Low lie the Fields: Irish at the Euro 2012

A few weeks ago the Irish national team, certainly not the most talented team in the world, made an appearance on the world stage at the Euro cup. They would eventually walk away winless after a 4-0 loss to Spain but the score isn't what I'll remember about this game. I'll remember the fans and their passionate singing of the "fields of Atherny" for the final ten minutes of the game.

The Irish fans, a people who've been hit as hard as anyone by the Euro-crisis, thanked their brave team with a somber and meloncholy tune about loneliness, hardship and eventual hope, a striking example of solidarity at a time when the people need to hold to each other. Of course, as cheeky Irishmen, they also had to poke a little fun at their German task mistress, Angela Merkel, whose insistence on a policy of strict austerity to pay down the national debt has caused no end of trouble for the working or out-of-work Irish, with a flag reading, "Angela Merkel thinks we're at work."

The whole affair reminds me of Nancy Scheper-Hughes ethnograpghy, Saints, Scholars, and Schitzophrenics, about mental illness in rural Ireland. In this beautiful piece of ethnographic work, Scheper-Hughes address some of the problems that rural Irishmen face while watching their friends and brothers leave in pursuit of prosperity somewhere else while they are left to tend the lonely fields back home. The Irishman who stays has to deal with social pressure from both direction. From the one side they are told that to leave faily property would be disloyal and from the other they are seen inferior to their brothers sisters who've left for other countries and often staying behind means being alone, as few women remain.

 The song the Irish fans sung was particularly fitting as it deals with the hardship of being left behind, "its so lonely round the feilds of Anthenry". In the song, a man is arrested and sent to Botany bay for stealing corn for his starving children and it features a dialouge between him and his love who he must leave behind. The character I think most of the Irish fans singing the song would most sympathize with would be the woman, which fits with Scheper-Hughes idea that the men had been in some way emasculated by their experiences.

 The book was written twenty years ago, long before the Euro-crisis reached what it is today, but I think the struggles it revealed are still experienced by Irishmen today and perhaps amplified by the deteriorating economy.

 The sound of those voices lifted into the air, celebrating their common suffering and hope has pushed me to give a shout-out to my comrades in Ireland, perhaps a few weeks later than I should have. To the people who've endured more than their share of hardship at the hands of the elite; to those who've watched their friends and families leave; to the oppressed periphery sliding into debt slavery; to those who still hold to hope; I wish you peace and love from America.

On Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Clarification from my last post

Just to.quickly clarify via my new moble blogger app, id like to clarify whag I meant in my last post "narcissistic self-reflection" about Machiavelli and Nietzsche as my "enemies". I did not mean to say i considered these men completely antithetical to myself but that i completely reject some of those things which they are most closely related to in popular understanding, notably Machiavelli`s ends-justify-the-means ethic and Nietzsche`s will to power. I consider Nietzsche something of a radicalized bourgeois but do acknowledge his contributions to western thought and I also understand that Machiavelli may have been satirizing authoritarianism as he was a well known republican. I mean i disagree with what they are most known for.

So this post was just a caveat for my last and a test of my mobile app. Hope it worked and read my actual post this refers to please!

Have a nice day!

posted from Bloggeroid

Narcissistic Self-Reflection

I haven’t been doing a lot of blogging recently. Partially because I know no one reads these posts regularly so keeping uniform intervals between posts is a bit less than important but mostly because I’ve really been trying to figure myself out recently. With the end of my high school days, I think I’ve come to a better understanding of a lot of what I was feeling throughout my high school career and how that has colored my thinking on subjects from politics to philosophy, which have always been a form of escape for me and a pursuit of meaning in a world that often seems alien and meaningless. Reexamining myself, I think a change in identification may be in order; I’m just not exactly sure from what to what. All in all these changes have taken place throughout the last four years and some of the might not seem very important to someone who isn't interested in anarchism and I’ve still got a lot to sort out but my horoscope told me that today was a good day to write about my beliefs so I decided I’d muse a little on what has shifted. Besides, it’s good to reflect on yourself a little bit, even if it seems narcissistic.

I really made the move to the left of the political spectrum a long time ago and have been moving further and further that way ever since. I was a vulgar libertarian for only a short time and a Rothbardian anarchist even shorter before discovering the works of Kevin Carson which really pointed me in the direction of anti-capitalism and what might be called “true anarchism” going back to Bakunin and Kropotkin. Understanding the roots of the inequalities in capitalism to be the result not of inherent differences in human abilities (as most mainstream conservatives and vulgar libertarians do) or of plain dumb luck (like I used to believe) but of systematic exploitation which was really just a continuation of medieval hierarchal society with new gods and new machines led me into a study of the work of communists, who I used to consider my intellectual enemies (I now recognize thinkers like Nietzsche and Machiavelli, with their emphasis on individual power, to be my enemies-- In the spirit of how their works are popularly understood, not in the men themselves or even their works as a whole).

Many communist ideas sat well with me (more of those of Kropotkin than Marx); after all I consider myself an egalitarian at heart and have always detested commercialism. I also know that throughout high school, in both academics and athletics, I had my fill of competition. I considered myself somewhat anti-social, going so far as to diagnose myself with avoidant personality disorder (though I distrust psychiatry as much as anything else). Following what I thought was my anti-social nature; I lost myself in individualist literature (if one can call Ayn Rand literature. Stirner, maybe, but Rand?). Upon reflection, I can say that a good deal of my anti-social nature was due to my disgust with competition and hierarchy. If I had to talk to someone from a position of inferiority, I’d sooner just not talk to them (I never got to know any of my teachers all too well and always had a kind of paranoia that my peers were looking down on me, particularly the female ones). I had been familiar with most communist doctrines before, including the basic idea of workers’ solidarity, but they never appealed to me until I began to discover the root of my discomfort with modern society which is based on coercion, subjugation, and exploitation. Solidarity then, was not an acceptance of the collective will, as I had once thought and therefore shunned it, but instead a rebellion against their selfish competition. The idea that, as one blogger on libcom.org put it, “working too hard is anti-social behavior” really spoke to the part of me that felt alienated. It said, “Maybe you’re not the one with the problem. Maybe you aren’t the anti-social one. Maybe it’s them and their heartless competition. Maybe it’s them and their fetishification of the commodity and their obsession with money and their need to quantify everything.” In short it said, “Blame capitalism. For all your angst, just blame capitalism.” This is, of course, the all too simple answer of a self-isolated teenage boy to his suffering in a position in which all of society was saying, “You have no reason to suffer!”

