-   Robert LeFevre

As the cancer of statism continues to metastasize – a preexisting condition against which Obamacare provides no protection – it is heartening to witness the champions of  institutionalized force and destruction playing the “anarchy” card as a way of terrorizing otherwise mature men and women into resisting efforts to restrain – or (gasp!) cut back – the growth of state power. Such Senate boob-hustlers as Harry Reid and Elizabeth Warren have informed us that “anarchists have taken over” in Congress (Reid), while “the anarchy gang” (Warren) continues to expand. Children have long been subjected to variants of the warning about the “ghosties and ghoulies, and long-legged beasties, and things that go ‘bump’ in the night.” Bringing the fear of goblins and other bogeymen into the present, the statists now intone that “the anarkists will git ya, if’n you don’t watch out.”

Having to resort to nursery rhyme logic to help keep their conscript constituencies in that dependent, child-like state of mind so necessary to their being ruled, may be the expression of a dynamic that runs deeper than may first appear. In the 19^th century, Schopenhauer observed that “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Having, for more than half a century, been focused upon – some might say obsessed by – inquiries into the nature of and conditions for peace and liberty, I have witnessed such processes of change. I would add to Schopenhauer’s progression, however, the first stage noted by Gandhi: “First, they ignore you.”

My views have often been criticized on the grounds that “anarchists believe in violence,” an accusation that stands more as an example of what Carl Jung would have called “projection” (i.e., the attributing of one’s “dark side” qualities and motivations onto “scapegoats,” against whom punitive action may be taken). The meaning of “anarchy” is found in the word itself: one dictionary refers to “archy” as “rule” or “government.” “An” is a prefix that means “absent,” or “without.” Thus, “anarchy” means “without rule by government.” Since governments are generally defined as “agencies with a legal monopoly on the use of violence,” to defend government is, by definition, to advocate violence as the dominant means by which society is to be organized.

The anarchist philosophy rejects violence, precisely because coercion is a denial of the liberty of individuals to direct their own lives. It is the nature of all living beings to pursue their own ends; a purpose that requires no external force to accomplish. When violence is employed against another, it is an admission that life is being forced to do what it chooses not to do, or to refrain from doing what it chooses to do. Government – the monopolist of violence – is, therefore, organized and revered on the principle of being at war with the fundamental processes of life.

When I read such buffoons as Reid and Warren – along with their loyal media hacks – contend that anarchists are running the government, I wonder just how unaffected such minds must be to the rigors of reality. Are they so absorbed by their own projections that they find it easy to believe that persons who, on both principle and predisposition of character, reject violence, are nonetheless motivated to “take over” and run the institutionalized machinery of violent destructiveness, tools that the statists insist upon controlling for their own ambitions?

My response to those who cannot grasp the fact that, on a micro level (i.e., where ordinary people live their daily lives)  peaceful relationships with others, and with respect for the inviolability of one another’s boundaries, are the norm. But the statists have no interest in individual purposes or behavior – other than as examples of deviance to be brought under their control – for theirs is a macro world; a universe of abstractions to be subjected to their management.

As statists pursue their accusations of what they insist on seeing as the violent motivations of anarchists, I respond as follows. “If I were desirous of employing violence as a means of accomplishing my purposes, I would not condemn the state, but would try to take it over! I would join you guys, who have created this destructive monstrosity and provided it with all kinds of tools of violence with which to subdue and control mankind. Machine-guns, grenades, bombs, napalm, nuclear weapons, deadly gasses and chemicals, missiles, drone bombers, instruments of torture: these and other anti-life mechanisms being designed and constructed by university research centers and corporate manufacturers, would provide a cornucopia of toys with which violent-prone persons could carry out their psychopathic purposes.”

“By joining forces with the rest of you,” I go on, “I can acquire all kinds of perks that do not derive from my more peaceful pursuits. I could devise all kinds of schemes programs to improve the well-being of mankind, if I were allowed to impose my systems on greedy, self-centered recalcitrant others. These plans could more readily be carried out with funds, acquired through theft taxes that the victims beneficiaries of my programs would be required to pay. As my reputation for creating such wondrous social visions escalated, I might become a regular speaker – or even faculty member – at prestigious universities; a guest on major television news or talk shows; or the author of non-fiction books that would quickly get placed high on the ‘best-seller’ lists.”

“Or, if I had propensities for violence, I might choose to go to the top of the violence ladder and become a member of the military. I would be given a handsome uniform to be worn in public, along with a chestful of colorful ribbons and medals with which to impress others. And as I walked along the streets or through shopping malls, young boys and grown women alike might find me attractive, while other people might pause to say  “thank you for your service.” On Sunday mornings, ministers might interrupt their sermons on the virtues of war to recognize my presence – followed by applause from members of the congregation – and might end services with the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”

“As the dedication to my career advanced, my talents would be increasingly recognized by those in command. I might be promoted to higher levels of power and authority in the military, and could help define the strategies that would best promote my social schemes American foreign policy interests.  I could eventually rise to become a member of the ‘Joint Chiefs of Staff.’ I would be cheered even by parents whose children I marched off to be slaughtered in wars in Lower Ruritania, Petrosyria, or other sites at which sizeable oil deposits were known to exist. If my efforts resulted in the killing of a sufficient number of innocents, I might receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and have boulevards and universities named after me.”

“With my reputation secured as an effective practitioner of state violence – and thus a person to be trusted by the corporate-state establishment – I might be able to get myself elected to Congress, there to join other members of ‘the anarchy gang’ that has ‘taken over’ there.”

Is this really what people believe anarchists are all about?

-   Artemus Ward

I blogged, awhile back, on the comment made by a top federal official who, in responding to Edward Snowden’s Internet release of top-secret NSA documents, said that the government would be able to secure the return of such information. The implication was that the government could order Internet providers to reverse the processes by which such documents were distributed to millions of Internet users. Underlying this claim is the apparent belief that Internet providers function as a kind of storehouse of various kinds of information, to which users apply for access. It is not an exaggeration, in their world, to analogize a provider – such as Google – as a public library, making stored information available to users, and being able to demand its return to the “library.”

This bit of nonsensical thinking is currently being promoted by another faction that seeks legislation allowing teenagers to “erase” or “retract” e-mails or blogs they had earlier put out into the Internet. The California legislature has already been suckered into participating in such delusional thinking by enacting a statute providing such a “right,” and efforts are underway to get Congress to do the same. At the request of a teenager, prior messages that might later prove embarrassing to him or her could be erased from the Internet.

Foolishness of this sort is a reminder of just how far out of touch with reality are those who continue to insist upon the idea that society can be effectively managed by the pyramidal structuring of people’s lives. Desperate to reinforce the top-down weltanschauung from which they invariably think and act, these people are not inclined to allow reality to interfere with their fantasies. If they had any basic understanding of the nature of the Internet, they would at once see the absurdity of their proposals. The Internet is not a place, but a system in which words and other images can be freely communicated to any who desire to receive them and, in turn, to respond to and/or pass them on to others. Like the old common law proposition that no longer protected a copyright once a written work had been “published” (i.e., made public), releasing information, ideas, or other material into the Internet is to place them beyond the control of their author or of anyone else. Those who believe that Google controls, directs, possesses, or otherwise manages the substance of what is put into the Internet haven’t the slightest idea of the anarchistic nature of this system that allows men and women to directly communicate with one another without the intercession of authorities. Like the early-morning warblings of a meadowlark, or the evening release of jasmine scents, words put into the Internet are no longer subject to the control of, or the return to, their authors.

There is no way that the NSA’s secrets can ever be “brought back” into the exclusive control of the state, any more than can Willie Zilch’s teenage Internet comments be erased from the memories of those who had once read them, downloaded them, or sent them on to others. Those who believe otherwise may soon be informing us of a means by which our virginity may be restored!

While the study of chaos and complexity informs us that the interplay between our thinking and the nonlinear nature of our world makes events both uncertain and unpredictable, those who insist upon the linear control and management of the world will continue presenting us with their top-down whimsical illusions as to how society should run. The harsh reality that terrifies such minds is that the antiquated vertical paradigm is collapsing, being replaced by a horizontal model. The coerced obedience to authority that centralizes decision-making in the hands of modern philosopher-kings, is eroding in favor of decentralized networking among men and women who voluntarily cooperate with one another. Those who cling to the traditional model see social order as a quality to be dictated, while the emerging paradigm focuses upon order that arises spontaneously through human interaction. The content of vertically-structured order awaits the outcome of elections, while the horizontally-networked order depends upon focused minds prepared to identify, act upon, and create informal patterns of orderliness.

I hesitate to speculate on additional foolishness that the top-down crowd might spring on us as they continue their desperate fight against the real “terrorist threat” to their lives: the fear that increasing numbers of people will find the world of the decentralized and the horizontal more suited to their interests, and ignore – or abandon entirely – the violent and regimented systems of institutionally-dominated order. People who believe that words, communicated to others, can be retrieved and returned from whence they originated, are capable of all sorts of Alice-in-Wonderland fantasies. If the Internet’s capacities for the decentralized sharing of ideas, information, and other expressions of conscious thought sufficiently terrorize our rulers, perhaps an all-out war on the content of human consciousness awaits us.

George Orwell’s prescience may be resorted to by the political  classes in proposing what might be called a federal Ministry of Truth. Among the agencies that might be subsumed within this department are the following:

[1] Internet Retrieval Agency. This bureau would involve itself in recovering anything published on the Internet that displeases the established powers.

