de facto state of competing governments presently existing in the USA.
Every area of the country suffers under the burden of at least three
governments, and in some places four: Federal, State, County, and City.
It was the competition between the state and federal governments that
resulted in the Civil War. Has there ever been an instance of Pinkerton,
Wells Fargo, and Wackenhut engaging in armed conflict?
Life under a government is a continual legal civil war, where men gang up
on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a
club over rivals until another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs
them with it in their turn. All of them continually clamoring protestations
of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good.
Arguments against competing defense agencies also overlook the fact that
the "useful functions" of government not only can be, but are presently
being performed by private agencies.
Suppose you seek the expertise of a security firm to protect your home.
You discuss the matter with 3 firms, Burns, Pinkerton, and Wells-Fargo, all
offering a different range of services and prices. You decide to hire Burns,
because they offer armed guards.
Is this not competition in the value of protective force? Is not the
force used to repel criminals subject to open-market buying and selling? Is
it not true that force is not only, in this sense, an economic good, but one
in which millions of "trades" are made daily?
"Security firms" (free market firms trading in the "administration of
law" for profit) are not fictional constructs from the anarcho-capitalist's
dream for the future. They are operating now, alive and well. The Cato
Institute proposes laws, or their abolition. The makers of "The Club" deal
in deterrence. Holmes Protection provides guards. The Mutual Detective
Agency investigates crimes. Private bounty hunters apprehend fugitives. The
American Arbitration Association offers adjudication. Corrections
Corporation of Ameria, Inc. makes a profit from incarcerating criminals. In
short, every aspect of functions traditionally considered exclusively
reserved to governments is now being performed privately.
Since there are innumerable free market trades in force daily, force must
be an economic good.
There are two kinds of force: Offensive and Defensive. Anarchists wish to
place only the second of these on the market - and to do so in ways that
will attempt to abolish the first. Statists, on the other hand, wish to
institutionalize the first.
An anarchic society is not a Utopia in which the inititation of violence
is impossible. Rather, it is a society which does not institutionalize the
initiation of force and in which there are means for dealing with aggression
justly when it does occur. The absence of government does not mean the
absence of violence. It simply means the absence of an official, legal,
institutionalized tool for its imposition. The basic thing that all utopian
theories have in common is that they can succeed only if they involve
utopian people. Anarchism does not make this unrealistic assumption about
human nature.
Anarchism is not a form of statism. Anarchists don't want to impose their
value system on anyone else.
Anarchism is not terrorism. The agent of the government - the cop who
wears a gun to scare you into obeying him - is the terrorist. Governments
threaten to punish anyone who defies State power, and therefore the State
really amounts to an institution of terror.
It is an oft-overlooked point that a non-government justice system should
be judged not by whether it can deliver perfection (which no system can) but
by whether it can do better than available alternatives, such as the system
we have now.

Here is what anarchists believe:

Government, which is a form of order arbitrarily imposed on society and
maintained through armed force, is an unnecessary evil.
All governments continually enlarge upon and extend their powers; under
government, the rights of individuals continually diminish.
All governments survive on theft and extortion, called taxation. All
governments force their decrees on the people, and command obedience under
threat of punishment.
The principle of government, which is force, is opposed to the free
exercise of our ability to think, act and cooperate.
Whenever government is established, it causes more harm than it
forestalls. Under the guise of protecting people from crime and violence,
governments not only do not eradicate random, individual crime, but they
institutionalize such varieties as censorship, taxation-theft and war.
Appeals to a government for a redress of grievances, even when acted
upon, only increase the supposed legitimacy of the government's behavior,
and add therefore to its amassed power.
The principal outrages of history have been committed by governments,
while every advancement of thought, every betterment in the human condition,
has come about through the practices of voluntary cooperation and individual
initiative.
No true reform is possible that leaves government intact.
Free people, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own
behavior, almost always cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and
helpfulness.
People are capable of voluntarily organizing themselves, and the social
order resulting from the voluntary interaction of individuals can meet any
and all social needs without any necessity for coercion.
Every person must have the right to make all decisions about his or her
own life. All moralistic meddling in the private affairs of freely-acting
persons is unjustified. Behavior which does not affect uninvolved persons is
nobody's business but the participants'.
We are not bound by constitutions or agreements made by our ancestors.
Any constitution, contract, or agreement that purports to bind unborn
generations - or in fact anyone other than the actual parties to it - is a
despicable falsehood and a presumptuous fraud. We are free agents liable
only for such as we ourselves undertake.

There are two kinds of anarchist: principled and non-principled. The

critics almost always argue only against the non-principled variety. They
seem unable to perceive the principled kind.
The principled anarchist bases his political beliefs on underlying
ethical principles. The non-principled anarchist is merely somebody who
hates government, not on the basis of ethical principle, but usually merely
as a result of his perception of its inevitable tyranny. The problem with
non-principled anarchy (or any other non-principled belief) is that he who
holds it can be swindled into accepting a disguised form (such as non-
governmental tyranny) of what he opposes, because he does not have a
principled standard of judgment by which to evaluate it.

The account of human history is almost invariably governmental, leaving

little to suggest that a viable anarchist society is possible. But the fact
that an anarchist society has never existed does not mean that one cannot
exist or should not exist.
The fact that no one had ever sailed around the world - because of the
acceptance of the erroneous "flat-earth" belief - does not mean that
Magellan could not or should not have done so.
What we have today that enables the existence of an anarchist society,
for the first time in history, is the Objectivist Ethics. Using this new
truth, we can accomplish things that have never been done before.

* A Covenant for a Union of Sovereign Americans

From CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE by H. D. Thoreau:
"I heartily accept the motto, - 'That government is best which governs
least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
believe, - 'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men
are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will
have."

An animal is an animal by nature. It has no choice in the matter. But a

human being must, by nature, CHOOSE to be human. The necessity of choice
arises from the structure of his cognitive apparatus. A part of this choice
is, as an individual, to choose to think - and, as a member of a society, to
choose to live by the non-aggression principle.
We are social beings who can realize our humanity fully only in the
context of community. But the culture of a community, which depends on the
ethos of each individual within the community, can inspire the best in human
beings or the worst. The culture can value - or denigrate - freedom, and
thus either promote or retard its members' capability to realize their
humanity. Thus it is that a person cannot claim to be fully human unless he
acts from the base of non-coercion.
The Objectivist stand is quite clear:
"The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may
INITIATE the use of physical force against others. No man - or group or
society or government - has the right to assume the role of a criminal and
initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man." (From "The
Objectivist Ethics," in THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS.)
It is the initiation of force that distinguishes criminal from non-
criminal behavior, and it is the acceptance or rejection of the non-
aggression principle that distinguishes a civilized human being from a
savage; a libertarian from a statist.

All civilized people, whether they are of the Anarchist persuasion or of

the Minarchist view of social organization, hold to the same basic ethical
principle - the libertarian ethic of non-aggression:

John Hospers: "Libertarianism...is a philosophy of personal liberty - the

liberty of each person to live according to his own choices, provided that
he does not attempt to coerce others and thus prevent them from living
according to their choices."

Ayn Rand: "Both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists
for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade."
 Robert LeFevre: "I will contend that each individual may rightfully do as
he pleases with his own person and his own property without asking
permission from anyone, and so long as he confines his actions to his own
person or property he cannot be morally challenged. What may he do morally
with the person or property belonging to another? Absolutely nothing."

David Boaz: "Libertarians believe the role of government is not to impose

a particular morality but to establish a framework of rules that will
guarantee each individual the freedom to pursue his own good in his own way,
so long as he does not infringe the freedom of others."

Karl Hess: "Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute
owner of his life, to use and dispose of as he sees fit; that all man's
social actions should be voluntary; and that respect for every other man's
similar and equal ownership of life, and by extension, the property and
fruits of that life, is the ethical basis of a humane and open society."

Many Anarchists believe that no explicitly codified statement of the

libertarian principle is necessary, and that no formal system of social
organization is desirable to ensure its implementation.
The Minarchists believe that an explicit statement is very much necessary
(in the form of a constitution) and that society would be impossible without
the existence of a formally-structured social organization possessed of the
monopolistic power and authority to enforce the terms of this constitution.
I disagree somewhat with both positions.
I believe that an explicit and formally accepted statement of the basic
ethical principle is very much necessary.

There is a standard of conduct that must be observed if man is to

flourish in a social context. In order that the members of a society adhere
to this standard, there must exist an explicit and formally accepted
statement of its underlying ethical principles. Anarchists err in
considering Rights, Justice, and other ethical concepts to be market
phenomena. They are NOT market phenomena, although their implementations
can, and should be, market procedures. The ethical concepts denote facts of
reality and therefore cannot be arbitrarily decreed but must be carefully
and accurately identified. Robert Bidinotto pointed out precisely the
mistake underlying the common anarchist position: "anarchists sincerely
believe that they are merely advocating competition in the PROTECTION of
rights. In fact, what their position would necessitate is competition in
DEFINING what rights ARE." Unfortunately, Bidinotto's colleagues, who accept
his argument and reject the idea of rights as defined by the marketplace,
simply turn the coin over and embrace the equally-mistaken idea of rights as
defined by government. I propose the alternative of rights being defined in
principle - according to reason.
Both the statist thesis and the competing-governments thesis are based on
the same premise: that rights are created by society. In the first case by
the government, and in the second by the market. Both these theories of
rights are manifestations of what Rand identified as the social school of
ethics: "The clash between the two dominant schools of ethics, the mystical
and the social, is only a clash between personal subjectivism and social
subjectivism: one substitutes the supernatural for the objective, the other
substitutes the collective for the objective. Both are savagely united
against the introduction of objectivity into the realm of ethics."
(Objectivist Newsletter Feb65)
Rights are like the elements in the Periodic Table. The structure of that
Table results from acts of scrupulous cognitive endeavor. It does not result
from a multiplicity of acts of economic intercourse, nor from the decrees of
a governing congress, no matter how many people it may claim to represent.
See Chapter 5 for a further discussion of rights.
See reference

I am swayed also by Rand's contention that an explicitly held

conceptualization is infinitely more reliable, useful, and enduring than one
that is held in a merely implicit manner. Implicit knowledge is not a
substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which you cannot identify, but
merely sense implicitly, are not in your control. You cannot tell what they
depend on or require, or what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep
them. You can lose them by means of other implications, without knowing what
it is that you are losing or why. And you cannot teach them to your
children!
While a culture results from the actions of individuals, it has its own
reality as an intellectual context within which individuals make choices.
Every society contains a network of values, beliefs, and assumptions, not
all of which are named explicitly but which nonetheless are part of each
individual's environment. Ideas that are not identified overtly but are held
and conveyed tacitly are difficult to question - precisely because they are
absorbed by a process that largely bypasses the conscious mind. Most people
possesses what might be called a cultural unconscious - a set of implicit
beliefs about reality, human beings, good and evil - that reflect the
knowledge, understanding, and values prevalent in a historical time and
place. Unless these implicit beliefs are brought to the forefront of the
mind and explicitly identified, they can be extremely difficult to change,
and they cannot be institutionalized.

Other scholars also realize the need for a formal statement of

principles:

Rose Wilder Lane: "I think there is a natural necessity for a civil law,
a code, explicitly stated, written and known; an impersonal thing, existing
outside all men, as a point of reference to which any man can refer and
appeal. Not any form of control, for each individual controls himself; but a
law, acting as a nonhuman third party in relationships between living
persons; an impersonal witness to contracts, a registrar of promises and
deeds of ownership and transfers of ownership of property; a not-living
standard existing in visible form, by which man's acts can be judged and to
which men's minds can cling."

Ayn Rand: "Even a society whose every member were fully rational and
faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need
of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that
necessitates the establishment of a government."

Robert James Bidinotto: "In any society, human life and well-being
mandate that there be a set of objective procedures to distinguish
aggression from self-defense, and some way of imposing the final verdicts
upon the victimizers on behalf of the victims."

Joel Myklebust: "'The market will handle it' amounts to little more than
a disguised form of majority rule. That the identification of justice is not
a market function seems clear from the fact that, given a demand, the market
will supply murder, theft, and arson, in addition to protection. It will not
determine right and wrong, it only reacts to supply and demand. Any attempt
to deal with complex problems of right without recourse to basic ethical
principles is hopeless."
 Murray Rothbard: "In my view, the entire libertarian system includes: not
only the abolition of the State, BUT ALSO the general adoption of a
libertarian law code."

John Hospers: "They (private protection agencies) should be able to

enforce only THE LAW OF THE LAND... - a body of law already enacted, and
known in advance, so that one would forsee the consequences of any
violation. In other words, laws should...be ENACTED by the state, even
though the ENFORCEMENT of them might be left to private agencies."

Brick Pillow: "I agree with you that people should solve their own
problems....But at some point, if there isn't a peaceful procedure to settle
the dispute, it will be settled without being peaceful, and quite possibly
the violent solution will not be a just solution. What I envision is
that...when the antagonist refuses to yield, decent folks will need an
authority that they can turn to....Of course, this presents the next level
of perplexing problem: What prevents our pristine Justice League of America
from exceeding its mandate, from becoming as evil as the government it
replaces?"

Nicholas Raeder: "It makes no difference whether the consumers desire

automobiles, frozen foods, heroin, murder or censorship; if allowed to do
so, the market will provide them. The market is not a slave to the good of
the individual, and it does not dispense justice. The market follows desire.
It will act rationally in fulfilling desires, but it is the desires of the
consumers that it follows.... Neither human nature, rights, justice nor
rationality are market phenomena. The actions of the market, as well as the
actions of every individual within the association, must be in adherence to
a certain standard of conduct in order to make justice and the exercise and
protection of human rights possible."

These are indeed powerful arguments for a need to establish some code of
basic principles, existing in visible form, codified and publicly known - a
code that would produce a set of instructions for civilized life and
indicate the direction toward which the men and women of good will should
choose to strive.
Given that volition is a first cause, man must choose to invest human
relationships with causality. Socially, the need for tranquillity requires
that man impose lawfulness - reliability - upon the apparent chaos of human
relationships. He requires an ethics of non-contradiction - the knowledge
that his rights will be protected from violations. A contract is one way in
which man imposes order on the apparently chaotic in that if the parties can
rely on each other, they can plan long-range. They can foretell otherwise
unknown futures.

The problem is one of providing a social organization that can

effectively combat aggression and ensure the rights of the people, but which
will not itself be able to encroach upon non-aggressive citizens. An
arrangement of such a nature that a libertarian anarchist would have the
OPTION of ignoring it completely, whilst de facto still living within its
jurisdiction. It would have to assert no influence over, nor contact with,
his life at all - so long as his behavior was non-aggressive.
What we must strive for is an arrangement wherein the necessary power (to
combat aggression) is so balanced against other, independently existing,
power (to prevent encroachment) that the probability of its misuse becomes
as small as it can be got. Can this be done by means of a government? Either
a constitutionally "limited" government, or several government-like,
competing defense agencies? I think not.
When I examine the idea of government and contemplate the nature of
governments as they have existed and do exist in the world, I see their
fundamental distinguishing characteristic to be "the strongest group of
aggressors in a given area at a given time." Herein lies my objection to
both the Minarchist proposal for a government limited by a constitution, and
the Anarchist proposal for competing defense agencies. In fact, there is no
limit to the power of a gun except another gun. A constitution cannot limit
the power of an armed group that chooses to ignore it. A "limited"
government would in fact be limited only if its members chose to adhere to
the constitution - and as we Americans have seen very well, this is no real
limit at all. LeFevre observed that "experience over the past ten thousand
years reveals clearly that governments are never limited." I think it
inevitable that any "limited" government would eventually become a tyranny.
I am strongly opposed to any social organization that has a monopolistic
power to compel - no matter what formal documentary restraints may be placed
on such an organization. There is a good deal more promise in the Anarchist
"competing defense agencies" scheme, but it too is open to such a
degeneration if one (or a consortium) of the defense agencies should become
"the strongest group." The Anarchist proposal is further flawed by the fact
that political power rests on an exclusive authority over the military and
police. (Exclusivity is mandated by certain "either-or" issues such as
whether or not a man - or merchandise -will be allowed to cross a border;
whether or not a given behavior is illegal.) Because this authority is
exclusive, two independent governments cannot permanently share a single
geographical jurisdiction.

There is a fundamental structural flaw in the American Constitution: the

principles upon which the government of the United States was based, as well
as the plan for the construction and operation of the government were
contained in the same document. To allow for the possibility of future
improvements there was a provision placed in the document allowing it to be
amended. This provision left the basic principles upon which the government
was founded also open to alteration.
Obviously the PURPOSE of governance should not be changeable, but on the
other hand, the MEANS used to fulfill this purpose must be changeable so as
to take advantage of new, more efficient technology and to correct errors.
When Jefferson prescribed a revolution every few decades, he spoke not
only politically but also about the need to remain flexible, ready to adapt
to changing circumstances - to innovate at need, while at the same time
staying true to those values we hold unchanging and precious.
To permanently fix the purpose of governance, it is necessary to state
the purpose in a binding form that cannot be altered or eliminated short of
revolution. Once this binding form is enacted, and the purpose of governance
thereby fixed, one can turn to constructing an agency to carry out this
purpose. But these two things, Purpose and Agency, should be explicitly
recognized as two separate phenomena. Thus governance should have two
foundation stones, rather than one: a fixed and immutable statement of
purpose - and an amendable implementation of that purpose. This "statement
of purpose" could then serve as a standard against which to judge the "means
of implementation." As things are now in America, there is no principled
standard against which to judge Amendments made to the Constitution, or the
practices by which the Constitution is implemented.
I believe the best, and safest, arrangement would be a modification and
linking of BOTH the Anarchist and Minarchist ideas into a scheme that would
place that ultimate power DIRECTLY into the hands of the individual members
of society. I believe, with Jefferson, that there is "no safe depository of
the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves." I am NOT,
however, an advocate of majority rule. I do not mean "a majority of voters,"
I mean each and every citizen.
It is claimed that a constitution limits a government. What is it that
gives a constitution its power? Nothing but the behavior of the people who
have chosen to abide by its specifications. A statement of authority,
according to which a country is governed (such as our Constitution), is only
as valid - as faithfully enforced - as the fidelity of those individuals who
implement it. Thus the Constitution of the USA is implemented only to the
extent of the honesty, competence and reliability of those who have taken
the oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States
against all enemies, foreign and domestic." The foundation of our
government, in its actual implementation, lies in the behavior of those
individuals who have taken this oath.
The ultimate democracy would be one in which all adult citizens have
taken such an oath, in just the same way as physicians take the Hippocratic
Oath. Carl Sagan approached this view when he lamented, "I wish that the
Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights rather than to the flag and the nation." I would go a step further
and advocate a confirmation ceremony such as the Bar Mitzvah, passed through
by each person as he or she becomes a fully-adult participating citizen of
the society. A ceremony in which an oath of fidelity would be taken, NOT to
an institution or to a document, but to a clear and explicitly stated set of
ethical principles. An oath expressed in the form of a contract between the
individual and the community in which he lives; a formal social statement
that would specify a libertarian restraint on individual behavior; a
statement making explicit the principle of non-aggression as the foundation
of social organization and interconnecting the individual to the
organizational structure of society in such a manner as to commit him to
support, uphold and manifest this ethical principle in his social
relationships; an oath that would make the individual consciously aware of
his responsibility to ensure the perpetuation of a free society. This oath
would be a Covenant formally establishing the principled basis of
relationships among individuals, rather than a Constitution setting up a
potentially dangerous coercive institution. It would establish a society
based, not on command and coercion, but on consent and contract.
I envision the Covenant as a "statement of purpose." It would state
ethical principles, but not deal with the specific implementation of those
principles. The Covenant would be an absolute, not open to amendment, but
any accompanying Articles of Implementation would be amendable so as to
accomodate technological and social changes in the culture. Thus there might
be several institutions (defense agencies among them) established for the
implementation of the principles, but each agency, as an organized
institution, would be bound by the Articles of Implementation. And each
agent, as an individual citizen, would be bound by the principles of the
Covenant.
The next step in this line of endeavor is, of course, to formulate such a
covenant. Here there are two basic problems. One is to conceive the
structure of a libertarian society and embody its principles in a specific
statement - the other is to establish a transition procedure that would
carry us from the presently existing state of affairs into that libertarian
society.
A procedure should be established whereby the new society can grow from a
small kernel. My suggestion is to establish an association similar to
something like the Black Muslims or the Quakers. This would be an inward-
directed society that withdraws as much as possible from participation in
the coercive world and in which each member lives as much as possible in
accordance with the ethical principles of the Covenant. I propose the name
"Union of Sovereign Americans" as a label for this association.
I envision the long-term goals of The Union of Sovereign Americans as
being the perpetuation of the libertarian ethic, being the seed of a new
society, (either to replace the present one if it should collapse, or
perhaps growing through time to the extent that it would extinct the present
one) and being a social group in which people of good will could find
companionship.
To begin the Union of Sovereign Americans there must exist a Covenant and
some guidelines (Articles of Implementation) on how to live one's personal
life in accord with the principles of the Covenant.

"THE GALLATIN DIVERGENCE" by L. Neil Smith (Ballantine book #30383)

contains a covenant, (fictionally proposed by Albert Gallatin at the time of
the Whiskey Rebellion and resulting in a complete alteration of the course
of history). This covenant has been extracted from the book and widely
circulated with a provision for registry of all signatories. It has been
signed by dozens, if not hundreds, of people. But I observe something of
critical importance regarding this covenant: in Smith's fictional account,
the signing of the covenant always resulted in a profound change in the life
of the signatory, because the people in Smith's story actually lived their
lives according to their professed principles. However, in the real world of
the present time, I am not aware that the behavior of any person has been
changed in any way as a result of having signed Smith's covenant. The
signatories simply continue their previous lives - working to support
government (and in some cases working FOR government) - with no causal
connection between their stated principles and their daily behavior. This is
not the fault of Smith's covenant, and I am not criticizing that covenant. I
criticize the lack of integrity in the lives of modern-day people. This same
lack of integrity is seen in Randites (who explicitly disapprove of
Shrugging), and in many of those who take the non-aggression oath of the
Libertarian Party: "I certify that I do not believe in or advocate the
initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals."
These people grumble about the condition of the society they live in, but
few of them choose to take the only effective path open to them for societal
change: the transformation of their own lives.
So what can be said of any kind of covenant or oath that requires no more
of a signatory than a mere verbal assertion? The world is filled with
hypocrites! Is a man who works as a drug-law enforcer really an advocate IN
PRACTICE of personal freedom and moral self-responsibility? (Could a priest
be a practicing abortionist?) Not hardly. How can you claim to be one of us
when you serve our enemies more than you serve our cause? Such a person
would not be a suitable member of The Union of Sovereign Americans. One must
not only assert fidelity, but also practice fidelity. One must establish a
lifestyle suitable to the set of ideas he professes. My point is that no
oath of allegience to any principle would preclude people for whom there is
no connection between principle and practice (This is why the American
Constitution has been betrayed over the course of two centuries). I believe
that to be successful the Union of Sovereign Americans must involve a whole
way of life - not just an oath. It must involve the learning of a set of
ideas and the practiced application of those ideas in one's life. It must
include not just an embracing of the libertarian ethic, but a resolve to
combat - or at least withdraw support from - the coercive aspects of the
society we live in.
My own belief is that a good place to begin would be with the act of
Shrugging that Rand proposed. This would be a way to separate those who
merely pay lip service to freedom while continuing to support the status
quo, from those who are really serious in their intention to devote their
lives to the practice of freedom.

This statement of principles might be a good starting place for the

formulation of the Covenant:
"Each individual is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others.
Each has the right to use and dispose of his own life and his own property
as he sees fit. The only real crimes are those activities which separate
people from their rightfully achieved values without their voluntary
consent. The only proper use of force is in response to coercion. I will
never initiate the use of force or fraudulent dishonesty, I will never
tolerate the initiation of force by other people, and I will recognize the
desirability of helping to keep my community free from coercion by assisting
other people in preventing coercion and in defending the right of each
individual to resist coercion. I will condemn any person or association
acting to contravene this principle and will have no dealings with them, and
upon all occasions treat them with the contempt they deserve."

It has been almost 30 years since I Shrugged in 1965, and after all those
years of watching the Libertarian Party and the various new country/enclave
projects, I am convinced that there is no seed population within the present
culture of America that can give rise to the scheme I envision. The process
of cultural value-deprivation has gone on too far for there to be any
significant number of people willing to drastically alter their lifestyles
to accomodate "mere philosophical principle." They are so immersed in
fantasies that they are blind to the existence of any rational morality and
ethics.
Thus, I do not know what to propose as a practical implementation of the
ideas I have presented. I don't see any real present use for them, but have
written them up and will circulate them in the hope that they will be
preserved for some future generation to whom they might have some functional
significance. All I hope to accomplish is to create an atmosphere within
which the times might have the possibility of change.

"Libertarians have one thing going for them that others lack: they are in
tune with reality. Human beings are all that really count and libertarians
know that. A man and his wife drinking coffee at the kitchen table, an old
woman warming herself by the fire, a child playing in the mud: these are the
only reasons governments should exist. All the giant industries and
superhighways, all the wonderful technology and fabulous medical knowledge,
everything that seems to stand so loftily above us is only there to serve
these people and their desires. One of these days, people are going to
understand what is real and what is illusion and that is the day when
anarchy will triumph." ... Allen Thornton
"From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not
then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They
will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget
themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of
uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore,
which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on
us long, will be made heavier and heavier, 'til our rights shall revive or
expire in a convulsion." ... Thomas Jefferson

Men, women, of every nation, every race and condition: how much longer
are you going to let yourselves be used? When are you going to tell your
rulers, "Enough!" and claim the right to live your own lives? If you
continually cling to government you are ensuring your own doom. The thing
you worship is destroying itself, and when it is gone you will perish
because you will not know how to live without it.
 Chapter 9
RELIGION

* Christianity vs Objectivism
I wonder if you realize just how profoundly antagonistic are Christianity
and Objectivism. I will make a brief comparison to exemplify this.
In morality, Christianity holds that one of the major sins is Pride
(remember that that was a main cause of the expulsion of Lucifer). On the
contrary, Objectivism holds Pride as one of its cardinal virtues (PSE,
chapter 12).
In ethics, Christianity regards self-sacrifice as a primary virtue.
Objectivism holds self-sacrifice to be an abomination and self-interest to
be a primary virtue (VOS, chapter 1).
From Augustine's "Confessions": After denouncing all the pleasures of
the body, he continues with a comment on the mind: "To this is added another
form of temptation, more manifoldly dangerous. For besides the
concupiscience of the flesh which consists in the delight of all senses and
pleasures, the soul has, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain
and curious desire, veiled under the title of knowledge and learning, the
seat whereof being in the appetite of knowledge, and sight being the sense
chiefly used for attaining knowledge, it is in divine language called 'The
lust of the eyes.'"
Contrast this with part of the description of John Galt:
"The first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of
his eyes - he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and
its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a
superlative value to himself and to the world - to himself for his ability
to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to
her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure
consciousness." (AS Part 3, chapter 1)
Faith is the acceptance of an idea as true in the absence of reason or in
defiance of objective reason to the contrary. It is not the acceptance of an
idea on the basis of incorrect reasons, it is the belief that reasons are
unnecessary. In defense of faith, Tertullian wrote:
"It is believable because it is absurd. It is certain because it is
impossible."
He is joined by Augustine who wrote: "One must first BELIEVE, that one
may then know."
Christianity has traditionally been so hostile to freedom of thought that
the term "free-thinker" became synonymous with "atheist." Christ on
libertarianism: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign
over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." Luke 19:27
Faith is the willful abdication of one's consciousness, and it is THIS
act that Objectivism holds to be the most fundamental sin that a man can
commit.(PSE chapter 12)
There is no common ground between Christianity and Objectivism. They are
diametrically opposed to one another.

* Christianity vs the Lightning Rod

Of all the fatal manifestations of nature, the one which is most clearly
an overwhelming attack by a divine being against man is the lightning bolt.
And yet, if the lightning stroke is indeed the wrathful weapon of a
supernatural being, there are some difficult-to-explain consequences.
 As it happens, high objects are more frequently struck by lightning than
are low objects. As it also happens, the highest man-made object in the
small European town of early modern times was the steeple of the village
church. It followed, embarrassingly enough, that the most frequent target of
the lightning bolt, then, was the church itself. Over a 33-year period in
18th-century Germany, no fewer than 400 church towers were damaged by
lightning. What's more, since church bells were often rung during
thunderstorms in an attempt to avert the wrath of the Lord, the bell ringers
were in unusual danger and in that same period, 120 of them were killed.
You will recall, in this context, the famous kite-flying experiment in
which Ben Franklin demonstrated that lightning is nothing more than a big
dose of electricity. Franklin had noted that an electrical discharge takes
place more readily and quietly through a fine point than through a blunt
projection. If a needle were attached to a Leyden jar, the charge leaked
quietly through the needle point so readily that the jar could never be
charged at all. Well, then - If a sharp metal rod were placed at the top of
a structure and if it were properly grounded, any electric charge
accumulating near the structure during a thunderstorm would be quietly
discharged and the chances of its building up to the catastrophic loosing of
a lightning bolt would be greatly diminished.
Franklin advanced the notion of this "lightning rod" in 1753. The notion
was so simple, the principle so clear, the investment in time and material
so small, the nature of the possible relief so great, that lightning rods
began to rise immediately over buildings throughout the world. And it
worked! Where the lightning rods rose, the lightning bolt ceased. For the
first time in the history of mankind, one of the scourges of the Universe
had been beaten, not by magic and spells and prayer, but by science - by an
understanding of the laws of nature and by intelligent cooperation with
them.
There was an embarrassed reluctance about putting up lightning rods on
churches. It seemed to betray a lack of confidence in God. But it soon
became all too noticeable to everyone that the town church, unprotected by
lightning rods, was hit, while the town brothel, if protected by lightning
rods, was not.
Every lightning rod on a church is evidence of the victory of science and
of the surrender of religion - and no one can be so blind as not to see that
evidence. Even though they may choose to be so blind as to deny it.