So I began to refer to my friends, who had the confidence to get jobs, as wage-laborers, to modern medicine as the cult of doctorism, to a popular shopping center in our area as a den of commercialistic depravity. I had decided this society was not for me and I would make my way out to study others, rekindling my passion for anthropology.

This is not to say that I consider myself an anarcho-communist now, I am still much closer to mutualism based on Carson and Proudhon. I can’t say I consider the sensible pursuit of profit to be immoral, particularly through a useful trade. Even merchants are useful when they are turning a profit based solely upon their service of transporting goods from those who have them and are looking to sell them to those who need them. Sinbad and the Arab traders in history and the Kajiit caravans in fiction live a life full of adventure which is easy to romanticize and it’s hard to say they hurt anyone. So I do believe in a market, as I always have. A truly free market uncorrupted by coercion and those that make profit on it.

This does likely mean that some people will get ahead, though not nearly to the extent that they are able to under modern state-capitalism. But is it fair for me to declare competition immoral because it disgusts me? Is it fair for me to declare that the only just society is one completely devoid of it? No, it would be no more fair than if I had declared that the only just society is one entirely free of spiders. My opposition to hierarchy and competition is on a fundamentally lower than, say, my opposition to war and violence (it’s ironic I began this ordering of my beliefs with my opposition to hierarchy considering I’m doing so hierarchically. I was, of course, referring to hierarchy in human relations only. I believe many things but some of them mean much more than others. For example: I would die for my belief in the inherent value in a single human life but I probably wouldn’t even lift a finger for my belief that The Next Generation is better than the Original Series).

Taking my distaste for hierarchy and competition (distaste is perhaps a better word to use than opposition) into account I’d say I wish to see a society much like Lysander Spooner and the American individualist anarchist wished to see, with lots of small landowners employed by themselves and carrying out some useful trade or other. This is certainly no departure from my older beliefs. I’ve always romanticized Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian and republican America of small farmers with no one coercing or being coerced, in fact it’s probably been this Shire-like dream that has colored a good deal of my political thinking.

To see where I’ve diverged from this ancient dream of mine we have to go back to solidarity. In the past couple of years, as I have studied syndicalism and the labor movement, I think there is more place in my ideology for the collective. I have no problem standing with comrades; in fact I prefer it as long as they don’t mind that I don’t do an awful lot of the talking. It was only when I was asked to stand against adversaries that I chose to stand alone.

My problem with collectivism is that it’s hard to accept half-heartedly. Halfway in between individual property rights and communal ownership is some sort of democratic capitalism, likely with a heavily entrenched coercive apparatus and likely to descend into kleptocracy, the prevailing political system of the world today. This leads me back to mutualism and the dichotomy between property in use only or property in use and holding.

Mutualism is less an exact philosophy than a set of similar trends in thinking. Its adherents generally consider themselves socialists, anarchists, libertarians and promoters of a truly freed market (as opposed to the Reganesque free market). It has its roots in Proudhon but I’m not the right person to attempt to really describe exactly what it is. A major distinction between it and the other market-loving individualist anarchists is the difference between property in use and holding and property in use alone. Most propertarian individualists consider property to be made when an individual mixes her labor and creativity with the natural world to change it in some meaningful way. Mutualists, on the other hand, might say that this amounts to little more than moving a couple of sticks around and declaring the entire forest hers.

Personally, I believe such beliefs are very much cultural abstractions and would likely vary by community in an anarchist world. The mutualist idea in practice would be a hedge against capital accumulation and large scale inequality; though I think large scale inequality is nearly impossible without a sustained application of force. If an individual is using force to protect her forest, which she considers hers by virtue of her rearranging the sticks; one could see how such “defensive force in protection of property” could actually be exploitive and aggressive force.

The difference between mutualism and other socialist anarchist philosophies is its focus on the market and trade. One would expect a mutualistic society to look quite like Lysander Spooner’s individualist America except with more workers’ syndicates and less bourgeois tastes in which workers would own a good deal of the means of production but an individual would not be entirely dependent upon the community for her lively hood and could still likely go into a trade for herself or with her family.

The mutualist idea is not an end-all answer either however, but again, these theories of morality are cultural abstractions and serve only to prevent conflict and serve the peoples’ happiness. For anyone who is interested I would recommend looking at Per Bylund’s ideas of property in use rather than in the object itself. However, these ideas are something I only wanted to address in brevity. I’m more concerned with the changes in my own thinking based on my experiences and wanted to introduce mutualism as my middle ground between individualism and collectivism in which the enterprising spirit (which I am certainly not) can create and find success and happiness and in which there is also room for the quietly loyal and all together unambitious second-rater (which I certainly am) to find do something meaningful other than be subjugated to the capitalist class; join the military, subjugate others and die; or get a government job and prop up the exploitative system.

I guess that with self-examination I’ve discovered that I really just don’t have the heart for capitalism. In fact I’m not sure any of us do. Human beings didn’t evolve to be calculators of net worth; we evolved as communal hunters and lived that way for a stretch of time that makes capitalism look like a mosquito on an elephant. False consciousness and greed can only carry us so far. You can give people symbols to be loyal to and to define themselves by (sports teams, hipsterism, bands, nation-states). You can exploit all the avarice you can find in the human soul, but in the end the things people are always the most loyal to, the things people wish they had spent more time caring for and being cared for by are not things at all but people. I remember hearing somewhere that the most mentioned dying regret of men is that they wish they hadn’t worked so much. I’m not even twenty years old yet and I already feel that way. I already know that I don’t want to define myself by what I do to make money (money is just a tool to get by in a foreign world) or by what false-consciousness symbols I’m loyal to but by the people I love. I want to live a life of comfort yes, but meaningful comfort. I want to live in a world where people don’t have to work a lot, but when they do it is out of love for their brothers and sisters. I want meaning. With every fiber of my being I want meaning and that’s really been what my pursuit of philosophical truth and political virtue has been about.