[2] Internet Gatekeeper Authority. This office – long desired by Hillary Clinton – would have to approve both the author and the content of anything to be placed on the Internet. In keeping with Hillary’s concern that not just anyone should be permitted to put whatever they want onto the Internet, would-be Internet contributors would first be required to obtain a license from this agency. As part of the licensing process, a background check would be conducted on the applicant to make certain that only “responsible” information and ideas would be allowed onto the Internet. That the Internet already has a “gatekeeper” in the form of the “Enter” key on each individual’s keyboard will, of course, be ignored, as such powers remain in the hands most feared by the ruling classes: independent individuals.

[3] Department of Memory-Hole Management. This agency would be the most important part of the Ministry of Truth because of its assigned role in eliminating the confusion and uncertainty that arise from the numerous and varied ideas and information that accompany the free expression of opinions. There is already enough chaos in our lives, it would be argued, without people having to distinguish truth from falsehood on their own. This office would be staffed by men and women from academia, thus assuring support from the professional intellectuals whose certified academic credentials will help persuade others that “truth” will be served by this program.

Any ideas, news stories, documentary evidence, published opinions, or other information that does not serve established interests will, even if previously approved, be relegated to what Orwell called the “memory-hole.” Did FDR manipulate the Japanese government into attacking Pearl Harbor, thus providing  him the excuse to enter World War II? If a “yes” answer is useful to the ruling classes, the evidence will be allowed to stand, just as a “no” answer will forever remove it from public view.

[4] Department of Intellectual Standards and Security. Working closely with the Department of Memory-Hole Management, this agency’s function will be to identify and standardize what constitutes “truth” in society, thus relieving the populace of the insecurity occasioned by the diversity of thought and ideas from which they would have the burden of making individual choices. Part of this department’s operations will include the Division of Intellectual Ecology, whose purpose will be to cleanse the intellectual environment of “impurities” generated by thought that pollutes the New World Order’s societal collective. Refraining from labeling such actions as “censorship” or “book-burning” – i.e., giving them different names – will relieve any anxieties harbored by Boobus.

For those whose minds are unable or unwilling to abandon their individualized pursuits of understanding, this department will provide Intellectual Recovery Services (aka psycho-surgeries) to remove mental barriers to the transformation of their thinking. When questioned about this practice, its supporters will defend it as being more civilized than burning deviants at the stake! Such services will, of course, be covered as part of the system of universal healthcare.

Boobus will also take comfort in being told that the Ministry of Truth will be devoted to the preservation of First Amendment guarantees. Far from restricting freedom of expression, the state will promote it by requiring every citizen to engage in “affirmative action” to facilitate it. Once a year, every man and woman will be obliged to report to an enclosed facility maintained by the Office of First Amendment Protection Services, where they will be allowed to speak their minds on any subject. In order to protect each speaker from the harassment, heckling, invasion of privacy, or violent reactions of others, no other persons will be allowed into the facility – to be known as “free speech zones” – with armed police guards present to protect the rights of speakers.

An important function of the Intellectual Standards and Security Department will be to license all persons who desire to speak in public (i.e., audiences of two or more persons). In order to elicit the support of conservatives, an exception will be granted to all persons who wish to speak to one another in a family setting. This exemption will, of course, leave open for debate the question of whether gays and lesbians qualify as “families,” thus preserving one of the many conflict-ridden issues that pervade society.

The licensing of speech will be defended by those enamored of government regulation of broadcasting, as well as mandated product standards. “Manufacturers may not make false or misleading claims about their products,” we will be reminded, “so why shouldn’t the same requirements for truth-telling apply to speech? Are you against truth?” In order to assure uniformity in the formulation of speech standards, the Department of Education will be brought into the Ministry of Truth, as will the Federal Communications Commission, whose regulatory and licensing powers will be extended to newspapers and other print media. In this way, the confusion and uncertainty that prevail when differing ideas and values are allowed expression will be minimized.

Does all of this sound preposterous and unworkable? If the statists believe that they are able to restore our reputations – and virginity? – and erase our past peccadilloes from public view, why would we not expect them to extend and universalize such beneficent powers? Isn’t the enforced uniformity of thought and conduct the essence of what it means to live in a free and creative society? Is our Brave New World New World Order to be held back by individuals whose thinking does not conform to an institutionally-mandated consensus of opinion?

-   Tom Clancy

In the science of chaos, “attractors” are operational principles around which turbulence and apparent chaos are harmonized. What the limited nature of our prior experiences dismisses as randomness or disorder, the study of chaos and complexity is revealing as deeper patterns of regularity. Attractors help to identify the dynamics by which complex systems organize themselves. Thus, it could be said that an earthquake fault line serves as an “attractor” for geologic forces in plate tectonics, just as river systems are attractors for water engaging in its ongoing relations with the forces of gravity. At a social level, an estate sale can be seen as an attractor for antique dealers; dumpsites as attractors for abandoned property; or hospitals as attractors for diseases. In marketplace economics, the pricing system is an attractor for buyers and sellers seeking to exchange property claims.

The study of chaos is helping us understand why all political systems are disruptive and destructive of life processes. Through this new science, we are discovering – contrary to Plato’s hubristic assumptions – that complex systems produce behavior that is both determined and yet unpredictable. Left to the playing out of the forces operating within and upon it, a complex system will spontaneously generate consequences that are implicit – albeit unpredictable – within it.

But we know that many people do not like a world that is unpredictable and indifferent to their particular interests. Thus, a business owner who is unable to effectively compete for customers in a free market, may seek to disrupt the order that does not accommodate his whims. He might begin by pursuing voluntary agreements with his competitors to reduce the pace with which they pursue their respective interests, a strategy that is rarely successful. When the voluntary approach doesn’t satisfy all industry members, he and many of his business rivals turn to the state to compel, by force, results unobtainable in the marketplace. My book, In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938, documents this politicization of the business system.

The state is almost universally defined as a system that enjoys a legal monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. Despite all of the media hype, government schools conditioning, and other institutional propaganda to paint political systems as noble, morally principled agencies devoted to serving the general welfare, the state is capable of doing no more than this: compelling people – through violence and the threat of violence – to do what they do not choose to do, or to refrain from doing what they do choose to do. Like the subjugated and exploited proletariat of Animal Farm, increasing numbers of men and women read those opening words to the preamble of the Constitution – “We the People” – and discover the identity of “the people” who control and benefit from the system that was created.

If the state is defined in terms of its enjoying a monopoly on the use of violence, what is the character of people who would be attracted to the use of its violent tools and practices? What sort of people would be attracted to careers that gave them the arbitrary power to force others to their will; work premised on the imperative of obedience? It is almost amusing to see legislators conducting hearings on the problem of bullying in schools: I often wonder whether these politicians are projecting their own “dark side” forces onto others; using playground ruffians as scapegoats for the more widespread bullying that is the raison d’etre of politics. Or might these solons simply be trying to eliminate competition, in much the same way that local governments war with the street-gangs that violently dominate urban neighborhoods, a role to be monopolized by the state’s police system?

There is a continuum running between “sociopathic” and “psychopathic” behavior separating degrees of antisocial conduct. A Post Office mail clerk, or a receptionist at a DMV office, may not exhibit such traits. But what about state officials whose functions are to enforce some governmental edict or program? The man or woman who is prepared to initiate an act of punishment to compel obedience to a governmental mandate easily segues into the SWAT team member or police brute or one who tortures another. It is the appetite for ultimate power over others that drives such people. We have now reached that most vicious end-point on the continuum, the war system, where the indiscriminate killing of innocent people – many of them children – becomes justified by the psychopathic war-lovers on no more compelling ground than that they have the power to inflict death on a massive scale.

During World War II, allied forces engaged in war crimes every bit as vicious as those perpetrated by the defeated enemies. The Nazi psychopaths who ran death camps were matched by the allied officials who bombed such non-military cities as Dresden and Hamburg, and vaporized tens of thousands of civilians along with some U.S. military prisoners of war, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear bombing of these Japanese cities was done primarily to impress the Soviet Union, while erstwhile beautiful cities such as Dresden were leveled because, in the words of one RAF official, “we didn’t have any other cities left to bomb.”  The RAF Bomber Command chief, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, said, thirty years later, that he would do the same thing again if presented with the same choices. Such is the mindset of the psychopath!

Sean Hannity and many of his neocon brethren embrace the same reasoning as Bomber Harris. With increasing numbers of decent, intelligent Americans able to see the planned war on Syria as being based on the same kinds of lies and forgeries that led to the unprovoked war on Iraq, the war-lovers are trying a different tack. If people are not prepared to “lob a few missiles into Syria,” Hannity argued, an attack on Iran would be an even better action to take. His position – and that of so many other neocons – comes down to little more than this: if the boobeoisie is not buying into our plot against Syria, then let us go attack someone else before any opposition arises. War is an end in itself, and it matters little who is chosen as the enemy of the year! If you have any doubts as to this, watch the wonderful anti-war film Wag the Dog.

If, as Randolph Bourne advised, “war is the health of the state,” those who are attracted to the exercise of violence over others can delude themselves to be health-care practitioners for a system at war with life itself.