* Christianity vs Women and Sex

Under Christianity, women lost all legal status and all right to property
(rights they had firmly held in the preceeding Roman society). All this was
justified by the Christians on the grounds that Eve had been the cause of
Adam's downfall.
Some attitudes toward sex, as expressed by several of the founders of
institutionalized Christianity:
Saint Paul: "It is good for man not to touch a woman. But if they do not
have self-control let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn."
Saint John: "Among all savage beasts, none is found so harmful as woman."
Tertullian describes woman as "a temple built over a sewer."
Clement of Alexandria: "It is disgraceful to love another man's wife at
all - or one's own too much. He who too ardently loves his own wife is an
adulterer."
The Compendia of Catholic Moral Theology devotes 44 pages to a
description of all possible forms of sin. 32 of these pages are devoted
specifically to sexual sin. Of all the ways you can sin, 73 percent of them
are sexual!
For the official Christian view of homosexuality, see Leviticus 20:13
Make no mistake about it, the Christian religion has a profound and
passionate hatred of sex.

* Interview with God

When I found God, He was sitting in a remote corner of the universe,
trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the Grand Design. "I am moving
to another universe," He said, "because too many Christians have moved into
this neighborhood."
Asked if he was angry, God said: "Wouldn't you be if something you made
didn't work? I made man to think, to use his reason, his thought, his logic,
to be free, to be just, to create beauty, to love truth, to achieve, to be
joyous. My eagles soar, don't they? My fish swim don't they? I made man to
walk in joy and triumph. My greatest achievement. My masterpiece. And what
does man do? He fears. He crawls. He has faith. He ignores reality. He
evades action."
"I gave him vision. I gave him principled imagination. I gave him
courage. I gave him Mind that he might experience the joy of insight. I gave
him my love of Truth. What does he do? He seeks masters and saviors."
"This is not what I wanted at all. I am going to try it again in the next
universe. Maybe there things will work out better."
Are you planning any changes in the next universe, God?
"Yes, I am. No religion. No government. No Church nor State to oppress
and intimidate my creation."
One last question God, if you will?
"Yes?"
Do you feel bad about leaving anything behind?
"Yes, I do...." (A tear came to God's eye. The first tear in a billion
years. His sorrow made me tremble. I waited for Him to speak.)
"I will miss the things most dear to me.... Conscience in the service of
Justice, and Genius in the service of Truth."
"I will miss the admiration and pride I felt when my creation perceived
Justice and asserted his knowledge of it."
"I will miss that immortal light of Genius, the power and glory of Man,
whose radiant glow gave me warmth and comfort on cold nights."
"I am just too damn disappointed to listen to any more foolish prayers."

* Robert Ingersoll on Religion

There may be a God who will make us happy in another world. If he does,
it will be more than he has accomplished in this.
I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that
promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders.
I had rather think of those I have loved and lost, as having returned to
earth, as having become a part of the elemental wealth of the world, I would
rather think of them as unconscious dust, I would rather dream of them as
gurgling in the streams, floating in the clouds, bursting in the foam of
light upon the shores of worlds. I would rather think of them as lost
visions of a forgotten night, than to have the faintest fear that their
naked souls have been clutched by a Christian god.
For thousands of years men have been writing the real Bible, and it is
being written from day to day, and it will never be finished while man has
life. All the facts that we know, all the truly recorded events, all the
discoveries and inventions, all the wonderful machines whose wheels and
levers seem to think, all the poems, crystals from the brain, flowers from
the heart, all the songs of love and joy, of smiles and tears, the great
dramas in Imagination's world, the wondrous paintings, miracles of form and
color, of light and shade, the marvelous marbles that seem to live and
breathe, the secrets told by rock and star, by dust and flower, by rain and
snow, by frost and flame, by winding stream and desert sand, by mountain
range and billowed seas. All the wisdom that lengthens and enobles life -
all that avoids or cures disease, or conquers pain - all just and perfect
laws and rules that guide and shape our lives, all thoughts that feed the
flames of love, the music that transfigures, enraptures and enthralls, the
victories of heart and brain, the miracles that hands have wrought, the deft
and cunning hands of those who worked for wife and child, the histories of
noble deeds, of brave and useful men, of faithful loving wives, of
quenchless mother love, of conflicts for the right, of sufferings for the
truth, of all the best that all the men and women of the world have said,
and thought and done through all the years. These treasures of the heart and
brain - these are the Sacred Scriptures of the human race.
It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, not to those
who enslave men by violence, it is to him who understands the world, not to
those who disfigure it, that we owe our reverence.
Wherever these human beings may be who have shared our love, whatever
landscape soothes their soul, whatever breeze cools their brow, their
country is our country too. Each square foot of land occupied by a man of
good will is part of our country.
Christ never wrote a solitary word. It has always seemed to me that a
being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to
mankind....
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament he would
be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he
would be insane. [Heinlein: "When religion makes you act like a fool, it is
a wrong religion."]
Pious ignorance always regards intelligence as a kind of blasphemy.
If we are ever judged at all it will be by our actions, and not by our
beliefs. If Christ was good enough to die for me, he certainly will not be
bad enough to damn me for honestly failing to believe in his divinity. Think
of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his
praise!
[Brick Pillow: "I will live by what I see and reason, not for a pie-in-
the-sky possibility of a god's existence and His liking me enough to confer
immortality on me for kissing His ass."]
[During the Dark Ages] Faith reigned with scarcely a rebellious
subject... She built cathedrals for God and dungeons for men. She peopled
the clouds with angels and the earth with slaves.
When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and
hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the
children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The day of Science
dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of today.
The building in which they were assembled took fire and many of these men
and women perished in the flames. A French priest called this horror an act
of God. Is it not strange that Christians speak of their God as an assassin?
This Deity says, "pray for those that despitefully use you; love your
enemies, but I will eternally damn mine." It seems to me that even gods
should practice what they preach.
[The Christians] are taught as a part of their creed to despise the
descendants of the only people with whom God is ever said to have had any
conversation whatever.

Thomas Jefferson referred to the clergy as "mountebanks calling

themselves the priests of Jesus," and making it their business in life to
confuse mankind with their abracadabra. He compared them to cuttlefish,
having the "faculty of shedding darkness... thro' the element in which they
move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there
they will skulk."

Thomas Paine: "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish
church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church,
not by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."

* Religious Roots of Evil

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He
personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the
Christian doctrine, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the
sins of the non-ideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was
sacrificied for men who are vicious. Here is the essense of the notion of
sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. Christians do not
know how to love their god except by crucifying man.
Jesus joined humanity in order to redeem it, and for this redemption to
take place, he HAD to be crucified, thus taking the sins of humanity onto
his own shoulders and expiating them. If that is so, then Judas, Pontius
Pilate and other villains had essential parts to play in this redemption,
and had they refused those parts, all of humanity would still be laboring
under original sin. That should make those men heroes, shouldn't it?

Saint Basil (AD 360): "The bread which you do not use is the bread of the
hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is that of one who is naked;
the shoes you do not wear are those of one who is barefoot; the acts of
charity you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit."
Saint Ambrose (AD 360): "You are not making a gift of your possessions to
the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his."
Thus we see that in the Christian belief, anyone who possesses property
needed by another must surrender it or be guilty of theft.
Pope Paul VI (AD 1973): "True justice recognizes that all men are in
substance equal. The littler, the poorer, the more suffering, the more
defenseless, even the lower a man has fallen, the more he deserves to be
assisted, raised up, cared for, and honored."
Marshall Cohen, Professor of Philosophy, CUNY: "Once an adequate social
minimum has been reached, justice requires the elimination of many economic
and social inequalities, even if their elimination inhibits a further
raising of the minimum."
Jan Tinbergen, first Nobel laureate in Economics: "A modest first step
might be a special tax on persons with high academic scores."
An Ayn Rand villain: "The men of ability? I do not care what or if they
are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the
incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take
pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the
needy is concerned."
Ayn Rand's analysis of the above attitude: "What passkey admits you to
the religiously moral elite? The passkey is lack of value. Whatever the
value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who
don't lack it. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral they
claim; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral
right."

* Attila and the Witch Doctor

The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of
tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must
maintain obedient faith in a cognitive authority, then you are not your own
intellectual master; in such a case you cannot guide your behavior by your
own judgment either but must be submissive in action as well. This is the
reason why, historically, faith and force are always corollaries; each
requires the other.
 To say that any man or human phenomenon can be perfect is to blaspheme
God, for to allow any value or significance to humanity is to derogate by
just that amount from the majesty, perfection, and supreme value of God.
Thus, no matter how good a man is, in the eyes of a Christian he is not as
good as he ought to be. If a man is sinful, the fault is his - but if he is
virtuous, the credit belongs to God. Similarly, if an investor loses his
money on dry holes, the loss is his - but if he hits a gusher, his profits
should rightfully be taken by taxes.
Nietzsche is correct in stating that Christianity fears, resents, and
attacks strength. But it is not Nietzsche's notion of strength - brute
strength, unleashed passion - that Christianity opposes. It is intellectual
strength, the strength of the sovereign, independent, rational mind that all
mystics oppose. It is no accident that in this opposition to reason,
Christianity and Nietzsche are allies. The Witch-Doctors and the Attilas
both hate the mind that yields to neither faith nor force.
Just as a child needs its parents, so does an immature adult need his
god. Freedom is always hard to bear, and the weight of self-responsibility
can only be carried after a certain level of intellectual (philosophical)
sophistication has been attained.

* Basic Principles of Objectivism - Nathaniel Branden - from Lecture #4

Let us examine the concept of god and observe some of its striking
implications for man's consciousness.
To begin with, those who profess to believe in god are unable to identify
or communicate intelligibly what it is that they believe in. What is the
nature, the identity of god? What is the meaning of the concept? "God is
'something'" they say, "only I don't know what it is." They claim to believe
in it nevertheless. No philosophy, theology or religion has ever given a
rationally intelligible definition or even description of the nature of god,
or any intelligible content to the concept god. Observe that I said
"intelligible." A great many descriptions have been offered and a great many
attributes have been ascribed to god but they are of a kind that represent a
negation and a mockery of man's consciousness as well as of everything known
to him in reason about the nature of reality.
For instance:
"God" claim the mystics, "is infinite." What does it mean to be infinite?
It means to possess no limits. To possess no specific determinite finite
number of attributes - no specific particular identifiable qualities. It
means to be nothing in particular. But to be nothing in particular is not to
be. To assert that an infinite being exists is to assert that something can
exist that possesses no identity - that is nothing in particular. To accept
the existence of a being who possesses no identity one has to reject the Law
of Identity. But to reject the Law of Identity is to reject the total of
one's grasp of reality. Thus the concept of an infinite god is the
destruction of man's concept of existence, of being.
"God" claim the mystics, "is pure spirit" or "pure consciousness." What
do they mean by spirit? Well, in rational terms the concept spirit is
intelligible and simply means man's consciousness. Consciousness, in
rational terms, means the faculty of awareness possessed by a specific
material living entity. But this is not what the mystics mean. By "pure
spirit" they mean a non-material entity. And by "pure consciousness" they
mean a faculty without any entity to which it belongs. What is a non-
material entity? The mystics have no identification for it and no
definition. No concept except the negation of man's concepts. Non-material
means simply "non-anything you know." Spirit, in the mystics' terms, is not
something specific or identifiable. Its nature is precisely that it cannot
be identified. It is not to be grasped by man. It is not merely different
from matter, it is the metaphysical opposite of matter. It is that which
matter is not. To grasp it you must reject everything which you do grasp and
replace it with the concept of "that which is not what I grasp." In terms of
man's consciousness, to grasp means to understand, to identify. The
definition of spirit offered by the mystics is in effect "that which is not
to be identified by man." The same epistemological devastation is performed
by the mystics' concept of pure consciousness. Man's concept of
consciousness is a faculty belonging to a specific being who possesses
specific means of awareness such as sense organs, nerves, a brain - which
make it possible for him to be aware of reality in the form of sensations,
perceptions, conceptions. But the mystics' concept of pure consciousness is
a faculty without an entity. A faculty that exists by itself and is
conscious without any specific means of awareness. An action without an
entity that acts. The action of an unlimited entity - unlimited by any
specific means. This is not only the destruction of the Law of Identity but
also the acceptance of the one epistemological method that destroys a
rational consciousness: the dropping of context. Logic, man's means of
cognition, requires the preservation of the full context of every concept
man forms. To accept the idea of a pure consciousness, man must drop the
context, the meaning, the root of consciousness as he knows it and replace
it with the idea of a consciousness which is "not what I know or mean or
grasp." Thus the doctrine of "god is pure consciousness" is the destruction
of the concept of consciousness.
"God" claim the mystics, "is omnipotent." What does omnipotent mean? It
means that god can do anything. Since the actions possible to an entity are
determined by the nature of the entity that acts, for god to be unrestricted
in action, he would have to be unrestricted in identity. And this would mean
that he possesses no identity. If god is omnipotent, not only does he
possess no identity but neither does anything else possess identity. Think
about that. God can do anything to any entity and he can make any entity do
anything, regardless of the entity's nature. Which is tantamount to saying
that the entity has no nature. Anything goes. Anything is possible. If
miracles can happen, reality is fluid, arbitrary, unpredictable, unknowable.
A miracle is the rationally impossible. If god is omnipotent, contradictions
have to be possible. This raises a number of questions the sole meaning of
which is a mockery of man's reason. For example: it has been asked "Can god
tie a knot that he cannot untie?" or "Can god create a mountain that he
cannot climb over?" The answer given by the mystics is "You must not try to
understand, you must believe." You must believe that that which is
inconceivable to you is possible. And that that which you do conceive of,
such as specific identifiable entities, can be negated and dissolved by
miracle at any moment. Thus the concept that god is omnipotent destroys the
Law of Identity and the Law of Causality.
"God" claim the mystics, "is omniscient." To be omniscient means to know
everything: past, present and future. Observe that the attribute of
omniscience is necessitated by the attribute of omnipotence. In order for
god to be able to do anything, he would have to know everything. But observe
also that the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience contradict each
other. In order for god to know everything, everything would have to be
fated and predetermined. But if everything were fated and predetermined, it
could not be changed. And if it could not be changed, this is a limitation
on god's potency and he is not omnipotent. Here again the mystic will tell
you "Don't think, don't examine, don't wonder, don't question - believe."
The concept of omniscience is the secret wish-fullfillment of every mystic.
To acquire one's knowledge, by a process of struggle and effort, is
abhorrent to the mystic. But to know everything, to know it instantaneously
and without effort, to know it causelessly without any specific means of
knowing it, or acquiring one's knowledge, or holding one's knowledge, this
is the mystics' passionate dream. The concept of omniscience is a
psychological monument to the mystics' hatred of effort.
 Finally, the mystics claim that "god is all-good." This means that he is
incapable of evil. This poses a number of problems. The first is, if he is
incapable of evil, how can he be omnipotent? Or consider another problem:
consider what is meant by the concept "Good." The concept of good or evil
can pertain only to a being who has the power of choice. Morality applies
only to entities who have a choice of action. If a robot were constructed
for a certain job which it would execute flawlessly because it was so
designed by a scientist, you would not call it a virtuous robot. You would
know that the robot has no power of choice and that it does only what it HAS
to do. But if god is incapable of choosing evil, then he is as amoral as
that robot. If god has no power to choose evil, if by nature he must always
and automatically choose the good, then he is outside the concept of
morality and his actions cannot be described as either good or evil. The
doctrine of "god is all good" creates an enormous problem which the mystics
have never been able to solve. It is known as the Problem of Evil, and it
consists of the question "If god is omnipotent and all-good, why does he
allow evil to exist in the world?" The philosopher Epicurus expressed this
problem thus:
"Either god would remove evil out of this world and cannot, or he can and
will not, or he has not the power nor will, or lastly he has both the power
and will. If he has the will and not the power, this shows weakness, which
is contrary to the nature of god. If he has the power and not the will, it
is malignity, and this is no less contrary to his nature. And if he is
neither able nor willing he is both impotent and malignant and consequently
cannot be god. And if he is both willing and able, which alone is consonant
with the nature of god, whence comes evil? Or why does he not prevent it?"
Theologians have been painfully aware of this problem and they have
offered a number of answers. The most common answer is that man's limited
intellect cannot grasp the mystery. That god in fact works for good
purposes, but the purposes are of a kind which man's reason cannot grasp.
So, if we see innocents slaughtered by the millions, and the seemingly evil
prosper, and if it seems to us that we are witnessing something evil, why it
is only an illusion - it is not evil. By god's standards, it is good. If you
see your loved ones being tortured and murdered, do not dare consider it
evil, do not dare pass any moral judgment; it merely seems evil from your
limited viewpoint. It serves a good end from god's viewpoint, which you
cannot grasp and must not question. If god wills it to be so, who are you to
call it evil or to protest? Thus the doctrine of "god is all good" is the
destruction of morality. Observe that the mystics' answer to all the
problems and contradictions in the concept of god is "Your mind cannot
conceive of it. If your mind cannot conceive of the irrational, the
contradictory, the senseless, the impossible, it is your mind that must take
the blame."
The ultimate brain-killer is the mystics' claim that god is unknowable.
Do not confuse the concept of unknowable with the concept of unknown.
Unknown merely means something not known at present or not known to you. But
unknowable means that which can never be known. That which by its nature
cannot be known. The most consistent theory of the mystics, pertaining to
god as the unknowable, is that of a theological school known as negative
theology. The negative theologians insist that one cannot possibly say what
god is because to ascribe any attributes to him is to limit him, and this
amounts to an impertinence. One must not say that god is finite - that would
limit him. One must not say that god is infinite - that would limit him
also, since it forbids him to be finite. One must not say that he is all-
good because that implies that he cannot be bad. One must not say that he is
good AND bad, because that forbids the possibility of his being exclusively
one. One must not say that he is omniscient, because that forbids the
possiblilty of his being fallible. One must not say that he is fallible
because that forbids the possiblilty of his being omniscient.
 Well, here in this theory you can observe the full, open and explicit
meaning and purpose of the mystics' advocacy of faith in god: the hatred of
man's mind and the desire to destroy it. To destroy all the cardinal
concepts of man's reason. To destroy the base of man's consciousness, the
Law of Identity. And to leave man groveling on his belly, as an abject
idiot, cringing in terror at a nightmare apparition which he dares not
identify as either real or unreal, knowable or unknowable.

* The Case of God vs the Case of Reality

To a rational person, there are many more reasons for not believing in
God than for believing. However, there are times when even a rational person
must ask himself if there might not be some basis for such a belief.
Probably this query most often occurs when no evident explanation can be
seen for some phenomenon. In such a situation, religion might be viewed as
an error concerning causality and the proper means of establishing causal
connections in reality. Perhaps early man did not develop a science since he
may not have believed that cause and effect could possibly be linked
together inexorably. Instead he tried to forsee the acts of an inconstant
reality by augury and witchcraft.
Much of human energy has gone into the working out of the proper rituals
for control of such a mystical Universe and into the effort of establishing
rigid adherence to those rituals. Verbal formulas, uttered by specialists,
are relied on to bring good luck to a fishing fleet, members of which would
be uneasy about leaving port without them. If you think this is but a vagary
of uneducated fishermen, I might point out that the Congress of the United
States would feel most uneasy about beginning its deliberations without a
chaplain mimicking biblical English in an attempt to call down good judgment
upon them from on high - a device that seems very rarely to have done the
Congress much good. The Canadian Parliament sends forth its supplications
alternating daily in French and English for a presumably bilingual God.
The strange declamatory language so often used in religious television,
radio, and even conversation may well have a cumulative quasi-hypnotic
effect on people who regularly listen to it for long periods and who rarely
(because they avoid secular people and media) hear more normal patterns of
speech. Consider the specific forms of behavior associated with strong
religious belief of various kinds around the world: prayer, meditation,
fasting, chanting, self-flagellation, abstinence from pleasure, memorization
and recitation of sacred texts (often in languages only half-understood by
the person doing this). It all seems almost calculated to produce and
sustain an abnormal hypnotic mental state. It's zombification. It's a mental
virus that takes over a human brain and reprograms it to behave in ways
which will maintain the virus and propagate it to other brains.
What is a religion? A religion is a system of beliefs and practices
resting on the assumption that events within the world are subject to some
supernatural power or powers, such that human needs, either physical or
psychological, can be satisfied by man's entering into relations with such
powers; the supernatural powers in question are called supernatural by
virtue of the fact that they can be known, related to, or influenced
primarily by means other than those of reason or sense experience. The
fundamental characteristic of all religions is this belief in a supernatural
power which can control everyday events. And a fundamental practice
characteristic of all religions is the attempt to influence this power.
But the psychological consequences of this belief are all-pervasive and
devastating:
Christianity, and most other religions, teach that God, by whatever name
He is called, is the father of us all. This places man in the role of a
child who is at the mercy of another's command and in whose will lies the
final verdict upon which all of man's actions must be based. This will
covers a multitude of irresponsible actions on the part of man. Man is
assigned no responsibility except to believe and obey. If he does not
succeed in life, it was not his fault; it was God's will that he should not.
God has a purpose for everything and everyone, and if we cannot see what
that purpose is, it does not matter because God knows. The Bible teaches
"all things work together for the good of those who love God."
We are told "take no thought for tomorrow, for sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof." This pearl of wisdom was given in the famous Sermon on
The Mount by Jesus to his followers. In this same sermon they were told that
God would provide whatever they needed in the way of food and clothing just
as he fed and clothed the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.
Religion today teaches the same thing: God will provide, just as long as one
serves Him. So what if you do not get to make the decisions, you will be
taken care of. Thus religion replaces critical thinking with fantasy and
wish fulfillment.
To a religious person, the concept of God explains everything. Man has no
need to ask why. His mind is not needed, only his faith. His faith gives him
the security of the firm conviction that SOMEONE knows what is going on,
even if he does not. It gives him the hope that SOMEHOW all will turn out
well. And if he is mugged every time he steps out of his door he has the
assurance that God will destroy the evil-doers and reward him for his
endurance.
This sort of faith in an all-knowing God and in a righteous judgment is a
great comfort to the believer. It relieves him of responsibility for just
about everything. It gives him a sense of worth as being part of "God's
Great Plan." AND, it promises him immortality!! Now that is a pretty good
argument for investing in something that really does not cost very much. A
little faith, professed now and then, and one can go on his merry way
without a worry in the world. But what does it REALLY cost? This is where
the rational, reality-oriented man finds his reasons for NOT believing in
God.
An adult person is one who has reached the point of maturity in his life
where he is able to care for himself. He has no need, nor wish, for anyone
else to take care of him. For this person, the religious obligation to defer
to a will outside himself would preclude his believing in God. This type of
person is one who uses his mind to reason and find out the facts in reality
that account for phenomena. The exercise of his reason teaches him that
blind faith will never net him a thing except the frustration of his hopes
(just ask any man who has ever attempted to adjust a carburetor), and that
learning to deal correctly with reality will help him realize his
aspirations. He says with Robert Ingersoll, "We need the religion of the
real, the faith that rests on fact." The cost of faith in God's omniscience
is the abdication of one's own ability to reason and to know.
Once the mind's ability to filter out nutty ideas has been dismantled for
the sake of irrational religious dogma, there is nothing to stop any other
nutty idea the person runs into from wandering in and taking up residence.
The believer has no real control over his life, since everything he does
is governed by "God's will." He has no answer for what happens to him except
that "it must be part of the Divine Plan." The only goal of his life is to
reach the end of it as well as he can and hope for his reward in heaven. He
has no real knowledge that this reward exists, only his blind faith in
religion's promise. He drags through existence with the hope that someone
else has the ability to know, and the fear that they may NOT know or that he
may not measure up in the end.
The automonous individual, on the other hand, knows that he himself has
control over his own life. He has ascertained the facts of reality by the
use of his ability to reason and arranged his life to be in accord with
them. He seeks the explanations for everything that happens to him in the
knowledge of cause and effect. The goal of his life is his own happiness
here on earth, and he does not look for or expect unearned rewards. This
individual has the knowledge that rewards do indeed exist and that they are
obtained by his own efforts. His life is lived in the knowledge of his
mortality, without fear, and with the confidence that he has the ability to
be happy while he lives. It is of no importance to him whether God exists or
not, HE exists, and it is important to him to be happy while he exists.
The cost of relying on the promise of heaven's rewards is the sacrifice
of confidence in one's own ability to live a happy life on earth.
What about the explanations for those things we can't explain? The
believer has no quandary in this regard, to him, the mystery of God explains
everything. He has no need to ask why, he only needs to accept what he does
not understand as part of the mystery. He is told that there are some things
he is not supposed to understand.
A rational man knows that there are some things he does not yet have an
answer for, but he also knows that he is capable of seeking an answer. His
mind is the tool he finds joy in using to solve the mysteries of the
universe he lives in. He is not willing to accept a lack of understanding as
a final judgment on his ability to understand.
His own worth as a human being is the biggest reason a rational man finds
for NOT believing in God. A being who has discovered the glory of his own
nature cannot regard himself as a chunk of depravity whose duty is self-
abasing obedience to supernatural commandments.
Robert Ingersoll expressed the attitude of the man of reason very well:
"Astrology was displaced by astromony. Alchemy and black art gave way to
chemistry. Science is destined to take the place of religion. In my
judgment, the religion of the future will be reason."

* God as Big Daddy

"God" is not a concept. At best, one could say it is a concept in the
sense in which a dramatist uses concepts to create a character. It is an
abstract of actual characteristics of man combined with the projection of
impossible, irrational characteristics which do not arise from reality -
such as omnipotence and omniscience. God: Somewhere, in an inaccessible
place, there is an old man in a nightshirt who knows everything and is all
powerful and created everything and rewards and punishes... and can be
bribed.
This is only a malignant practical joker with the morals of a terrorist.
Aren't malaria, cholera, syphilis, yellow fever, and bubonic plague
merely the punishments that this infinitely wise, compassionate, and
forgiving Father created to inflict upon His children? The victims that He
hounds the most gleefully are always the poor, the hungry, the defenseless.
What kind of a fiend would we brand any human father who treated his
children like that?
The Sun is in a backwater arm of an absolutely humdrum galaxy. Why should
I-Am-That-I-Am hang out around here? There must be more pressing things for
him to do. All this intervention (in the form of miracles) speaks of
incompetence. If God was clever enough to create the Universe, why wasn't He
clever enough to create it in such a way that life could evolve naturally
without miraculously improbable events? Those who claim that the evolution
of life is prohibitively improbable without Divine intervention are saying
in effect that God was a bungler who couldn't get it right the first time
(and who, after ten billion years of tinkering, STILL hasn't got it right!).
If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient,
so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a
shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and
omniscient, why didn't he start the universe in the first place so it would
come out the way he wants? Why's he continually tinkering, repairing and
complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: God is a sloppy
mentufacturer. He's not good at design and he's not good at implementation.
He'd be out of business, if there were any competition.

* Religion and Insanity

Apparently many schizophrenics are drawn to charismatic/fundamentalist
Christian sects wherein "hearing voices" is normal and accepted. People with
mental illness are often treated with generosity and kindness in
Fundamentalist churches. This is worth remembering when news articles
appear, as they sometimes do, describing how some religious fanatic just
committed a social atrocity on the advice of "God" or "Jesus." Usually the
mental illness preceded the religion. Of course the influence of
exploitative preachers and/or fasting and many of the other trappings of
fundamentalist Christianity could aggravate pre-existing illness.
The great trouble with religion - ANY religion - is that a religionist,
having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge the
consequences of those propositions by evidence. Thus he can easily come to
commit the most heinous atrocities in good conscience.
THE WAR-PRAYER by Mark Twain:
"O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with
our shells;... help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of
fire; ... help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to
wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and
thirst; ... We ask it, in the spirit of love."

Beyond the region of the Probable is the Possible, and beyond the
Possible is the Impossible, and beyond the Impossible are the religions of
this world. The mystical ideas in which they trust are fictions, barren in
their yield of results, powerless in prediction, and devoid of useful
application. In a word, they are worthless.
Maybe I cannot see the naked Face of God - but my eyesight is good enough
to detect fraudulent baloney.
All magical and ritual practices are hopelessly inappropriate to the
preservation and increase of life. My cat would turn up his tail at them. To
regard them as mistaken attempts to control nature, as a result of wrong
synapses or "crossed wires" in the brain, leaves the most rational of
animals too deep in the slough of error. If a savage in his ignorance of
physics tries to make a mountain open its caverns by dancing around it, we
must admit with shame that no rat in a psychologist's maze would try such
patently ineffectual methods of opening a door. Nor should such behavior be
carried on in the face of failure for thousands of years; even rats learn
more quickly than that.