When I lost my faith in the supernatural, though I certainly don’t rule it out, I found that it’s much harder to find individual meaning in life than I had thought it was and when people do it’s usually a form of aesthetic nihilism. I thought liberalism was about clearing a ground for individuals to discover their own meaning and to an extent I was right. The problem is that people derive meaning from each other and in a liberal society, in order for them to provide for themselves and their loved ones they have to spend an awful amount of time toiling to prop up an exploitative system. A liberal society encourages competition at the expense of cooperation, which was never what I was about even when I considered myself a true classic liberal. It pushes meaning into the hands of the individual who is then left to her own devices to define who she is and why anyone should give a damn about her in the first place. This just isn’t how it should be. Mankind is a social animal and virtue and meaning and identity are all communal ideas. You cannot separate a person from their community identity and expect them to be happy. That’s why I think people spend so much time trying to define themselves with social media and fan crazes. It’s also why nationalism took on its great fervor after the rise of capitalism. With the decline of religion people needed something to be loyal to besides the market and nation-states have done a pretty good job filling in the void. We’ve lost community identity so we look for it wherever we can.

My greatest fear truly is meaninglessness. That’s something I’ve known for a long time. I want my life to mean something. I don’t care what happens to my consciousness after I die, eternal darkness doesn’t sound so bad; I just don’t want everything to have been meaningless. Meaning is what I have been looking for through my study of mankind and my search for it has led me away from my previously individualistic ideas towards more collective ones (I’ve always been more of an aggregate thinker anyways). The pursuit of Truth is the pursuit of meaning and I believe that Community and Love are where we find meaning and that is why I chose to embrace the philosophies that place enough of an emphasis on them. When faced with the choice between individualism and collectivism I still choose both just as Max Nattlau did. Human beings find comfort in both solitude and community. I suppose this is where I should give something of a closing statement, after all I was told by my horoscope to practice my writing a little, but the holes in my thought process are far from filled and my ideas are far from their closure. There is quite a bit more I should have to write before I write the end. I’ll just take solace in the fact that I found an appropriate place where the end should be, even if I haven’t quite found the end yet.

Margaret Mead and Stefan Molyneux agree!

I was reading Margaret Mead's famous anthropological study, Coming of Age in Samoa, when I noticed a similarity between an assumption she made and the worldview of Stefan Molyneux, the host of FreeDomain Radio (for anyone unfamiliar with FreeDomain, Stef is all about self-ownership and NAP and seeks to extend the bounds of morality we hold whendealing with our neighbors and friends to the interactions of societies and governments. Of course if governments observed these decencies, they would no longer be governments.

Steph, building off the rationalism of Ayn Rand, has stated that he believes the root cause of much of the psychological strife children and adolesents experience is due to an inability to reconcile two ideas about reality. For instance, if a parent tells a child not to hit but himself hits the child, the actions of the parent are irreconcilable with the words of the parent so, as well as being abused, the child grows up believing that morality is mostly talk and something that adults will throw off whenever it is convienient. This would tend to breed a cynicism and an amoral attitude whenever the child can get away with it.

Margaret Mead was also trying to explain some of the psycological strife children in America go through. Notably she was trying to answer the question whether adolescent anxiety and angst were a result of the physiological phase the body was going through or of environment conditions of the society. To answer the question, she turned to a people far different than those she originally inquired about and compared the adolescent experience of girls in Samoa with girls in America and found that there was significantly less nuerosis in Samoa and that much of the strife that makes adolescence a difficult time for the American girl did not exist in Samoa.

She cited many differences between the cultures that cause these diffences in adolescent experience, such as attitudes towards sex and death, but a lot of her assumtions drew on the idea that America, being a much more heterogenous culture, had many more internal inconsitenceies which could trouble the young mind. In America, worldviews are in constant collisions with each other, while in Samoa there is one basic path to life and one basic understanding of the universe. In America, we still believe that there is one objective truth, but we have many definitons of what that truth is, so many, in fact, that the young mind must understand that whatever any person around her believes is very likely false. If she does chose to accept some worldview as her own and embrace it wholeheartedly, she runs the risk of dealing with its own internal inconsistencies. The inability to reconcile all of these problems likely leads to a good deal of strife in the adolecents' expeirence.

I find it interesting that such different thinkers could come to a similar idea. Though the sight different examples (Stef's based on violence. Mead's based on reconciling Christianity with war and the Declaration of Independence with inequality) I do believe they are both striking essentially the same bone and that there is a lot of truth to their thoughts. Unfortunately, these problems are likely to stay, as we are not likely to give up our hetergenous society. A few suggestions I would build off both Stef and Mead are to not pressure children to make decisions early, when their minds are still adjusting to the world as is the habit of the protestant evangelising movement in America and to always treat children honestly and fairly. It is important to walk the walk as well as talk the talk when dealing with them because I believe, as do many psychologists, that experience as a child has an extreme impact on developement and if your experience with rules of morality is full of hypocrisy and dishonesty, you are not likely to hold much account in morality.

Solutions to problems like these are not easy to come by, especially considering that they are problems throughout society. Our chief method of combatence is awareness and I think the more people understand that adolecence does not have to be an especially difficult time in a person's life and that much of the difficulty is a product of the environment, the closer we will be to living smoother and more contented lives.

Who would pave the roads?

Statist: Without government, society would descend into chaos.

Anarchist: Historically and today, there has been no greater agent of chaos, disorder, violence and lawlessness than coercive government. No private concern has ever or could ever match the government's antisocial effects on society. When free of a coercive agent, humans (as social animals) tend to cooperate and organize in self-interest and concern for others. The corruption so common in government agencies and institutions that stems from possessing a coercive monopoly can be regulated by competition in non-coercive market counterparts to such institutions (courts, security, etc.).

Statist: You seem to trust people in theory more than you would in real life. Real people are inherently evil; therefore, we need government to keep them in line.

Anarchist: Government is made up of people. If people are inherently evil, the worst thing that could happen is for a small group of them to seize and maintain a monopoly on crime (unjustified use of violence). I definately don't trust people with that.

Statist: I just can't imagine how a society could function without government. It just all seems a little "pie in the sky".

Anarchist: There was a long period of time when people simply could not imagine how society could function without the church, or how economies could function without slavery. These are ancient institutions with rigorously taught mysticisms. It takes time, study and reflection to be able to imagine a world without them.

Ultimately the world always changes and the people change with it. We have to strive collectively to change it into a world better suited for happiness. It is up to us to culturally determine what the next generation sees as neccesary and good and anarchists want posterity to live in a world of freedom, equality, and solidarity.

Statist: Umm... I see, yes. I admire your idealism but, WHO THE FUCK WOULD PAVE THE ROADS!?!?!