No more than we would expect Mother Theresa to operate a brothel can we imagine advocates of peace and liberty to be welcomed into the management of the state. This is why Ron Paul was so persona non grata to members of the political elite. He wanted to reduce – perhaps even eliminate – the violent nature of the American nation-state. He was almost booed off the stage at a Republican gathering for suggesting that this country employ the “Golden Rule” as the basis for a foreign policy! He wanted to minimize that which attracts the sociopaths and psychopaths to the state: the opportunity to use ever-increasing levels of destructive violence against their fellow humans.

-   H.L. Mencken

Why are so many men and women driven to seek and to exercise political power? If you were to judge their motivations on the basis of promises they make, you might conclude that they desire to promote the well-being of our society, or of all mankind; or to end injustice and promote the rights and interests of the poor and down-trodden; to protect children; to defend the country from foreign aggressors; to generate economic prosperity; or to advance other noble ends that serve the public interest. Our willingness to accept such benevolent objectives as the explanation for a few wanting coercive power over the many, is a reflection of our gullibility.

The question of whether people are to control their own lives, energies, and resources for their own ends, or whether they are to be subservient to the interests of those who want to forcibly control others, has been with us from our beginnings. The impulse to advance one’s interests by controlling others can probably be traced to our earliest so-called “primitive” ancestors. While male tribe members were off hunting for a gazelle, one bright young man might have figured out a less burdensome way of being provided for. “Why should I spend so much of my energy chasing a bunch of wild animals around in the hot sun, especially when the other guys are better hunters than I?,” he reasons. He then concocts the following scheme and presents it to his fellow tribesmen. “I am in contact with the gods who control the world in which we live. They can inform me of how best to capture gazelles, how to protect our tribe from the deadly ‘Nine Bows’ from across the river, and how to  organize our tribe for our betterment. I can pass this information on to you, and if you obey what I tell you, our lives will be better.” In such primordial ways was politics invented, allowing the few to control the many.

Whether they are channeling the gods, translating nature’s secrets into scientific truths, envisioning the inexorable march of historic forces, or identifying causal connections so as to be able to plan for economic well-being, clever minds have conceived increasingly sophisticated ways of playing upon the fears and uncertainties of their neighbors in order to gain power over them. Such schemes depend upon keeping the subservient in a constant state of fear of the adverse consequences that will likely follow from their disobedience: there may be food shortages as the supply of game animals dwindles; the “Nine Bows” may sneak into our village at night and destroy our buildings; or deadly earthquakes, drouths, or great storms may occur if we do not live in accordance with the dictates of the gods.

While the details of the political power-game change, the underlying logic of the system remains basically intact. The tribal shaman with his collection of trinkets and magic smoke would fully understand the modern government bureaucrat’s use of licenses, rules, and other gimmicks to accomplish his ends. The more primitive shake-down shaman, with his alleged pipeline to the gods, has been replaced by the academically-trained PhD-“expert” with his computer projections, each psychic racketeer claiming the capacity to predict outcomes in a world that is forever chaotic and uncertain.

The concoction of fears of an intensity sufficient to sustain the obedience of the many ultimately depends upon the use of lies. For a primitive society, the lies have a simplicity and narrowness of reach that they may be accepted by tribesmen. But for a more complex society – wherein millions of people interact through a myriad of networks – the lies become an avalanche of conflicts and contradictions that insinuate themselves into every facet of human action. By virtue of this ubiquitousness, social discord, economic dislocations, wars, genocides, and other dehumanizing and dispiriting practices have become the norm of mankind’s present existence on earth.

Maintaining power over others requires a sufficient flexibility that allows political practitioners to respond to changed conditions. Urban renewal programs of the 1960s – through which the power hungry were able to tear down old inner-city housing – came under criticism by the 1970s. Suddenly the cause of conservancy, premised on the preservation of old buildings, became more important, and many of those who had promoted urban renewal became advocates of this new program for controlling cities. To this crowd, it didn’t matter whether old structures were to be destroyed or maintained: what was central to the elitists’ purposes was that they – not property owners – were to have the final decision in the matter.

One sees the same resiliency among so-called environmentalists: the threat of global cooling that drove the elitists in the 1970s, quickly morphed into the problem of global warming in the following decade. When it became evident that the earth had undergone numerous fluctuations in global temperatures over millennia, the imagined threat was transformed into climate change. But whether the planet is getting cooler, warmer, or just changing really doesn’t matter: the elitists will insist upon resolving the “problem” by controlling the lives and activities of all human beings. If it were ever suggested that the climate was in a condition of equilibrium, these elitists would come up with a “stimulus” program to have the state “get the planet going again.” We will be told that, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must submit to the authority of the environmentalists to manage the details of our lives, lest earth suffer the same lifeless fate as Mars!

As long as the lies are propagated and reinforced by persons respected by members of the general public – and such esteemed voices are always to be found within the halls of dominant institutions – any correspondence to truth is rarely questioned. As the falsehoods and exaggerations spread, so do the adverse consequences metastasize, bringing more disorder to which the power-elitists respond with more distortions and contradictions.

The specter of Hitler wanting to take over the world, became the ogre of communism that wanted to take over the world, and has since turned into the bogeyman of terrorists who want to take over the world. Like children at a “Frankenstein” movie, members of the boobeoisie keep purchasing tickets for the next show, believing that those in power have a magic bullet, a bag of garlic, or a scarecrow to ward off the monsters others have planted in their heads.

Those who demand coercive power over others must convince their intended subjects to do what no rational individual would ever think of doing, namely, subordinating the pursuit of his or her interests to someone else’s agenda. To overcome the insanity of making one’s own purposes – indeed, one’s life – inferior to the self-serving interests of the elitists, institutions have been empowered to condition minds in the virtue of obedience and self-sacrifice. Those who resist this campaign are labeled “selfish,” a word whose meaning, to the elitist, comes down to no more than this: “one who puts his greedy interests ahead of mine.”

Boobus is not to ask the “why?” question, for to do so is to invite “truth” into the political equation. Intelligent minds have long been aware that lies are the currency with which political systems transact their business. As with monetary systems, inflation of the supply of untruths accelerates the diminution in value of prevailing lies, as even the dullest minds become suspicious. In an effort to overcome these deleterious effects, further inflation occurs. Lies become increasingly fantastic, with the threshold of gullibility continuing to get elevated. Even some of the more respected members of the mainstream media and academia begin to see the wisdom of abandoning the sinking ship. A variant of Gresham’s Law arises, as runaway falseness leads increasing numbers of people to inform their minds with truthfulness.

But “truth” is to the power-seekers what industrial waste is to manufacturers: a form of entropy to be disposed of in the least-costly manner. That some of the more observant of one’s subjects might inadvertently stumble across the incongruity of a lie with the unforgiving harshness of the real world is unavoidable. But the effects of such an eventuality can be isolated by members of the philosopher-king class, whose expert training will make their explanations more palatable to those who have discovered the contradiction.

Far more troublesome to the elitist-class are the people who uncover and reveal to others the truth found behind the falsehoods. The lies, forgeries, exaggerations, provocateuring, and other distortions and misrepresentations of reality are understood to intelligent minds to be essential to corporate-state interests. If institutions are to be ends in themselves, individuals are expected to subordinate their purposes to those of the established order. But since the real-world functions in decentralized forms and practices, the idea that institutions are to have a pre-eminent, centralized importance in human behavior is a fiction that can only be maintained with distortions of truth. Those who say “I never believe anything the government tells me,” or “never accept anything as true until it has been officially denied,” help awaken their neighbors to the fundamentally dishonest nature of all political systems.

Those who reveal the lies upon which politics rest are an embarrassment to the elitists who scheme to control and consume others in service to their special interests. To those who insist upon the privileges of coercive power, the rest of humanity amounts to nothing more than “Soylent Green” raw materials to be converted to their narrow interests; resources to be kept as “contented cows” until their energies are sacrificed for the “greater good” of elitist interests. Government schools, the mainstream media, and corporate advertising are focused on such ends; conditioning minds in the necessity of maintaining the society as it is presently organized, and of being prepared to make major sacrifices to protect the interests of their rulers. The fabrication of the “terrorists” – the updated equivalent of the “Nine Bows” – helps to reinforce the sacrifice of self upon which political structuring depends. To reveal this alleged threat to be a lie is more easily dealt with by the statists who can – as was done with the imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” threat – treat the falsehood as no more than a failure of informational intelligence.

What the political order cannot abide, however, are the persons who reveal governmental policies and practices to be more than inadvertent statements generated by the uncertainties of a complex world, but as contrived intrigues; conspiracies contrived by the self-appointed ruling classes to maintain their power over all of mankind. Like the young boy who informed others of the emperor’s nakedness, the truth-tellers will not be allowed to upset the plans of the power-elite. When Rotary Club members begin to question the purposes of those who would rule humanity by violence, the system is in dire trouble. To discourage truth-telling is the reason Ed Snowden must seek sanctuary in Russia; why Julian Assange must hide out in an Ecuadorian embassy; why a great journalist like Glenn Greenwald has moved to Brazil; and why Bradley/Chelsea Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, a term far longer than those of any previous American government employees who had sold secrets to other governments or terrorist groups. A corrupt and utterly dishonest system cannot allow truth-seeking and truth-telling to prevail in a world run of, by, and for those who fancy themselves entitled to rule mankind.