In conclusion I can only say this: I hope, for His sake, that God does
not exist. Because if He does, He has one hell of a lot to answer for!
 Chapter 10
SPIRITUALITY, ART, AND BEAUTY

* The Spirituality of a Scientist

I have come into a peculiar sort of spiritual awareness during the course
of my studies of Objectivism. I have found that this philosophy, which is
very strongly oriented toward rationality - toward a Galilean rather than
Tertullian epistemology - leads, when it is fully developed and manifested
within oneself, to a kind of spiritual awakening - a blossoming of the soul
- that has its own unique nature. I experience this in part as an inward-
directed focus - a growing recognition of (as Nathaniel Branden put it) "the
biological forces deep within our organism that speak to us in a wordless
language we have barely begun to decipher." I experience it also as a
growing sense of the wonderful capability of human intelligence and its
place and function in the universe.
"It is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first,
that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent
which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for
something as a condition of the course of events. Each of these beliefs can
be verified experimentally, as often as we like to try. Each, therefore,
stands upon the strongest foundation upon which any belief can rest, and
forms one of our highest truths." ... Albert Einstein
The idea of a "scientific religion" may seem a contradiction in terms,
but I have for some time been intrigued with the introspective observation
of a deep sense of wonder, awe and spirituality that has arisen within me
during the time that I have been studying and applying Objectivism, growing
in scientific knowledge, and developing the functional competence of my
intelligence. This has nothing to do with any mystical, faith-oriented
notions, but is a sense of becoming more and more united with the totality
of the Universe as I adjust the epistemological methodology of my mind to
bring it more and more into accord with Reality. To give a mundane example:
a rainbow is no less beautiful, but actually grows in beauty and wonder,
with a deeper knowledge of the postulates of physics and epistemology that
describe and explain it.
Although religious people deny it, I find no difficulty in accepting a
non-mystical explanation of the foundation of my beliefs:
"Existence is the first cause. The universe is the total of that which
exists. Within the universe, the emergence of new entities can be explained
in terms of the actions of entities that already exist. All actions
presuppose the existence of entities. All causality presupposes the
existence of something that acts as a cause. To demand a cause for all of
existence is to demand a contradiction: if the cause exists, it is part of
existence: if it does not exist, it cannot be a cause. Nothing cannot be the
cause of something. Nothing does not exist. Nothing is not just another kind
of something - it is nothing. Existence exists; you cannot go outside it,
you cannot get under it, on top of it or behind it. Existence exists - and
only existence exists; there is nowhere else to go. The universe did not
begin - it did not, at some point in time, spring into being. Time is a
measurement of motion. Motion presupposes entities that move. If nothing
existed, there could be no time. Time is 'in' the universe; the universe is
not 'in' time." ... Nathaniel Branden.

Holiness is a measure of the reverence and awe which men hold for certain
symbols and the power those symbols give us over the world of nature.
It is Language which grants godhood to man by enabling him, through
symbolic conceptualization, to encompass the world within the scope of his
thoughts. Thus, sense, reason, and intellect - all of which are functions of
"the Word" - are what make me a Man. And give me the power to be a God.
Surprisingly, some of the best expressions of this function of language
can be found in the Bible:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made
that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the
light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. And God
blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth.

Here are examples of how some other scientists and scholars have
expressed this feeling:

Ayn Rand, in her introduction to THE FOUNTAINHEAD:

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category
of abstractions which, for centuries, has been the near-monopoly of religion
... the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional
connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain
to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.
Religion's monopoly in this field has made it extremely difficult to
communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of
life. Religion has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language,
placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach. Exaltation, Worship,
and Reverence do name actual emotions. What, then, is their source or
referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to
a moral ideal.
It is with this meaning that I would identify the sense of life
dramatized in THE FOUNTAINHEAD as man worship. The man-worshipers are those
who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. They are those
dedicated to the exaltation of man's self-esteem and the sacredness of his
happiness on earth.

Galileo: "I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has
endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their
use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by
them."

Albert Einstein: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the

mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this
emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as
good as dead: his eyes are closed.... To know that what is impenetrable to
us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most
radiant beauty which our dull facilities can comprehend only in the most
primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true
religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks
of the devoutly religious men."

Isidor Isaac Rabi: "Not religion in a secular way, but religion as

inspirer of a way of looking at things. Choosing physics means, in some way,
you're not going to choose trivialities. When you're doing good physics,
you're wrestling with the Champ."

Robert Ingersoll: "The real miracles are the facts in nature."

James Hogan: "If one wants to feel more than inarticulate wonder before
mountains or buildings, it helps to understand the invisible mechanisms that
support the visible beauty."

Richard Feynman: "I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty
of the world. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to
do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a
generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear
so different and behave so differently are all run 'behind the scenes' by
the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the
mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that
the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings
between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling
of awe - of scientific awe - this feeling about the glories of the
universe."

Henri Poincare: "The scientist does not study nature because it is useful
to do so, he studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes
pleasure in it because it is beautiful."

Margaret Geller: "We would sit there absolutely mesmerized by [galaxy

clustering]. We would stare at this thing over and over and over again. It
was as if we were high on something."

Carl Sagan: "Whenever I think about [the great accomplishments of

science] I feel a tingle of exhilaration. My heart races. I can't help it.
Science is an astonishment and a delight.... Science is not only compatible
with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.... Understanding
is a kind of ecstasy."

A student of Arthur Eddington: "The Great Hall was crowded. The speaker
was a slender, dark young man with a trick of looking away from his audience
and a manner of complete detachment. He gave an outline of the Theory of
Relativity, as none could do better than he. He led up to the shift of the
stellar images near the Sun as predicted by Einstein and described his
verification of the prediction. When I returned to my room I found that I
could write down the lecture word for word. For three nights, I think, I did
not sleep."

Victor Weisskopf: "The Joy of Insight"

Ayn Rand: "I will ask you to project the look on a child's face when he
grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is
a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-
conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two
directions: outward, as an illumination of the world - inward, as the first
spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen
this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as
'sacred' - meaning: the best, the highest possible to man - this look is the
sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or
anyone. This look is not confined to children. Comic-strip artists are in
the habit of representing it by means of a light bulb flashing on, above the
head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive
terms, this is an appropriate symbol: an idea is a light turned on in a
man's soul. It is the steady confident reflection of that light that you
look for in the faces of adults - particularly of those to whom you entrust
your most precious values. That light-bulb look is the flash of a human
intelligence in action; it is the outward manifestation of man's rational
faculty; it is the signal and symbol of man's mind. And, to the extent of
your humanity, it is involved in everything you seek, enjoy, value or love."
 Peter Zarlenga:

I am thought.
I can see what the eyes cannot see.
I can hear what the ears cannot hear.
I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
Yet I create Beauty for the eyes,
Music for the ears,
Love for the heart.
They, ignorant of their ignorance, call me cold.
Barren of Sight.
Barren of Sound.
Barren of Feeling.
But it is I who am from which all comes.
Given to the ungrateful.
Unseen.
Unheard.
Unfelt.

Ayn Rand: "I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and
I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I
wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a
warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon
my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. It is my eyes which see, and
the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear,
and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which
thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find
the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the
only edict I must respect. Many words have been granted me, and some are
wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: 'I will it!' This miracle
of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine
to kneel before. And now I see the face of god."

From A Jewish Prayer Book:

God, where shall I find Thee, Whose glory fills the universe?
Behold I find Thee, Wherever the mind is free to follow its own bent,
Wherever words come out from the depth of truth, Wherever tireless striving
stretches its arms towards perfection, Wherever men struggle for freedom and
right, Wherever the scientist toils to unbare the secrets of nature,
Wherever the poet strings pearls of beauty in lyric lines, Wherever glorious
deeds are done.

Jawaharlal Nehru:
"Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and
spirituality."

Let us take spirituality out of religion.

* The Credo of a Rational Man

As a rationalist, I am often chastised by faith-oriented people for not
having anything to "believe" in. Although I have always dismissed as
nonsense the notion that Belief must inevitably be grounded in Faith, it
required many years of philosophical study for me to be able to make a
specific statement of just what it is that I do Believe in.

I believe that no snowflake ever lands on the wrong place. I believe,

with Niels Bohr, that the laws of physics work - whether I believe in them
or not. I believe in the Law of Identity. I believe in the primacy of
Existence over Consciousness (and I see this manifest in the Quantum
Physics). The greatest source of wonder and amazement I know is the
interactive relationship between the Primary and Tertiary structures of
nucleic acid molecules.
I believe, with Einstein, that "Out yonder there is this huge world,
which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us
like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our
inspection and thinking." I believe, with Thoreau, that "Man's capacities
have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any
precedents, so little has been tried." I believe that man is a heroic being,
with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, non-aggression as
his standard of social behavior, productive achievement as his noblest
activity, and reason as his only absolute.
I believe that reality is an objective absolute, existing independently
of my consciousness. I believe that my mind is competent to achieve valid
knowledge of reality, and that the values proper to me are objectively
demonstrable. I believe that the basic function - the purpose - of
consciousness is to perceive and understand the world: my mind must first
perceive the independently existing world - then it must understand its
perceptions - then I must use this understanding to govern my behavior so as
to interact successfully with reality and thereby achieve my values.
Job 40:7,10,14

* Prayer
People who engage in prayer have been persuaded that it has power, and
that it gives them, however indirectly, some degree of influence over the
future course of events.
One of the things that atheists often overlook about prayer is that it
actually does make a difference to the people who practice it (though not
for the reasons that the practitioners assume): It helps them live with
mistakes that they think they can't live with. It also gives them something
to do in times of crisis - it's a first step out of paralysis. The downside
is that it places most or all of the responsibility for what happens next in
the hands of another (nonexistent) party. Nevertheless taking SOME action is
the best antidote to feelings of fear and depression.
But the power of actually changing the course of events with your own
hands is much more compelling, thus what we need is some human and humane,
non-magical alternative to the action of prayer. Prayers should be just a
kind of incantation or ritual that serves as a prelude to or a means of
focusing the mind on the really important concern of finding a way to deny
the validity of an injustice by acting in ways that are diametrically
opposed to it.
There is value and importance in building a society that is based on
principles of reason rather than blind faith.

* Oath
The function of an oath is to help, not to threaten. It is something to
remind you of how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are
important. The words that embody ideas and principles are important. Your
word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.
An oath can concretize Purpose within your mind and give you an explicit,
objective guideline for your actions. It can serve to focus your mind
directly onto your goals.
A few examples:
"I now, in the presence of death, affirm and reaffirm the truth of all
that I have said against the superstitions of the world."
 "I have seen my daughter, I have lain with my wife; now I will kill my
enemies, and then I can die."
"We are gathered to call desolation over evildoers. May the sorrow they
have wrought and the wrath they have raised turn upon them. May our enemies
suffer as we have suffered! May they feel our fire and steel as we have felt
theirs! May their hearts beat fearfully for what they have done to us!"
"May God grant me the wisdom to discover the right, the will to choose
it, and the strength to make it endure."

* Marriage
Marriage is a form of oath-taking that states the purpose of a
relationship:

"I, Colin, take thee, Gwen, to be my wife, to have and to hold, to love
and to cherish, as long as you will have me."
"I, Gwen, take thee, Colin, to be my husband, to care for and love and
cherish for the rest of my life."

"I will demand much of thee, All that thou art and all that thou canst
be,
And I will give unto thee, All that I am and all that I can be,
In the name of the best within me, I pledge unto thee my troth,
I will strive to make that best ever better and better,
Thou art the purpose of my existence, All that I have made of myself is
what I give to you in trade for that which you have made of yourself."

"By oak and ash and springtime-whitened thorn, through ages gone and ages
to be born, by earth below, by air arising higher, by ringing waters, and by
living fire, by life and death, I charge that ye say true if ye do now give
faith for faith. We do. Place each a ring upon the other's hand, and may
the sign of binding prove a band that joins the youth to maiden, man to
wife, and lights the way upon your search through life. Farewell! And if the
roads ye find be rough, keep love alive, and so have luck enough."

"Do you each individually swear that you will be true and loyal, each
helping his chosen one in all things, great and small; that never,
throughout eternity, in thought or in action, will your mind or your body or
your spirit stray from the path of truth and honor?"

* Love
Expressions of love can take on the character of an oath, stating the
deepest meaning of one person's emotional response to another:

"If you can show me beauty that I haven't found, And teach me secrets
that I never knew, Lead me to vistas that I haven't seen, And fill each day
with more of you, If you can share a soul that makes my soul grow greater,
If you can teach my glance to see the sky, If you can make each year grow
only shorter, Then so will I."

"Yes, I have made many mistakes in life. But you are not one of them."

"Maybe one day one of us will cause the other a tear or a curse. Maybe
one day we will play the foolish game of 'What if.' But somehow I doubt it.
I have seen rainbows and I did not curse the sky when they were gone. I have
heard nightingales sing and I did not curse the forest when it was silent. I
was grateful that I had seen and heard. And their memory is a thing that is
beautiful to me yet. So it will be with you. If I turn and one day find you
are gone, the memory and the beauty of it will make all my tomorrows a
little warmer."

"I have never had so much as now. All my life I've been alone. I would
look into the huts and the tents of others in the coldest dark and I would
see figures holding each other in the night. But I always passed by. You and
I - we have warmth. That's so hard to find in this world. Let someone else
pass by in the night. Let us take the world by the throat and make it give
us what we desire."

"I have nothing to offer you
for your surety, my ability and
authority and position for your
offer to a woman - the devotion
arm."
but my strength for your defense, my honesty
industry for your livelihood, and my
dignity. That is all it becomes a man to
of a man's heart and the strength of a man's

"She kissed me. Me. She did. She does. She will. It cannot die until I
do. What need I more than this? How wonderful the world is."

"We shall light up for one-another a lamp in the temple of life. Aimless
lumps of stone blundering through space will become stars singing in their
spheres. An extraordinary delight and an intense love will seize us. It will
last hardly longer than the lightning flash which turns the black night into
infinite radiance. It will be dark again before you can clear the light out
of your eyes: but you will have seen: and forever after you will think about
what you have seen and not gabble catchwords invented by the wasted virgins
that walk in darkness."

"Our love is not over. This is the first, the most important, thing for
you to know. We have said good-bye. That was at breakfast this morning. You
kissed me. You smiled. It was perfect. We have said good-bye. And our love
is not over. Our good-bye was perfect, as our love will always be. Forgive
me for wanting that. Forgive me for fearing the other good-bye. My pain
bringing you pain, your sadness bringing mine. Leaving you with the lie that
there could be sadness between us. Have we lived our love so that wicked
little cells, growing in darkness, could cheat us at the end? No. We cheat
them. We say good-bye with a kiss and a smile. And our love goes on forever.
What you must know is that in my last hours I have lived our life again, in
tears of joy that so exquisite a life could have been mine. Now you must do
something for me. You must live long and well. You must live as though you
are saving each moment to share with me, in my arms, when we are together
again. And if you find another love before your life is over, treasure those
moments most of all, and know that nothing could make me happier."

Some statements of profound emotion can surpass oaths and become songs of
prayer:

May the Lord protect and defend you

May He always shield you from shame
May you come to be in Israel a shining name
May you be like Ruth and like Esther
May you be deserving of praise
Strengthen them Oh Lord, and keep them from the stranger's ways
May God bless you and grant you long lives
May the Lord fulfill our sabbath prayer for you
May God make you good mothers and wives
May He send you husbands who will care for you
May the Lord protect and defend you
May the Lord preserve you from pain
 Favor them oh Lord with happiness and peace
Oh hear our sabbath prayer
Amen

* Table Blessing
The sharing of a meal is an act symbolic of good will. So simple a thing,
a lighted fire, yet it is a symbol of man's first great step toward
civilization. How many times has it seemed as if a man, in offering fire and
warm food, was saying, "See, I am a man, by these signs you shall know me,
that I can make a fire, that I can cook my food."
Another example of the symbolic phenomena I am trying to portray is the
almost universal practice of expressing gratitude at the supper table (I
refer to this practice as "Table Blessing"). I believe this expression,
although misguided in its religious aspect, has a profoundly important
function in human life as a symbolic recognition of the importance of
productive achievement.
I have endeavored to contrive statements by which this phenomenon could
be suitably expressed in an Objectivist household:

"My dear friends, let us pause in our proceedings for a moment and
contemplate the nature and the source of the providence which we see before
us on our table and around us in our lives. Let us look within ourselves and
ask if we be worthy to partake of this bounty. Let us resolve to act so that
the scales of Nature shall balance - so that all that we must take from the
world for our sustenance we shall return to the world in like measure,
giving thankful recognition to those who, in doing likewise, bring into
being the civilization in which we live. Thank you."

"We should be thankful to our natures that we can earn our food and be
thankful to ourselves that we have done so. As we have earned this food, so
must we earn all that is valuable in our lives."

"The sun never sets on Ford tractors. Somewhere, right now, there is a
Ford tractor working the land. Remember this when you break bread."

A blessing to use on entering a home:

God bless the master of this house, the mistress of this hall
And all the little children here who run or walk or crawl.

A blessing for a grave:

Warm summer sun shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here.
Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Dark earth below, embrace and
cherish.

* Art
The essay "Art and Cognition" by Ayn Rand, which appeared in the April,
May, and June 1971 issues of THE OBJECTIVIST, is an in-depth analysis of all
forms of art.

Art is the selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's

metaphysical value-judgments. Metaphysical values are those which reflect an
artist's fundamental view of the nature of man and the nature of the
universe in which he lives.
Cognitive abstractions identify the facts of reality. Normative
abstractions evaluate the facts, thus prescribing a choice of values and a
course of action. Cognitive abstractions deal with that which IS; normative
abstractions deal with that which OUGHT TO BE (in the realms open to man's
choice). Cognitive abstractions form the epistemological foundation of
science; normative abstractions form the epistemological foundation of
morality and of art.
Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the
principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.

* Beauty
Beauty is a concept of consciousness. It is the integration of one or
more experiences of pleasure along with one or more observations of a
manifestation of one's values. Here are a few examples of this:

Jean Auel: "In Ranec's eye the finest and most perfect example of
anything was beautiful, and anything beautiful was the finest and most
perfect example of spirit; it was the essence of it. That was his religion.
Beyond that, at the core of his aesthetic soul, he felt that beauty had an
intrinsic value of its own, and he believed there was a potential for beauty
in everything. While some activities or objects could be simply functional,
he felt that anyone who came close to achieving perfection in any activity
was an artist, and the results contained the essence of beauty. But the art
was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just
the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created
them."
[Ranec was an artist, thus his supreme value was the process by which art
is created.]

The artist said, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But
you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull."
Richard Feynman replied, "First of all, the beauty that he sees is
available to other people - and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not
be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a
flower. But at the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I
can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There's beauty not
just at the dimension of one centimeter; there's also beauty at a smaller
dimension. There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other
processes. The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to
attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see
the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also
exist in lower forms of life? There are all kinds of interesting questions
that come from a knowldege of science, which only adds to the excitement and
mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds."
[Feynman was a scientist, thus his supreme value was the process of
gaining knowledge of the world of nature. He realized that a sharpened
awareness helps us to make distinctions that would otherwise elude us.]
The artist Constable studied cloud formation extensively and, as a
consequence, painted clouds as no one ever had before. Leonardo Da Vinci
made extensive studies of human anatomy to the same end.
The more one learns, the better one sees.

Every child in the world looks upon his mother and sees the most
beautiful woman in the world, even though many mothers are not beautiful. Do
you know why this is so? The child looks with love, and sees love returned.
Love is what makes beauty.
[The child is a child, and his supreme value is to be loved. Have you
forgotten that?]

* The Need for and Function of Art and Beauty

Man's need for art springs from the fact that he needs the ability to
bring his widest abstractions into his immediate perceptual awareness.
Every man seeks a confirmation of his own view of existence, and by
concretizing this view into something that a man can grasp directly, art is
performing this function. Art can give both to the artist and the spectator
the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his
distant goals. Thus works of art are valuable to us if they reinforce our
view of existence in any of its many aspects. The brief respite that is
obtained from a flight of fancy into an imaginary world, or the feeling of
beautiful rightness when music takes hold of the senses and your body moves
in perfect accord with the rhythm it feels, are food for the soul.

The world of nature is not a kind place towards living things. It is

harshly indifferent to our well-being, and we must continually strive to
maintain our existence - our very lives - in the face of inimical
conditions. As the human brain evolved, and volitional behavior increased in
significance, it became possible for man to explicitly recognize the
harshness of nature - to lament:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Oh, to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

Man became the only creature capable of deliberate suicide - the only
creature requiring an intellectually deliberated motive for continuing his
existence. To perceive beauty in a sunset, wonder in a rainbow, glory in a
thundering waterfall, delicate charm in a hummingbird's iridescence, could
only have infused early man's soul with a cause for continuing in the face
of adversity. Thus could Beauty have come to serve an evolutionary function
in human development: those who found beauty to be a pleasure and a value
would have more incentive to continue with the struggle of life.

* The Nature of Fiction

But to fully satisfy our need for spiritual inspiration, we need to
nourish ourselves on works of a certain level of complexity and
sophistication.
Tolkien spoke of good fiction thusly: "...literary belief, the state of
mind that has been called willing suspension of disbelief. But this does not
seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that
the story-maker proves a successful subcreator. He makes a Secondary World
which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is true: it accords
with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it
were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic,
or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again,
looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are
obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be
suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become
intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the
genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-
believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can
in the work of an art that has for us failed."
A basic tenet of Objectivism is that truth is the recognition of reality.
The principle of Objectivist Epistemology which assumes prior certainty of
existence indicates that we cannot invent physical things or concepts
without referents in reality, and then declare them to be real. However,
thoughts are real, and it is an observation of objective reality that man's
thoughts include the creation and manipulation of abstract concepts and
symbols. It is also observable that many of these creations have no physical
identity of their own - such as Pegasus. But although they lack physical
identity, these creations/concepts/symbols are real and are existents. We
must just be careful not to confuse a concept created without a referent in
reality with an actual physical being. You don't have to believe in Santa
Claus, and you don't have to believe in unicorns, but what you GOTTA believe
in are the concepts that are symbolized by Santa Claus and unicorns.
Identity without physical existence is what fictions have. But we must
recognize that it is not the sort of incontrovertible, indestructible,
absolute identity that existents have; it is the identity ascribed to them,
defined for them by their author and shared by his audience. None of us
doubt that Hamlet and Ophelia have identity: Hamlet is not to be confused
with Laertes. Yet none of these people ever existed and none ever will.
Non-existence is a derivative concept which can be formed or grasped only
in relation to some existent that has ceased to exist. This is the way in
which the concept is formed intitially. But once it is formed and grasped it
can be applied to that which has never existed or even that which cannot
exist. This is a perfectly valid use of the concept non-existence.
One can hypothesize a non-existent concrete and then subsume it within an
abstraction. To do so is to create a fiction.
I see two broad categories into which my thoughts can be divided: those
which correspond to the real world (the reality domain) and those which do
not (the imaginary domain). The Objectivist Epistemology is a splendid tool
which enables me to make proper identifications in the former category and
also to make a firm distinction between the two categories. The Objectivist
Epistemology does not apply to the second category - and I do not think it
needs to. The reality domain is a limited, circumscribed context. This
domain is limited by the facts of reality and it is circumscribed by the
principles of the Objectivist Epistemology, which serve to keep me very
firmly in cognitive contact with the real world. The imaginary domain, on
the contrary, has no limits. Imagination is the same sort of concept as
freedom - they are both defined in a "negative" manner, as absences. Freedom
is the absence of social constraint. Imagination is the absence of reality
constraint. I must confess I am not entirely comfortable with the notion
that there can be any entity in the universe that is not constrained by
reality, but it seems quite clear to me that the human imagination is just
such a thing. But then, if the universe itself can be infinite (i.e.,
unbounded) there could be within it an entity which is also unbounded. In
spite of my misgivings, all my thoughts on this matter compel me to swallow
the hard fact that there are no bounds on human imagination, and that it is
not subsumed by the Objectivist Epistemology.
I approached this by introspection of two of my thought processes: the
act of creation and the enjoyment of works of fiction. When I invent some
mechanical contraption I begin by making a picture inside my mind of the
device I want. I imagine all its parts and how they fit together and
interact with one another. If something does not seem right I modify my
mental picture of it, and eventually I come up with a picture of a device
that I think will do the job. This picture may be of a device that I have
never seen before, and as far as I know has never even existed. Therefore it
is a fiction. But now comes the important part: sometimes this picture can
be easily and straightforwardly transformed into fact, i.e., it corresponds
precisely with the potentiality of the real world. On other occasions the
picture must be modified considerably before such a transformation can
occur. And I must confess there have been some pictures I have had to scrap
entirely - the facts of reality simply do not allow them to be
existentialized. I can see in this process that my mind is free to conceive
ANY picture whatsoever. The only point at which I am constrained is when I
try to make real my mental pictures. Only if my mind has been in close
cognitive contact with reality can I do this. If I were to be constrained in
my imaging to a factual corresponence with reality then I could never create
(except perhaps by accident) something which had not previously existed. (I
have for many years believed that all philosophers should be required to
spend some time as practicing engineers - there would be a whole lot less
nonsense in the field of philosophy if this were done.)
I see the same process occur in the creation of intellectual entities. A
lifetime of Science Fiction addiction has shown me that there are no bounds
to the fictional worlds the human mind can imagine. Unfortunately, the
attempted existentializaion of some of these worlds is not quite the sort of
simplistic scenario as my attempts to make real the sometimes clumsily-
conceived physical devices that I imagine. Karl Marx believed he had
conceived an excellent "social" device, but you all know very well what
disastrous consequences have ensued from the attempt to make real that
miserable scheme.
This distinction between these two basic categories of human thought
shows the value of the Objectivist Epistemology in keeping a firm grasp on
reality, and also shows the basis of mental health: the ability to
distinguish between fact and fantasy.
These observations lead to an important link between science and fiction:
without fantasy, science would have nothing to test.

* Music
Extracted from the essay "Art and Cognition" by Ayn Rand, which appeared
in the April, May, and June 1971 issues of THE OBJECTIVIST:
"Music is a certain succession of sounds produced by periodic vibrations.
Musical tones heard in a certain kind of succession are integrated by the
human ear and brain into a new cognitive experience, into an auditory
entity: a melody. The essence of musical perception is mathematical: the
consonance or dissonance of harmonies depends on the ratios of the
frequencies of their tones. The brain can integrate a ratio of one to two,
for instance, but not of eight to nine. Music offers man the singular
opportunity to reenact, on the adult level, the primary process of his
method of cognition: the automatic integration of sense data into an
intelligible, meaningful entity. To a conceptual consciousness, it is a
unique form of rest and reward. A composition may demand the active
alertness needed to resolve complex mathematical relationships - or it may
deaden the brain by means of monotonous simplicity - or it may obliterate
the process by a jumble of sounds mathematically-physiologically impossible
to integrate, and thus turn into noise. The other arts create a physical
object and the psycho-epistemological process goes from the perception to
conceptual understanding to appraisal to emotion. The pattern of the process
involved in music is: perception - emotion - appraisal - conceptual
understanding. Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man's
emotions directly. It is possible to observe introspectively what one's mind
does while listening to music: it evokes subconscious material that seems to
flow haphazardly, in brief, random snatches, like the progression of a
dream. But, in fact, this flow is selective and consistent: the emotional
meaning of the subconscious material corresponds to the emotions projected
by the music. The subconscious material has to flow because no single image
can capture the meaning of the musical experience, the mind needs a
succession of images, it is groping for that which they have in common, for
an emotional abstraction. Man cannot experience an actually causeless and
objectless emotion. When music induces an emotional state without external
object, its only other possible object is the state of actions of his own
consciousness. If a given process of musical integration taking place in a
man's brain resembles the cognitive processes that procuce and/or accompany
a certain emotional state, he will recognize it, in effect, physiologically,
then intellectually."
 Douglas Hofstadter: "I feel that mathematics, more than any other
discipline, studies the fundamental, pervasive patterns of the universe.
However, as I have gotten older, I have come to see that there are inner
mental patterns underlying our ability to conceive of mathematical ideas,
universal patterns in human minds that make them receptive not only to the
patterns of mathematics but also to abstract regularities of all sorts in
the world. Indeed, how could anyone hope to approach the concept of beauty
without deeply studying the nature of formal patterns and their
organizations and relationships to Mind? How can anyone fascinated by beauty
fail to be intrigued by the notion of a 'magical formula' behind it all,
chimerical though the idea certainly is? And in this day and age, how can
anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers the
ultimate tool for exploring their essence?"