Breakfast in Collinsville- Police harass innocent trekkies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJqq6KCOkdM

Force all the way down

Well, once again its force all the way down. The true structural root of inequality and a conflict between the producers and the exploiters is the use of force, not market actions. Politics, rather than economics is the problem here, yet liberals like Krugman seem tofind that hard to believe although they insist that money buys power. Common sense would dictate that giving power more control over money, which is already controlled by the moneied elite would accomplish very little. Unfortunately public policy isn't dictated by common sense.

Here's a link to a short article on c4ss. It's the kind of things that, as libertarians, we hear all the time, but it never fails to fire me up.

http://c4ss.org/content/10258?doluv=on

DC tries to cut down Uber ride service

Uber is a app service that helps customers connect to taxi or limo services in their area and make deals with them far more efficiently than most cities currently monopolised cab services do. Unfortunately, DC is already trying to cut them down as one could well have predicted. I think this is a marvelous example of how technology is slowly beating back the monopolists, or at least bringing them out in the open. Here's an article for "the Atlantic Cities" about DC's latest attempt to foil a legitimate service.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/01/dc-taxi-industry-already-irritated-uber/926/

Herbert Spencer: Dismantling the Myth.

My AP World History textbook defines "White Racial Supremacy" as:

"Belief in the inherent mental, moral, and cultural superiority of whites; peaked in acceptance in decades before world war 1; supported by social science doctrines of social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer."

Spencer gets a bad rap from the educational establishment for his supposed "social Darwinist" views. What they fail to realize is that he was condemning existing nation states by saying they only existed because they were stronger than those before them, not by some social contract or divine right. He was actually very anti-imperialist. If anyone needs further proof that what a man actually believed and wrote in his lifetime could be drastically different than what he is famous for; here it is. A great article about how drastically wrong the textbooks are which could truly refute the myth can be found here,

http://mises.org/daily/4779

Apparently they also forgot about the time Spencer wrote this lovely article, not to mention his writing against imperialism, racism, and coercion:

PATRIOTICSM

Were anyone to call me dishonest or untruthful he would touch me to the quick. Were he to say that I am unpatriotic, he would leave me unmoved. “What, then, have you no love of country?” That is a question not to be answered in a breath.

The early abolition of serfdom in England, the early growth of relatively-free institutions, and the greater recognition of popular claims after the decay of feudalism had divorced the masses from the soil, were traits of English life which may be looked back upon with pride. When it was decided that any slave who set foot in England became free; when the importation of slaves into the Colonies was stopped; when twenty millions were paid for the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies; and when, however unadvisedly, a fleet was maintained to stop the slave trade; our countrymen did things worthy to be admired. And when England gave a home to political refugees and took up the causes of small states struggling for freedom, it again exhibited noble traits which excite affection. But there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse. Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions – settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. – does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so-called “pacification” – these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators. Love of country is not fostered in me on remembering that when, after our Prime Minister had declared that we were bound in honour to the Khedive to reconquer the Soudan, we, after the re-conquest, forthwith began to administer it in the name of the Queen and the Khedive – practically annexing it; nor when, after promising through the mouths of two Colonial Ministers not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Transvaal, we proceeded to insist on certain electoral arrangements, and made resistance the excuse for a desolating war.* Nor does the national character shown by a popular ovation to a leader of filibusters, or by the according of a University honour to an arch-conspirator, or by the uproarious applause with which undergraduates greeted one who sneered at the “unctuous rectitude” of those who opposed his plans of aggression, appear to me lovable. If because my love of country does not survive these and many other adverse experiences I am called unpatriotic – well, I am content to be so called.

To me the cry – “Our country, right or wrong!” seems detestable. By association with love of country the sentiment it expresses gains a certain justification. Do but pull off the cloak, however, and the contained sentiment is seen to be of the lowest. Let us observe the alternative cases.

Suppose our country is in the right – suppose it is resisting invasion. Then the idea and feeling embodied in the cry are righteous. It may be effectively contended that self-defence is not only justified but is a duty. Now suppose, contrariwise, that our country is the aggressor – has taken possession of others’ territory, or is forcing by arms certain commodities on a nation which does not want them, or is backing up some of its agents in “punishing” those who have retaliated. Suppose it is doing something which, by the hypothesis, is admitted to be wrong. What is then the implication of the cry? The right is on the side of those who oppose us; the wrong is on our side. How in that case is to be expressed the so-called patriotic wish? Evidently the words must stand – “Down with the right, up with the wrong!” Now in other relations this combination of aims implies the acme of wickedness. In the minds of past men there existed, and there still exists in many minds, a belief in a personalized principle of evil – a Being going up and down in the world everywhere fighting against the good and helping the bad to triumph. Can there be more briefly expressed the aim of that Being than in the words “Up with the wrong and down with the right” ? Do the so-called patriots like the endorsement?

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling – anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called – in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man – then a captain but now a general – drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying – “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”

I foresee the exclamation which will be called forth. Such a principle, it will be said, would make an army impossible and a government powerless. It would never do to have each soldier use his judgment about the purpose for which a battle is waged. Military organization would be paralyzed and our country would be a prey to the first invader.

Not so fast, is the reply. For one war an army would remain just as available as now – a war of national defence. In such a war every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause. He would not be engaged in dealing death among men about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who were manifest transgressors against himself and his compatriots. Only aggressive war would be negatived, not defensive war.

Of course it may be said, and said truly, that if there is no aggressive war there can be no defensive war. It is clear, however, that one nation may limit itself to defensive war when other nations do not. So that the principle remains operative.

But those whose cry is – “Our country, right or wrong!” and who would add to our eighty-odd possessions others to be similarly obtained, will contemplate with disgust such a restriction upon military action. To them no folly seems greater than that of practising on Monday the principles they profess on Sunday.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* We continue to hear repeated the transparent excuse that the Boers commenced the war. In the far west of the U.S., where every man carries his life in his hand and the usages of fighting are well understood, it is held that he is the aggressor who first moves his hand towards his weapon. The application is obvious.

The Hunger Games: War Propaganda or inherently anti-authoritarian.