The “whistle-blowers” provide evidence that the higher qualities of character, moral courage, and a commitment to truth – traits that offer a synonym for “integrity” – remain within the soul of mankind. These are the kinds of people Albert Jay Nock had in mind when he spoke of “the Remnant,” the men and women who will help to create social systems that serve all of mankind, not just the few who create and control the instruments of human destruction.

When men of character must go underground, hide out, or are imprisoned or threatened with death by the rulers, you can be assured that the society dominated by such brutishness is in its death throes. A system that insists on controlling others through increasing levels of systematic violence; that loots the many for the aggrandizement of the few; that regulates any expressions of human behavior that are not of service to the rulers; that presumes the power to wage wars against any nation of its choosing, a principle that got a number of men hanged at the Nuremberg trials; and finally, criminalizes those who would speak the truth to its victims, has no moral energy remaining with which to sustain itself. The treatment accorded private Manning may have been the final nail driven into the coffin of the American state. Those who pretend that the state serves any credible purpose on behalf of the well-being of mankind, will face the impossible task of demonstrating any such ends. When those who speak truth are imprisoned for doing so, there is no pretense of decency or worthwhileness left to the system.

I can think of no more vivid picture of the condition of the modern nation-state. After years of dragging its corpulent carcass about, indifferent to the injuries it caused to those lesser creatures who got in its path, this dinosaur continued to gorge itself on leaves, heedless of the voices from its hinterland informing it that its fate was already determined.  My oft-used metaphor of the just-beheaded chicken can also help describe the condition of the modern state: it flaps about in a pattern of automatic reflexes spewing blood in its path, making a mess of whatever gets in its way. It no longer serves any life-enhancing purpose, having become little more than a mass of reactive energy.

How should intelligent people respond to this? Having been thoroughly conditioned in the political mindset of using force as the most effective manner of bringing about change, our initial answer might be to try to reform the state; to make its actions more palatable to its victims. Such a response recalls Frank Chodorov’s wonderful rejoinder about wanting “to clean up the whorehouse, but keeping the business intact.” But recent history informs us that we are far beyond being able to treat the state as an instrument established and controlled to serve our purposes. As an institution, the state is its own reason for being, its violent powers in the hands of the kinds of people attracted to compulsion as the principal method of dealing with others. As Einstein so well-expressed the point: “Force always attracts men of low morality.”

The state serves only the most debased motives through the most destructive means of accomplishing the ends of the most vicious and corrupt members of the human species. By its nature, the state wars against truth and reality, using terror and violence to overcome our more peaceful and cooperative individual dispositions. To think of reforming such a monstrous system makes no more sense than trying to enclose a wild tiger with a tall fence! Such thinking reflects a continuing attachment to power, a force that would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of those who imagined themselves fit to exercise it.

To attack the state through violent means is the most self-defeating measure. To think this way is to succumb to desperation, to give up on life itself. Our beliefs in systemic violence are destroying us. If we are to live peacefully with one another, our means of doing so cannot be found in the conflict that is the state’s organizing principle. Even the most superficial mind ought to recognize that resorting to violence in an effort to rid the world of state-violence, is not only self-contradictory, but would require us to have coercive powers greater than those of the state! Those who might be successful doing this would have to amass the energies of a super-state, and would have to maintain such powers to prevent the “return” of the deposed state. Sound familiar? Do Marx and Engels come to mind, with their promises about the eventual “withering away of the state?” We cannot use the methodologies that have gotten us to where we now find ourselves. Furthermore, at a time when politicized thinking is on the defensive – and, to many, in full retreat – it is far better to focus attention on the development of alternative models of social organization.

We are beyond the place where incremental changes will suffice. Cosmetic alterations – providing the emperor with a new suit of clothes – may modify, but not end, our well-organized destructiveness. To redesign the systems that war against life, or to replace the puppets atop the pyramid, will only keep us spinning our wheels. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation in our thinking as to how we are to live in society with one another will bring about the change that matters.

As we focus our minds on the task of rethinking our basic assumptions, the question of how to end statism may answer itself. Like the stegosaurus and the decapitated chicken, the state clumsily staggers around in a brain-dead condition. At its best, the state may be said to be functioning at no higher level of intelligence than that of its reptilian brain with its reflexive, knee-jerk “see/act” behavior. Its behavior is dominated by contradictions, conflicts, falsehoods, corruption, violence, and other traits that work against a peaceful and orderly world.

Daniel Goleman observed that “[s]ocieties can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness,” a reminder of how collective power and collective ideas can bring down civilizations. Rather than focusing our energies on trying to rehabilitate or reinvent the state, we would be better advised to direct our attentions to alternative social practices that serve the living, not exalted abstractions. Like the dinosaurs – whose presence on earth was of far greater duration than that of humans – the state’s monstrous size renders it incapable of making creative, life-enhancing responses to the changes occurring within the world.

Leopold Kohr has written of the dysfunctional nature of size, observing that “whenever something is wrong, something is too big.” The study of chaos and complexity affirm the adverse consequences of trying to manage the world from the apex of Plato’s pyramid. The state is a behemoth that stumbles about, ravenously increasing its consumption of whatever resources it deems necessary to sustain its ever-more-bloated size.

In the long run, the well-being of our children and grandchildren depends upon our bringing about a paradigm shift in thinking about what it means to be human. This involves learning how to regain control over our lives, a task that entails expanding the understanding of our own self-directed abilities, and the awareness of how we have given up such personal powers and authority to the state. This is not something we can do passively, but requires the most energized and focused mind.

In the short run, the best answer to the violence that is synonymous with state power may be to just let politicized thinking play out the logical consequences upon which it is grounded; to allow the system to grind itself down. Perhaps, like the attacking Martians in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, or the final days of dinosaurs on earth, our best short-term defense against the state may be to allow its dysfunctional size and nature to provide the catalyst for its own extinction. The rest of us need to protect ourselves as best we can against its over-reaching into our lives, and to participate in those peaceful, voluntary alternative systems and practices that serve our purposes. But in the meantime, we should take a lesson from our ancestral mammals who were able to wait out the dinosaurs who lacked the resiliency to respond to the changed conditions of an ever-changing world. Instead of trying to prop up and rehabilitate this destructive monolith, let us allow it to collapse of its own dead weight!

-   Turkish proverb

It was during my freshman year of college that I first encountered the works of that most eminent American political philosopher, Pogo Possum. Channeled through cartoonist, Walt Kelly, Pogo provided an alternative to the “Ozzie and Harriet” mindset that kept most Americans from engaging in those twin towers of political sin: asking questions and speaking truth. In those post-World War II years in which the state had to hurriedly find a new threat with which to keep Americans under its control – lest they mistakenly think that the end of that war presaged a world at peace – the Cold War bogeyman was put together.

While Pogo was decidedly a left-of-center person – Ayn Rand had yet to arrive on campuses to challenge collectivist thought and behavior – he was one of the remnants of the spirit of classical liberalism whose ranks were rapidly being conscripted into the service of statism. At a time when Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were doing their best to convince Boobus Americanus that “active agents of the communist conspiracy” were entrenched everywhere, Pogo went forth from his meager homesite in Okefenokee Swamp to find these “enemy” forces. Upon his return, he confided to his neighbors that “we have met the enemy, and they is us!”

In this simple phrase, Pogo Possum encapsulated the essence of statism. His words continue to inform those who desire to understand politics. Pogo became a popular presidential candidate, and I wore a campaign button that read “I Go Pogo!” to show my support for that most prominent example of a person eager to stick pins in established balloons. I later discovered that most effective social critic, Lenny Bruce, whose works laid the foundations for people like George Carlin. But that is another story altogether.

What Pogo helped us to see was something that Ms. Blodgett omitted from our high-school civics class lessons: all political systems – from Washington, D.C. to Mud Flats, Kansas – depend for their existence on the institutionalization of lies. Truth is as fatal to the state as oxygen was to earlier anaerobic life forms. It is not just that some politicians or government agencies occasionally lie to us: no political system can withstand the sunlight of truth. This is not because the politically minded are genetically-determined evildoers, but because of the very nature of politics.

Political systems exist because of the willingness of most people to participate in what economists call “externalities.” We are, by nature, cost-avoiders. We love the benefits of our actions, and want to keep them for ourselves. But the costs of acquiring such desired ends we are eager to share with others. A factory owner may not want to incur the costs of disposing of the unwanted by-products of his business, and might resort to dumping such “wastes” into a river or the atmosphere, actions that force such costs to be transferred to others. Such property trespasses as a means of disposing of externalities, are also appropriately known as “socializing the costs.” Physicists have a related term to describe this: “entropy,” defined as “energy unavailable for productive work.”

In a society grounded upon respect for the inviolability of individuals and their property interests, responsible people internalize these costs (e.g., dispose of the unwanted consequences of their actions at their own expense). For men and women of irresponsible dispositions, the state provides mechanisms for imposing such costs onto unwilling victims. Those who want schools, highways, parks, mail delivery, hospitals, or other services, will generally turn to the state to provide them, not because political systems have demonstrated any capability for more effectively creating such projects, but because the state can compel others – through its powers of eminent domain and taxation – to incur the costs involved.

How does the state get away with this? Why would otherwise intelligent people passively consent to being forced to provide “benefits” they do not want? One might exercise sound judgment and give an armed street-mugger his money, but what would motivate this same victim to stumble into a voting-booth every two years to anoint the mugger as his “elected representative?”