Tonality was the foundation of western music. It's a hierarchical

arrangement of notes into triads based on the natural harmonics (also called
overtones) of a note. We perceive that chords built on the fifth and fourth
degrees of a scale feel very powerful and are therefore the most commonly
used. Around 1910, Arnold Schoenberg announced that tonality had exhausted
itself, the time had come for a new music, and he was its prophet. He
devised a system that works like this: serial composition starts with a
musical subject, or tone row, which must be constructed by using all twelve
tones of the octave system, in whatever order you want, before using any one
of the tones a second time. You can then manipulate these tone rows by using
all the tools of baroque counterpoint: imitation at various intervals,
inversion, retrograde, etc. You can do all kinds of interesting things
within these constraints, and it even seems like music at a certain
distance. In fact, it's best appreciated with the eye and not the ear. The
Germans even call it Augenmusik: music for the eye. This music can't be
appreciated by the ear because serial procedure rips its notes out of the
fabric of the harmonic series, and human beings can't integrate these random
relationships between tones. Some of these composers also transpose their
procedures to choose the beat of the piece, with a resulting rhythmic drive.
Others, like Berg, wrote tone rows that mimicked tonal relations, and
actually sound okay some of the time.

I wonder if any serious modern composers have ever listened to a piece of

music and felt a passionate response in their soul. If that's not its goal
then what the hell use is music?
I believe this deep feeling must be guided by a rational, natural
technique, or else what's the difference between purveying my passion by
writing a symphony or by dancing naked in my backyard while passionately
howling at the moon?
I like "music in the subjunctive" (or sense of life in the subjunctive),
the verb form used to express what is imagined or wished or possible. Not as
"a thing is what it is," but "if a thing were, it would be...."

I have conceived a nifty descriptive label for "music" that is non-

rhythmic and/or non-melodic and/or just so dumb that it's not worth
listening to. You have no doubt heard that old adage that if you chain a
monkey to a piano and let him pound on the keys for 13 billion years, you
will eventually hear every possible composition. Yeah, well... what you
really get is a couple hours of good stuff and 13 billion years of monkey
pound. Thus the crummy junk being passed off as "music" is just some of the
Monkey Pound.

* Dancing
Rhythm is the periodicity of groups of recurring heavily and lightly
accented notes which conform to a specific metered timing. Timing is simply
the number of notes per measure of music. Tempo denotes the rate of speed
these notes are metered in.
Dancing is the manner in which the movements of the body are distributed
and applied to notes of music, thus forming patterns of motion.
The important things to remember are not only to find the correct note of
music on which to start a dance step, but to perform it in its correct
sequence while remaining on the proper note of each measure of music, at
whatever tempo played. When you are able to move your body in correct
pattern while placing it to the correct notes of the measure you will then
have good timing and rhythm. You will then be a good dancer.

* Some Writing Techniques

Here are a few elements that show what makes a story a realistic work of
art - or a bomb.

The Expository Lump. The creation of a story's context - its "reality" -

is one of the most important jobs the writer has. All too often this job is
handled in a rather clumsy manner and the reader stubs his toe, so to speak,
on an Expository Lump that occurs in the story. The Expository Lump comes in
two forms: the narrative lump and the dialog lump. In both forms, the story
pauses while the author throws information at the reader in order to
establish the "reality" of the story's situation in the reader's mind.
Here is an example of the dialog lump:
"Well, John, we've been stuck in this busted-down spaceship for three
weeks - and it's gonna be another week before we get rescued."
"Yeah, David. And on top of that we're running out of oxygen, since the
storage tank sprung a leak yesterday."
This isn't really two characters talking to each other, it is the author
talking to the reader, presenting information that should have been
skillfully interwoven into the story line.

Subjunctive Tension is the ambiguity between what your words say and all
the possibilities of their meaning. "He walked through the door."
(Teleportation, obviously - he probably walked through the doorway rather
than the door itself.) "The sun came through the window." (In which case, it
got rather hot in here. It was the sunlight that came in, not the sun.)
But people rarely notice these things if they are thoroughly immersed in
the story; subjunctive tension is a symptom of the failure to engage the
attention and belief of the reader, not a problem per se.

The Said-ism: In an attempt to avoid repetitious use of the word "said,"

characters have been known to "hiss" sentences containing not a single
sibilant, to "growl" lines consisting mostly of vowels, to "ejaculate," to
"effuse," to "pronounce," to "smile" entire conversations. Once you become
aware of the said-ism, its use becomes hilarious.

The Capitalization of Words in an attempt to make one's Inventions

important by Typographical Tricks rather than by the Power of the
Descriptive Words themselves is a technique you will all too often encounter
in my own writings.

The hierarchy of rules for the use of science in science fiction:

If you can make it correct, you should.
If you can't make it correct, at least make it plausible.
If you can't make it correct or plausible, you had better make it fun.

Characterization and story are of equal importance. If man's nature must

be expressed through his actions, it is equally true that action is
meaningless unless it is the product of, or the expression of, someone...or
something...human.

See The Ayn Rand Letter, 17Jan72, for an excellent discourse on

fallacious literary methods.

* The Destruction of Art under Statism

A good story is one wherein the protagonist has to apply reason to bring
order out of chaos. To apply the scientific method, in short. But this
requires that the author portray independent thought and judgment in action
- he must portray a character who interprets reality according to his own
judgment.
The artist and the State are natural enemies because the state insists
upon being the sole interpreter of reality, and if the artist acquiesces in
this function he abrogates his own metaphysical value-judgments and is thus
bereft of the fundamental requirement for creating art.
The Newspeak-bred, statist mentalities of most modern "artists" render
them incapable of equaling even the perceptiveness of a good forger: they do
not know what they are imitating, nor why it had been successful. They do
not know the difference between trash and values and therefore are rarely
able to produce anything of value, either in industry or in art.
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash,
we have very little reason to be interested in them.

* Miscellaneous Comments on Art

A young would-be composer wrote to Mozart, asking advice as to how to
compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and
demanding musical form and that it would be better to start with something
simpler. The young man protested, "But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies
when you were younger than I am now."
And Mozart replied, "I never asked how."

Sitting beside him on a pedestal he had a piece of jade, a good-size

chunk, almost as big as my head. Every once in a while he would turn it so
it would catch the sunlight in a different way. One day I asked him what he
was doing, and he said, "I'm trying to see what it is - there's something
there I haven't captured yet, and when I do, I'll start carving."

In a novel of ideas, the ideas have to work.

The hand that can create these images and reveal the soul in them, and is
inspired to do this and nothing else even if he starves and is cast off by
his community and all his family for it: is not this hand the hand used by
God, who, being a spirit without body, parts or passions, has no hands?
 Chapter 11
THE DISASTROUS STATE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION

* SAT score decline

For the decade ending in 1962 the mean scores on the Scholastic Aptitude
Test varied within about a 10 point range (from 471 to 479 on the verbal
section and from 490 to 502 on the math section).
In 1963 these scores commenced a decline which continued for almost 20
years:
YEAR VERBAL MATH

1962: 478 502 1981 : 424

466
-11% -7%

From 1981 to 1991 the scores leveled off, holding within a few points of
425 Verbal and 470 Math. Some of this decline can be attributed to the fact
that a wider range of students now take the test than took it in the l960s,
but the Wirtz Commission concluded that about half of the decline represents
an actual decline among students with qualifications similar to those taking
the test earlier.
However, in early 1990 a nation-wide scandal came to light: it was
revealed that school administrators and teachers, in their attempts to
improve their standing in the community and to earn for themselves and their
schools "improved student achievement" bonuses offered by the state
governments, had been cheating on the achievement tests by providing their
students with the answers prior to testing. This makes highly suspect the
"leveling off" of the SAT score decline that was reported in the mid-1980s.
(In any case, the issue will be sidestepped in 1995, when the College
Board will recalibrate the "average" combined verbal and math score
(supposedly 500) to the median of the test group of that year. This will
result in that year's group having a combined score 98 points above that of
their predecessors.)

During this two-decade period there was also a precipitous drop in the
number of students scoring at the top 1% level (700 or higher) in spite of
the fact that the total student pool increased by more than one-fourth:

YEAR VERBAL MATH

1966: 33,200 55,500
1979: 12,300 38,900
-63% -30%
To say less than words can say is to commit an intellectual crime. Today,
the shriveled fruits of that crime are dropping off the vine of education,
in the form of millions of students who have been prevented, by their years
of schooling, from developing their capacity for thought.

The situation is further aggravated in the field of higher education.

Observe the number of new Ph.D.s in science:

Physical Sciences Physics Mathematics

1971: 4500 1970: 1500 1978: 619
1984: 3400 1986: 900 1988: 341
 -24% -40% -45%

And this sorry situation is by no means restricted to the scientific

fields. It is taking a terrible toll in the arts as well. Between 1966 and
1989 there was a reduction of 77% in the number of public school students
enrolled in music courses.

More than a fourth of the science Ph.D.s and 60% of the engineering
Ph.D.s awarded in 1986 went to foreign students, and two-thirds of
postdoctoral appointees in engineering were foreign citizens. In early 1989,
only 7 in 1000 American university students were studying engineering. In
Japan the ratio was 40 in 1000. The percentage of American students pursuing
a degree in any science dropped from 11.5 in 1966 to 5.8 in 1988. This
paucity of American science students extends down into the high schools:
among the winners of the 1990 Science Talent Search, 57% were foreign
students. And again, the arts are affected along with the sciences: in 1993,
thirty-seven percent of the students at the Julliard School of Music were
foreigners.

During the 1960s, American colleges and universities expanded as if the

post-War baby boom that produced the massive youth cohorts of that period
would last forever. (But what else could they have done - in view of the
demands placed upon them?) It did not, and institutions of higher learning
are now confronted by sharply declining enrollments in a period of economic
hardship and insecurity. Faced with this potentially devastating situation,
most undergraduate institutions, including some of the most selective, have
lowered their admissions standards and many have abandoned them altogether.
A 1978-79 College Board survey of 2,600 colleges showed that only 40%
required any minimum grade point average for admission and only 30% set
minimum cut-off scores on the SAT. As a result, percentages of applicants
accepted were very high:
91% at public two-year colleges
86% at private two-year colleges
79% at public four-year colleges
77% at private four-year colleges
The inevitable overall result is that virtually all literate and numerate
students and many semi-literate or even illiterate ones can find some
college which will accept them, if they can somehow arrange to pay the fees.
This is illustrated by University of Wyoming president Terry Roark's comment
in September, 1988: "My plan to stiffen UW admissions standards will not
prevent any high school graduate from entering Wyoming's only university."

* High School dropout rate

While the SAT scores decline, the high-school dropout rate increases: NEA
data for the '85-'86 school year reveal that 30% of America's teenagers are
not graduating from high school. (In 1965 the fraction was 24%) In the large
cities, the dropout rate is 35-50%. Indeed, in Boston for that year more
kids dropped out (52%) than graduated!! Perhaps partly through actual
physical fear: many classrooms require two teachers, one to talk and keep
the pupils amused while the other tries to keep them from killing each
other. Teaching someone the difference between velocity and acceleration is
irrelevant if that person is hungry and scared. The social cost of this
phenomenon is staggering - in part because these dropouts tend not to enter
the labor force. In 1987, 19% of the labor force had college degrees, up
from 10% in 1963. Only 18% had less than a high school diploma, down from
45% in 1963.
"So where are all the dropouts?" you may ask. More than half of the
nation's prison population is comprised of these dropouts. The dollar cost
of confining a prisoner can be up to $25K/year - a figure higher than the
cost of a year of schooling at either Harvard or Yale.

And this dismal situation exists in spite of an enormous, and growing,

financial investment: government spending on education consumes 7% of GNP
($240 billion in 1984). The cost per student of public elementary and
secondary schooling was $2279 in 1980, $4810 during school year 1988-89, and
$4929 the following year. Between 1950 and 1976, per pupil spending
increased nearly 300% (inflation adjusted). In the five years from 1971 to
1976 total professional staff in US public schools went up 8%. The number of
administrators increased 44%. The cost per pupil went up 58%. While the
number of students went DOWN 4%. The number of school districts went down by
17%, continuing the trend to greater centralization. These massive changes
produced not a nation of scholars but the least educated generation in our
history.
The cost of education is more than just taxpayer and parental dollars; it
is also the students' time, much of which is wasted. For example, does it
really take 12 years to produce high school graduates who cannot read, who
cannot find the USA on a world map and who do not know when WWII was?
Couldn't the same results be achieved in a lot less time? Is it likely that
better results will be achieved with longer school years and extra years in
school, as many educators advocate?
The conjecture that schools are primarily custodial institutions is
corroborated by the observation that in most school districts children are
forbidden to take the high school equivalency exam sooner than the age at
which they would complete high school. If a child can demonstrate at age 13
that she knows what is required of a high school graduate, why shouldn't she
be able to take the exam and be done with school?

* Quality of Education
For those who stay in school, the quality of education leaves much to be
desired. I have seen estimates of functional illiteracy ranging from 25% to
33% of high school graduates, and up to 13% of the entire adult population.
The National Commission on Excellence in Education found 23 million adult
functional illiterates, and Daniel Boorstin, head of the Library of
Congress, claims the number is growing at an annual rate of 2.3 million. A
1992 study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 17
percent of U.S. adults have only the rudimentary ability to pick out facts
in a brief newspaper article; 4 percent are unable to read at all.
Critics of schooling rarely attempt to define the term "functional
illiterate" but I believe a distinction can be made between two groups of
people: those who are not able to read/write (correctly described as
"illiterate") and those whose educational experience has traumatized them
into a state where they are not WILLING to read/write, even though they are
able to do so. This is the group being described as "functional illiterates"
but I believe either "aliterate" or "scriptophobic" would be a more accurate
term. These are the people who eschew independently initiated literary
behavior. They have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to passive obedience
that their intellectual initiative is almost extinct.

According to the National Council for Geographic Education (corroborated

by an independent study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress),
one in five American students is unable to locate the USA on a world map. An
NSF poll in 1988 revealed that 55% of adult Americans do not know that a
year is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. Perhaps even more
frightening is the fact that 25% of Americans do not know that the Earth
goes around the sun. Says James Vining, executive director of the NCGE: "We
have a situation where Johnny not only doesn't know how to read or add, he
doesn't even know where he is." And, I would add, he can't figure out what's
going on: the NCEE also found that 40% of 17-year-olds are not able to draw
a simple inference from written material. And as time passes, they have less
and less access to even the simplest written material: In 1950, virtually
all American households received at least one daily newspaper. In 1970, 98%
did so. But by 1993, that had fallen to 63%.
In 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state to force children to
go to school, the literacy rate in that state was 98%. Today, after nearly
150 years of compulsory government schooling, the literacy rate is 91%
Only nine of the states require a geography course for graduation. Thirty
percent of US high schools do not offer a physics course, twenty percent
offer no chemistry, and ten percent offer no biology. Almost 75% offer no
earth or space science courses. In 1990, fewer than 50% of the graduates had
taken chemistry, and only about 20% had taken physics.
In an examination of 17 countries, the International Association for the
Evaluation of Educational Achievement found that US 14-year-olds ranked 14th
in their knowledge of basic science. (Hungary was first and Japan second.)
US students were also among the worst at age 18. A 1989 international math
test included the statement "I am good at mathematics." The Americans led in
their agreement with this statement: 68% answered "Yes." (In another survey,
30% considered themselves to be not just good, but "among the best.") But
when the test was scored, the Americans ranked LAST in their actual math
performance. American students do not know their math, but they have
evidently absorbed the lessons of the newly-fashionable curriculum wherein
kids are taught to feel good about themselves, thus American kids feel good
about doing bad. The US high-school grad used to be highly educated relative
to the rest of the world. This is no longer the case, and the economy is now
much more globally-extensive. Thus the US grad is relatively dumber.
A 1988 survey found that half of those who had never taken a course in
biology did as well in tests as 40% of those who had; apparently, biology
courses taught most of those taking them almost nothing.
But the kids ARE learning something: the fraction of schoolchildren
believing in astrology rose from 40% to 59% between 1978 and 1984.
The institutionalized ignorance described here has another really tragic
consequence for American teen-agers: partly as a result of grossly
inadequate - or nonexistent - sex education programs, the rate of abortions
rose 70% between 1973 and 1988 among American girls under the age of 20.

But what can you expect from an educational process in which reading,
writing, arithmetic and science are delivered to students in much the same
way as tires, windows and doors are attached to the frame of an automobile
on an assembly line? A student moves along this assembly line, at each stage
having an additional "education module" slapped onto his mental framework.
It is supposed that the end result of this agglomeration process will be a
comprehensively educated person. But nowhere during the process does the
student acquire the ability to integrate the modules into a coherent whole.
In the public schools the students are, at best, merely memorizing facts -
they are not integrating ideas, and are certainly not learning to do so.
Good teachers are as much victims of this situation as are the students.
They are forced to comply with government and school administration
"guidelines" ...instead of determining them. The result is that students are
"exposed" to subject material instead of being taught it.

A culture is a collection of values and the behaviors required to achieve

those values. Schools do not transmit the culture because they do not teach
children how to set long term life goals in the context of a political and
economic environment. In fact, what the schools are actually doing is
culturally retrogressive, as they are instilling a philosophy of value-
deprivation/depravation. A 1989 survey by the National Endowment for the
Humanities showed that nearly one quarter of college seniors believe the
words "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
are found in the US Constitution.
At the time you graduate from high school, everything you know about
government you learned in schools which are owned by government, operated by
government, staffed by government employees, financed with government money,
teaching courses of study which are selected by government committees, and
which you have been compelled to attend by government law. Can you really
trust what you supposedly "know" about government? Or about any of the
ethical ideas which government considers to be important?

Sooner or later America will have to face the fact that angry
denunciations of public education and innumerable studies by committees with
prestigious appellations have left us blue in the face but have produced not
one whit of change. In no field is there more rhetoric about change, and in
no field is there less actual change reflecting real improvement.
Many parents turn a blind eye to these phenomena because they don't want
to face (for example) the prospect of having minority students who should be
in the seventh grade attending fifth or sixth grade classes with their
children. People who support this view point to the overwhelming percentage
of minorities in remedial classes as evidence that it is a genuine concern.
But when the "right to an education" becomes the "right to a diploma" many
students are graduated who haven't received an education.

* Quality of the Teachers

The National Committee on Excellence in Education remarked: "If an
unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as
an act of war."
And what of the soldiers who are waging this war? Observe:
The state of Texas recently heaved a sigh of relief that only 3.3% of its
teachers flunked a basic "see-Spot-run" competency test. Still, that was
6579 teachers unable to read, write, or cipher - all early grade-school
material. And you wonder how they managed to finish college and get hired?!
Medals given to the winners of a Los Angeles scholastic competition in 1992
misspelled the word "academic" (acadumbic?)
Using data provided by ETS, Ron Hoeflin compiled this list of median GRE
advanced achievement test scores for graduate school applicants in various
fields. It shows clearly the intellectual position of teachers relative to
other professional groups:
Mathematics 630
Physics 628
Philosophy 627
Biology 609
Chemistry 606
Economics 590
Engineering 583
Geology 569
English Lit. 549
Spanish 549
French 544
German 535
Psychology 533
History 529
GRE (total) 509
Political Sci.498
Geography 486
Music 485
Education 464
 The decline in the SAT scores of educators has been just as acute. In
1973, future education majors scored 59 points lower than the national
average on the combined SAT; by 1982, they scored 82 points lower. The
negative selection of those going into teaching has been aggravated by
negative selection among those already in the field: the 1972 National
Longitudinal Survey of high school seniors shows that the mean SAT score for
those who enter the field of teaching and then leave it is 42 points higher
than the score of those who enter and stay. Those who remain permanently in
the profession have a combined SAT score 118 points lower than the score of
those who have never taught.
In the words of teachers-union president Albert Shanker, "For the most
part, you are getting illiterate, incompetent people who cannot go into any
other field."
And if you should ask "Well, why can't they clean up their act?" -
consider this: The American Association for the Advancement of Science is
attempting a radical redefinition of science curricula. The first phase,
intended to establish what high school graduates should know, was intended
to last six months, but took five years! Many teachers who are honestly
looking for ways to improve their techniques walk away without any answers.

In view of the widespread concern for "classrooms without education" the

simple alternative of "education without classrooms" ought to be readily
apparent, but no one seems to be aware of it. The belief that classrooms are
a prerequisite to education leads to the belief that education comes only
from classrooms - that education is a prerogative of the schools. How many
times have you heard the remark "When will you finish your education?" when
what is meant is "When will you get your diploma?" It is unfortunate that
many people, strutting off the stage while clutching in their hot little
hands that decorative piece of wallpaper, think "at last my schooling is
finished" and then commence to stagnate intellectually for the rest of their
lives.
Merely sitting in a school room for a period of years is not equivalent
to receiving an education.
(See the BOOKLIST file for a large selection of references on home
schooling.)
See reference

And for those ambitious students who manage to cope with this state of
affairs and graduate from high school, what awaits them when they do get to
college? (52% of the graduates of American high schools go on to college.)
Just what is the educational philosophy of the modern university? Here are
some representative examples:
In metaphysics, the University of Delaware offers a course titled:
NOTHING. "A study of Nil, Void, Vacuum, Null, Zero, and Other Kinds of
Nothingness. A lecture course exploring the varieties of nothingness from
the vacuum and void of physics and astronomy to political nihilism, to the
emptiness of the arts and the soul."
In epistemology, New York University offers THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. "Various
theories of knowledge are discussed, including the view that they are all
inadequate and that, in fact, nobody knows anything."
For ethics, we go to Indiana and attend course SOCIAL REACTIONS TO
HANDICAPS, in which the students will "explore some of the different ways in
which the handicapped individual...has been regarded in Western
Civilization. Figures from the past such as the fool, the madman, the blind
beggar...will be discussed."
There was once a time when college students studied facts, knowledge, and
human greatness. Now they study nothingness, ignorance, and blind beggars.
The resulting technical incompetence and moral relativism is producing a
generation of young people who are intellectually impoverished, lacking the
knowledge, moral standards and the commitment to reason necessary to sustain
the technologically sophisticated civilization they have inherited. They
have become innocent people stumbling through a Rube Goldberg world and
trying in vain to make sense of it.
This may seem like an exaggeration, but some philosophers do not shrink
from spelling out the final consequences of the modern skepticism: "There is
no truth," holds Richard Rorty, "there is no such subject as philosophy,
there are no objective standards by which to evaluate or criticize social
and political practices. No matter what is done to the citizens of a
country, therefore, they can have no objective grounds on which to protest."
Having been taught that there is no knowledge, no values, no standards of
judgment to appeal to or rely on, men must now accept the fact "that we have
not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it if we do
see it. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers
violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them."

Nowadays we hear much about the value of our colleges and universities,
their importance to the nation, and our need to contribute financially to
their survival and growth. In regard to many professional and scientific
schools, this is indeed true. But in regard to the arts, the humanities and
the social sciences, the opposite is true. In those areas, with a few rare
exceptions, colleges and universities are now a national menace; and the
more distinguished (and therefore popular) the university, such as Harvard
and Berkeley and Columbia, the worse its effect is. Today's college
faculties are hostile to every idea on which this country was founded, they
are corrupting an entire generation of students, and they are leading the
United States thereby into slavery and destruction.
Most of the colleges of this country have simply classified ignorance and
are peddling it as knowledge. There are very good reasons to believe that
the money you pay to a college could be much better spent in other
investments for your future. (See Chapter 14 - An Alternative Lifestyle for
an Individualist.)
See reference
I have asked several students, "What does it cost you to spend a year in
that school?" And in every case the answer is an amount of money that would
suffice to support me comfortably for at least two years, with plenty left
over for the purchase of all the books, journals and educational materials
that I normally consume during that time. College is a financial rip-off.
Consider also that if you take a degree, you will then probably enter
that particular field of professional endeavor and spend your life pursuing
it. This tends to make you educationally restricted. I have a vastly broader
education today than I would have acquired if I had spent my life pursuing
only the scholastic specialty I began with.
Self-education IS a viable alternative! The personal experience of many
people who have successfully educated themselves proves this conclusively.

* Futility of Reform - Principles underlying government schooling

The NEA boasts that in 128 years its goal has never wavered: "Excellence
in every classroom, for every child." The dismal picture painted here
suggests a more appropriate slogan: "Ignorance is our most important
product."
The effects of NEA policies, and of five generations of John Dewey in the
public school system, show clearly that that system has failed. Public
schools have failed and will continue to fail for a very simple reason:
there is no impetus for success.
Because children HAVE to be in school and HAVE to do what they're told,
teachers almost never get any quick and reliable feedback about their
teaching. By contrast, people teaching their own children, even if they make
many mistakes, are soon likely to become effective teachers, because they
get from their children the kind of unmistakable feedback that tells them
when their teaching is helpful and when it is not. But public education is
accountable to no one. Taxpayers must support it and the majority of parents
must accept its product, like it or not.
Much of the legislation concerning educational reform, particularly that
directed toward "minority" accomodation, is no more than ideology
masquerading as reform, as conflicting pressure-groups fight for control
over the school system.
Competing educational systems would offer the consumer a wide choice in
his purchase of education for himself and/or his children. This would end
forever the squabbles over curriculum (sex education? more athletics? more
academics? Black Studies programs?), student body (segregated or
integrated?), control of education (should it be in the hands of parents,
teachers, voters, the school board, or the colleges?), and all the other
questions which are unsolvable within the context of government's coercive
control of education. If each consumer were free to choose, among competing
schools, the type of education he valued most, all these problems would be
solved automatically. But the government school system preempts the options
of the citizens who are obliged to finance it, so that alternatives are
dependent on the arbitrary decrees of government committees.
The government has not solved the education problem because government IS
the problem.
If the government got out of education, would all parents make the best
choices for their children? Of course not. We don't live in a perfect world.
But we SHOULD live in a free country - one in which each of us is free to
make his own choices, good or bad. And those parents who are capable of
making good choices shouldn't have their children held prisoner in
government schools because other parents are less competent.

As American public schools slowly sink under waves of violence, drugs,

and illiteracy, supporters search frantically for salvation - but there is
none. The internal chaos and increasing politicalization of public education
are inherent in its government ownership wherein, without the necessity to
compete for customers, and lacking the profit motive, there is little
incentive for improvement. As long as local school systems are assured of
state and federal financing, it would be sentimental, wishful thinking to
expect any significant increase in their efficiency.
The application of individual rights and cognitive competence to the
educational system is necessary before sanity can return to the classrooms.

The Japanese educational system demonstrates some interesting contrasts

with that of the USA. In the mid-1960s math tests were given to 18-year-olds
in 12 countries. The AVERAGE Japanese scored at the same standard as the top
1% elsewhere. A second run of these tests in the early 1980s had similar
results. Another comparison (in 1981) of 17-year-olds in Japan and in
Illinois showed the average Japanese scoring better than 98% of the
Americans.
In attempting to understand this disparity, it should be noted that the
financing of state-owned senior high schools in Japan is about average for
economically advanced nations. But 30% of Japanese high schools are
privately owned, and although compulsory schooling extends only to age 15 in
Japan, 94% of Japanese adolescents voluntarily continue their education,
even though they are all required to pay fees for this continuance - whether
they choose to attend a state-financed high school or a wholly private
school.
Thus, while the American government-controlled schools are barely able to
attract half the nation's adolescents, the Japanese experience suggests
strongly that schools sensitive to consumer requirements by virtue of their
market orientation provide a service which virtually all adolescents (and/or
their parents) are not only willing to avail themselves of but even to pay
for. AND which has fabulously successful educational results!

We should make the public aware of how much better educated their
children would be from reading things produced by private institutions
rather than from studying the social sciences at a university. What happens
in the American Sociological Association is trivial, but what's coming out
of think tanks like the Cato Institute is much more central to the real
problems of American society. The Laissez Faire Bookstore undoubtedly
provides a better selection of useful educational material than can be found
in any university's social science department.

The erosion of confidence in government resulting from continual policy

reversals, irresolution in the face of electoral whims, and stifling
bureaucracy may eventually lead to a trend toward private funding of
education.
To ensure the supply of trained talent, business will have to invest in
the private educational system. And to some extent, it already is doing so:
the NSF estimated in 1992 that employers in the US spend about $100 billion
a year retraining high school graduates in basic skills. Of 200 major
American corporations, 22% teach employees reading, 41% teach writing, and
31% teach arithmetic. The Savannah symphony orchestra players sign two
contracts, one to play in the orchestra, and the other to teach music to
high school students for 20 hours per week.