—I saw this post on the old mises community and I have to say, I think the guy is dead wrong. I actually read the books and think I understand the narrative a little better than this guy:

“I just saw this movie. I’ll try to recall the obvious stuff, maybe a discussion can get going about what others noticed.
I’ve always been extra skeptical of tv/movie/music propaganda, and my wife is absolutely obsessed with hollywood and can predict any movie. Her secret is, “every detail counts” but I’m sure she’s just good with hollywood propaganda patterns. Anyways, I’ve thought a lot about propaganda in movies, and if the rest of my thinking in life is any indication then I’ve probably caught onto a lot of the right things. So this is what I noticed, and my take on that movie given my perspective:
The movie is pure war propaganda. From the hyperemotional yanking from family to be conscripted, to the proving yourself with violence in front of your judgemental peers, to the “group mentor” a la the military, to the obvious stuff like sportifying murder, impossible moral decisions, laughing about the killing your group has done, absolute disregard for morals because of some clearly avoidable crisis. It had blatant military and prison overtones, and yet never showed the rape that would likely have occurred from such disconnected and powerful supermales (the 10 guy, the black mentor, the white mentor, and the old god man). The murder-scapegoat was a posterboy military superhero stock character who killed shamelessly and laughed and got the girl while times were good, and stayed strong until the bitter end. And just like that he exits the movie and we’re supposed to not judge him because “all he knew how to do was kill” and at least he fought to the death for what he believes in.
Stock characters and the morals and themes: The girl is a sex toy/prize, but she has talent. The berserk 10 points military hero is white and automatically has a girl and friends and dominates everyone, and when he is exposed as a plain murderer its simply brushed off because he couldn’t help it. I live in a military town, and half the people in the theater were women/girls, so I noticed that they all giggled (if you rewatch the movie, you’ll notice the girl characters giggle often too) during scenes that normal people would hate. For example when the military superhero is running around slaughtering people with teeny boppers giggling presumably blowing him off between scenes of murder or some other psychologicalk trauma. Or when the boyfriend (?) back at home saw that she was falling in love with another guy. In fact, the whole idea of sexual promiscuity and widespread cheating and the idea of never talking about the rape that’s all around you is psychological preparation for a standard military life. More preparation was for PTSD, I forget the precise details of every scene, but of course there was something traumatic which involved the anatagonist making an impossible moral decision and panicking afterward. As I mentioned before, the panick for acknowledging evil was clear, and then immediately brushed aside as it cut to the sex prize hero girl sleeping peacefully.
There’s so much more. I saw the latest showing and it’s extra late now. I wonder how this will seem to me in the morning.”

— The Hunger Games takes place in a fictional dystopia. Nobody respects the Capitol and the only time the protagonists try to impress them is when their lives depend upon it. Rather, I think the existance and popularity of this series reflects a realization by people in the Western wolrd that we are the Capitol and that we are on top of the world for reasons that may not be too pretty to look at. A major theme in the Hunger Games is the depiction of the Capitol as a “Bread and Circuses” society. In fact the country Panem is named for the Latin for bread. The fact that people giggled every time someone was slaughtered only reinforces what the book is capturing; that we live in the Capitol; that too many things are controlled by a nefarious government; that the wealth and success of that government exist largely through theft and hegemony; and so much more. It really reflects that people understand that the way we live off of others is wrong, but we don’t know how to change it. So pop culture reflects societies feelings. Sometimes popcult is full of propaganda, but this, I think, is much more a reflection of our understanding that things are just fucked up.

Also, when they do rebel, they side with another government which is quickly shown to be just as bad as the Capitol. You'd think war propaganda would portray at least one government as good.

I think these will be more than your common serial novels turned movies. They will be, as literature should, a reflection of what society is experiencing. Right now we're expeirencing the fact that we done fucked up the world just like the Capitol did in The Hunger Games.

You have to love Tolstoy

I see mankind as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures and plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite grass enough for the cattle. Consequently, the cattle are tramping underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence.

I saw the owner of the herd come to them, and when he saw their pitiful condition he was filled with compassion for them and thought of all he could do to improve their condition.

So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And that they called Charity.

Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing up into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should each have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast.

Because they were dying off in the cold nights, he put up beautiful well-drained and well-ventilated cowsheds for the cattle.

Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence, he put corks on the horns of the cattle, so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and cows over 70 years of age.

In fact, he did everything he could think of to improve the condition of the cattle, and when I asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing, break down the fence, and let the cattle out, he answered: "If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them."

Xero and Pragmatarianism Part 2

---In responce to my bringing up the paradox of tolerance, Xero said this,

I’m tolerating intolerance? Let’s consider what Kinsella wrote in that link you shared…

It simply means that the state-advocate does not mind the initiation of force against innocent victims — i.e., he shares the criminal/socialist mentality. The private criminal thinks his own need is all that matters; he is willing to commit violence to satisfy his needs; to hell with what is right and wrong. The advocate of the state thinks that his opinion that “we” “need” things justifies committing or condoning violence against innocent individuals.

You anarcho-capitalists are advocates for the victims. But who are the victims though? Taxpayers. In a pragmatarian system, if taxpayers felt like the IRS was initiating violence/force/aggression against them…then why would they allocate any of their taxes to the IRS? As Rothbard said…”In a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors.”
Regarding Mao, Hitler and Rothbard…who doesn’t have some sense of right vs wrong? The thing is… we are all touching different parts of an elephant. Therefore, no two people are going to always agree on right vs wrong. Therefore, the issue is 1. the willingness to make a decision for millions and millions of people and 2. our ability to truly understand the unintended consequences. As Milton Friedman strongly emphasized, “If we can’t persuade the public that it’s desirable to do these things, then we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it.” The difference between Rothbard and Friedman is the same difference between Conceit and Humility.
Regarding the invisible hand…you really don’t see Hayek’s partial knowledge in Buddha’s parable of the blind men and the elephant? It seems like they were both saying that we all have some information but nobody has all the information.
Consider this passage by Adam Smith…

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. – Adam Smith, Theory of Moral

Every single one of us has our own unique principle of motion. These principles of motion are determined by the part of the elephant that we are touching. Given that we are all touching different parts of an elephant…then isn’t it self-evident that we’re all going to have different principles of motion? Buddha didn’t need to say anything about an invisible hand because how could anything else follow from his parable? You’re certainly not going to get the visible hand from his parable. You’re certainly not going to get Rothbard or Hitler or Mao pushing a button to try and impose their ideal society onto everybody else.

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James Rick said 1 week ago:

We’re kind of talking in circles here. Being humble doesn’t mean you concede everyone the right to abuse you simply because you’re not enitrly sure that abuse is wrong.
Again its about the theft, not what it is allocated towards afterwards. If a theif came to my house, stole the money I was going to donate, and donated it himself anonymously, it would still be theft. If I had rather kept the money at home, well, then the theft is just more annoying.