The operators of the political system, and those who benefit from the practice of imposing externalities/entropy upon others, are able to sustain their racket only through years of conditioning people to accept, as truths, what are demonstrable lies. It has been the purpose of schools and academia, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, and other institutional voices, to condition minds to accept, as true, whatever serves the interests of those who control the apparatus of the state. Those who expose the lies, or reveal deeper truths about the political system, become enemies of the state to be destroyed. This is why Ron Paul was so condemned: not for “speaking truth to power” – the slugs who exercise political power already know the nature of their well-organized fakery – but for speaking truth to the powerless. Ron’s efforts even forced Rudy Giuliani to publically admit his ignorance of what most grade-schoolers know: Newton’s Third Law of Motion!

The mountains of lies upon which citadels of power are built are comprised not of granite, but of glass, easily shattered by particles of truth. One need not go back into ancient history to confirm this: the “weapons of mass destruction” lie that led most Americans to approve of a war against Iraq, and the repeat performance being put together against an equally innocent nation, Iran, offer sufficient evidence. The statists now call for retaliation against Russia for having granted political asylum to Ed Snowden.  The politically-motivated have always been aware of the fragile nature of coercive power, and of how contagious the pursuit of truth can become. Truth and individual liberty represent entropy to the state; forms of energy that not only do not contribute to the ends sought by political systems, but often interfere with such purposes. As such, state power remains ever-vigilant to their threats.

We have been witnessing the institutional order’s war against truth in the ongoing persecution of such men as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Ed Snowden. The essence of the state’s complaint – and that of its media lickspittles – is that these men (gasp!) dared to truthfully inform the public regarding what the state has been up to! Theocratic states once found the charges of “blasphemy” or “heresy” sufficient grounds for burning people at the stake. But a modern politicized society is too sophisticated for that, right? A different but equally vacuous charge had to be invented: the “threat to national security.” Anything that anyone says or does that offends those in power is deemed a “threat to national security.”

Those who identify with the nation-state often find themselves embarrassed by revelations of the “dark side” forces that are inevitably attracted to the state’s monopoly on the use of violence. What cannot be acquired through one’s own efforts, or through trade or other voluntary dealings with one’s neighbors, are often seduced into pursuing their interests through legalized coercion. But to create – and perpetuate – policies that depend on forcibly violating the will of others requires the suppression of truth. As our world becomes ever-more politicized, men and women implicitly embrace the idea that “a lie is as good as the truth, if you can get other people to believe it.” Ed Snowden et al are the latest to uncover the lies upon which the state fabricates its scarecrows to “protect us” from our “enemies.” Like Pogo, they also reveal to those who are not afraid to look that the “enemy is us!”

Any relationship – from the most personal to the more formal – that is grounded in lies will quickly perish. As my jurisprudence professor, Karl Llewellyn, was fond of saying, truth is like a beautifully spun spider’s web. A lie is equivalent to throwing a rock into this web; it breaks up the interconnectedness that otherwise gives the web wholeness.

When those who speak truth are labeled “criminals,” “traitors,” or “threats to national security,” you know that America finds itself in the same moral and intellectual sewer from which officials of Nazi Germany tried to extricate themselves with the plea “I was just following orders.” While the Nuremberg Trials were doubtless an expression of “victor’s justice,” they nonetheless raised the very troubling question that most Americans prefer to ignore: can a person avoid being responsible for one’s actions on the grounds that a governmental authority had ordered them to act? This question represents what has come to be known – and largely forgotten – as the “Nuremberg principle.” Are we accountable for the consequences of our behavior when someone orders us to do something in violation of our moral principles?

Of course, Americans have put the kind of twist on this question that negates it as a problem at all: what “enemy” forces do are “war crimes” or acts of “terror”; what “our” troops and leaders engage in are “recognized” and “accepted” acts of war. Brendan Behan made this distinction: “the terrorist is the one with the small bomb.” As much as anyone, George Orwell understood how the power of the state depends upon distorting and deforming reality to create whatever impressions will serve the interests of the ruling class.

To believe in and act upon lies results in the abandonment and/or transfer of responsibility for conduct. The liars who have crawled out from beneath their rocks to condemn Ed Snowden for speaking truth to the world, are doing no more than projecting onto this man wholly fabricated “consequences” which, even if they were true, derive from the cascade of lies, forgeries, and other corruptions that comprise the totality of governmental behavior. Ed Snowden has embarrassed the political elites in much the same way as did the young boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes. Boobus Americanus – who has long identified his very sense of being with the nation-state – has begun taking down the flag from his house, and less-frequently plasters his car with “Support the Troops” bumper-stickers. This transformation wasn’t caused by Ed Snowden: he is just the latest scapegoat upon whom the parasites of both wings of the bird of prey now descend.

The Hitler regime used the “due process” model that the post-9/11 despots long to squeeze into the Constitution. Republican Newt Gingrich defended the Obama administration’s killing of an American, Anwar al-Awlaki on “due process” grounds. “The president signed an order to kill them. That was due process,” he concluded. Sophie and Hans Scholl and other members of the White Rose – to whom I dedicated my most recent book, The Wizards of Ozymandias – were summarily decapitated by the German Gestapo for having exercised their sense of responsibility by daring to criticize and expose to the German people the vicious criminality of the German state. The Obamas, Holders, McCains, Grahams, Kerrys, George W. Bush’s, and such lesser weasels as Jay Carney, Michelle Bachmann, John Bolton, and the reptilian-brained members of the mainstream media, may secretly admire the swiftness with which their counterparts in the National Socialist German Workers party dispensed with those who embarrassed the regime. One doesn’t have to be a Nazi to respect the resolve with which a dictator can act. George W. Bush admitted this in his comment, while president, “if this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier. . . as long as I’m the dictator.” It is the political system itself – not the temporary puppets put in place by the owners to run the system – that insists upon the absoluteness of its rule, a purpose that is disrupted by truth-telling.

Those who babble the inanity that Ed Snowden should “come home” and “make his case” within the American legal system, reflect not only their own moral and intellectual bankruptcy, but that of those who share in such nonsense. “The law is the law,” such empty-brained babblers mutter, a phrase befitting those who speak from beneath the bottom of the barrel of human intelligence and decency.

For those of us who regard the speaking of truth as something more than just one of a number of available strategies; and who understand the unavoidable connection between truthfulness and responsibility, I direct attention to the film Judgment at Nuremberg. One of the trial judges – played by Spencer Tracy – is discussing with another judge the proposition that Nazi judges on trial before their tribunal might not be responsible for their judicial decisions. In Judge Haywood’s (Tracy’s) words: “You were saying that the men are not responsible for their acts. You’re going to have to explain that to me; you’re going to have to explain that to me very carefully.”

~ Emma Goldman

One of the more important inquiries into the nature of collective thinking and behavior was Charles Mackay’s 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Focusing on such phenomena as the South Sea Bubble, Alchemy, the Crusades, and the preoccupation with witches, Mackay provided great insight into the nature and energies associated with the herd mindset. Were he around today, Mackay could do an empirically-based treatise on the illusory character of democracy.

As much of the world watches the Egyptian military forcibly oust from office a democratically-elected President Morsi – who received 51.7% of the vote in last year’s election – even a few editorial writers are beginning to suspect that the concept of “democracy” can no more bestow legitimacy on political rule than does “divine will.”  The idea of governments arising through individual desires spontaneously coalescing into a collective structure appeals more to magical thinking than to historic evidence. Were it ever to be shown that all human behavior is genetically-determined – not just influenced but directed – you can be assured that those who want to control others will concoct a “DNA-imperative” for political rule.

Political systems are invariably grounded in the ambitions of elitist men and women who regard their interests as superior to “ordinary” people – ones they arrogantly dismiss as the “masses” or “Joe Six-Pack.” It is not enough that these elitists endeavor to secure the cooperation of others – an undertaking that is the sine qua non of a market-based social system based on trade –; they insist upon using legalized force to overcome whatever resistance others might have to their schemes. Because the state is defined as a system enjoying a monopoly on the lawful use of violence, those who regard their purposes as superior to those of their neighbors, must concoct a rationale that their victims will accept as a justification for their subject condition.

It is not enough that those who would rule others have weapons of force to back up their demands: street muggers use guns or knives with which to threaten their intended victims, but enjoy no lingering support following the crime. To create a system that can continue to be used to coerce others into obedience to the elitist demands requires the sanction of the victims; their belief that being forced to obey the dictates of others is justified by some transcendent principle. In religiously-based societies, the legitimacy of the state was explained in terms of “divine will.” During the Scientific Age, so-called “natural law” principles were invoked; while the Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on relations based on contracts, made it easier for people to accept a “social contract” theory of political systems.

Marx’s “dialectical materialism,” Bentham’s and Mill’s cases for “utilitarianism,” or other rationales for governments, illustrate the need for the politically-minded to justify their rule by principles that go beyond the simple-minded notion “I want what I want when I want it.”  Those to be ruled must become convinced that the system to which they will be subject serves –or is justified by – some principle that transcends that of the common mugger.

That none of these theories of the state do, in fact, serve their expressed purpose is of no consequence, as long as the ruled believe that they do. What God could be so perverse as to sanction tyrannical, butcherous regimes that paraded under the banner “divine will?” To those who argue that governments violate “natural law” principles, my response has been: how can anything that exists – particularly as temporally and spatially ubiquitous as state systems – be considered unnatural?  Nor will I ever forget my jurisprudence professor, Karl Llewellyn, answering a fellow-student’s argument “what about the greatest good for the greatest number?”, with the question “what about the greatest good for the greatest guy?”