Educational policies in America - from pre-schoool to graduate school -

are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but
also morally confused, emotionally alienated and socially maladjusted. The
destruction begins in the primary and secondary schools, with content-less
classes designed to inculcate relativism by encouraging students to express
whatever it is that they happen to FEEL about a subject, rather than teach
them the facts about the subject. Students taught under this curriculum are
given no techniques for dealing with facts. They are not taught logical
principles, nor even any concept of right or wrong answers. It is not merely
that Johnny can't read, or that Johnny can't think. Johnny doesn't know what
thinking is, because in the classroom thinking is so ofen confused with
feeling.
While schoolchildren in Japan are learning science, mathematics and
languages, American children are sitting around in circles, unburdening
their little souls and expressing themselves on scientific, economic and
military issues about which they lack even the rudiments of knowledge. Worse
than what they are NOT learning is what they ARE learning - presumptuous
superficiality, taught by practitioners of it.
American schools are failing in every subject and on a fundamental level;
they are doing it methodically, as a matter of philosophical principle.
Their courses are a hodge-podge of random and contradictory information that
can't possibly be integrated into a consistent whole, and one of the first
things they teach students is not to bother to try. The anti-conceptual
epistemology that grips them comes from John Dewey, who stands on the
shoulders of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who dedicated his life and his
system to the destruction of reason.
About 1900, psychologist William James developed what came to be called
the "pragmatic method." It maintained that the value of anything is to be
found only in terms of its "usefulness" or actual consequences. It denied
the existence of "absolutes" of any kind. Shortly thereafter, philosopher
John Dewey seized upon this concept and developed the theory of
Instrumentalism. It holds that thought is simply a method of meeting
difficulties - that its goals are wider experiences and the solving of
problems. To Dewey, knowledge equals experience, and there are no universal
truths of any kind. To Dewey, anything in life which satisfies a want is a
"good." If one concedes that good and evil have no other connotation than
satisfying or failing to satisfy an individual want or need, then it follows
that there can be no positive standards of child behavior, no moral code
except a relative one. Knowledge, in this gibberish doctrine, is never worth
pursuing for its own sake, only for the sake of problems it might solve for
the individual. Dewey's pragmatism held the main goals of education to be
these: To aid the child to live the life of the peer group, and to enable
him to adjust to unknown and constantly changing environmental conditions.
There is nothing here, you will note, about the basic essentials of
knowledge. Nothing about culture. Or teaching children to use the
intellectual tools which the human race has found to be indispensable in the
pursuit of truth. Or even simple literacy, for that matter. The American
education establishment has continued to embrace this balderdash long after
its failure has become blatantly apparent (except to that establishment),
and no matter how many kids emerge from its clutches illiterate and
ignorant.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated,
will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though rarely said, that
uttering nonsense and half-truths without cease ends by destroying
intellect.

* Tragic consequences
Incompetence in cognition creates a caste system. Those who can use
language can think and therefore be independent, rational and productive;
those who cannot are more ignorant, less productive and more easily
manipulated, intimidated and controlled. Thus the American school system has
produced generations of citizens who eagerly embrace the very principles
which are being used to impoverish and enslave them.
If improvements are not made in the educational system, the divisions
among people in this country will only become more extreme.

A few horror stories:

City government departments such as Fire, Police, Ambulance, Hospitals,
Parks, Electricity, Water, and Streets need to employ people who are at
least moderately literate and who possess sufficient education and self-
confidence to make reasonable judgments in everyday situations. It was
disheartening to call 911 to report a crime at the playground in Riverside
Park at 91st Street, only to have the responding city employee ask
plaintively: "But what is the house number? We have to have a house
number..." I had managed to get hold of a person who wasn't familiar with
the geography of her own city, probably didn't know how to read a map, and
didn't realize that private homes with numbers are not part of the layout of
the public parks and playgrounds. This is not so unusual. Incompetent public
service does not contribute to a high standard of community living.

A Missouri couple took their local public school to court for failing to
teach their child to read and write. The judge ruled for the school on the
grounds that the law specifies compulsory attendance in Missouri, not
compulsory education.

The social sciences are "disciplines" whose connections with reality seem
to get more and more tenuous every year. This can be frustrating for
graduates who depart college full of a social science know-how that leaves
them knowing only how to teach the same stuff to others. A political science
professor tried to convince me to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. in
political science:
 "What could I do with a political science Ph.D.?" I asked.
"Well," came the answer, "you could lecture to other students getting
political science degrees."
"And what would they do with their political science degrees?"
"Well, they could teach others..."
It sounded like a giant Ponzi scheme, so I left college immediately.
As Martin Gardner remarked: "If you're a professional philosopher,
there's no way to make any money except to teach. It has no use anywhere."
One woman, looking back on her scholastic experience, remarked that
school "was too stifling for me and," she maintained wistfully, "the wrong
place for people who need freedom and who want to use the energy of their
youth to ask naive questions. You may be using up a time in life that will
just never come again."

During the 1994-95 school year, the administrators of a high school near
Boulder Colorado decided to rent its wall space for commercial advertising.
In an attempt to quell the inevitable opposition to such a decision, they
held meetings with the students in which they explained their reasons. When
the students were told that the local voters had not passed an increase in
the school tax base for over 20 years, the response of one student was
rather surprising:
"Why do you hate us so? You force us to spend 12 years in these schools,
but then you refuse to pay for their operation. When we go into the
community we see signs on doors saying 'You are not welcome here if you are
under 18 years old.' You have recently passed a curfew that forbids us to
move about in our own community at night. The tone of moral outrage and
vilification used by the conservatives when they talk about teenage
pregnancy makes it perfectly clear to us that they hate these young parents.
Why do you hate us so? In a few years WE will be the adults who run the
world, and YOU will be old folks whose economic well-being will depend at
least in part on us. We will remember then what you are doing to us today."

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,

It expects what never was and never will be.
.... Thomas Jefferson

Chapter 12
THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION

* Alienation
It is not necessary to prove that something is wrong with the world.
Everybody - of any creed, color, or intellectual persuasion, old and young,
rich and poor, conservative and liberal, foreign and domestic - senses that
something monstrous is destroying civilization. But no one can figure out
what it is.
The reason civilization is declining may not be loss of resources, or the
uncontrolled obsession to reproduce, or the decline of literacy, or the
continuing increase in government tyranny, or any such thing. Those may be
mere effects, while the real cause may be a collective subconscious revolt
against this steel, concrete and machinery. Since we evolved among forests,
do we dare cut down every tree on earth? The thousands of visible stars that
defined the night sky for our ancestors are now too washed out for urban
eyes to see. Our loss of the velvet night is profound. Not only have we lost
the stars, we have lost even the night itself. Here in central Wyoming, I
live in one of the least populated regions of the country. Even so, I must
trek well up into the mountainous wilderness before I can experience a
darkness that is not encroached upon by artificial lights. Along with
darkness, we have lost silence. The incessant and inescapable clamor of
modern civilization is pounding continually against our eardrums, hammering
its way inexorably into our subconscious minds. Surely this must have
similar consequences to the Newspeak phenomena that I discussed in Chapter
2.
See reference
There has been a social loss also. Many people exist like zombies,
refusing to run the risk of interacting emotionally or intellectually with
other people, but this leaves them with a vacant feeling in their hearts and
minds so they switch on the TV and live vicariously, watching some actor
having a make-believe experience when they no longer experience anything for
themselves. This enables them to run no risk of being hurt but to experience
emotions they are otherwise missing. This counterfeit practice fills the
need for emotional experience only until the next day when it has to be fed
again. Before TV, people had no phoney out. They had to get their emotional
satisfaction from relating to other real live people. But today they have
become a gum-chewing, bag-rattling crowd of couch potatoes. A crowd that
wants its entertainment overplayed so that it won't have to think about
what's going on. A crowd whose senses are so dulled that its laughter comes
out of a can. A value-deprived crowd that doesn't want to reach OUT for a
feeling or a meaning. It wants to be clubbed in the head with the meaning,
so that it doesn't have to reach. A situation which hardly predisposes to
virtue.
Maybe man can survive on earth this way, but his dreams can't. There is
too much "civilization" and it has crowded out all the dreams. And there's
no LIFE left for anyone. Just day-to-day survival. Average life in America:
you're born, you go to school, you grow into an adult and join the rat-race,
you get a job to survive and pay taxes, then you die.
Happiness and beauty are psychological necessities. That's why we
experience beauty in such natural-world phenomena as sunsets and rainbows,
and why we experience happiness in successful value-achievement. But it must
be authentic happiness - the brain is a natural, not artificial, organ. Many
people have very little authentic happiness. There is a difference between
the joy of creative achievement and the mere pleasure of release from work.
TV watching is not authentic. Nor is the mad scramble to earn a living while
focused not on genuine productivity but on extraneous things like keeping up
with the Joneses or keeping your boss satisfied.
Nathaniel Branden once commented on "the biological forces deep within
our organism that speak to us in a wordless language we have barely begun to
decipher." I rather suspect that it is more likely the case that we have
forgotten how to decipher their language. The trappings of civilization have
cozened humans to sever their direct links with fundamentally important
values and "the biological forces deep within our organism" that impel us to
the achievement of those values. Thus we live in what Rand has so aptly
described as a condition of "cultural value-deprivation."

* Principles have Consequences

To understand the state of a society, one must discover the extent to
which a given philosophy has been institutionalized and has penetrated the
spirit of its citizens. On this basis, one can then explain a society's
history - and forecast its future. This is what makes intelligible the fact
of Hitler's rise, and the inevitability of America's decline.
If you have been taught - and accept - that oppression is proper, then
you will participate in a form of gradual social suicide. You will, as a
matter of course, help to spread within your society the attitudes that must
be nourished in order to accept oppression. (They are, after all, your own
attitudes.) As a result, a greater and greater percentage of the population
will come to embrace social institutions that eventuate in the self-
destruction of society. (Thus the continual victories for collectivist
politics.)
For example: Starting with the premise that sacrifice is a fundamental
requirement of human existence, it is inevitable that laws will be passed
mandating sacrifices. The unwillingness of an individual to accept the
sacrifices that "the law" demands will be perceived as a violation of
civilized decency. Thus even if a man starts out as benevolent, a consistent
application of the collectivist principle of sacrifice will drive him,
against all his better premises and feelings, to accept the necessity of
violating individual rights. Here you see the indirect - and largely
unrecognized - influence of philosophy on human existence.
Principles do count. If we destroy the principles by which we live
through cowardice, expediency, fear, or any other reason, we will destroy
the basis of our existence.

Imagine passengers riding on a train which, they have been told, is

taking them to a distant utopia. At first all seems well, but as the train
moves closer to its destination, the scene outside the windows becomes
ominously bleak. Finally, the passengers catch sight of the destination.
Instead of the utopia, they see starving children, chain gangs, and, in the
distance, the barbed wire and sentry posts of a concentration camp.
Frightened and angry, they attempt to negate their forward motion by running
back INSIDE THE TRAIN. The attempt, of course, is hopeless; to save
themselves, the passengers must get off the train altogether. In the same
manner, the moral code of altruism will carry society to tyranny, regardless
of short-term backpedalling. The only hope is to fully reject altruism and
enable man's right to exist for his own sake.

* Freedom/Slavery schizophrenia
It is prerequisite to mental health that a man be in spiritual contact
with his own knowledge of reality. (See PSE chapter 6.) Thus an ignorant
man, whose conceptual view of the world is limited, can live in a successful
state of mental health if he will just recognize and act according to the
view of reality he does have. However, a man with greater knowledge MUST
recognize and act according to his advanced view or else he will be neurotic
- by being out of spiritual contact with the reality he perceives.
A man living under a totalitarian government, who has no real knowledge
of what freedom is, suffers a condition of enslavement, but he does not
misperceive his situation, thus his only burden is that of being a slave.
Citizens of the United States also suffer a condition of enslavement, but
they have been taught that their nation was established in freedom, and that
their ancestors were free, and all their lives they have been led to believe
that they themselves are free. Devoutly but falsely believing themselves to
be free, they refuse to acknowledge the fact of their enslavement. But the
reality of that fact is inescapable. Once they are released from the school
system and enter mainstream society, these slaves - having been thoroughly
indoctrinated by the government with the notion that America is a free
society and that they are free people - immediately encounter such phenomena
as: selective service, driver's licenses, vehicle registration, income tax,
property tax, business licenses, and the myriad regulations that control all
aspects of their daily lives. (Read a New Hampshire license plate: "Live
free or die.") Thus they have a double burden: the enslavement itself and
also the psychological effects of the hypocritical discord between the
reality they live in and the falsehood of their beliefs.
 The polite voice of a policeman is nothing more than a mocking,
hypocritical expression of tyrannous authority - the arrogant inhumanity of
power - even if the policeman truly believes he is being polite! The fact of
government's omnipotence over the individual renders his politeness a mere
hypocrisy. In fact, the truant officer is a kidnapper; the tax collector is
a thief; the soldier is a murderer. This all-pervasive hypocrisy also
contributes greatly to the spread of criminal behavior among the populace:
most people have decided the system stinks because the politicians are
corrupt, in one way or another, so why should ordinary Joes punish
themselves by always being honest?
Is it any wonder that the subconscious attempt of a mind to integrate the
firm belief in freedom with the inescapable facts of slavery should result
in massive psychological distress? Enough to drive one to drink - or
addiction of an even more self-destructive nature - or even suicide. The
victim has chopped himself into pieces which he struggles never to connect -
and then he sees no reason why his life is in ruins. Not knowing precisely
what has happened to his life nor who to blame, he sees only that the
quality of life has shockingly deteriorated, and that life is now so beset
by apprehension for the future, difficulty in remaining solvent, and actual
physical danger, that it is hardly worth living any more. His life has been
a slow slide into anesthesia, a bleak life, the sadness of which is like a
slow-acting acid on his soul. He survives by becoming less and less
sensitive, until he no longer cares even for himself. This is the cause of
his apathy and lack of emotion. One can respond emotionally only on account
of something for which one cares.
And it is immensely difficult for him to fight this situation: having had
his concept of freedom thoroughly depraved, he lacks the derivative concepts
needed for active resistance to tyranny.
When I hear someone say that Americans are free, I consciously and
explicitly recognize that statement to be false. I also know subconsciously
that it is false. Thus there is no conflict between my conscious mind and my
subconscious mind. When you hear the same statement, you consciously and
explicitly accept it as true. Your subconscious mind, however, knows -
because of its inability to integrate the contrary observations you have
made - that the statement is false. In order to avoid the psychologically
devastating (or at least distressing) process of seeing your most cherished
beliefs refuted, you must suppress the knowledge of your subconscious mind -
so that it will not conflict with your consciously held convictions - and
accept only a selected subset of your observations. You must divide your
mind into two parts: the set of observations that you consciously accept,
and that disturbing set of observations that contradict your conscious
beliefs. As time passes, this alienation process becomes more pervasive, as
you come to deny a larger and larger body of your observations, and it
becomes more intense, as you force yourself to deny a more and more
important body of observations. Since the fundamental function of a human
mind is the process of integration, this continual segregation process
results in a growing nervous tension, as your subconscious mind tries harder
and harder to integrate these two bodies of knowledge. Eventually there will
occur an explicit recognition of this conflict, accompanied by a emotional
trauma proportional to the amount and degree of segregation that had
previously occcurred. The rage and frustration resulting from this trauma
(and/or from the sudden destruction of your most cherished beliefs) may so
seriously derange your mental processes that you drive your pickup truck
through the front door of a restaurant and then kill two dozen people.
A man can accept enslavement - after all, most people throughout history
have lived in a state of enslavement, and they have accepted this (although
in many cases they did not like it at all). But what a man CANNOT do is
believe that he is free while simultaneously realizing that he is a slave.
It is not possible to integrate a contradiction. Any attempt to do so will
make you insane. This is a major reason why half the hospital beds in
America contain people who have mental, not physical, illness. Being unable
to resolve the conflict between their environment and their upbringing, they
wind up in mental institutions. It is also a major contributor to the
widespread cultural derangement, and its accompanying violence, that so
plague modern America.
Facts are facts, whether you believe in them or not. They are immutable.
The thing that depends on your cognizance of them is not the reality of the
facts, but the effectiveness of your behavior - and your mental health.

* Financial Manipulation
When you manufacture products, you add value to raw materials, and you
literally create wealth. But America is turning more and more to a different
economic perspective: Americans make money now by paper manipulation, the
error of which is bound to catch up to us because paper profits don't
reflect real wealth. The fascination with Wall Street and junk bonds is so
misplaced as to be crazy.
Instead of goods, services, and work - realities of the physical world -
Keynes' economic realities are mere symbols: money and credit.
The advice of economic counselors is usually very good in times of
affluence when the game is played with intangibles such as dollars, stocks,
bonds, etc. These things have value in the same sense that bubble gum cards
have great value among children. but a dollar is no more money than a
hatcheck is a hat. Sooner or later you've got to have a hat.
Contrast the great fortunes of the early 20th century with those of the
late 20th century. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford made vast fortunes, but
these were productive fortunes: they produced steel, oil and automobiles.
The great fortunes of the 1980s resulted not from production, but from
manipulation of financial assets. Never have so many made so much in return
for producing so little.
The world no longer has the patience for long-term investments. The vast
increase of government interference in the market has resulted in a general
economic thrust away from far-sightedness and the building of capital for
the future, and toward destructive short-term looting of the stock of
capital. Political Man is narrow-minded and short-sighted. He loots
resources for short-term benefit. It is capital ownership in the free market
that encourages Economic Man to look to the future, to safeguard resources
in order to maintain their long-term value on the market.
The increasing scope of government's control and its associated transfers
of property rights from private individuals to government or to political
interest groups undermines the private property arrangements that support a
free market system. This process creates considerable uncertainty about the
future value of those private rights that have not yet been taken. When
resource owners are relatively uncertain about their continued ownership of
those resources, they tend to use them up relatively rapidly and have less
incentive to enhance future production capabilities. Resources are then
overused and underproduced.

* Standard of Living
I recently came across a prediction made by futurists back in the 1950s:
"People in the 1980s will be commuting from their rooftops via personal
helicopters, filing flight plans instead of fighting freeways."
I got to thinking about this and said "Why not? There is no technological
reason why personal helicopters are not widely available, or perhaps small
VTOL aircraft." This led me to a related line of inquiry - a comparison of
the American standard of living of the 1950s with that of the 1980s.
Has it been going up? Down? Remaining about the same? Or is this a
spurious question? It might be better to ask "Whose standard of living?"
Some people do better, some do worse. Is it even possible to measure an
aggregate "standard of living"?
And what is the difference between the state of the economy and the
standard of living of the people? I think there is a difference. I can
conceive of a healthy, robust and growing national economy in which most
people have a rather low standard of living (compared with what we have
today). This would be true of America in the first half of the 19th century.
The country was free, the economy was growing rapidly and uninhibitedly, but
the people were starting from a rather low standard of living. On the other
hand, during the 1930s most people were materially better off than their
ancestors had been a century previously - but the nation's economy was in
dismal condition.
I surmise that "state of the economy" could be measured in absolute
terms, but "standard of living" is only comparative.
In terms of electronic appliances there can be no doubt whatsoever - a
staggering increase in wealth has taken place during recent decades. The
same is true for some other industries also: bicycles, fabrics, junk food
(but whether this one constitutes a rise in standard of living is
debatable).
My tentative conclusion is that people have more material wealth today,
but they have to work more to get it. So is their standard of living higher
or lower? I don't know.
Think back to the fifties (if you are old enough to do so), when an
American family of three or four could live comfortably on the income earned
by the father, the sole breadwinner of the family. That father could own a
house, raise a family, and send the kids to college, all on a single
paycheck. Today, however, one income alone will usually not suffice for a
comfortable living for such a family. Both parents must work and still many
families can't even afford a house. In a family of my acquaintance, the
father, the mother, and the teenage daughter (this is the whole family) all
work full-time jobs. And I don't think this is at all unusual. The dollar
buys less, everything is more expensive. People struggle just to hold on to
what they have, and can't seem to get ahead.
Here are some data from the 1992 edition of the US Statistical Abstract:
Families with working wives 1950:24% 1991:58%
Families with working children 1960:6% 1982:12%
Percent of total population employed 1960:29% 1990:44%

Here is a comment by Harry Browne, from his book HOW YOU CAN PROFIT FROM
THE COMING DEVALUATION. (Published in August, 1970):
Can you imagine being asked to pay $3500 for a Volkswagen?
That's stretching your imagination quite a bit, I realize.
And yet that day may not be very far away.

And here is an item from NEWSWEEK magazine, August 29, 1977:

After 28 years in the US market, the homely little
Volkswagen Beetle is on its way out. Last week, after sales
of 5 million models, Volkswagen stopped shipping them here.
Since 1968 the Beetle's base price has raced from $1699 to
$3699.

No matter how much more wealth per capita improving technology makes
possible, it seems there is always something to soak up the surplus and
condemn ordinary people to a lifetime of labor. (And then at the end,
Greenspan & Co. recently arranged to knock two years off your retirement by
increasing the Social Security start age from 65 to 67.) No matter how much
productivity increases, people never seem to work less, only differently. So
if they don't reap the fruits, who does? Who sucks up the surplus?
 For every worker there is at least one drone - someone who "works" for
government or who is being supported by government, so you are working
enough to support at least two people.
People today have a lot of material goods, but they have a crushing
burden of debt and very little equity. In 1950, about one-third of the
after-tax income of the average family was used to pay off debts. By 1980
that proportion had risen to three-quarters. America is a nation that has
forgotten how to finance growth through earnings rather than debt.
In the early 1960s, interest payments made by American corporations were
5% of their cash flow. By 1989 that had risen to more than 20%. This makes
them more vulnerable than in the past to an economic downturn. If falling
sales hit their cash flow, and many find themselves unable to service their
debts, a wave of bankruptcies could follow in a domino effect as one
company's inability to pay reduces another's cash flow even further.
A key to the continued existence of any business is its ability to
generate a stream of profits sufficient to finance future capital
expenditures for replacement and growth. Small or large, it doesn't matter -
this fundamental economic requirement must be satisfied. But the profits of
American businesses are more and more being eaten up by interest payments
and government regulations. This bodes ill indeed for future prosperity.
Throughout history some nations gain power while others lose it. The
evidence shows that nations that pursue policies of respect for an
independent economic sphere - private property, the market economy, sanctity
of contracts, low taxes, sound money, free trade, and unrestricted
experimentation with technological advancements - tend to grow the fastest,
establishing national bases of tremendous economic power. But this economic
power always tempts governments to seize control over it, so they can pursue
policies of military expansion and foreign adventurism or, in general, for
the basic purpose of aggrandizing governmental institutions. But these
policies become parasitic on the very forces that led to the economic growth
in the first place; nations become militarily and bureaucratically top-heavy
and overextended, saddled with debt and high taxes, and ever resistant to
further change and necessary economic adjustments. In the end, such nations
are usually wrecked by a growing disparity between statist ambitions and
economic realities.
We can see this happening in America in those areas (especially inner-
city ghettos) where there is a growing similarity of life to that of some
Latin American republics where all attempts of enterprising people to rise
in life and make something of themselves are systematically squelched by the
reigning bureaucracy.
For the last hundred years in America, statist intervention tried to
preserve and even extend an industrial economy, while scuttling the very
requirements of freedom and the free market which in the long run are
necessary for its survival. For half a century, statist intervention could
wreak its depredations without causing clear and evident crises and
dislocations, because the free-market industrialization of the nineteenth
century had created a vast cushion of "fat" in the economy against such
depredations. But now statism has advanced so far and been in power so long
that the cushion is worn thin; the "reserve fund" created by laissez-faire
has been exhausted. So that now, whatever the government does brings about
an instant negative feedback - ill effects that are evident to all - and
what had been a problem solvable by free-market pricing and advancing
technology has become a complex puzzle the resolution of which will require
the complete dismantling of an all-pervasive system. But can the dismantling
occur without catastrophe? Consider just one aspect of it: If all government
subsidies were ended tomorrow morning, without any changes in the economy
having been effected first, there would be much suffering, and probably
starvation.
The government is very cunning, and the economy of America is very
resilient. But though the government may be very flexible, the principles it
is violating are not - and sooner or later the causes being implemented will
have their inexorable effects. The people I really feel sorry for are the
little children - who will have to live with those effects as they become
adults.

* Dependency
Millions who are now on Valium or other narcotic tranquilizers might go
insane if their supply were cut off. They represent a frightening dependency
on an outside life-support system. A simple edict of the government (or a
terrorist bomb) is all it would take to cut off the supply of tranquilizers,
electricity, propane, petrol or anything else (even food) which is
centralized in its production and distribution and therefore centrally
controllable. If the electric power went off in Wyoming in the middle of
winter, people would die. (A few years ago it did just that for four days -
and indeed, some people did die.) This possibility should scare everybody -
but hardly anybody even thinks about it. My idea of anarchism is not just
opposition to a centralized State, but the advocacy of as much economic
decentralization as is feasible for a civilized life. For example, I would
like to see a solar panel on everybody's roof, and the consequent extinction
of the power companies. Not that I have anything against the power companies
(except, of course, when they have a legal monopoly on utility provision),
but I am opposed to the institutionalized centralization of life-support
that they represent.

* Dictatorship American Style

The Nazis and the Communists achieved their power not by destroying but
by subverting the capacity of the individual to implement values. They
simply used propaganda to swindle him into implementing values they had
chosen. Today in America it is realized that any similar attempt would soon
be recognized, by comparison with the tactics of the Nazis, and rejected. So
today's American totalitarians must use another means to accomplish their
ends - a different kind of swindle: Newspeak. Thus has been taken the next
step in philosophical degradation: the individual's capacity to implement
values has not been subverted - it has been destroyed.
An understanding of the subversion process leads readily to a
comprehension of the Nazi and Communist systems. But what of a system in
which individuals are bereft of the motive to achieve any values at all? For
their future I can see only degeneracy into total chaos. If a dictator were
to rise up and command them, would they obey? This problem is compounded in
America, where the "dictator" is not a value-oriented individual but is a
bureaucracy itself comprised of valueless individuals. No centralized,
cohesive, value-oriented structure can arise from the American populace. I
am inclined to prognosticate a future for America not of dictatorial
tyranny, but of a chaos in which barbarians will overrun and destroy
civilization. Not the sort of barbarians from without who overran the Roman
civilization, but a new sort of barbarians from within - the illiterate,
non-cognitive, valueless denizens of America's inner cities, who will rise
up in their unfocused outrage and destroy everything.
The presently existing political structure does not have the potential to
function cohesively in a dictatorial manner such as the Nazi government did;
it contains too many disparate and mutually conflicting subgroups.
Through the system of checks and balances the Founding Fathers
established a political system whose operation is independent of the moral
character of any of its temporary officials - a system impervious to
political subversion. However, there are economic ramifications to this
idea: whereas the Nazis and the Communists channeled their nations' economic
power into the lifeblood of centralized government, the American government
is merely dissipating the nation's economic power into porkbarrel projects
proposed by the myriad of competing federal and state bureaucracies. It is
much more likely that all these will collapse from economic anemia than that
they will coalesce into a centralized tyranny.
Along with this, voters in America will keep on clamoring for the
government to violate the laws of nature. Perhaps the most significant
difference between the American government and a totalitarian government is
that a totalitarian government has a form of institutionalized intelligence,
but the American form of government is absolutely brainless. A dictatorial
government at least has the unifying mind of the dictator behind it. A
democracy has no mind behind it. For this reason it is unlikely to become a
centralized tyranny, for it cannot select and implement a unifying central
theme.
Even with the imposition of martial law, could the FedGov deploy enough
troops to control the entire country? And do so without the consent of the
local authorities, who control the local police? As a local policeman once
remarked to me: "The Lander police are not governed by the Supreme Court,
but by the laws of the State of Wyoming. We do not change our behavior until
we get a ruling from the State government."
Before a dictator could arise in America, the present political structure
would have to be largely or completely abolished.
What would another civil war be like in this country if the participants
were not divided into geographical factions? Maybe like the Spanish Civil
War? But that was a strongly ideological war, and my contention here is that
Americans lack ideology, so who would fight? Real power is institutionally
dissipated into a large number of separate foci and there is no provision
for its centralization.
There is one, and only one, group in America that comprises a potentially
effective totalitarian entity: the police. Their communally held goal is to
exercise total dominance and control over the citizens. If, in the
implementation of this, they can obtain the complete cooperation of the
other agencies of government, America may become literally a police state,
with the rest of government functioning primarily as a supportive
substructure for the police. It will probably not be the sort of centrally
organized police state that is common throughout the world, because the
American police are not centrally controlled, but they are coordinated and
cooperative.