And of course, if someone’s perfect system of governance is different than mine, I won’t attempt to stop them from practicing it themselves. When it involves unwilling participants is when it is a problem.
I’m certainly no chess master, nor do I ever want to be. I do, however, reserve the right to condemn the chessmaster who coerces his pawns into place. Its not a matter of pride, its a matter of decency.
How would Rothbard have been imposing his will on everyone else by pressing the mythical button? They would have been free to form a voluntary system of governance afterwards. By not pressing the button, he would have been, in effect, condoning the behaviour of the state.
And I have to say, this relateing Buddha to YOUR ideal system of government is nothing but pure sophism. Historically he has nothing to do with it. I understand the point you’re trying to make but you’re trying to connect a very broad idea to a very specific issue of justified aggression. It’s like me saying that because Jesus once said “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword” he must have been an anarcho-capitalist because he clearly opposed agression; in fact I may have more ground in my statement due to its specific nature whereas the elephant parable is open to much more interpretation. Both are, nonetheless, absurd.
This concept that no-one truly understands his own fallibility who doesn’t agree with pragmatarianism is itself one of the highest forms of arrogance.

One Man's Terrorist

A group called "Bucking the System", which is composed of some very able filmakers and at least one veteran of the Iraq war, released this production over the last few weeks. It is a sort of “Red Dawn” invasion of America thing, which I think is a very important tool to use when talking with conservatives., as they are the ones most likely to grab a rifle if anyone were to try and occupy their backyards they way we occupy the backyards of people overseas.

Murray Rothbard and the Slaughter of the Gingers.

From Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty"
Does anyone else think this might be where Parker and Stone got their idea for the "ginger-kid" theme in some of their South Park episodes?

"Let us consider a stark example: Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the Devil and therefore to be executed whenever found. Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation — so few as to be statistically insignificant. The utilitarian-libertarian might well reason: "While the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, the executions are small in number; the vast majority of the public, as non-redheads, achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from the public execution of redheads. The social cost is negligible, the social, psychic benefit to the rest of society is great; therefore, it is right and proper for society to execute the redheads." The natural-rights libertarian, overwhelmingly concerned as he is for the justice of the act, will react in horror and staunchly and unequivocally oppose the executions as totally unjustified murder and aggression upon nonaggressive persons. The consequence of stopping the murders — depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure — would not influence such a libertarian, the "absolutist" libertarian, in the slightest. Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural-rights libertarian cheerfully admits to being "doctrinaire," to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines."

Thoughts on Pragmatarianism with Xero

Here is a short Mises.org discussion between me and Xerographica about tax-choice or pragmatism. It was a doctrine I was largeky unfamiliar with. It insists that people must pay taxes to the state but that they may choose to what government programs those taxes are spent. It differs from anarcho-capitalism in that it still believes in the coercive authority of the state. We ended up getting into a discussion on the implications of "the invisible hand" and Xero tried to convince me that the person who truly understands human fallibility would be the one who continues to support the coercive authority of the state to exist. I took issue with this and here is the conversation to date:

James Rick said 22 hours ago:

I like the idea, and I would certainly promote tax-choice in politics but I’d like you to tell me exactly what the real difference between anarcho-capitalism and pragmatarianinsm is. Is it only a conflict of means towards the same ends?
By my thinking, the U.S. government would exist in an anarchist society much the way the Catholic church exists now. The Church used to have crazy powers over a lot of things but now has almost no coercive power outside of the Vatican and is an institution capable of promoting social good. Could not the same happen with the institutions of government. In “Alongside Night” the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre says that government institutions will likely become workers syndicates in an anarcho-capitalistic society (agorism vs. ancaps aside).
Is the difference between this and pragmatism simply that pragmatist institutions would still claim some sort of official claim as representatives of the people rather the worker’s syndicates? Because I believe such pretentions to authority, even if people have the right to opt out, can be dangerous.

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Xerographica said 20 hours, 25 minutes ago:

Here’s the main difference…
Anarcho-capitalist: the state is not necessary
Statist: the state is necessary
Pragmatarian: the state may or may not be necessary
Buddha, Socrates, Smith, Bastiat, Hayek all argued that our perspectives are extremely limited. For example, if you came to me with a business plan…I could give you my opinion on your business plan but I couldn’t truly say whether your business was or wasn’t necessary. The only way to figure out if your business is necessary is to start it and see if anybody purchases your product/service.
Pragmatarianism sounds like a ridiculously good idea to me. But if nobody “buys” it then well…the markets have spoken. Ideas can always be ahead of their time.
There wouldn’t be any pragmatist institutions though. There would only be institutions in the private sector and institutions in the public sector. Given how limited my perspective is…there’s no way that I…or anybody else…can truly know which institutions would be in which sector. That would be up to the market to decide.
What would happen in an anarcho-capitalist system if you felt that an institution was becoming dangerous? All you could do was encourage people to boycott it and start up your own institution to try and compete with the dangerous institution. It’s the same exact thing in a pragmatarian system. If you felt the Dept of Defense was dangerous then you could encourage people to boycott it and then start up your own organization that had none of the same flaws as the Dept of Defense.
Call your organization the Bleeding Heart Militia and use it to stop genocide in Africa and I’m sure some people would donate money to your organization.

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James Rick said 20 hours, 6 minutes ago:

Right, and I’m a big fan of all those guys and thats the number one arguement I have with statist friends: “How do you know all this when the market doesn’t?” It’s funny because most of them will agree with Socrates that “all that I know is that I know nothing” but they will still insist that they are right on social issues like gay marriage and deny others the right to choose.
I’m just not sure you could call a pragmatarian idea “The State”. Do I have the right to opt out of it entirely and make no contributions to any sector of it, whatsoever?
Also, if I think an organization is dangerous I would boycott it, but if I have to chose between government organizations and the choice to opt out entirely is removed, then it isn’t a true choice.
I don’t know if youre saying I would or not be able to opt out entirely, thats why I’m asking, but your site’s by-line “make all governmental donations tax dedecutable” sounds like you have to donate to something.
From what I gather though, pragmatarianism sounds like a great “middle-way” or “golden-mean”. I can see why you brought the Greeks and Buddha into this. Of course Bastiat and Smith are there because, well, we are still libertarians, right?

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James Rick said 20 hours, 2 minutes ago:

I read the discussion again and I’m not sure you gave a satifactory answer to the question, “why be taxed at all?”
Do we have to put some money in, or is it okay to do nothing? It isn’t truly voluntary if I have to put a certain amount of money into at least one of a certain selection of organizations. The power to choose between two master does not make a slave free.