It always comes down to this: ideas are abstractions and, as such, are always subject to interpretation. The interpretations are, themselves, expressed in additional abstractions (words) that also require interpretation. This is the underlying cause of the failure of written constitutions to limit the exercise of power, and why those who argue “we must get back to the Constitution” fail to recognize that we never left it; the same words are still there! What words could more beg being interpreted than “general welfare,” “common defense,” “justice,” “reasonable” and “unreasonable,” “due process of law,” “excessive,” etc.? When constitutional cases inform us that “slaves” and “Indians” are not “persons” entitled to protection, but “corporations” are, it is evident that the underlying problem, here, has to do with interpreting the meanings of such words. The state not only enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence, it is also allowed – through powers of judicial review that are nowhere provided for in the Constitution – to interpret both the range of its powers, and the limitations thereon. It should come as no surprise to anyone paying close attention, that the state has provided itself with an ever-expanding definition of its powers, and an ever-diminishing realm of individual liberties.

This political racket has been made possible through decades of conditioning by government schools, the media, and other institutional interests, a belief in the proposition that “we” are the government; that politicians and government officials are our agents, with ourselves as principals. I suggest to people a simple way to test this notion: call up the Post Office and tell them to start making Sunday deliveries. You will quickly discover just who “the people” are who comprise “we the people,” and also learn that you are not included in the group running the machinery of the state.

“Democracy is a system in which four wolves and a sheep decide what to have for dinner.” This provides as vivid a picture as any of what underlies this rationale for collective force. But it is not a collective mindset that creates the democratic urge. The relatively small group of elitists who desire to have coercive control over the rest of mankind have employed the concept of democracy as a way of mobilizing “dark side” forces; to get people to lose their sense of individual purpose, direction, and responsibility in a collective identity (e.g., nation-state) which the elitists – using primarily schools and the media – then manipulate to serve their interests, not those of humanity in general. The common mistake most of us make is assuming that a collective impulse from ordinary people generates a demand for the creation of a democratic political system. The distinction between the drafting of The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution is instructive: the former was, in the words of Frank Chodorov, “not at all the charter of a new nation. It is a rationalization of rebellion.” The latter – produced eleven years later – was the creation of a power structure that exploited the sentiments for liberty in order to serve the interests of those with ambitions of authority over others.

As long as people embrace the illusion of democracy, they will be inclined to obey the dictates of those who control the machinery of the state. They are inclined to regard their obedience to a given mandate as only a short-term problem that can be overcome by “working within the system” to effect change. But such an attitude ignores the mechanisms in place that prevent any popular change that is contrary to the interests of the elitists. The early case of Marbury v. Madison allowed for a usurpation of authority for the Supreme Court to pass on the constitutionality of the actions of other branches of government, a power that is nowhere spelled out – or even hinted at – in the Constitution. It would probably have been fatal to ratification efforts if the Constitution had expressly provided the judicial branch with such powers.

Such an arrogation of authority has provided a barrier to efforts by ordinary people to direct the political system to ends they might value, purposes that would be contrary to elitist interests. Thus, if a majority of voters in a given state vote in favor of a referendum measure (e.g., to allow for medical use of marijuana), the courts have no difficulty in striking down such legislation as “unconstitutional.” The interests of the elitist owners of the system must prevail over the preferences of the majority!

The Egyptian people are now experiencing the fallacy of a democratically controlled political system. A man who, just one year ago, was elected president of that country by a majority of the voters, has been removed from office and held prisoner by military force. And, to make clear that any “social contract” illusions about the legitimacy of the state do not prevail in Egypt, the military has also suspended the constitution, embracing the same sentiments as former president George W. Bush who declared the U.S. Constitution to be “just a goddamned piece of paper!”

The belief that what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite” would ever be so careless or witless as to allow tens of millions of subject people to have any real control over the machinery or purposes of the state, is refuted in what passes for daily news. The treatment accorded Ron Paul in his popularly-supported efforts to make fundamental reforms in the American political system, demonstrates how desperately the elitists – along with their well-trained political and media lapdogs and toadies – insist on keeping political power where it belongs: in their hands.

The 1999 film, Election, centered on a high-school campaign for student body president, illustrates the fallacy of voter-based elections determining outcomes. In the midst of the campaign for votes between the campus butterfly and the football hero, another student – a nonconformist who sees the meaningless of what is transpiring – enters herself as a candidate. Her campaign speech at a school assembly follows that of the other two. The honesty of her words so resonates with the entire student body, that school administrators hurriedly gather and remove her name from the ballots!

Emma Goldman got it right!

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice! And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

~ Barry Goldwater, in speech written by Karl Hess

A recent discussion on the Fox Business channel, amongst John Stossel, Stuart Varney, and Judge Andrew Napolitano, has raised, once again, the empty charge directed at libertarians: “you are being an extremist!” Such words are always offered in lieu of a substantive analysis of the position advocated. That both Albert Einstein and Jeffery Dahmer could be labeled as “extremists,” by virtue of how far their thinking deviated from some norm, provides us no basis upon which to evaluate their thinking or conduct. Intelligent minds would ask: by what criteria do you judge these men; what are the implications of what each is doing or saying? That so many scientists who contributed to the development of our understanding of the world had to endure such criticism, should cause us to insist upon a standard of evaluation that rises above the simplistic thinking presently in place.

These three men were debating the wide-ranging NSA surveillance practices recently revealed by Edward Snowden – whose actions have led statists to label him an “extremist,” among other charges. When Judge Napolitano insisted that the government should be required to adhere to Fourth Amendment standards and procedures, Varney – the moderator of the program – began accusing the good judge of “extremism.”

But how does one define “extremism”? Is there a standard by which we can make intelligent distinctions, or is the word only intended as a polite form of name-calling? Words are but abstractions and require interpretation, no matter how certain we feel that our subjective sense allows us to overcome the difficulties that often attend defining them. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous admission to the difficulty of defining “pornography” nonetheless led him to conclude “I know it when I see it.” Does Mr. Varney’s charge of the good judge being an “extremist” amount to anything more than his stating a preference for his preferences?

Explanations for the inability of people to employ a reasoned analysis in their thinking are to be found in institutions of learning. One criticism directed at the government schools is that they do not do an adequate job teaching students how to pass the tests such systems use to evaluate themselves. In this sense, schools – including universities and graduate schools – are more in the business of certifying their students to the next level at which they are to perform than helping them learn to become independent thinkers capable of engaging in principled, factually-supported analysis. In performing this certification role, schools engage in the circular process of certifying themselves. “See, 83% of our students passed the test that we taught them how to pass!” In law schools, this helps to explain the preoccupation with bar exam results.

When a school system’s emphasis shifts from helping students learn how to think, to teaching them what to think, the dumbing down process is well under way. The principal failure of the education system is not reflected in the fact that most students cannot identify the kinds of information easily found in a Google search, but that they cannot analyze the meaning of such empirical data. An honor student may correctly answer that the Hundred Years War was a series of 14^th and 15^th conflicts between England and France; that same student may give you a blank response to such follow-up questions as what were thecauses or the consequences of this war?

Persons who were educated in the rote methods of the institution-serving schools, tend to be very weak in the skills of intellectual analysis. Being unable to intelligently evaluate a particular proposition, they may resort to public opinion polls, or the pronouncements of a recognized authority for direction. They may also fall back on the “extremism” charge when confronted with a point of view they are otherwise unable to analyze.

The contrast between these two approaches is evident from Judge Napolitano’s discussion with Stuart Varney. The judge’s criticism of the NSA’s ubiquitous, unconsented surveillance of everyone was grounded in principles from which he reasoned. He quoted the Fourth Amendment, which has a narrowly-focused exception to the general rule that people should be “secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures,” an exception that requires the government to go to court and seek a warrant against specific persons, at specific locations, identifying the specific items to be seized.

In making this argument, the judge is being accused of engaging in what is rarely taught in modern schools: the art of implicit thinking. It is not just that the state is engaged in actions wrong in themselves, but that the acceptance of such behavior can lead to even more serious consequences. If Uncle Willie drinks a quart of Scotch every day, cirrhosis of the liver is implicit in his habit. Does this mean that he will develop this disease? The study of chaos tells us “no,” that outcomes associated with complex systems are unpredictable. It does mean, however, that his addiction will greatly increase the likelihood of his developing cirrhosis. As such, on the first day that Willie consumes his quart of Scotch, he should understand that the destruction of his liver is implicit in what he is doing, and not just assume that each additional day stands on its own, unaffected by what has preceded it.

If, on one occasion, a police officer brutalizes a harmless individual, does that mean that a police-state has arisen? No, but intelligent minds should recognize that such totalitarian consequences are implicit in such an act, and should respond accordingly. I am reminded of that powerful scene at the end of the movie, Judgment at Nuremberg. Judge Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy) has been called to the jail cell of the Nazi judge (played by Burt Lancaster) who has just been given a life sentence for his crimes. The convicted judge tells Judge Haywood: “Those people, those millions of people. . . I never knew it would come to that.” Judge Haywood replies: “it ‘came to that’ the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.” This is a poignant example of “implicit thinking.” If you doubt that one atrocity, indulged in and sanctioned today, does not have implications for the future, ask the ghosts of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka – and the hundreds of other Nazi concentration camps – whether critics of such systems were being “extremists” for warning of the likely consequences! A more dramatic expression is to be found in Judge Haywood’s explanation of the court’s ruling at the end of the movie. His words may help us to understand the implications of the present behavior of the American state.