Since the time of Hitler and Stalin, our age has lacked easily
identifiable villains of stature commensurate with their crimes against
humanity. No longer the transgressions of exceptionally cruel and notable
individuals, evil has been bureaucratized by the twentieth-century State and
made the charge of relatively faceless bureaucrats, small in character and
comprehension. Who knows the names of those who burned little children in
Philadelphia and Waco? Throughout the world, natty figures in suits or
uniforms have carried out monstrous suppressions, uprootings, and
exterminations without entering the pages of history as striking despots.
Considered individually, their outstanding characteristic is their
mediocrity. There are no large-scale villains anymore, only colorless
bureaucrats competing for common power and common booty.
There now flourishes a class of State-funded social scientists whose
professional status requires an ideology to justify the continuance of State
funds. Their work consists in discovering and defining particular "social
problems" which will become the material for further State activity. An army
of cops, judges, jailers, social workers, psychologists, therapists,
sociologists, counselors, and other petty bureaucrats have swollen the
payrolls of government and public institutions. In order to justify their
budgets, they have had to postulate ever newer and more threatening social
pathologies from which they can claim to protect us. More and more areas of
life have been criminalized at the same time as the techniques of
surveillance, interrogation and repression have been extended, refined and
made more powerful. For all these groups the "discoveries" of child abuse,
sexual abuse and drug abuse have been godsends. And each has benefited from
the others' legitimization of an increasingly generalized attitude of
repressive intolerance for any non-conformist belief or practice.
For example: Homosexuality is the name we give to the preference for
sexual intercourse with members of one's own sex. Would calling preference
for marriage with members of one's own race and religion "homoraciality" and
"homoreligiosity" make them mental diseases? Would the members of the
American Psychiatric Association vote on whether or not they are mental
diseases? (See Chapter 7 * The War On Drugs)
See reference
Psychologist Adrian Raine of USC observes that teaching parents more
consistent, less coercive discipline techniques reduces their kids'
misbehavior, and concludes: "We should make parenting skills classes
compulsory for high school students." The idea that "we shall coerce you
into learning how to be non-coercive" is a gruesome self-contradiction.
The next step in this process is to reconceptualize crime as a "disorder"
and explain criminal behavior as the product of "disease" rather than
choice.
For example, C. Ray Jeffery, criminologist at Florida State University,
maintains: "If we are to follow the medical model, we must use neurological
examinations in place of the insanity defense and the concept of guilt.
Criminals must be placed in medical clinics, not prisons."
Diana Fishbein, professor of criminology at the University of Baltimore:
"Treatment should be mandatory. We don't ask offenders whether they want
to be incarcerated or executed. They should remain in a secure facility
until they can show without a doubt that they are self-controlled. They
should be held indefinitely."
Another ghastly example:
"In an unjust society a man may violate laws for valid social or economic
reasons. In a just society there are no valid reasons except mental illness.
Recognizing this fact protects the violator as well as the society whose law
he attacks. It affords the violator an opportunity to be quarantined until
his illness can be expertly treated. Therefore you see how vital it is that
investigators have their own psychological consciousness raised so that they
may detect those subtle signs of the pathology before the deviant has a
chance to violate the law. It is our duty to spare society from injury and
to save a sick man from the consequences of his acts."
This raises the prospect of a tyranny so malevolently vicious as to be
incomprehensible to any sane mind. It is one thing to convict someone of a
crime and then compel them to do something. It is another thing entirely to
seize upon someone who has not done anything wrong and say, "You look like a
high risk, so we will force you to do what we wish." I see an imprisoned
mind frantically darting from framework to framework, pursued inexorably by
the psychosurgeon with the implements of torture in his hands - a mind
trying to find a framework which the psychiatrist will approve and so
slacken the torture. The psychiatrists call this a return to sanity, but is
it really anything more than an induced psychopathic attempt to escape from
an insanely impossible situation?
There are moves being made by the psychiatric profession to implement
this grotesque parody of justice:
During the past half dozen years there has been an explosion of cases in
which adult men and women - most frequently, young women undergoing
psychotherapy - have seemingly remembered childhood sexual abuse that they
had forgotten for years or even decades. Are these memories accurate
recollections of terrible traumas, or artificial phantoms of events that
never happened? Have therapists developed effective new memory-retrieval
techniques, or have they employed misguided procedures that suggestively
help to create the memories? And are the patients who recover memories of
sexual abuse being empowered to speak out, or are they being diverted away
from the truth and toward a psychological frame-of-reference that the
therapist finds more desirable?
Many therapists have reported on patients who have clearly recalled
savage acts carried out by satanic cults. Yet in most instances, no memories
of ritual brutality existed prior to therapy, and no one has produced hard
evidence of such acts. Investigations by the FBI of more than 300 such cases
have failed to turn up any proof. These reports include bizarre but
fascinating cases in which people "remember" exceedingly improbably events
such as past lives and alien abductions. Multiple-personalities are often
fabricated in therapy, but just as often, once the patient ends therapy the
memories are retracted and the pseudo-personalities are abandoned. A growing
number of people are retracting ALL their "recovered" memories.
Some therapists interpret patients' symptoms as "implicit memory" - that
is, nonconscious effects of experience on subsequent behavior and cognition.
They cite this as justification for interpreting their patient's fears,
dislikes or attractions as subconscious "memories" of abuse. Many trauma
therapists infer that a woman who hates bananas is necessarily reacting
subconsciously to a memory of her fathers's erect penis.
In an attempt to buttress this turpitudinal twaddle, some analysts have
proposed something called "robust repression" a special mechanism which
could cause someone to forget completely about years of repeated sexual
trauma. But there is a lack of scientific evidence that extensive, severe
sexual trauma can be pushed into the subconscious through a mechanism of
memory repression. Validated research indicates that emotionally traumatic
experiences tend to be well remembered.
Other practicioners dispense outright with any attempt at rational
justification: On being asked to cite scientific support for her ideas,
Ellen Bass (one of the foremost propounders of the "memory recovery"
movement) replied: "Look, if we waited for scientific knowledge to catch up,
we could just forget the whole thing. My ideas are not based on any
scientific theories."
On the other hand, extensive laboratory research indicates that
suggestion and other factors can lead to profound memory distortion. There
are solid indications that a phenomenon known as source amnesia (in which a
person forgets the source or context in which a memory originated) renders
people vulnerable to memory distortions. When people cannot remember the
source of a memory, they are apt to confuse whether it relects an actual
event, a fantasy or something that was said or suggested. When there are no
external records that you can refer to, even the outline of your own life
loses its sharpness.
Therapy techniques that involve visualizing or imagining abusive
incidents are used as a first step toward inducing remembrance of them. Thus
a therapist who believes in the reality of forgotten abuse can help validate
imagined experiences as bonafide memories.
There is no scientific documentation of the efficacy of these techniques
but good reason to believe that they pose a danger because they encourage
patients to blur the line between imagination and memory.
The September 1997 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an essay by
Elizabeth Loftus, the president of the American Psychological Society, on
the subject of implanted memories. She contends that the mechanisms
underlying such false memories are not known. However, Nathaniel Branden, in
his identification of Social Metaphysics, explained the psychological
principles underlying this phenomenon over 30 years ago. (see Chapter 10 of
his book THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM.)
THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD by Carl Sagan, 1996, Ballantine Book #345-40946-
9.
In Chapters 8 and 9 Sagan deals with the unreliability of memory, memory
manipulation, fraud, hallucination and fantasies.

Taken together, these considerations lead inexorably to the conclusion

that some recovery therapists have helped create pseudo-memories of events
that never occurred. If, for no defensible reason, some therapists are
causing the same emotional and psychological trauma as an actual rape or
sexual assault, they, like those who physically victimize people, deserve
moral condemnation.
I strongly suspect that those people who are so intensely concerned with
getting you to remember and re-live a distressing experience are not so much
concerned with identifying the experience as they are with controlling your
mind.

In 1952, Hans Eysenck of the University of London reported the results of

an "outcome-of-therapy" study of neurotics that showed that 44% of the
patients who received psychoanalysis improved; 64% of the patients who
received psychotherapy improved; and 72% of the patients who received no
treatment at all improved.
In a recent (1995) conference on Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice, one
participant asked whether a therapist might aid a patient simply by doing or
saying nothing. Another described a patient who began to improve after
deciding to spend her therapy sessions sitting alone in her car in her
therapist's driveway.
At a 1996 convention of the American Psychological Association, these
observations were made:
Freudians cannot point to unambiguous evidence that psychoanalysis works,
but neither can proponents of more modern treatments, whether Jungian
analysis, cognitive-behavioral therapy or even medications. Indeed, claims
about the "wonder drug" Prozac notwithstanding, numerous independent studies
have found that drugs are not significantly more effective than "talking
cures" at treating the most common ailments for which people seek treatment.
The theoretical framework within which therapists work has little or
nothing to do with their ability to "heal" patients. That power stems,
rather, from the therapist's ability to make patients BELIEVE they will
improve. In other words the placebo effect is the primary active ingredient
underlying all psychotherapies and even most drug treatments.
Studies of antidepressants conducted over the past 30 years showed that
two thirds of the patients placed on medication either showed no improvement
or responded equally well to a placebo as to the antidepressant; drugs
produced significantly superior outcomes in only one third of patients. The
studies also showed that the effects of medication wane for many patients
after the first several months, and those who discontinue treatment have
high relapse rates.
Many patients report more satisfaction with Alcoholics Anonymous than
with any of the mental-health professionals or medications.

These, and similar, findings have never been refuted, and other studies
have confirmed their negative results, no matter what type of therapy was
used. How, in all good conscience, can therapists and psychiatrists continue
to practice?

That scholars still debate Freud's ideas suggests that the profession's
grasp of the mind is still rather tenuous; after all, experts on infectious
diseases do not debate the validity of Louis Pasteur's ideas. In mature
scientific fields one usually doesn't critique ideas more than three or four
years old.
 Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. I told
the last psychiatrist I met that I would make an appointment with him just
as soon as I decided he was saner than I am. From the wall-eyed look he gave
me, I think he considered me to be overdue already.

* The Alternative of Freedom

In early 1991, Mary Margaret Glennie claimed that she had received over
600 inquiries, about half of whom were serious about moving, and that thirty
libertarians had actually taken up her suggestion to move to Fort Collins.
Although her idea is, in principle, a good one, I think her implementation
of it is specious. The population of Fort Collins is 88K, a number hardly
likely to be affected by even a large influx of libertarians. If she could
instead get 30 libertarians into Loving County, Texas, they would constitute
a substantial fraction of its population of 107.
I first saw this idea for a "gathering of libertarians" in an essay in
Reason magazine about 1985. That was the only sensible presentation of the
idea that I have ever seen, as it gave an estimate of the potential
political impact of such a gathering on several locales chosen for their low
population. Every one of the numerous subsequent proposals (including Mary
Margaret's) has merely suggested that the gathering should occur at the
location where the author happens to reside! All these people expect
everyone else to bear the inconvenience of moving - none of them is serious
enough about implementing the proposal to be willing to move themselves to a
location where such a gathering would have political significance.
I have been watching the "new country" and "libertarian enclave"
movements for many years and have yet to see any of them get off the ground
(or out of the water - with the island-based projects). They have all been
schemes requiring mass participation (such as the Fort Collins proposal): if
they can't enlist thousands (literally!) of libertarians, then their time
and energy are mostly wasted. I think that this has been a major factor in
the failure of these projects, and that if they were focused on individual
participation for personal benefit rather than on mass involvement for
political suasion they would have a much higher probability of success. They
should be arranged in such a way that success does not depend on the number
of participants, and should be set up so that an individual can see a
personal benefit to be gained by participating. No immediate personal
benefit would ensue to me from moving to Fort Collins - that's why I won't
do it, and that's why that project will never get off the ground: few others
will do it either.
It's really an unfortunate waste - if the advocates were to devote their
energy to freeing THEMSELVES as individuals they would no doubt achieve
considerable success, but they're wasting their lives in futile attempts to
"free the world." I don't believe a thousand people are required - or 200 -
or even 20. If there were just TWO people in this country who really wanted
to be free they would find each other, and profit from a mutual association.

The LP has been presented to the American people continually since 1972,
but never has it gained the support of more than a tiny fraction of the
general electorate. As of July 1995 the LP has fewer than 20K members and
has only about 140 people holding elected office. This represents about one
one-hundredth of a percent of the elected officials in America, yet the LP
hypes it as a significant success. Much similar Libertarian hype is merely
an equivocation between the recognition of rights and a pragmatic loosening
of controls necessitated by economic difficulties.

It has been argued that untapped support for the LP lies in the 50+% of
the population that does not participate in politics, but the Australian
experience belies this. The LP has made no more headway in Australia than in
the USA.
Leonard Peikoff claims there is still time and opportunity to save
America: "The American spirit has not yet been destroyed.... There is only
one antidote to today's trend: a new, pro-reason philosophy." He does not
mention the history of the Libertarian movement during the 1970s, when a
new, pro-reason philosophy was indeed presented to the American people. They
turned it down.
David Kelley makes the same error, claiming that the American body
politic is "a public that is hungry for values."
If, as Kelley believes, the public is hungry for values, I wonder how he
would explain that public's enormous rejection of the LP.
(Neither Peikoff nor Kelley are libertarians. What they advocate is
merely a variant of political conservatism.)
What would it take to convince these men that the American voters do not
want a libertarian alternative?
In any case, after 1980, vote-getting gained ascendancy over
philosophical vision, and the LP became too involved in electoral politics
and succumbed too easily to compromise. By 1990 the Libertarian movement and
the LP had been so co-opted and corrupted that neither had any consistent
pro-reason presentation to make any longer.

Consider an alcoholic who has been drinking a quart of whiskey every day
for the past 20 years. It is not now possible for the alcoholic to come into
possession of the health that he would have had in other circumstances. It
doesn't matter at all if he now swears off whiskey and takes up gin or vodka
instead - these choices would simply continue him along his path into
physical degeneracy. His only hope for any health, or even partial recovery
in his old age, would be to swear off alcohol altogether.
I view human society as being similar to that alcoholic. The accumulated
effects of government institutions (effects which are increasing in
intensity at an exponential rate) are reducing society to a state of
degeneracy similar in malignancy to that of the alcoholic.
No matter how much you may want to, you cannot grow into a decent human
being while drinking a quart of whiskey every day. No matter how much you
may want them to, your children cannot grow into decent human beings while
living within the context of the forfeiture laws and the Internal Revenue
Service.
Society can no more save itself by implementing a different kind of
government than the alcoholic can save himself by drinking a different kind
of alcohol. Society's only salvation lies in the total abolition of
government.
In this respect Rand was correct: you cannot have a political change
without a preexisting philosophical change. But here too I believe there is
no hope. The prevalence of Newspeak and the decline in intellectual caliber
of the general population precludes the adoption of the philosophical
rationality that is prerequisite to the restructuring of society.
As an individualist, I seek ways to implement changes that are not
dependent on mass philosophical conversions or mass political persuasion.
Objectivism has created a technology for individual enlightenment and
growth. Only through such individual change can major cultural
transformation occur.

* Cultural Value-deprivation
Rand describes the sensory-deprivation experiments, and then carries this
notion further, to the idea of conceptual deprivation, observing that
today's individual lives in an intellectual desert - in the equivalent of an
experimental cubicle the size of a continent - where he is given the sensory
overload of screeching, screaming, jostling media assaults, but is cut off
from ideas. If severe enough and prolonged enough, such a distortion of the
natural, active flow of cognitive experiences may paralyze a man's
consciousness by telling him that no significant thinking is possible. This
chronic lack produces a gradual erosion of man's emotional vitality, which
is recorded and preserved by his subconscious, until the day when his inner
motor stops and he finds himself with no desire to go on living. If a person
is deprived of his values, he will have little to live for.
Another aspect of this conceptual deprivation phenomenon is what might be
called principle extinction - the process by which people's ability to think
and act on the basis of principles is extinguished.
Visual agnosia is a condition in which the visual association cortex has
been injured, resulting in the victim's inability to perceive the world as a
whole picture. He sees only bits at a time and has lost the ability to
recognize patterns. He is, in effect, a visual illiterate. A closely
analogous effect results from the destruction of his ability to think in
principles. Then he will be able to perceive only specific concrete
instances of reality. He will have lost the ability to recognize the
underlying patterns. Perhaps we could call this "cognitive agnosia." (See
the SPURIOUS SUPERFICIALITY fallacy.)
Americans are taught NOT to think in principles, and then - just to make
sure they are thoroughly corrupt - they are given principles that are
depraved. Newspeak goes even further, by distorting the very concepts used
to formulate principles. People deprived of their ability to formulate
values will trash their civilization with very little incentive.
Not only are people value-deprived and value-depraved they are also
value-destructive.
In the long run, a tyrannical society is possible only on the basis of
cognitive deprivation. So long as people are not permitted to have standards
of comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed. (This
may explain the widespread manifestation of the Fallacy of Relative
Privation.)
Value deprivation means not only the absence of positive values, and the
actions taken to achieve them, it also means the absence of any effective
actions taken to combat a negative. People lose any impulse to rebel against
tyranny since, lacking a principled basis for judgments, they are bereft of
any way to decide who their real enemies are. Thus the mad bombers - people
driven over the edge of insanity by the contradictions they endure, but
lacking a means of directing their rage toward an appropriate target. Thus
also the widespread apathy we see in American society: many people, losing
values and principles, also lose the power of grasping that the world could
be other than it is.
They can be granted intellectual liberty, because they no longer possess
intellect. They can be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
reality, because they never fully grasp the enormity of what is being
perpetrated upon them. They remain sane, in part, by lack of understanding -
in a sort of protective stupidity. The more intelligent they are, the less
sane they must be. The prevailing mental condition must be one of controlled
insanity.
But sanity is not arbitrary. Rulers of all ages have tried to impose a
false view of the world upon their subjects, but they cannot afford to
encourage any illusion that impairs military efficiency. In philosophy,
religion, ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one is
designing a gun or a bomb they HAVE to make four. War is the main instrument
by which governments are kept in touch with physical reality.
This thesis has great significance for modern America, not so much as it
applies to war, but as it applies to technology. We live in a society that
is entirely dependent on advanced technology. If any major aspect of that
technology is not sufficiently maintained, our entire civilization may well
collapse.
 There are many people for whom work is the primary touch with reality.
When important functions, such as personal autonomy and perception of
accomplishment are removed from their work the result is impaired contact
with reality, and a consequent decrease in their job performance. We can see
the results in automotive recalls, on Three Mile Island, and other
indications that the technological underpinnings of our civilization are
eroding.

* Inheritance
At the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and
of life's potential. This view of man has rarely been explicitly asserted in
human history. Today, it is virtually non-existent. Yet this is the view
with which - in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and
agonized confusion - the best of mankind's youth start out in life. It is
not even an explicit view, for most of them, but a foggy, groping, undefined
sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one's life is important, that
great achievements are within one's capacity, and that great things lie
ahead.
Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of a culture which tells them
persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of
abandoning one's values; practicality, of abandoning one's self-esteem.
Many who cannot dispense with their natural sensitivity turn to suicide:
they see too clearly what sort of existence awaits them and, being too young
to find an antidote, they cannot tolerate the prospect. If a young person
sees no real future to look forward to, his choices may well resemble those
of a terminally ill person.
People who cannot control their own lives feel either despair or
rebellious frustration. This is the situation of the youth of America. What
people don't understand is that the children soon learn to detach themselves
from these emotions, but in the process they lose a large part of their
capacity to feel ANY emotions. We hear of sensational, coldblooded crimes
being done by children and youths, yet few wonder how these children and
youths became so insensitive to the pain of others. You must remember that
morality and ethics are NOT instincts! They are LEARNED phenomena.

Here is a letter printed in the Casper (Wyoming) Star Tribune, Sept.,

1988:
"I would like to thank the Natrona County Sheriff's Office, and
particularly McGruff the Crime Dog, for recently visiting my day-care home
and presenting their program 'Stranger Danger.' The children enjoyed the
visit and McGruff helped the children understand the importance of staying
away from strangers."
Most people believe this sort of thing is commendable, even necessary for
the safety of their children. And within the context of the violent society
we live in, it is indeed desirable to alert one's children to potential
danger.
But consider the inevitable result of this sort of training: witnesses
watched from scores of windows in surrounding apartment buildings as Kitty
Genovese was murdered, but none of them did anything to help. And everyone
wonders why, but the answer is quite simple: from nursery school to
adulthood they have been trained to avoid strangers. On their TV sets, from
prime-time dramas to live coverage of the Vietnam War, they watch strangers
suffer and they remain passive observers.
Viktor E. Frankl, in MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING states: "At first the
prisoner looked away if he saw the punishment parades of another group; he
could not bear to see fellow prisoners march up and down for hours in the
mire, their movements directed by blows. Days or weeks later things
changed....the prisoner who had passed into the second stage of his
psychological reactions did not avert his eyes any more. By then his
feelings were blunted, and he watched unmoved.... Disgust, horror and pity
are emotions that our spectator could not really feel any more. The
sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him
after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him any more."
Here is a sociologist's description of a family living in an American
inner-city ghetto:
"They had got used to the sound of gunfire. Everyone heard shots from
time to time. After the first few occasions they had become curiously
indifferent to them. Whoever was speaking would pause, then continue when
the shooting stopped, just as he might when a jet aircraft passed overhead.
It was as if they could not imagine that shots might be aimed at THEM.
Surely, they were telling themselves, if we just lie low and hang on, the
trouble will blow over."
Just as one can, in the field of economics, analyze the "logic of
choice," so one can focus on the "logic of coercion" - on the unintended but
entirely predictable results of dishonesty and violence. And it need not be
"real" violence. If you spend all your childhood and adult life watching the
violence on TV, you may begin to believe that the normal, the usual, the
only method of dealing with any sort of distress is to start drawing pistols
and killing people, or calling on the government to do the coercing for you.
Defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between
television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programs now (in
1995) average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this
desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if
impressionable adults can so easily have false memories implanted in their
minds, what is being implanted in our children when they are exposed to tens
of thousands of acts of violence even before they graduate from elementary
school?

The center of America might be insane. The country has been living with a
fiercely controlled schizophrenia which has been deepening with the years.
Every person who is devoutly Christian and works for the American
Corporation is caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split his mind
from his soul; a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul
brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for
the condition - since the expression of brutality offers a definite if
temporary relief to the schizophrenic.
Many common people greet warfare as the first glad sense of a great
definite purpose dawning into their stagnant and unillumined lives - as the
opportunity to support something that might shed some meaning upon an
existence otherwise apparently without significance.
Socially and psychologically repressed, people are drawn to spectacles of
violent conflict that allow their accumulated frustrations to explode in
socially condoned orgasms of collective pride and hate. Deprived of
significant accomplishments in their own work and leisure, they participate
vicariously in military enterprises that have real and undeniable effects.
Lacking genuine community, they try to discover or create a sense of pseudo-
community, if only that of fighting some common enemy. They thrill to the
sense of sharing in a common purpose, and react angrily against anyone who
contradicts the image of patriotic unanimity. The individual's life may be a
farce, his society may be falling apart, but all complexities and
uncertainties can be temporarily ignored in the self-assurance that comes
from identifying with the State.

The child knows no other way of life than the slave's way. Born free, he
has been laid hands on from the moment of his birth and brought up as a
slave. How is he, when he is at last "set free," to be anything else than
the slave he actually is? Clamoring for war, for the lash, for police,
prisons, and scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things
he is lost.
Eye the ever expanding systems of prisons, the ever expanding branches of
law enforcement agencies, and the myriads of laws being churned out by
delirious lawmakers who are flushed into office by pandering to this insane
slave mentality. Yes, eye them well, for tomorrow there might not be anyone
left to speak out for sanity and civilization.
You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as slaves are
governed. Nor can you expect them to behave in any other way than as slaves
and barbarians. In school, misbehaving students are punished for a host of
reasons - but adults in positions of authority (i.e., government school
administrators) initiated force against them to make them go to school in
the first place. The discipline system the students have been immersed in is
basically contradictory. When a child sees this kind of irrationality
institutionalized in his social environment, what does this do to his sense
of ethical values? Blaming the children for their misbehavior is unjust.
Juvenile delinquents have no 'better natures'; the experience inflicted upon
them has taught them that what they are doing is the proper way to survive
in this society. They have been enslaved and subjected to torment. Now they
strike back and subject others to torment. Since they have been taught, and
believe, that causes do not necessarily have subsequent effects, they are
not able to perceive the real cause of their torment. Thus they cannot
identify the justified target of their anger. They vent their anger
indiscriminantly, treating people, as representatives of society, in the
same way that "society" has treated them. Calling the students animals is
unforgivable; it's an insult to animals. Animals generally behave quite
rationally, but there is very little rational behavior in a public school. I
prefer to call the students barbarians. However, this does great injustice
to some of the students. Although there are many children who would be
gentle and civilized individuals, they must cope as best they can with their
irrational environment, which means many of them finally relent and join the
barbarians. The moral and intellectual rot spreads and is handed down as, in
several years, these barbarians begin to take part in community activities
(what will happen when they get on the Board of Education?) and teach THEIR
children the values they have learned. Thus viciousness becomes embedded in
the social structure of society. Student behavior had better be improved
upon soon, or it will be too late, because the new generation won't see the
necessity of it when they come of age and join the establishment.
This, I believe, is the basic cause of the decline in American education.
The system is fundamentally self-contradictory and thus fundamentally self-
destructive. And since causes do inevitably have subsequent effects, those
effects are what we are seeing manifested in the schools today.
What schools mostly do is practice rigid age segregation, socialize
children into narrow roles, label them into limiting categories, create
meaningless problems, compel obedience and compliance above all other
virtues, teach that life is segmented by ringing bells, and deeply
indoctrinate children with the profound belief that government is an
absolute necessity for civilization. School is the first coercive
institution most of us endure, and it wears down our resistance to the later
ones. It makes them seem normal.
Sure, there are good and decent teachers, but the abstract logic of the
institution drowns their individual decency in a sea of wickedness.
One can understand why the contradictions of our society weigh so heavily
on the young: no sane mind can integrate the contrast between the
righteousness of a Secretary of State and the ruthlessness of a B-52;
between the sanctimony of "a kinder, gentler, America" and the savagery of
the Los Angeles Police beating Rodney King; between the notion that violence
is fine against people 10000 miles away but shocking against injustice in
our own land; between the equality demanded by America's constitutional
structure and the equality denied by America's political structure; even
between the accepted habits of one generation and the emerging habits of the
next, as when a parent tipsy on his fourth martini begins a tirade against
his son's marijuana.
The generation that's growing up today has been thoroughly brutalized by
the system. It's in their schools, their media, their political ideology -
everywhere. They're conditioned to the worship of violence and the statist
cult - to view the power and strength of the State as the only criteria for
establishing right. Their teaching idealizes the right of the strong to
subdue the weak and glorifies the triumph of brute force as the expression
of natural law. A nation settled by men who refused to uncover in the
presence of kings is now populated by people who grovel before petty
bureaucrats - and are proud of doing it.
How do you get rid of a regime like this once it has taken root? You
can't reason with it, because all you'll get is indifference, or contempt
for what it sees as weakness. You can't bargain with it - a trading
relationship implies equality, but all the State understands is domination.
You can't hope to coexist peaceably because the very existence of a free man
represents either a threat or an opportunity for exploitation.
One of the things that makes us so different from other animals is our
ability to pass on to our children the sum total of what we and our parents
have accomplished. That legacy of accomplishments - intellectual, artistic,
spiritual, and material - is the content of human culture. To the extent
that a society inhibits the transfer of this legacy, it is dooming its
children to stagnation or retrogression. Even worse is the future of a
society that transfers to its youth a legacy of ignorance and brutality.
"We will descend into a new Dark Age, made more sinister by the lights of
perverted science." ... Churchill

* Conservation - Environmentalism
Conservation is not synonymous with any lessening of one's standard of
living. It is synonymous with more wealth, power, and freedom. The idea is
not to make do with less civilization. The idea is to do all the things you
are doing now - heat your house, cook your food, drive your car - using
fewer resources. More efficient heaters and more efficient cars mean cleaner
air, better health and greater prosperity.
Many environmentalists assert a significant distinction between consuming
or conserving one's resources, but the important distinction to make is
between two forms of resource consumption: dissipation or production. Mere
conservation is economically irrelevant - to conserve something rather than
to use it makes no contribution to prosperity. A sensible approach to the
subject of human well-being is to USE resources, but in such a way that they
are augmented or regenerated as much as possible (and thus, in a manner of
speaking, "conserved" for future use) and in such a way that their present
use PRODUCES future well-being. The real crime in this context is to
destructively dissipate resources in order to achieve only a transient
benefit. Perhaps the best example of this process is the gluttonous
dissipation of the world's supply of fossil fuels, much of which is consumed
for no other purpose than to transport imbecilic adolescents back and forth
from one end of Main Street to the other. (But even this is insignificant
when compared with the amount of the world's resources that are poured into
the enterprise of War.) A sane practice would be to use the fossil fuels, to
as great an extent as necessary, for the purpose of establishing a nuclear
fusion or solar power technology.

Here are some comments by a Randite:

"I see nothing unnatural about man's activities. It's called natural when
beavers dam a stream, flood a valley, and change the ecosystem, but not when
men do the same thing. This distinction is false. From the time men
discovered that they could keep warm by wearing animal skins, to the
cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals, to today's
skyscrapers, man has flourished by adapting his environment to himself. It's
our method of survival, and it's just as natural for us as it is for cats to
prey upon mice. What inclines me to doubt the sanity of many
environmentalists is their insistence on reading human life out of the rest
of nature. As if we were not natural, did not belong with the rest of the
world - Indeed, as if we had been dumped into reality by some runaway dump
truck disposing of unnatural trash. The plain fact is that we are every bit
as natural as are snail darters, spotted owls or wetlands. This means that
housing developments, too, are part of nature. As are high rise buildings,
bridges, freeways, parking lots, dams and disposable diapers, and even
nuclear waste. What a natural being does is by definition natural. When a
zebra is destroyed by a lion, this isn't depicted as the sad demise of some
natural thing at the hands of an alien, unnatural force."

Of course it is "natural" for man build homes, provide for his needs, and
to produce waste. These are inevitable concomitants of the life process. But
there is another "natural" attribute of man which, if not taken into
consideration, results in a grossly distorted and inaccurate analysis of
man's relationship to his environment. That is the attribute of "choice."
I do not at all have an "insistence on reading human life out of the rest
of nature" what I do insist on is identifying the proper relationship
between human beings and the ecology in which we live. After all, the beaver
doesn't really have much (or any) choice about his dam-building activities.
But man DOES have a choice about such things as the puddle of slag beneath
Chernobyl, the toxic waste dumps in New Jersey that poison his unborn
generations, and the combustion of the Cuyahoga river. I do not regard any
of these three phenomena (and many more I could specify) as being "Natural."
"Natural" for man is to make the environment better - because he has the
CHOICE to do so. There is nothing better about the slag puddle and the
poisonous waste dumps. Does that jerk really think the Cuyahoga river is
better when it burns? That was not natural. Nothing that makes the world
unlivable for our descendants is natural. Doing so is a form of social
suicide. And if he thinks suicide is natural, let him start with himself.