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Xerographica said 19 hours, 8 minutes ago:

Why be taxed at all?
If I said that taxes should be optional then I would be saying that the proper scope of government does not include forcing people to pay taxes. But if I said that then I would just be an anarcho-capitalist.
As a pragmatarian I say that the proper scope of government should be determined by taxpayers. So if taxpayers do not feel that forcing people to pay taxes is within the proper scope of government then they would just boycott the IRS out of existence.
If you get a chance you should check out my post on libertarianism and the free-rider problem….and my post on anarcho-capitalism vs civilization.

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James Rick said 18 hours, 51 minutes ago:

Right, thats what I thought and why I’m definately an ancap. If some people donate enough to the IRS to keep it in buisness, those people are exercising coercive power over me and are essentially filling the role of “the secretive band of robbers” which Lysander Spooner talks of in “no treason”. They are the voting class which controls the non-voting class, except its not by ballot anymore.
That is if you believe the ballot actually did anything, but thats not relevant here. What is relevant is that you’re still giving power to a coercive, large-scale democracy.

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James Rick said 18 hours, 38 minutes ago:

I like pragmatarianism as a stepping stone, but I don’t support the right of some people to fund the IRS. They may fund the IRS voluntarily but the IRS will be securing funds from others involuntarily. Even if they choose where in government those funds go.
Quick thought on your anarcho-capitalism vs civilization: I think you’re taking a bit of what might be called an ethnocentrist view of civilization. Alliegence to a tribe or religion rather than nation is in no way inferior to what you call “civilization” which is just about the most subjective term on the market. I agree with David Graeber in that sometimes we make this “us and them” distinction between “civilized” and “non-civilized”. Why would allegience to extended kinship relations, tempered with self-ownership and propert rights, be an undesireable thing. Compared to nationalism, it rocks.
I actually think of myself as a human being first, a Rick (my family) second, Cathagnostic (agnostic who supports the Catholic church for social justice and social solidarity) third, and a whole bunch of things after that. I’d say “American” (which to me is someone who who was born on either of the American continents) is pretty low. Involuntary member of the tax farm known as America might be up there, but that title would be gone in an ancap society.

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Xerographica said 18 hours, 14 minutes ago:

It boils down to fallibilism. Having lived in a stateless society for a year my best guess is that a state is necessary. But I could be wrong. Are you willing to admit that there’s a chance that you might be wrong as well? If you’re not willing to admit that there’s a chance that you might be wrong…then how are you any different than a statist?
Again…here we see Hayek’s Conceit vs Humility and Buddha’s parable of the blind men touching different parts of the elephant. Rothbard said that if there was a button that would instantly and entirely abolish the state then he would push that button until his thumb blistered. But what if his theory was wrong? Do you think Hitler and Mao thought that their theories might be wrong?
Having studied International Development Studies at UCLA I can tell you for a fact that brilliant brilliant people have no idea why some countries develop and other countries do not. They have their theories…but time and time again their theories have been proved wrong. By saying that the state is not necessary you’re saying that you know better than all those brilliant brilliant minds.
Maybe you know something that none of us do. Maybe you can actually touch the entire elephant. Therefore, maybe you’re the only blind man that can actually “see”. But isn’t that what all the blind men think? Throughout history…the only people who could truly “see”….Buddha, Socrates, Smith, Bastiat, Hayek, etc…were the ones who fully understood just how little they could actually see.

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James Rick said 18 hours, 3 minutes ago:

You’re assigning some sort of confidence to me that I clearly don’t have. I don’t think my ideas are infallible, hell most of em can’t even be considered “my” ideas. But I don’t think democracy or a pragamtist idea of allowing people to essentially pick their poison is any less fallible. I admit my fallibility, in fact I’ll swear by it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take a stand on something I believe. After all, I could be wrong that murder is evil or genocide unacceptable, but that doesn’t mean I won’t stand against them with all I can.
In the same fashion I’ll stand against a coercion I think is wrong, though not to the extent that genocide is.
And the Rothbard, Hitler, Mao comparison is a little ridiculous. I get your point but try to use Hitler-relations sparingly.
Couldn’t we be wrong about “the invisible hand” anyway. Kevin Carson in “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisble Hand” how capitalism was largely a political change, resulting from the interests of the establishment, not a sponatneous market order. Sometimes libertarians do over-estimate our own liberal conceptions of the free-market and property rights or our ideas of “civilization”. Rothbard probably did. But couldn’t we be just a little wrong about how great the invisible hand really is. I mean Smith used the analogy like six times to mean six different things (I forget the exact number). Perhaps we shouldn’t base our entire moral philosophy on the idea that we are unworthy to have a moral philosophy?

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Xerographica said 17 hours, 12 minutes ago:

Saying that you’re an anarcho-capitalist is signalling that the state is unnecessary. If you’re not confident that the state is unnecessary then why call yourself an anarcho-capitalist?
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying that Rothbard was the same as Hitler and Mao. The difference is quite clear. Rothbard never had the opportunity to press the button while Hilter and Mao did have the opportunity. Maybe if Rothbard had had the opportunity then perhaps he would have thought twice about pressing the button.
You’re not quite catching my drift if you solely associate the invisible hand concept with Adam Smith. He just coined the term but the idea is really no different than Buddha talking about the blind men and the elephant. We all have different values and access to different information. Bastiat’s Seen vs Unseen covered the idea of different values and Hayek’s Conceit vs Humility covered the idea of different information.
So it’s all the same idea expressed in different ways from different angles. We all have extremely limited but unique perspectives… therefore.. .tolerance… cause there’s a really good chance that we might be wrong.
Now…personally I’m not smart enough to go down the path of being wrong about tolerance. I’m just smart enough to understand just how little we can truly know. That’s what makes me a pragmatarian.