Implicit thinking requires a standard by which to judge the propriety of one’s actions. Judge Napolitano used language from the Constitution as such a standard, but other principles could be employed as well (e.g., the inviolability of the person or property of individuals). Having a norm by which to measure one’s response to state action is a necessary means for engaging in an intelligent, reasoned analysis. Without such a principle, one is left with frenzied ranting, name-calling, or empty rhetoric such as accusing another of “extremism.”

How does one learn this art of implicit thinking? It is evident that such skills will never be a part of the curriculum of government schools. Their job is to condition young minds in the establishment mindset, a purpose wholly inconsistent with the development of critical thinking. There is nothing so annoying to the state’s conditioning academies as children who keep asking questions. The word “why?” – and the independent thinking that underlies it – is a constant challenge to a system that has no standards that would appeal to curious minds. The child who persists in questioning what is being taught may soon be labeled “hyperactive” or having an “attention deficit disorder” and be subjected to therapies or drugs to overcome his or her resistance. The words of the late Steve Jobs come to mind, in discussing his response to elementary school: “I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

How does one help children develop the skills of implicit thinking, and avoid the indoctrination that trains one to become a servo-mechanism of the corporate-state? In his 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim discussed the importance of fairy tales in helping children deal with the kinds of fears that are so much a part of growing up. In the course of reading and finding meaning in such stories, children would experience the kind of emotional development necessary to the well-lived life.

I believe that such stories – and the processes of questioning that accompany their reading – can help children learn to think implicitly. Fairy tales are often presented in terms of black-and-white contrasts: the consistently “good” guy up against the “villain” who is beyond the possibilities of rehabilitation. The purpose of making such sharp comparisons is not to make children aware of how people necessarily behave in the world, but to provide standards with which to evaluate human conduct. Are all children as sweet and innocent as Hansel and Gretel, or as loving and considerate as Little Red Riding Hood? Are step-mothers all mean? Hardly. These stories are not offered as psychological or sociological studies, but as clearly defined criteria by which to make judgments.

One of my favorite children’s stories is The Little Red Hen, but I detest those modern corruptions of the tale in which the Red Hen gives in to all the free-riders and allows them to share in the product of her labors. There is an important lesson for children to learn from Ms. Red Hen, which goes far beyond the modern simple-minded standard of “niceness” that seems to limit the judging of human conduct. The story informs children of what, in a welfare-dominated world has long been forgotten: not only are there consequences to our actions, but precursors for the attainment of what we enjoy. The bread that the Red Hen produced – and the moochers now want to enjoy – came about only through her willingness to incur all of the costs necessary to create the bread. This is the meaning of Milton Friedman’s now classic observation: “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Someone had to incur the costs of providing it.

Implicit thinking has no relevance absent a clear standard by which to evaluate our thinking and behavior. In order to live as intelligent adults, children must learn to explore the importance and meaning of principles that transcend the immediate circumstances they confront. In the turbulence of a world that is redefining itself into fundamentally new social systems and practices, our thinking – and judgments – must undergo major transformations. If we are to survive – and I believe that we will – we must walk away from such school playground rhetoric as “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” or “America: love it or leave it,” or “you’re being an extremist.” As Einstein observed: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Butler Shaffer Archives

“Doctor Murnau: A crowd is easier to control than an individual. A crowd has a common purpose. The purpose of the individual is always in question.”

~ From the movie Kafka

My recent book, The Wizards of Ozymandias, was dedicated “To the memory and spirit of Sophie and Hans Scholl and the White Rose, who reminded us what it means to be civilized.” These young people – most in their teens or early twenties – lived in Nazi Germany and, fearing for the future of their country, took it upon themselves to write – and publicly distribute – leaflets critical of the government. They apparently operated from the premise that what transpired in their country was any of their business. They were soon found out, arrested on February 18, 1943, found guilty of “treason” on February 22, by the People’s Court, and summarily beheaded that same day.

Modern-day voices of fascism, American style, have been urging the same kind of “due process” for such individuals as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and now Edward Snowden, who have had the “arrogance” – in the words of a few of their critics – to do what members of the White Rose did in the early 1940s: to make public the wrongdoings of the American government including such intelligence agencies as the NSA. Political, legal, and media hacks have been stumbling over one another to get in front of network cameras to denounce these men, and to demand the same kind of swift punishment as was meted out to the Scholls and other White Rose members. This vicious reaction has been so void of intellectual reflection as to lead some of the babblers to insist that Assange be tried for “treason,” overlooking the technical detail that Assange is not even an American, but an Australian! But in an age of a presumed worldwide American empire, such a matter can be overlooked, along with all the other moral, legal, and constitutional niceties that have been dumped into the memory hole.

The bankruptcy that is driving this campaign against truth-telling is shown by some of the content of the attacks on the accused: “Mr. Snowden doesn’t even have a high-school diploma!” Well, what more needs to be said? The unstated presumption, here, is that this man hadn’t even completed his government-school conditioning in the unquestioned power of the state. Had he graduated from high-school and gone on to college and graduate school, his conditioning in the statist mindset might have been completed. He might even have received a PhD or JD degree that would have allowed him to ascend to the upper heights of the establishment pyramid, from whence – like his accusers – he would not risk his position amongst other elitists.

If his lack of a diploma is not enough to condemn this young man, consider this: he had contributed $500 to the Ron Paul political campaign! Now the entire libertarian movement can be smeared as “traitorous.” It is those who continue to ask questions about the legitimacy – or even the legality – of governmental behavior that undermine authority. If individuals are troubled by what the state is doing, they should confine their complaints to government officials! Speak truth to power, but never to the powerless! “Truth,” as Mark Twain reminded us, “is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” If you object to the corruption of the Mafia, take the matter up with your godfather! If you are critical of the corruption, violence, looting, wars, and other actions of the government, write a letter to your congressman – who has helped to create these conditions – and ask him to do something about it. Had the Scholls and other White Rose members addressed their complaints to the Gestapo, all problems would have been corrected, right? Right?

Messrs. Manning, Assange, and Snowden apparently took literally the message that has been plastered on public buildings, subways, airports, and billboards: “if you see something, say something.” What the “something” is, and to whom your report is to be made, are never indicated, but the reaction of the hacks is clear: don’t have that “something” be critical of the state or its owners!

Perhaps the most lackwitted condemnation of Mr. Snowden is found in the last resort to which all statists eventually come: the public opinion poll. More Americans condemn this man than support him. The Barrabas factor; turning to the well-conditioned mob, whose members probably did graduate from high-school, for the final verdict, has long served the interests of state power. Even now, idolaters of state power are hoping that the rest of us will remain firm in our conditioning, and join in their lynch-mob frenzy.

My judgments of other people have always rested on the nature of their actions, their demonstrations of character, and never on pedigree (however certified). Those whose behavior is grounded in respect for the inviolability of the life and property of others, who live peaceably with their neighbors, and who do not presume to use force to accomplish their purposes; impress me more than do people who can, without a break in meter, recite all the socially-correct bromides about peace, love, respect for others; but then resort to governmental coercion to resolve problems before them.

Those establishment defenders who condemn the Bradley Mannings, Julian Assanges, and Edward Snowdens, have yet to present an indictment that extends beyond the fact that these courageous men have spoken truths that embarrass the institutional power structure. Such consequences may be disruptive of the special interests of the establishment, but how ordinary people are harmed in the process is never explained. Snowden has revealed how the government has insisted on having access to every private piece of information regarding every American. If this is true, and if it serves any valid purpose of the state to have such power, how can it be wrong for Americans to be made aware of this fact? If the state is entitled to know everything about us, why aren’t we entitled to know all the details of state action?

The hacks’ thoughtless reaction to these revelations is the familiar one: it will help our enemies. But who are the “enemies” who might benefit from knowing the details of the state’s surveillance, wiretapping, e-mail snooping, DNA and medical records, and other attributes of “Big Brother”? In this regard, the hacks have unwittingly confirmed the insights of that noted 1950’s social philosopher, Pogo Possum when he advised that “we have met the enemy, and they is us.” You and I are the foe most feared by those who keep their power over us through our state-induced fears, ignorance, and belief in their necessity.

As Western Civilization is swept into the dust-bin of history, it is crucial for us to ask: what will replace it? What values, moral principles, economic understanding, and social practices will prevail in the future? You will not hear these questions asked by any of the establishment hacks – who will confine themselves to refashioning statism in a “new and improved” package. The hacks are as bankrupt as the dying culture to whose withering tentacles of power they so desperately cling. They will continue to entertain us with trivia from the lives of the political sinners, but will not explore either the causes of, or the alternatives to, what brought down our freer and more prosperous culture. They will not engage in such depths of inquiry for one reason: their minds do not work in any transcendent, principled manner. It is power, and power alone, that both impresses and motivates them.

As more soldiers die from suicide than from combat; as other soldiers earn medals while killing hundreds or even thousands of Afghan and Pakistani civilians with drones they control from facilities outside Las Vegas; as the police-state continues to metastasize; as the looting of the citizenry continues to benefit corporate-state interests who pay little, if any, taxes; and as the general material, spiritual, and socially-supportive nature of a decent society continues its decline, it is evident that all of mankind – including Americans – will need to engage in some highly-focused, principled, long-term thinking if we (i.e., ourselves, children and grandchildren, and species) are to survive this collective madness.