As long as we share a planet with the hydrogen bomb, human beings, too,
are an endangered species.

There is no such thing as a balance of nature. The world of nature is

continually in flux, and it is up to man, with his power of choice, to
control the direction and nature of that flux.
 Chapter 13
LIBERTARIAN GUERILLA WARFARE

* Rebellion against Government

When is it OK to rebel against a government? Is there some point where
you throw your hands up, cry "Enough!" and pick up a gun? If there is, has
it been reached yet?
Yes, there is such a point, and yes, it has been passed. For some
Americans, it occurred in May of 1985 when the Philadelphia police
deliberately (and legally) burned to death 11 people, including four
children. For others it occurred in April of 1993 when over 75 people
(including at least 25 children) perished in flames at Waco, Texas.
But these were merely specific personal breaking points for some people
in one country. A more generally relevant answer to the questions would come
from an examination of the underlying principles which justify violent
revolution.
Some allowances have to be made in judging the behavior of police - we
cannot, after all, expect perfection, neither in a government police agency
nor in a private defense agency. If a policeman accidently runs over your
cat while he is chasing a bank robber, it would not really be reasonable to
condemn his government to annihilation. Even cases of deliberate aggression
would not necessarily justify rebellion. We cannot expect ALL police agents
to be decent people at ALL times, but we CAN (and MUST) demand legal
protection against the aggressions they sometimes DO commit, in the same way
and for the same reasons that we expect legal protection against non-
government criminals. As long as the government is structured so as to
provide the citizens with legal protection against aggression by its own
agents, it should not be condemned for the aberrant violent behavior that
some individual agents may manifest. Even such things as the Rodney King
beating would not justify revolution - if the perpetrators were brought to
justice and punished for their crime.
The line beyond which revolution is justified is crossed when the
aggressive behavior that I have mentioned is institutionalized. By that I
mean codified and legally accepted. To use the Rodney King incident as an
example: the perpetrators justified their attack with the argument that
everything they did was strictly in accordance with established police
department procedures. This justification was legally accepted. (In a sane
society, such an excuse would be grounds for including the police department
training personnel in the trial - charging them with abetting an attack on a
citizen.)
Another very blatant example of institutionalized aggression can be seen
in the forfeiture laws. Forfeiture is used (about 5000 times per week as of
1996) to legally deprive innocent people of their property without a jury
trial, and is one of the government aggressions that the Fourth and Fifth
Amendments were intended to forbid.
It is at this point - when legally institutionalized procedures provide
immunity to government agents who initiate force against the non-criminal
behavior of free citizens - that revolution is justified.

* The Peaceful Means Argument

It is argued that violence is not justified as long as there is ANY non-
violent protest procedure available. But to assert that violence is not
justified so long as there are peaceful means is to assert that violence is
NEVER justified, for there are ALWAYS peaceful means.
George Washington could have become a faithful subject of the king, been
appointed governor of the colonies, and used his position of power to effect
many beneficial changes - peacefully.
A good citizen could become a member of the mafia, and by working his way
up through the ranks attain a position wherein he could considerably reduce
the evils perpetrated by this odious organization.
When knocked down by a common thug, you could resort to the peaceful
means of appealing to his "better side" and entreating him gently to cease
engaging in such undesirable behavior. Of course while you are talking -
peacefully - the thug is bashing in your brains.
It is easy to see the fallaciousness of the "peaceful means" argument. In
fact, you are obliged to restrain yourself to peaceful means only when your
adversary refrains from using violent means against you. When one is
fighting for his freedom against an armed and violent enemy he does not
resort merely to verbal entreaties; he most certainly does not collaborate
with his enemy; and under no circumstances is it conceivable that he should
actually join with his enemy. You should always remember that you are not
fighting for control over your enemy's coercive political institution, you
are fighting for the preservation of your rights, your freedom, and your
life.
Coercion is not an acceptable form of social institution. Treating it
peacefully, as you would treat the acceptable forms, is to grant it
acceptability. Thus you deny its nature. You say "The not-acceptable is
acceptable."
"Be reasonable," our enemies implore. Being "reasonable" to them means
that they can perpetrate all the outrages I described in Chapter 7. All that
is reasonable. But when we tell them, who are responsible for our misery,
"Give us the justice you have denied us so long, or we will strike,"
suddenly that is unreasonable. Suddenly, because we ask for justice, we are
described as terrorists and fanatics.
See reference
If your life is to be meaningful, you must do more than protest
injustice, you must do something to set it right. Your protest has no
meaning if you don't follow it up with action.
The "peaceful means" argument is used only by philosophical cretins who
refuse to believe that self-defense is an inalienable right, and by cowardly
moral cretins who lack the courage to assert that right.
The wicked just love people who don't believe in violence. It gives them
a free hand because they not only believe in it, they use it.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the
pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Along with the principled invalidity of the "peaceful means" argument,

there is a practical objection to it also. There is a sense in which
libertarians and statists simply cannot even communicate, much less
compromise. This is because the foundations of our philosophies are so
different that it would require a huge effort to undo both the "knowledge"
the statist has, and also the underlying structure of this knowledge. It is
not simply a matter of a slight change in mental direction, but a radical
unlearning and relearning. We think in profoundly different epistemological
frames of reference, and in the realm of ethics, we speak mutually
incommensurable languages.
You cannot persuade a man that his behavior is evil when his entire
existence is founded on the conviction that his behavior is good. There are
indeed things about which you cannot argue - you can only fight. An example
of such a thing is the assertion by the IRS that the income tax is
voluntary. You can argue on the basis of practicality, and you can argue on
the basis of ethical principle, but ultimately, when you are up against
someone who will not see reason, you can only fight. Trying to deal
reasonably with someone who thinks the Waco massacre was a good idea is
certain to be an exercise in futility.
It is not pleasant to kill any creature, but to pretend that one can live
without doing so is self-deception. There needs to be meat on the table,
there have to be vegetables forbidden to flower, and even the cycles of
microbes must be blocked in order for us to continue our own cycles. It is
neither shameful nor shocking that this should be so, it is simply a part of
the great revolving wheel of natural economy. And just as we must preserve
our physical species in these ways, so, too, we must preserve our moral
species (those who love freedom) against others who wish to destroy it, or
else fail in our obligation to pass on to our children the culture of
freedom.
If this notion of violent warfare shocks or offends you, it is because
you have not been able to stand off and, knowing what you are, see what a
difference in KIND must mean. You must always remember that one cannot claim
to be fully human unless one acts from the premise of non-coercion. Those
who reject this premise are, in a very important way, NOT fully human. You
are not yet able to recognize, and accept, that there is a profoundly
important distinction between you and policemen. They are not just "ordinary
men" who are merely "doing their job." They are people who believe that is
is not merely appropriate to use coercion but that it is necessary to do so.
Your mind is confused by your cultural ties and your upbringing. You are
still half-thinking of them as beings of the same kind as yourself. That is
why they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are
alert and corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite
well that if they are to survive they must be protected from the threat
posed by the existence of people who value freedom. In loyalty to their
kind, they cannot tolerate your freedom; in loyalty to your kind, you must
not tolerate their tyranny.
If you still feel reluctant about the necessity to combat tyranny, just
consider some of the things that these people, who have taught you to think
of them as your "protectors," have done: The savage beating of Rodney King,
and the deliberate burning to death of children, are legally-sanctioned
expressions of government behavior.

Nor can society be saved by any political reform process intended to

change the behavior of government - this is as futile as attempting to save
a patient by switching a cancer from one organ to another, or to save an
alcoholic by converting him from whiskey to gin.
Even more mistaken is the idea that you can work within government in
order to "change the system from within." You can't turn stampeding cattle
from the middle of the herd - you'll only get yourself trampled.
Max Stirner observed: "Can I change a piece of nonsense into sense by
reforming it, or must I drop it outright?"
Reform is of two types:
Changes which merely serve to make oppression more palatable.
Changes through which people actually enlarge their autonomy and reduce
their subjection to coercive authority.
The second type is not something that the majority of voters want. This
is proved by their overwhelming rejection of the Libertarian Party.
It is clear, from the quarter-century history of the Libertarian Party,
that the minority of people in this country who wish only to live in peace,
protected from government oppression, have no political protection against
enslavement. They have seen the government become continually more
destructive of their rights, with no end in sight, and with no effective
political redress available to them.
This is an inevitable consequence of "majority rule." If you want police
protection, go ahead and hire a cop to protect you. But it is not proper for
you to use the government to enslave the entirety of the community just
because you are worried about the few of your neighbors who may be wicked.
It is important that freedom be preserved. Not for those who do NOT want
to be free, but for those who DO. The former MUST not be allowed the
"freedom" to enslave the latter.

* Injustice is Everyone's Fight

Some people claim that "injustice is everyone's fight." Others claim, as
Thoreau observed, that
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the
eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have
other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it
practically his support."
Does the choice of other men to act unjustly impose upon you a moral
obligation to combat their injustice? Your moral stature is a function of
YOUR choices, not the choices that other people make. Certainly a man has
the real obligation not to participate in a vicious social system. But does
he have in addition an obligation to actively combat such a system?
Consider that if you accept, by default, the existence of an injustice,
then you yourself (or your children) will be visited eventually by the
consequences of that injustice. A man MUST be cognizant of his needs,
whether those needs be biological (e.g., the need to avoid poison in his
diet) or social (the need to avoid coercion in his society). Concern for the
rights of others is a necessity if you care about your own future and the
future of your children.
But this concern for the rights of others must be punctilious. You must
remember that the only "obligation" any man has toward you is to let you
alone. He has no obligation to take any positive actions whatsoever
regarding you or your situation. He has no obligation to combat your
enemies. But he IS obliged not to join with your enemies in oppressing you.
If he does so, he then becomes an enemy. But as long as he does NOT do so,
he may not be your ally - but he is at least a neutral.

* The Problem of the Innocents

Begin with the premise that rebellion must be selective - acting against
tyrants and their supporters only - and must refrain from damaging innocent
people. This leads to the question: who is really innocent, anyway?
ATLAS SHRUGGED was published in 1957, and since 1972 the Libertarian
Party has been vigorously bombarding the American people with knowledge of
the principled distinction between freedom and slavery. Is there any excuse
for any adults not to know what the difference is? No, there is no excuse
for them. And you have no need to care about them. It is not on their behalf
that you should fight the oppressive actions of their government. It is on
your own behalf and also for the possible benefit of future generations.
It is important to distinguish between victims and aggressors on the
basis of their deliberate actions - on the basis of actual implementations
of oppression. For example, a person who is subject to income tax is a
victim, and thus you might say that a businessman is a victim because he is
taxed. But observe that the same businessman is himself a willing
participant in the implementation of taxation: he extracts taxes from his
employees and his customers. A man has a right to work for a living - that
is a necessity for the preservation of his life - but he does NOT have a
right to earn his living by depriving others of their property. Likewise, a
businessman has a right to operate a business, but he does NOT have a right
to deprive others of their property in the process of operating that
business. Thus employers who collect withholding tax, merchants who collect
sales tax, and any other people who participate in implementing the
viciousness of government, must be considered victimizers even though they
are also victims.
The real question is not "Who is innocent?" but "Who is guilty?" The
determining factors are the oppressive behavior (regardless of any
assertions of intent - see Chapter 7) and the advocacy of such behavior.
These attributes determine the guilty persons. Anyone who does NOT engage in
oppressive behavior, or advocate such behavior, is innocent, even though he
may do nothing to combat tyranny but sit around and gripe.
See reference
To complain about tyranny while submitting to it and taking no action to
combat it is hypocritical: the complainer's actions and his words are
contradictory - but what if the complaint is the only safe action he can
take? Do not condemn a man for being a victim, nor for acting so as not to
become a victim (except when his actions are themselves victimizing).
In this context, there are three kinds of people:
1. Those who actively sanction, support and advocate statism. A subset of
these are people who in practice do willingly participate in statism (such
as sales-tax collectors and voters) even though they may protest some of the
government's oppressions.
2. Those who say: "I don't care about tyranny. I am interested only in my
immediate self-interest. In short, I should do those things that benefit me
- even if the State should happen to benefit from them also." These are the
people who invariably seek profits at the expense of their asserted
convictions. The best examples of these people are the scientists who
willingly sell their souls to the State in return for laboratories financed
by loot.
It is ethically (but not morally) proper to do things that benefit
yourself, even if you thereby become a victim of oppression. But it is NOT
proper to willingly engage in oppressive behavior yourself. If the things
you do actually constitute oppressive behavior then you are in the first
category, regardless of your assertions. Your state-of-mind is not the
important consideration. What IS important is your behavior.
3. Those who actively oppose the State and do all they reasonably can to
avoid supporting it.
The goal of a revolutionary should be to fight the first, ignore the
second, and embrace the third.

* Questions to Determine Philosophical Orientation

How do you tell just what a person really is? You can't simply pose the
straightforward question "Do you believe in liberty?" You will merely get a
null-value answer: if he really does believe in liberty he will answer "Yes"
but if he does not really believe in it he will also probably answer "Yes."
It's like asking a man if he is honest - you get the same answer whether he
is or not. You have to go at it in an indirect way, asking questions
designed to circumvent his dishonesty (or his ignorance - many people would
answer the questions without real knowledge of what is liberty or what is
honesty).
You must also allow for any self-delusion he has. What is important is
not to ascertain the rationale that he uses to justify his behavior, but the
actual principles underlying the behavior.
The object is to determine whether he accepts or rejects the non-
aggression principle. Even though he may not be philosophically
sophisticated enough to properly apply it in all circumstances.
The questions should be constructed so as to pose a distinguishable
separation between two phenomena. The important thing to look for when you
ask them is NOT the clarity and precision with which the person identifies
the distinction, but merely whether or not he MAKES the distinction. After
all, you cannot expect an ordinary person to be a trained philosopher or
logician, but you can and SHOULD expect him to be a decent human being, and
thus to REALIZE that there is a distinction to be made, even though he may
not be able to precisely specify that distinction.
Always remember that actions speak louder than words.

Here are some sample questions:

How do you distinguish between trade and theft? [according to Marxist
doctrine, there is no distinction.]
How do you distinguish between taxation and theft?
What are you opposed to - the people running the government, the way they
are running it, or government itself?
Define freedom. Define slavery.
What is the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of government?
What are the proper functions of government?
What is the alternative to government?
What is the difference between Politics and Economics?
What is the logical fallacy in the statement "cheating on a tax form"?
Under what circumstances may the State justly place its welfare above
that of an individual citizen?
Are there any situations which transform actions which are otherwise
immoral in principle into actions which are then moral, or in which morality
does not obtain?
Under what circumstances would it be proper for a member of a group to do
something that it would be improper for that individual to do alone?
Can a man who is acting as Head of State properly do something that would
be improper if done by a private individual?
Would you be morally justified in killing an innocent person if that were
the only way to prevent your own death?
Does a fire in a theater entitle any individual to trample another person
in order to facilitate his own escape?
In order to save the life of his own family member, may a doctor with
whom you have contracted refuse to perform an operation on you, at the cost
of your life?
How do you distinguish between criminal and non-criminal behavior?
Is there a distinction between moral principle (natural law) and
legislative edict (government law)? Illustrate your answer by reference to
gambling and to the legal and illegal ownership of gold, whiskey and heroin.
What part do you play in the political process of the community?
What have you done to reduce your taxes?
Do you believe it is necessary for each individual to independently
derive the ethical principles which he uses to govern his life? [The
Nietzschean answer to this is "yes"]
Do you judge both government behavior and non-government behavior by
reference to the same ethical principles?
Here is the legal definition of "larceny": "The trespassory taking and
carrying away of the valuable personal property of another with the intent
to permanently deprive the owner of possession."
Do you agree with this definition? If not, how would you define it
differently?
Do you think that the government is not committing larceny? If so, how do
you explain government behavior that corresponds to that definition?
Do you think that larceny is sometimes justified, or justified if the
amount is small enough, or justified as a policy of the State, or justified
if the perpetrator is in a position of dire need? How would you define the
conditions which would justify larceny?
If larceny can be justified as a policy of the State, can the State
consistently uphold a larceny standard in criminal proceedings?
 Are your private scholarly or professional projects important enough to
justify larceny? Are anyone's? If so, when and why?

* Prerequisites of a revolution
For a revolution or civil war to occur, two conditions must be met:
1. The population of the country must be divisible into at least two
mutually exclusive groups. These are the groups that would actually be
shooting at each other during the conflict. For example: the Union army and
the Confederate army.
American Libertarians would, of course, see these two groups as "the
government" and "the people" but I believe this view is false.
What Ayn Rand called "cultural value-deprivation" means not only the
absence of positive values and the actions needed to achieve them, it also
means the inability to take any effective action to combat a negative.
Value-deprived people lose any impulse to rebel against tyranny since,
lacking a principled basis for their judgments, they are bereft of any way
to decide who their real enemies are.
To vent their rage and frustration, victims of tyranny frequently turn
against each other instead of against their oppressors. Thus, in their rage
over the beating of Rodney King, the citizens of LA beat up their neighbors
and burned their own neighborhoods. They did NOT rise up against the police,
for they do not know who their enemies actually are.

2. There must be possible a triggering situation that would precipitate

the conflict.
In America this is precluded by the general attitude toward tyranny,
which usually rests on the phrase "too much." If you press a protestor (and
this is especially true of political conservatives) until you can get him to
identify the foundation of his enmity toward government, you will find that
it is based on a statement containing some variant of the phrase "too much."
He is not fundamentally opposed to slavery, just "too much" slavery. He is
not fundamentally opposed to tyranny, just a level of tyranny that is "far
beyond" what he judges acceptable. He is not fundamentally opposed to
government interference in private lives, just "an excessive amount" of such
interference (or a type of interference that is not HIS proposed type of
interference). But "too much" is not a dividing line. It is simply an
ambiguous realm with no firm boundary. Thus it is very unlikely that, for
this guy, there would be ANY level of "too much" that would induce him to
take up arms and rebel. In any case, such an ambiguous level would surely be
different for each individual (just ask several and you will see), and thus
NO level would suffice to precipitate a general rebellion.

Because these two conditions are not met (and I believe cannot be met) in
America, I do not forsee a revolution occurring here.
It takes a certain energy of idealism to create a revolution. The drawn-
out death of freedom in America has been so insidious, but yet so
penetrating, that few people have any idealism left that can be stirred to a
revolutionary fervor. The people of America will not rise in rebellion
against their government. The State has warped their lives, swallowed their
fortunes, and destroyed their sacred honor, leaving them in a value-deprived
moral vacuum, lacking any principle by means of which they might rebel
against its tyranny.
From The Anti-Federalist: "If the people of America will submit to a
constitution that will vest in the hands of any body of men the power to
deprive them by law of their rights, they will perforce submit to anything.
Reasoning with them will be in vain; they must be left until they are
brought to reflection by feeling oppression - they will then have to wrest
from their oppressors, by a strong hand, that which they would have retained
by a moderate share of prudence and firmness."
Cultural value-deprivation must inevitably result in a very docile
population. Who in America believes in any idea (or any value) enough to
fight for it? Certainly not the libertarians, and they are the closest thing
America has to freedom-lovers. The totalitarians know what they stand for.
The non-totalitarians will stand for anything.
But maybe tyranny in America has a limit. Although Americans will not
fight the actual institutions of tyranny, perhaps they will not accept
unlimited tyranny without the sort of blind uprising which destroys
civilization. Here I speak of uprisings such as that which followed the
beating of Rodney King by the LA police - a rebellion directed not against
the police but against the very neighbors and neighborhoods of the rioting
people.

Two out of three Americans are obese. Who ever heard of a revolution of
fat men?

* Thoughts on Terrorism and Guerrilla Warfare

Terrorism consists of acts of violence designed to affect the victims not
merely physically but psychologically also. It produces, in the minds of the
victims, a long-term anxiety resulting from not knowing who is going to be
attacked, where the attack will take place, when it will take place, or what
form of violence will occur. If the concept of terrorism is to be a
psychological-psychiatric concept in addition to being merely a legal-
political concept, its study must include politicians, military personnel,
police, businessmen (particularly armaments manufacturers), and scientists
and technicians in addition to the skyjackers and urban guerrillas to whom
the term is usually applied. What we are dealing with are certain immutable
psychological patterns and principles that apply to a chief of state just as
well as they do to a lone gunman.

Imbuing fear into the mind of your enemy is a legitimate aim of warfare,
thus terrorism is a valid tool of combat. However, there are few, if any,
revolutionary groups in the world today who apply it properly. They fail
utterly to make a proper identification of their actual enemy.
Consider those groups usually (and properly!) labeled as terrorists. They
are active in many countries around the world: the ETA in Spain, the PLO in
Israel, the IRA in England. None of these groups makes much, if any,
distinction between the government they are fighting and the people who are
subjects of that government. They strike not only at members of the
government, but also indiscriminately at the general public. In the behavior
of such groups, war is morally equivalent to bombing a prison because one
has a grievance against its sadistic warden.
(It should be noted that although terrorist activities are almost always
directed against innocent civilians, with few exceptions those activities
are prompted by, and a response to, government behavior. If we got rid of
government, we would thereby eliminate the motives for most terrorism.)
Indiscriminate violence is not only wrong in principle, it is also
counterproductive in practice: many British people who might otherwise be
sympathetic to the IRA's desire to get British troops out of Northern
Ireland are appalled at the spectacle of bombs killing their neighbors in
the subway, and are thereby quite rightfully inclined to support the
suppression of the IRA and its goals.
A principled revolutionary group should strike only at ethically
justifiable targets, and the general public is NOT such a target.
As Murray Rothbard has observed (FOR A NEW LIBERTY pg269):
"Revolutionary guerrilla war can be far more consistent with libertarian
principles than any inter-State war. By the very nature of their activities,
libertarian guerrillas defend the civilian population against the
depredations of a State; hence, guerrillas, inhabiting as they do the same
country as the civilians, cannot use weapons of mass destruction. Further:
since guerrillas rely for victory on the support and aid of the civilian
population, they must, as a basic part of their strategy, spare civilians
from harm and pinpoint their activities solely against the State apparatus
and its armed forces."
Even actual terrorists recognize, to some extent, that they must side
with the people against State tyranny - as in this account of how the IRA
helps those opposing the occupation:
After internment the Catholics went on rent strike, and there was talk of
shutting off the water and the electricity if they didn't pay up. So what
did Paddy do? He went round to the local betting shop, held up the cashier,
raked in a few thousand quid, then went to the first house in the street and
asked,
"How much do you owe?"
"Forty seven pounds and twelve pence."
"Here's the money."
And he went down the whole street with the cash and paid them out. The
rent man came, knocked at the first door: "Mrs Murphy, you owe..." She paid
it all, the book was signed, and so on down the row. The rent man got to the
last house well pleased he'd got the money off all the street - and Paddy
was standing there on the corner: "Hands up!" Took all the money off the
rent man, gave it back to the bookie, and that was it. You have to admire
that: brilliant.

Consider the situation in America, for example. For two centuries the
government has whittled away at freedom, gradually - with each additional
law it passes - depriving individual people bit by bit of their right to
choose their own destiny. If the tyranny that exists today were to have been
foisted in its totality upon our forefathers they would have risen in a
rebellion even more forceful than that which they inflicted upon the tyrants
of King George. The government could never have accomplished such a massive
change in one fell swoop - it had to be brought about by a lengthy series of
gradual encroachments: in small enough doses that the populace would be
willing to accept each encroachment individually as being of itself
insufficient to justify the immense rebellion required to bring down the
entire government.
But this process is a two-edged sword. In a similar manner, the oppressed
victims of a tyranny could turn this sword against their government and
gradually reduce its tyrannical power over them. They could do this through
a series of small encroachments on government power, none of them in and of
itself sufficient to induce the government to undertake the expense of a
major military mobilization, but all of them adding up over the years to the
gradual reduction of government tyranny.
But they can achieve this goal only if they make proper and effective use
of the force they wield. To use it properly, they must make sure it is
directed only against the appropriate target: government. And to use it
effectively, they must make sure that it is applied in a way that will have
the desired influence on government behavior.

* Strategy - Disarm and Disable

Two of the primary precepts of warfare are:
Disarm the enemy economically and militarily.
Disable the enemy's determination to pursue his intentions.
The strategic aims of the rebels should be to make the State less capable
of functioning and less determined to function. And to show others who hate
the State that it IS possible to strike effectively against it.
 The goal is not to defeat the State in battle, but to intimidate it from
practicing tyranny; not to conquer it, but to cripple it so severely that
acquiescence to demands for freedom will become a political and/or economic
necessity.
The goal is not to destroy a particular, individual tyrant, who will
merely be replaced by another individual tyrant, but to demolish the
institution of tyranny which enables the individual tyrant to inflict his
viciousness on other people.

* Tactics - Focus, Meaning, Purpose

The implementation of this strategy consists of a three-pronged tactic.
The first level of guerilla war is a focused attack. The target must be
carefully selected and the attack must be directed exclusively at that
target. In order for a libertarian rebellion to succeed, it must strike only
against the oppressive behavior of the State, and not against innocent
people who are themselves victims of that State. In so doing, the rebels
will more and more bring the victims into sympathy with their goals rather
than alienating them.

The second level is a focused attack invested with meaning.

The rebels must tell the world why they have attacked. A clear statement
must be made, describing in detail the tyrannous behavior that motivated the
attack.

The third level is a focused attack with meaning and purpose.

The rebels must tell the world what they are fighting to achieve - what
it is they want the State to do. For example:
"We demand the enactment and vigorous enforcement of a law making it a
criminal offense for a policeman to interfere with the lawful behavior of a
free citizen (coupled with the repeal of all victimless-crime laws). Until
our demand is met we shall continue to defend our freedom as forcefully as
the government violates it. So long as we must live under the threat of
government oppression, the government will live under the threat of our
retaliation. We wish only peace and respect. If you will not see fit to
grant us these things, then we will fight for them on the field of arms, a
field of your choosing. You chose it when you sent your armed police into
our lives."

The public must know what the rebels are doing and why they are doing it.
If the rebels attack the police and the public knows that their goal is to
make everyone safe from police brutality, or if they attack tax collectors
and the public knows that their goal is to diminish everyone's tax burden,
then the public is much more likely to support (even if only tacitly) their
ends. If the rebels don't get THEIR message to the public, then public
opinion will be based only on the State's message.

A carefully controlled and directed attack could indeed be conducive to

an ameliorative change in a tyrannous government.
1. By reducing the government's economic resources, it would reduce the
government's ability to oppress its subjects.
2. It would reduce the oppressive motivation of individual government
agents by giving each of them negative reinforcement for such behavior. The
police might not care what publicity says about the police department, but
each individual policeman WILL care if there is forceful retaliation for
what HE does. Each individual will have to think before he continues his
oppression, and ask himself what might happen to him personally in response.
Armed agents of a tyrannous State respect the rights only of those whom they
have reason to fear.
 It is, of course, impossible for a small number of freedom fighters to
stand in force against the armed might of a government. But there is great
potential for a few dedicated guerrillas to accomplish a considerable amount
of change in the behavior of a government.
The weapons with which a government can be hit and hurt by an individual
or small group of rebels are assassination and sabotage. If a few people
hate the State fervently enough to fight effectively against it, the State
won't be able to control the country economically because of the ruination
of its expensive equipment. It can't just ignore the rebels or pretend they
don't exist - the State will have to start putting men and money into a
fight against them, and that will bring closer the day when the State will
be politically and/or economically disabled, or at least reduced in its
ability to impose tyranny.
This fight would, indirectly, reduce the support for government in the
general population, since, in order to compensate for the economic losses
imposed by the rebels, government would have to increase the economic drain
it imposes on the citizens it claims to be protecting. Thus government will
need more police and tax collectors to get the same amount of cooperation
and resources out of the civilians - but that simply increases civilian
resentment of the State.
Another reason for generating widespread hatred of the government is that
government in America is responsive to what it perceives as the will of the
majority of the voters (see Chapter 7). Thus if enough people hate it, it
may change itself.
See reference

* Morale
It may be asked, "Isn't it stupid and senseless to fight any war when
there is no hope of winning it?"
Mencken: "It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it only takes a
few determined men and a sound cause."
Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
persons can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has."
You must be continually aware that although there may never be an
absolute, total victory - that you have no hope of achieving any type of
military victory over government forces - nevertheless, if you act with
prudence and diligence, the final practical victory - the one that matters,
the one that changes the behavior of individual government agents - will be
yours. Keep in mind that no one has ever gained freedom except by fighting
for it.
While it is true that the great power of the State has absolute dominion
over any small group of free people, this dominion is similar to that of a
man over a hornets' nest: it can be exercised only at the risk of
considerable personal danger. Each policeman must be brought to consider the
risk to him personally of his tyrannous behavior.
You, as an individual, and acting by yourself alone, CAN make a
difference! If you can make just one cop reluctant to hassle people, then
you have in fact reduced the extent of tyranny. If you make such a change,
even a little one, then you've won something.
"But," it is claimed, "some policemen are good men who are only doing
their jobs." An Allied soldier fighting the Nazis did not question the
particular character of each individual German soldier he encountered, he
merely looked at a man with a uniform and a gun, and he knew that man by
those signs to be his enemy, and he acted accordingly. Likewise, the rebel
should not question the particular character of each individual policeman he
encounters. It is by the uniform and the gun, and the ethical principles
that those signs represent, that you recognize him to be your enemy. By
choosing to wear the uniform and bear arms against you he has declared
himself to be violently opposed to your freedoms.
G. B. Shaw: "To kill a man in uniform who is your enemy is not an act of
murder, but an act of legitimate warfare." The enemy command authority
(either civilian or military) is always a legitimate target of war.
Your war will be a righteous war, a war fought to defend your rights and
your honor against the colossus of the State. You have a new world of
freedom to gain; your enemy has only a lost cause to lose.
If you don't strike against the State now, it will eventually destroy the
means of civilization. After a revolution today, we would still have a
civilization to live in. After a revolution tomorrow, there would be less
civilization remaining. If you leave the job to your children, there might
be no hope at all for their survival.

