Free The Animal

I truly enjoy receiving email from strangers who’ve read an entry or two and want to share their comments–good or bad. My last entry, The Left Side of History prompted some email. To the guy who wrote to tell me that it was all “bullshit,” thank you. Thank you especially for informing me that the “Communists were the first to fight the Nazis.” Yes, I get it. Joseph Stalin was morally outraged at what an evil guy Adolph was. Thank you; thank you. Just goes to teach me yet another lesson in the utter folly of thinking in terms of underlying principles, essentials, and critical distinctions. To the nice gentlemen who wrote to compliment me in general, but complain about my ‘left/right partisanship,’ I have this article for you by Dennis Prager that boils the whole thing down to what I’m really talking about. The left is worth nothing February 1, 2005 “Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing.” — Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005 It took a Polish rescuer of Jews in the Holocaust, cited this week 60 years after the liberation…

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The Market Shall Set You Free Oddly, the underlying problem is that this Republican president doesn’t appreciate free markets. Mr. Bush doesn’t see how capitalism helps drive history toward freedom via an algorithm that for all we know is divinely designed and is in any event awesomely elegant. Namely: Capitalism’s pre-eminence as a wealth generator means that every tyrant has to either embrace free markets or fall slowly into economic oblivion; but for markets to work, citizens need access to information technology and the freedom to use it – and that means having political power. This link between economic and political liberty has been extolled by conservative thinkers for centuries, but the microelectronic age has strengthened it. Even China’s deftly capitalist-yet-authoritarian government – which embraces technology while blocking Web sites and censoring chat groups – is doomed to fail in the long run. China is increasingly porous to news and ideas, and its high-tech political ferment goes beyond online debates. Last year a government official treated a blue-collar worker high-handedly in a sidewalk encounter and set off a riot – after news of the incident spread by cell phones and text messaging. You won’t hear much about such progress from…

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I’ve got a whole thing brewing with respect to that title, but it’s going to take a while to work it all out, which will likely take several entries over the next few days. It was set off by a sequence of events. First, Greg Swann writes me sometime last December to remind me that the world actually isn’t going to hell in a handbasket. I think he cunningly waited until just before the Christmas holiday to tell me that, counting on the whole joy of life at that time of year just overwhelming me. It did, actually. Then, longtime mutual friends Billy Beck and Greg get into it over that “to-hell-in-a-handbasket” thing. I’m not going to rehash the debate in detail (see their websites). Essentially, Billy thinks things are getting worse and that we’re reversing the progress gained in the Enlightenment. He refers to this state of affairs as the Endarkenment. Greg thinks things are getting better because mankind is advanced by a few tremendously great people who come along to grace mankind from time-to-time, and in-between, most everything else is just noise that can be disregarded. To Billy, it matters greatly that so many people are so stupid….

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Greg Swann emails to give me some input on my last post, Serving Ideals. Regarding individualism versus collectivism, it is more precise, I think, to speak of anti-individualism. Collectivism is a nice catch-all, but although Abel doesn’t necessarily always pursue collective ends, he is always opposed to individualism. Consider a cloistered nun, for example. The altruists would argue that her objective is selfish, but no one who understands the self would call her an egoist. Collectivism is a form of anti-individualism, and it is a very potent form because it is so hard to argue against. Environmentalism is another hard-to-argue-against form of anti-individualism that doesn’t even have any thing to do with people, either singly or in groups. The point of every superficially varied form of anti-individualism is simply that, an opposition to egoism that the advocate hopes is incontrovertible. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, roping her into my own metaphor: Abel doesn’t want to live. He wants for Cain to be prevented from living as he chooses, guided only by his own rational choices. It truly is a war against the mind as it really is. There is no way that Abel can win this war, not without killing every…

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Why you should be optimistic I recall about 10 years ago, just as the general public was catching onto the world wide web (I was on when it was still possible to view every website that existed), that there was a lot of hand wringing over porn, of course, but also over cultish propaganda, such as Neo-Nazism. I recall remarking at the time that it’s the best sort of thing that can happen. The way to render things like Neo-Nazism and other stupidities obsolete and irrelevant is to shine a light on them. In the moist darkness of cloistered “authority,” they can grow like mold and attract all sorts of idiot followers. Illuminate them, and they become clearly ridiculous to everyone that matters. They’re no longer interesting to the curious clueless, because they’re no longer mysterious. John Sabotta posts a great example of this phenomena. I will just humbly suggest to those with a pessimistic outlook, that perhaps the pessimism is brought on, in part, by all the idiocy we now have easy access to that we never had before, and that the real reason for optimism is that ultimately, Bullshit cannot stand.

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