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James Rick said 6 hours, 45 minutes ago:

I am fairly confident the State is unneccesary, and even if I wasn’t, it is possible to be a pessimistic anarcho-capitalist. See Kinsella:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kinsella/kinsella15.html
The difference between Hitler, Mao and Rothbard has absolutly nothing to do with the abilty to press the button. It has every thing to do with the application of violence. It’s about morals, not goals. Means, not ends.
I’d just like to bring up Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”.
I’d say we’re both pretty humble people who accept a basic idea of the invisible hand that certainly transends Adam Smith (The problem is that in modern thinking the phrase is almost exclusivly associated with Smith and markets. Mostly becasue niether Jesus or Buddha ever actually said anything about an invisible hand. The ideas are applicable and worthy of thought, but they are still an idea, as infallible as the rest. Bastiat is a different story, and “the seen and unseen” is important here, but either way the invisible hand is percieved by most as a sort of Gordon Gecko “Greed is Good” thing).
Popper theorised that tolerance cannot completely by accepted because to do so would be to tolerate intolerance and hence, tolerance dies. The difference between us right now is that you are willing to tolerate some coercion. You will allow the taxpayer to choose to whom he is enslaved but he is still a slave. Therefore, I would say, in your humility, you are tolerating intolerance.
You are essntially, asserting your right to say that all people MUST donate to the state. This does not sound very tolerant to me. I don’t think there is any arguement whatsoever in the idea that a form of minarchism (like Pragmatrainism) is “more tolerant” simply because it allows the state to exist. That would be saying it is more tolerant because it tolerates intolerance, hence, Popper’s paradox.
It isn’t about our infallibility to know whether or not the state is neccesary, it is about our infallibility to control our fellow man through force and his infallibility to control us through force. I accept that Man is too infallible to do so, I also accept that it is deontologically, not just consequentialistly, wrong. I will not tolerate slavery simply because I may be wrong about the neccesity of it. As Stephan Kinsella argues in the link above, “crime may never disapper, but that doesn’t mean I have to support it.” (Paraphrase). It also doesn’t mean I have to tolerate it, due to my own infallibility.

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James Rick said 5 hours, 58 minutes ago:

Just a quick relation with the blind men and the elephant: (Although I remembered it as being mostly about religious tolerance, I looked it up again and realised it could be applicable to political theory as well):
A pragmatist is essentially saying, that because I know not the whole elephant, I must contribute my effort to support alternate interpretations of it. They would force the man who believes it is a wall to contribute to the man who believes it is a pillar.
An anarcho-capitalist would be saying, You should support others’ views of things, but no one is going to force you to.
It is the application of force which shows the governmentalist to be doing wrong, not the fact that I believe his social theory to be flawed.

Why Noam Chomsky should vote for Ron Paul PART 1

The Competitive Mentality

What are dreams anyway? I thought I had those in my sleep.

                I recently listened to a speech given by a good friend of mine with the classic "Don't give up your dreams!" theme. I know, very cliché, but I don't hold that against him (compared to my aptitude for public address, cliché is good.) What I do hold against him is what that theme rolled into. After laying out some inspirational quotes from the Rocky movies and even one that I think was from "Hoosiers" but I'm not sure (I don't watch sports movies) he continued to say that everything from our current economic troubles to our lack of a cure for cancer exist because people didn't believe they had the ability to go into fields that could solve those problems and do so. He lamented the fact that retail sales-people and not super-heroes or astronauts hold the largest single percentage of the workforce.  We've all been confronted with this view of the world before. It usually causes us to lean back and say, "What's wrong with retail sales-people?" but when we take a step back we realize that the underlying emotion of the speech is something natural to capitalism itself.

                 No, it isn't the give-everyone-a-trophy egalitarianism of our youth soccer days; it is something far more insidious and elitist than that. For us young-folk it is a call to never give up on ourselves, but it isn't only with the young that this idea is popular. It is a very popular idea with those on top. Why? Because it gives an excuse which is culturally acceptable as to why some people are successful and others aren't.

                The defenders of capitalism often believe people's inequality of wealth is a result of economic performance (barring the state; we're talking about why some people are doctors and lawyers while others are retail salespeople). It is no longer popular with the upper-middle and even high class to believe that this is based on some sort of superior upbringing or genealogy. Instead we have substituted the idea of effort. When a successful man looks down and says, "How did I get here?" perhaps the most comforting answer is "I worked harder than everyone else and never gave up." The privileged rarely want to admit the existence of pure, dumb luck (or at least they'll never acknowledge that it may be more important that work ethic or determination). It makes a good substitute for social Darwinism as they successful no longer have to insist the poor deserve to be underprivileged but instead insist that the poor must believe in themselves. They blame society for keeping the individual down through ridicule of goals and disbelief in what the individual thinks he or she can do and advocate a kind of unadulterated ambition that I, personally, find terrifying in a secular world.    

                I think that's part of the reason my father, who is about as dedicated and "brilliant" as me, is such a huge liberal. He knows that he is very successful due in large part to the luck of the draw. This is also I think why we see a huge liberal bias in actors. Many of them have a true talent and work very hard but they know that a lot of their success is dependent entirely on chance.

                As true free-marketers we must never forget that the luck of the draw has just as much, if not more, of an effect on the successes and failures of individuals as dedication. We can't allow ourselves to fall into the trap of thinking that the underprivileged are so for any reason other than chance. If we do, we try to legitimatize our station over them and trample all over the idea of basic human equality. If you are on the short end of the stick, don't subscribe to the competition mentality that you must struggle and struggle and if you don't make it there must be something wrong with you--not the system, but you. 

                People often complain about complacency or lack of work ethic but if you look to history you see that human beings are working harder and more often than we did before inequality reared its ugly head. In many pre-State societies egalitarianism reigned until a few "big-men" decided they would work harder than everyone else and eventually people began to fall into their control. Later they would look down and wonder what was wrong with those lazy people below them and reaffirm their right to rule and be respected as great men. This is an over-simplification of the process which occurred among many Native American and New Guinea peoples but I think the point stands. Inequality goes hand in hand with both liberty and tyranny; with liberty because it is necessary for self-determination and with tyranny because a tyrant always must secure and legitimatize his place over his fellow man.

                I'm not saying I think we should all stay at home and do nothing, nor am I saying that the profit motive is not a good way to get things done in human society. What I am saying is that if there is any hope for social unity under free-markets, we cannot keep telling the unsuccessful that they needed to work harder. We have to understand that because of the way our culture and society are currently structured there are only so many seats at the table and it is often the worst among us, not the best, who make it to those seat (As Hayek, an Austrian neoliberal economist, pointed out).

                The idea is about a society with opportunities for all and where all may find a place at one or two good tables that strike their fancy, not about a society that allows the "better-man", the "dedicated", or the Rocky Balboa to get on top. In a truly free society, the top won't mean nearly as much as it means now and hopefully we can stop complaining about how few astronauts and super-heroes there are around.