Chapter 14
TO SHRUG - AN ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLE FOR AN
INDIVIDUALIST
Throughout all my writings, I use the word
"Shrug" (always capitalized)
to designate a certain activity. That activity is described precisely in the
book ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand.
This essay is a consideration of some aspects of that activity. If you
have not read ATLAS SHRUGGED, you will probably find this essay to be
somewhat obscure.

* Underlying Philosophy
All civilization rests upon the productive achievement of creative
individuals. Without that productivity, the amenities of civilization would
be little, if anything, more than a cave, a bearskin and a chunk of raw
meat. Observe that totalitarianism is not creative. A Sherman Tank is not a
tool of construction, nor is the revolver on a policeman's hip an instrument
of productivity. A totalitarian regime can exist only if it is able to to
obtain economic support from the productive members of society. Without that
support the regime will collapse or dissipate, as there is no other means of
maintaining its economic existence. The evil is that which is destructive
and life negating. The good is that which is productive and life sustaining.
Evil is impotent - literally impotent - in a very fundamental way. The only
power evil has is the power it gets, one way or another, from the good.
Consider any evil action which you can conceive of, and take a real hard and
deep look at it. What were the means by which that action was perpetrated?
What is the basis (particularly the economic basis) upon which the
perpetration rests? If you look far enough into the matter, you will find
that somewhere, sometime, something good must have happened before this evil
could have come into being. To take only one example (but a rather blatant
one): A thief cannot steal from me that which I do not possess. His act of
theft presupposes my act of producing that which he would steal. If someone
has not produced it, he cannot steal it. It is only my sanction that gives
him his power. Without my good, he is impotent. Without me, he can not even
exist. This is true not only of the simple act of theft but of ALL acts of
evil, no matter how complex they may be in their insidious manifestations,
and no matter where or how they occur - materially, intellectually or
spiritually. As you can see, this is the basic theme of ATLAS SHRUGGED.
All that is required for the defeat of evil is that good men stop their
unwitting support of it.
 A productive person who uses his creative energies in support of
totalitarianism is acting according to an irrational morality - he is
providing sustenance for an evil that tends to destroy him. The remedy is to
STOP SUPPORTING THE EVIL THAT AFFLICTS YOU. The functioning of your mind -
the creative application of your intelligence - is something that is
entirely under your personal control. Most things you own can be forcibly
removed from your possession. The one thing that cannot is your creative
ability. This cannot be touched without your sanction. The guns of a
dictator, though they may destroy you, cannot compel you to think (Thoreau
and Gandhi taught us this). It is simply not possible to enslave a free
mind. Your body can be enslaved regardless of your personal choices, but the
creative power of your mind can be manifest only if you choose to express
it.

* Historical Precedent
The idea of Shrugging was not unique to Rand. Its advocates include such
other illustrious names as Thoreau, Lane, and Ghandi.
Thoreau: "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote
himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may
still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at
least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not
to give it practically his support.... Cast your whole vote, not a strip of
paper merely, but your whole influence."
In 1943 Rose Wilder Lane implemented yet another exercise in subversion,
which was an attempt to reduce her income below taxable levels. It was
merely the next logical step in her exercise in self-sufficiency combined
with political resistance.
Ghandi's policy of satyagraha can be viewed as an "activist" expression
of Shrugging.
Judge Learned Hand (1934): "Any one may so arrange his affairs that his
taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern
which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to
increase one's taxes."

* Implementation of Shrugging
On dealing with the immorality of government, here are five courses of
action to consider:
1) Refuse to engage in any implementation of your personal creative
ability which benefits the State. Take your brains off the statist
marketplace. Act so that only those who add to your life, not those who
devour it, comprise your creativity marketplace. Do not abandon creative
productivity, merely deny it to all who advocate statism. Reserve your
achievements for yourself and those who will join you in the endeavor to
build a sane and sensible world. This is the main ingredient of Shrugging.
As Robert Ringer observed: "I am in favor of complete freedom of trade
between companies and people throughout the world, but not under the
umbrella of political partnerships between governments." Thus my attitude is
that I will use my creative abilities on behalf of people who are STRIVING
to act outside the authority of government, but I will not permit government
to benefit from their use - either directly or indirectly. I will not use my
abilities in any way that requires a tax to be paid, and I will not help
other people to pay or to collect a tax.
2) Arrange your circumstances so that the State benefits as little as
possible from whatever sort of menial work you do.
3) Propagate the philosophy of libertarianism. Make these ideas known to
others who are seeking a means to combat totalitarianism.
4) Actively oppose the State in a political manner.
 5) Contribute in a positive way to the establishment of a new
civilization. Establish for yourself a lifestyle which will demonstrate that
rationally moral behavior is in fact eminently practical in one's personal
life.

* A Different World-View
Ayn Rand never advocated Shrugging (in fact, she was firmly opposed to
the action) so there has never been any discussion of the nitty-gritty
aspects of "how to do it." Nobody told me what to do after I Shrugged. I had
to figure it out for myself. Most of my life's work since I Shrugged has
been devoted to finding how to live an economically comfortable and secure
existence while denying the State any benefit from my creative ability. The
result of this has been the implementation of a lifestyle that maximizes my
standard of living while minimizing my exposure to the oppressive elements
of society.
I have been disappointed with most other libertarians because they
manifest very little of any practical use - because they seem to want only
to TALK rather than really DO anything to achieve freedom. To object
verbally while non-violently submitting to (and economically supporting) an
aggression is the behavior of a hypocrite whose talk and actions are
diametrically opposed. My own goal has always been to eschew collective
activities in favor of better ideas to apply to individual life, firmly
believing that society will not be changed by people hollering and shouting
in and about nation-wide mass movements, but will be changed only by people
who choose to alter their own personal lives to live in accordance with a
rational morality.
If there is ever to be a society of free men, there must first be free
men to comprise that society. Assembling them into a society would be an
interesting proposition, but the act of becoming free is the individual's
self-responsibility, not mine.
I believe the best path to a free society is not via the alteration of
government, but its abolition. Although I am in sympathy with those
libertarians who seek freedom by means of social reform, my own primary
focus is on the achievement of individual liberty and economic self-
betterment. I am not concerned with getting other people to adopt
Objectivism, but rather in reaping the rewards of living an Objectivist life
myself. I think it unfortunate that other people do not accept this kind of
life, but I do not consider it my job to induce them to practice good health
- either physical, mental, economic or social health. I think also that it
is rather a waste of time to try to do so - after all, the Libertarian Party
has been at work since 1972, but still gets only about 1% of the votes. And
too, it is over a third of a century since the publication of ATLAS
SHRUGGED. Those mature adults who are intellectually self-responsible will
have learned by now of the existence of the Objectivist philosophy. I have
neither hope for nor interest in the others. If the vast majority choose to
be fools, I can say only "Let them live with the consequences of their
foolishness."
Most people who ask the question "Is there any hope for saving society?"
will settle only for an answer that by its nature would enable one
individual to make singlehandedly a mammoth immediate alteration in the
situation. This, of course, is impossible. Sadly, the fact that one
individual alone cannot put a complete end to an evil is often used as an
excuse and justification for accepting and supporting the evil. While
realism tells me that I cannot fix all the problems of the world, my
idealism tells me that my inability to do so does not preclude me from
addressing those individual imperfections that I CAN affect. I view the
situation, and my approach to it, as a physician would view a society
suffering under a catastrophic epidemic. He would not sit back, wringing his
hands in dismay, lamenting the fact that he alone could not produce an
immediate and total cure for the epidemic. What he WOULD do is simply pick
up his little black bag and commence to treat as many afflicted individuals
as he possibly could. I believe society is suffering from a disastrous
epidemic of irrational morality, and that the remedy lies in the practice of
a rational morality by each individual - especially by a certain type of
individual: those capable of a high degree of productive achievement. (For a
much more comprehensive treatement of this phenomenon, see THE AYN RAND
LETTER, 3Jan72.)
While you are trudging through the world with your little black bag, keep
in mind that the difference you make can be negative (by withdrawing your
contribution) as well as positive.

At an early age I started developing a world-view that can see outside

the normal American lifestyle. I was in my early 20s when I went shopping
for a house in the suburbs. I looked at a couple houses, noted the prices,
and learned about financing arrangements. At this point I paused and the
mathematical wheels in the back of my brain cranked round a couple times. I
said "Hey! over the course of a 15-year mortgage I will be paying almost
TWICE the purchase price of this house! I'm not gonna do that!" The real-
estate agent just gave me a funny look (I've been getting that funny look
all my life) and terminated his presentation. And I began thinking about
alternative lifestyles.
It didn't take me long to discover that there are also other people
interested in alternative lifestyles - and not much longer to learn that by
and large they are a bunch of losers. They don't drop out to find a better
life; they drop out because they can't cope with the life they have. The few
exceptions to this are those who drop out because of their environmental
concern. A laudable motive, but these people throw the baby of technology
out with the bathwater of pollution by renouncing any use of civilized
technology in the primitive lifestyles they establish. People interested in
a "natural" lifestyle seem to have no concern at all for any of the
technological prerequisites of a decently civilized life. Many appear to see
not much further than grubbing for roots and cooking over an open wood fire.
Even Thoreau did a lot better than that! Our conflicting motives and
disparate goals precluded much collaboration at all between myself and these
people.
I think the best of the lot that I encountered was the Back-To-The-Land
SIG in Mensa, but even they were a considerable disappointment to me, their
primary focus of attention being the collecting of recipes on how to prepare
natural foods. I wasn't interested in learning 47 different ways to cook
organic turnips. My concern was "What am I gonna cook them WITH?" I was also
surprised at how very few of them actually had any genuine intention of
converting their daydreams into real life. They were almost all city
dwellers who had no notion of any practical procedures for getting Back To
The Land, and no genuine motivation to find or create such procedures.
I had a philosophical motivation (based on my decision to Shrug) and also
the economic motivation that I described above: I was strongly opposed to
spending the major part of my life supporting the moneylenders.

* Escape from the moneylenders

The first element of my economic strategy was to escape from the
moneylenders.
When most folks begin their working life they immediately start making
payments on a car, paying off a mortgage (or paying rent, which is probably
worse in the long run), and in other ways making long-term committments to
moneylenders. They get economically locked-in to this syndrome and then find
themselves in a situation which is very difficult, if not impossible, to
break out of. They HAVE to live where and how they do, in order to keep
making payments so that they can continue to live where and how they do. I
call this the "white collar squalor" syndrome. You GOTTA stop paying other
people for the use of their property (rent) or the use of their money
(interest). If you're not accumulating wealth, you're dissipating your life.
The procedure for breaking free of the moneylenders would be quite
different for people whose financial situations were different. One man
might need to scrimp and save for a long time, whereas another might only
need to divert immediately available resources from one area to another. But
unless you can get out of this "white collar squalor" syndrome you will
never be truly free.

* A suitable dwelling
"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, but so to
love wisdom as to live according to its dictates....The philosopher is in
advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed,
sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a
philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other
men?" .... Thoreau

The biggest expense most people have is the cost of their housing, so I
gave a lot of thought to what kind of dwelling would be suitable to the
lifestyle I wanted.
I had no intention of giving up the comforts of a civilized life,
especially since my philosophical principles require no such sacrifice. It
is not at all necessary to settle for what Rand described as Galt's dingy
little quarters:
"a long, bare garret with a bed in one corner and a gas stove in another,
a few pieces of wooden furniture, naked boards stressing the length of the
floor, a single lamp burning on a desk.... the wooden rafters of his
ceiling.... the cracked plaster of his walls, the iron posts of his bed."
Extending the idea of "escape from the moneylenders" to include escape
from other institutions that have economic control over everyday life (the
foremost among them being the utility power companies), I concluded that
what would be appropriate to my goals would be an inexpensive, energy-
independent, mobile dwelling possessing the comforts of modern technology.
I considered living in a motor home, but I quickly discovered that motor
homes and travel trailers are NOT designed for permanent residence, and are
even less than not designed for living in a cold climate, [I went to college
to learn how to write like this?] and are certainly not energy-independent,
or even energy-efficient. I wanted a home that would be inexpensive to
construct and maintain, be mobile, and still have all the amenities of a
civilized existence. So I decided to create one myself. I began by doing
renovations of vehicles - converting them into little "rolling homes." I
gradually figured out how to use my knowledge of physics and engineering to
convert an old van, truck or bus into a very nice little house - an
inexpensive, energy-independent, non-polluting, transportable dwelling - for
a whole lot less money than the cost of a new house, or even the cost of a
new motor home. After building several such dwellings - and living in one of
them myself for a few years - I came to realize the truth of Thoreau's
observation:
"Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are
actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they
must have such a one as their neighbors have."
Either as a permanent alternative to a fixed-box type dwelling, or as a
temporary transition between the city rat-race and a rural existence in the
country, a motor home can offer an inexpensive and comfortable lifestyle.
As a transition device, a motor home offers the city-dweller the means by
which he can get out of the city in whatever spare time he has (weekends,
vacations, holidays) and travel about in the country seeking land and
housing suitable to his desired rural lifestyle. If he does find land
without a dwelling on it, he will have a temporary living arrangement after
he has left the city and is building his permanent home on the land.
It is an excellent way to test your ideas about independent living: you
load up your motor home and trundle up into the mountains. Find a nice,
secluded place and live there for a few months, making a list of all the
things you discover that you don't have and all the things you can't do.
Then you trundle back down into civilization again and start crossing things
off that list. When the list is gone, you are ready to live an independent
life. I want to stress the importance of DOing it experimentally before you
make a full committment. The actuality is never just what you expect it to
be.
As a permanent residence, I think this sort of home is a wonderful way to
beat the housing racket with its multi-kilobuck lifetime mortgages for
shoddily constructed boxes with built-in and almost irrevocable dependence
on the energy companies. A nice little home can be built in an old school
bus for a modest amount of money and, if carefully done up, will keep you
cozy and warm in the coldest climates (I have lived quite comfortably
through 20 Wyoming winters).
It's amazing what living in a Rolling Home does for your economic
situation. Gone are the mortgage payments. Gone are the rent payments. Gone
are most all of the utility bills (a small house takes much less energy to
heat, and if, like me, you don't drive it too much, gas is a small expense).
Gone are the huge tax bills laid on a stationary house. Sure, there are
still some living expenses but they are a tiny portion of the expenses
associated with a "regular" house. I can live on a MUCH smaller income than
I needed before.
And then, of course, there are all the benefits of mobility. If I don't
like it here I can always fire up this old clunker and trundle off down the
road, seeking warmer climes, more congenial neighbors, or even just a
different view from my window.

Some comments on technology: many people seeking an alternative lifestyle

reject technology. I think this is a mistake. I have a very high regard for
technology - insofar as it is the practical application of human
intelligence and creativity to the problems of living a SANE and SENSIBLE
life in the environment of this planet. What I greatly object to, however,
is the use of technology in irrationally insane manners that inhibit decent
human life and contribute to the destruction of earth's environment. The big
difference between me and many other environmentally concerned people is
that unlike them, I do not advocate the destruction of a pricelessly
valuable tool (technology) just because it is being used by some vicious
people for improper purposes. (Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!)
So I integrated two usually disparate ideas - a profound love for the
ecology and an equally great respect and admiration for technology - and
thereby established a style of life that incorporates all the stated
objectives of the most enthusiastic environmentalist with all the comforts
and conveniences available from modern technology.
I worked on the technological problems of self-sufficient living for many
years, concentrating on the use of solar energy as the primary source of
household power, and I found that a motor home - or a trailer house - makes
a splendid dwelling if it has been designed and constructed to be energy-
efficient (very well insulated) and frugal in its use of heat, water, and
electricity. The operating expenses of such a home can easily be reduced to
a few hundred dollars per year (assuming it stays parked in one place).

The lifestyle I have developed consists of more than just an unusual

dwelling; it is a comprehensive set of practices that have led me to
substantial economic success while reducing the extent to which I am
victimized by the government. Through the practice of this lifestyle, I have
lowered my living expenses to not much more than what I spend in the
supermarket, and an income of less than $200 per month (in 1994) can support
me very comfortably indeed. I have a higher standard of living than anyone
else I know, but my income is so small that I pay no income tax.

* Lifetime supplies
After I had reduced my housing expenses to just about nil, I had all that
"mortgage money" to spend on other things - and I soon found a lot of other
things to spend it on. As I observed in Chapter 4, there is a critically
important distinction between being rich and being wealthy. One of the most
economically successful things I have ever done was to implement that
distinction in my personal life. Whenever possible, I have opted to acquire
merchandise rather than money - or to turn my money into merchandise.
See reference
It really doesn't take much money (or much storage volume) to acquire a
lifetime supply of X. For X, just substitute anything that you need to live
comfortably and that can be stored away indefinitely. Socks, for example. If
you have a few dozen pairs of socks in the back of your closet, then you
don't have to be at all concerned that the price of socks is increasing
continually - or that those socks may vanish off the marketplace entirely.
Recently I took a brand new pair of trousers out of my storage trunk. While
I was ripping off all the tags I noticed the price tag attached to the
waistband. I thought it might be interesting to see how much the price had
risen since I bought them, so I stopped in at the store where I had
purchased them seven years ago, and was told: "Oh, those pants aren't being
made anymore - they're no longer available!" I'm sure the lady thought I was
completely crazy, because I burst out laughing.
If you save dollars, the government simply eats them up via its inflation
of the money supply. But if you convert those dollars into books, tools,
clothes, or even just cans of beans, then you beat that inflation. The
government will eat your dollars, but YOU will eat your beans!

* Income reduction
The best way to gain economic freedom is to cut expenses. People who
squander their prime years on excessive work to pay unnecessary expenses,
and then spend the remainder of their lives working just to stay sheltered
and fed, can't enjoy much freedom.
As part of her exercise in subversion, in 1943 Rose Wilder Lane began an
attempt to reduce her income below taxable levels. My own implementation of
this has been a great success. As of 1992, the base (federal) taxable level
of income in the USA is above $5000 per year. This represents over twice the
amount necessary for me to live comfortably. For the final 14 years of my
working life I worked two 8-hour shifts per week at or near the minimum wage
(as dishwasher/janitor in local restaurants). My standard of living rose
continually during that time, mainly because almost the entirety of my
income was "disposable income." I had followed Ms Lane's example and reduced
my living expenses to just about nil.
My standard of living has been rising continually since 1975, when I had
fully implemented my lifestyle. Whether I consider the amount of material
wealth that I possess or the amount of leisure time available to me or the
amount of time I must devote to earning my living or the amount of economic
security I have. In all these respects I am better off now than I have been
at any previous time of my life.
An interesting thing about all this is that I believe ANYBODY could do
what I have done. Anybody in America could work 10 years at minimum wage and
then retire for life. As screwed up as it is, this is still the richest
society the world has ever seen.

* Occupation
After I had thought about Atlas Shrugged for a while, I realized that
Shrugging is appropriate not just to someone at or near Galt's level of
productive capability, but to anyone who is concerned with the ethical
propriety of his life. I believe that even though there are immense
differences between Galt and a track walker, they are differences in
quantity, not in quality. Thus Mr. Walker may well have just as legitimate a
concern for the ethical nature of his behavior as Galt has for his. When I
contemplated the question "If Galt steps down to the level of the track
walker, what would the track walker step down to?" I identified this as the
essense of Shrugging: do not pay tax on your creative ability. I believe
that EVERY person has some creative capacity, and that the proper way to
respond to government is to deny it the benefit of that creativity.
"Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the
moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material
value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and
leaves no further value...." Rand
Consider that it is not just taxation per se that supports
totalitarianism, but the exploitation of productive achievement. No
government could survive merely by taxing ditch diggers, track walkers and
dishwashers. These people do not create civilization (although I readily
admit that they do help maintain it); civilization is created by those whose
productivity generates the need for ditch diggers, track walkers and
dishwashers. The taxes imposed on a dishwasher will not support a
totalitarian state, simply because the dishwasher does not generate wealth.
He merely manipulates the wealth generated by someone who is functioning at
a considerably higher level of productivity. If this "someone" were to stop
generating wealth, eventually there would be nothing for the totalitarian
State to tax - and it would perish. If you wish to strike at the State then
strike at its root - deprive it of its economic foundation. The functioning
of your mind - the creative application of your intelligence - is something
that is entirely under your personal control. The guns of a dictator, though
they may destroy you, cannot compel you to think.

* Security
There are three major aspects to my security.
The first is that my house is both mobile and energy-independent. Even
though I have not moved my little house in over ten years, I could readily
do so if the need ever arose. Since my domestic utilities are almost
entirely solar-powered, I am not dependent on outside hookups. I do not have
blackouts or brownouts; I am not subject to power rationing, and they can't
raise my rates!
The second element of my security is that I have provided for my future
in ways that are linked as little as possible to money. I own my home, and
it is quite capable of housing me for the rest of my life. Thus I will never
have to worry about getting money in order to provide myself with shelter. I
have sufficient clothing and other household goods on hand to keep me
comfortable for longer than I expect to live. Unless all this property is
physically destroyed, I will never have to obtain money to replace any of
it. I have, in my parlance, "pushed self-sufficiency all the way to the
bananas." All the way to those things that I cannot provide for myself
and/or cannot lay up a lifetime supply of (such as bananas). I am as
unaffected as I can be by the government's continual destruction of the
American economy.
The third element of my security is that my philosophy, and and the fact
that I actually LIVE by it, are so unthinkable to stateolatrists that I am
essentially invisible to them. I call this the "Thompson Invisibility
Syndrome" (see ATLAS SHRUGGED Part3 Chap8). This syndrome is their response
to someone who is so far removed from their frame of reference that they
literally cannot perceive him as a genuine philosophical entity. They can
ignore me, or they can ridicule me, but they CANNOT take me seriously. Rand
was quite wrong about the need for secrecy: their ignorance and self-
blindedness are my shield. My knowledge is their weakness.

* The Moral is the Practical

Before Ayn Rand, there was a perceived dichotomy between being good and
being practical. This put morality in a dilemma because "how should I act?"
rested on two antipathetic goals: to be "moral," or to be "practical." It
was thought that to flourish you needed to be immoral to some extent, and
that the actions which make you moral inhibit flourishing. Now that Rand has
given us the basic science of a rational morality, the pretext for thinking
this has been eradicated.
Objectivism is not a mere philosophical assertion, but a living, concrete
procedure by which a rational individual can learn the laws of the universe
and implement them in his personal life. It is, as Rand observed: "A
Philosophy for Living on Earth." This living, concrete picture is itself
profoundly convincing: the observation of my personal life has produced
conversions and induced a commitment to the idea of rationality in other
people. As this conversion and commitment spread to more and more people, it
will, hopefully, become a movement, adherence to which will distinguish one
as enlightened, and ignorance or denial of which will mark one as
intellectually retarded or superstitious. Those who reject Objectivism are
akin to those who renounce computers, thus depriving themselves of
humanity's most powerful instrument of literacy. Both groups are doomed to a
stunted level of intellectual capability. People who ignore Objectivism are
simply going to become irrelevant and, eventually, extinct. People who
accept and use it are, like me, going to prosper.
Whether you are a rocket scientist today or a hunter-gatherer of 25,000
years ago, the extent of your failure to live by rational principles is
reflected in the extent of your failure to flourish. The more you use your
mind properly, the more you'll flourish - succeed at survival. As the
economy of America becomes more and more fouled up by government, those
people who can bypass their dependence on this economy can function more
efficiently, but those who continue to live within the mainstream will have
their economic efficiency diminished by a parasitical government.
"You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to
man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his
reward for accepting ours." John Galt

Nothing encourages ethical practices so well as a practical, profitable

alternative to evil. We can't make people want to be poor. If we want to
clean up the Earth and establish a free society, we'll have to show people a
way to be wealthy without harming the environment or depending on the State.
Not only must we demonstrate how to live well, we must show how to make a
profit. As one investor remarked: "As soon as the environmental sector
starts producing profits, we'll start investing."
A lifestyle should be adopted on the same basis as the advocacy of an
environmental issue: If you object to pollution, the first thing for you to
do is to stop your own polluting behavior. If you advocate the conservation
of some natural resource, the first thing for you to do is to diminish your
own consumption of that resource. And if you want to contest the tyrannical
system you must reject tyranny in your own personal lifestyle.

I have proved in my own life that he who actually lives by the morality
of Objectivism can thereby have a HIGHER standard of living than the large
majority of people in America, who are hobbled ethically and economically by
circumscribing their lives within the authoritarian frame of reference, and
that the adoption of such a lifestyle is much less expensive and much more
technologically feasible than most people surmise. Amidst a population of
individuals employing one strategy, I employ a different strategy which has
a higher payoff.
As Rand repeatedly asserted, "the moral IS the practical."
And I can look into a mirror and know that I did not work all my life to
help make possible the burning of babies in Philadelphia and Waco. Can you
say the same?

* Recommendations
Keep in mind that Shrugging doesn't have to be one big jump - it can be
done in stepdowns, thus avoiding traumatic shock to your present lifestyle.
I believe the best way to go about implementing the lifestyle I have
described would be to start by buying a pickup truck as your first (or next)
vehicle.
When you are financially ready to do so, buy a camper to put onto the
truck - or a small trailer to pull behind it.
Spend weekends, vacations, and as much time as you can living in this
thing. This will prepare you for later full-time residence, and teach you
what domestic facilities you should modify or add in order to create a
satisfactory situation.
If you are the adventurous type and want to skip this intermediate
preparatory step, then buy a large gooseneck trailer-house. You might want
to consider buying a gooseneck flat-bed trailer and building your own house
on it.
I have lived for over 20 years in a 30-foot school bus and find this
plenty large enough for one person (and three cats) to live in.
If I were to do it over again, I would opt for a truck/trailer
combination, as that makes for more transportation convenience. When you
want to stay parked in one place for any length of time, it is convenient to
just detach the truck for your occasional trips to town. (I use a bicycle.)

Once your little house is fully prepared, take the next big step by
moving permanently into it. At this point your economic situation should
take a big leap upward as you begin to reap the benefits of the
rent/mortgage money that you no longer have to pay out.
Two things you should consider doing with that money are stocking up with
supplies of merchandise (such as the socks I mentioned above) and investing
in a pension for your future years. It shouldn't take much to convince you
that the government's Social Security scheme is of dubious value. There are
other ways in which you can provide for your future. The best I ever found
is:
Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association
College Retirement Equities Fund

730 Third Ave New York City 10017 Phone: (800) 226-0147
To initiate your participation in TIAA-CREF it is not necessary that you
be a teacher. It is only necessary that you be employed, in any capacity, by
one of the many educational institutions that comprise the Association. Once
you have become a participant, you remain so for life regardless of your
subsequent employment.
During the late 1960s I invested several thousand dollars into this
scheme. That money was put into a wide array of commercial and industrial
enterprises (not into government bonds!). Today, about thirty years later, I
can begin drawing an annual pension that will pay me, each year for the rest
of my life, an amount of money greater than the sum total that I invested so
long ago.

Keep this in mind when you are considering investments: The crazy thing
about investing is that there's really no such thing as absolutely bad news.
Whether an event is good or bad depends on where you've got your money.

When you have got yourself set up in your new lifestyle you can begin to
think about changing over from full-time work to part-time work. For the
final 14 years of my working life I worked only part-time (as a dishwasher
and janitor). I usually worked one or two days a week - and had a five- or
six-day "weekend."
This free time enabled me to pursue my education to an extent that never
would have been available to me if I had been working full-time all my life.
I went into full retirement at the age of 48, and have been living quite
comfortably ever since.

* Bibliography

From Loompanics Unlimited Box 1197 Port Townsend, WA 98368:

THE ALPHA STRATEGY by John Pugsley
Convert your money into merchandise.
FREEDOM ROAD by Harold Hough
How to establish life in a motor home.
HOME IS WHERE YOU PARK IT by Kay Peterson
How to live in a travel trailer.
TINY HOUSES by Lester Walker
Inexpensive, self-sufficient little homes.

ROLLING HOMES by Jane Lidz A&W Publishers, 95 Madison Ave, NYC 1979

J.C. Whitney Co Box 8410 Chicago IL 60680

Parts, accessories and appliances for cars, trucks and RVs. If you
intend to build your own motor home, this company is an excellent source for
parts and equipment.

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