Manning, Assange, and Snowden have challenged each of us: will we, as the hacks and their owners continue to insist, do as we have been trained to do, namely, mind our own business and do as we are told by those in authority? Or shall we, like these courageous men – and the White Rose members before them – have the individualized ”arrogance” to believe that the fate of mankind is our business, and that we have a responsibility to act, with focused and peaceful energy, to help extricate ourselves from the collective arrogance of power that is destroying us?

Butler Shaffer Archives

This
originally appeared November 14, 2000.

With
the 2000 election behind us – if, indeed, it will ever be behind
us – I have now gone 36 years without participating in the
voting process. It was not always thus. Upon my graduation from
law school, my first full-time job was that of executive secretary
of the Nebraska Republican Party. I later became a member of the
State Central Committee, the Young Republican State Executive Committee,
one of the incorporators of Barry Goldwater's first national fund-raising
campaign, and a member of the Nebraska delegation to the 1964 Republican
National Convention. The Goldwater movement was the precursor to
the modern Libertarian Party, and was largely energized by young
men and women who were convinced that state power had become destructive
of individual liberty and social order, and that "working within
the system" could change all of that. My experiences in the
Republican Party convinced me otherwise. Like Karl Hess, a man who
was to become one of my dearest friends years later, I quickly lost
my appetite for politics and have never returned.

Is there a case to be made for voting? Indeed there is, if
one believes that social order is a quality that can be instilled,
by violence and other coercive means, by political authorities.
I do not accept this proposition. To the contrary, I believe that
social order is the product of unseen, spontaneous influences of
which most of us are not consciously aware. The study of economics
helped me to understand how we respond, marginally, to fluctuations
that are continuously generated by one another's self-seeking pursuits.
I also came to understand that politics – like a rock thrown
through a spider's web – disrupts these informal processes
as well as the existing patterns of interconnectedness upon which
any social order depends.

I
suspect that most of those reading these words share my sense of
liberty and social order, and so I shall not address the mindset
of the statists herein. I understand the temptation, born largely
of a sense of frustration, of wanting to participate in the political
process in order to get persons elected who more closely reflect
one's views. The illusion of a short-term reduction in the rate
of increase of state power clouds the longer-term consequences inherent
in political participation. Political systems derive their power
not from guns and prisons, but from the willingness of those
who are to be ruled to expend their energies on their behalf. For
state power to exist, a significant number of men and women must
sanction the idea of being ruled by others, a sanction that
depends, ultimately, upon the credibility of those who exercise
such power. When we vote in an election, we are declaring, by our
actions, our support for the process of some people ruling others
by coercive means. Our motivations for such participation
– even if they be openly expressed as a desire to bring state
power to an end – do not mitigate the fact that our energies
are being employed on behalf of the destructive principle that liberty
and social order can best be fostered through the coercive machinery
of the state.

One
of the sadder comments that I heard, just prior to the recent election,
was from a radio talk show host whose thoughtful and analytical
mind I generally respect. In response to a caller who complained
that Gov. Bush was philosophically inconsistent upon some issue,
he declared that "politics is the art of compromise,"
and that if one wanted principled consistency, one could find it
"only in a religion." It is this attitude upon which I
wish to focus, for I believe that the conflicts we experience –
both within ourselves as individuals and socially – derive
from a sense of division. The attitude that one's philosophic
principles are nothing more than interesting "ideas" that
have no relevance to how we behave with others – an attitude
that is implicit in this talk show host's remarks – is what
is destroying us, both individually and societally. It derives from
the same sentiment, articulated in the actions of Bill Clinton,
that truth-telling is simply one of a number of strategies available
in efforts to reach political "compromise"; that a lie
is as good as the truth if you can get others to believe it. It
is the notion that principles are nothing more than fungible commodities
– to be traded according to the prices dictated by prevailing
fashion – that now directs the seemingly endless cycle of vote
recounts in Florida. As Groucho Marx put it: "Those are my
principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

I have long found nourishment in the words of Richard Weaver: "ideas
have consequences." If I am of the view that politics is destroying
our world – and let us not forget that politics managed to
kill off some 200,000,000 of our fellow humans in the 20th
century alone – am I prepared to direct my energies into such
a destructive system? If I answer "yes," which I would
do if I voted, then do my philosophic principles have any real-world
meaning to them, or are they simply amusing ideas to be talked about,
debated, or dispersed across cyberspace? If I cannot end the division
within myself by living with integrity (i.e., by having my
behavior and my principles integrated into a coherent whole) then
what hope is there for the rest of mankind doing so? I am mankind,
as are you, and as Carl Jung so eloquently put it: "if the
individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be
either"; that the individual must realize "that he is
the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists
in the salvation of the individual soul." To participate in
politics is to consciously devote one's energies to mass-mindedness;
to the statist proposition that collective thinking and collective
behavior preempt the will of the individual.

Still,
there is a basis for optimism. Just as the marketplace generates
its own responses to government regulatory schemes, there are informal
processes at work undercutting the foundations of statism. The collapse
of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of state socialism generally;
anti-taxation and secessionist movements throughout the world; the
study of chaos – whose major tenet that complex systems are
unpredictable strips away any rationale for state planning and control;
the Internet as an unrestrained expression of information and ideas;
and, in America, the contributions of Clinton and Gore to bringing
discredit upon and destroying the credibility not only of the presidency,
but of government itself, have all been major contributors to the
terminal condition of Leviathan. How remarkable, that the Internet
– which Al Gore advised us he created! – should now be
the undoing of the imperial presidency that he and Mr. Clinton sought
to enlarge! What better confirmation of the power of unintended
consequences!

At no period in my lifetime have the opportunities for reversing
the dehumanizing nature of politically dominated societies been
greater. Leviathan is dying as a consequence of its inner contradictions.
Those of us who love liberty should rethink any temptations we might
have to rush to the deathbed of statism and attempt to revivify
its corpse by giving it a transfusion of our energies. The society
upon which statism has fed will doubtless undergo a few headaches,
fevers, and upset stomachs in the interim. But like a case of the
flu, it may be better to let the sickness run its course rather
than continue our habit of suppressing the symptoms.

Butler
Shaffer [send
him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University
School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In
Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition,
1918–1938
and of Calculated
Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.
His latest book is Boundaries
of Order.

Butler
Shaffer Archives

Recently by Butler Shaffer: The Mirror Speaks

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Congressional renewal of the federal Violence Against Women Act is generating a good deal of discussion in the media, academia, and political forums over what sounds like a noncontroversial topic. Is there to be a debate on the question of whether violence should be visited upon women? Are there articulate "pro" and "con" positions to be heard and evaluated on the propriety of brutalizing females? Might this be the time to recall W.C. Fields' answer to the question: "do you believe in clubs for women?," to which he replied "only when kindness fails"?

Owners of the established order insist that their serfs limit the range of their inquiries to subjects that do not disturb the tranquility of their minds. The owners depend upon a select group to be the keepers of the questions to be asked in our world, and woe unto those who dare wander beyond the boundaries of the permitted. Journalist Peter Arnett, television personality Bill Maher, and presidential candidate Ron Paul suffered the consequences of daring to raise unapproved questions.

One of the deadliest practices in which we humans engage involves identifying ourselves with abstractions — such as institutions, belief systems, and other entities — which, by definition, lie beyond our individual selves. In so doing, we not only separate ourselves from others, but substitute the interests and values of the abstractions for our inner personal sense of meaning and direction. In each instance, we generate the psychological and societal conflicts and contradictions that define our world. I explored this topic in my book, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.

An all-too-common reaction to such conflict-driven behavior is to unconsciously engage in psychological projection or transference. This involves attributing one's "dark side" feelings or fears to others; or the shifting of long-held emotions from one person to another. In either instance, the person engaging in such practices operates on the illusion that, by transferring the source of the problem to another, the inner sense of discord can be resolved. Modern politics could not exist without such thinking, as groups endeavor to control state power in efforts to punish, reform, or otherwise regulate their respective herds of scapegoats.

As our world becomes increasingly politicized — with the range of state power reaching ever deeper into the details of human action — there is a growing awareness that all political systems are the organization and mobilization of violence. It is not just that such institutions employ violence, but that enjoying a monopoly on the use of violence is what defines them. Persons who identify themselves with a nation-state often find it disturbing to realize, even unconsciously, that the system with which they find their meaning in life might behave contrary to other values they hold. This can cause them to either deny or suppress the evidence of the wrongdoing. This is why — following the end of World War II — so many German people were unwilling to acknowledge the tyrannical nature of the Nazi regime (see, e.g., Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free). It also helps to explain the actions of so many Republicans booing Ron Paul for his maintaining that America's militaristic foreign policy has been responsible for most anti-American sentiments throughout the world.

The politically-faithful try to resolve any unconscious inner turmoil by projecting their "dark side" traits onto others. Institutionalized minds are unwilling to consider causal explanations for destructive, violent behavior by looking within the system with which they identify their sense of being. To do otherwise not only indicts the agency with which they have entwined their egos, but condemns themselves for [1] being indistinguishable from the collective wrongdoer, and [2] allowing their thinking to be taken over by such external purposes.

As one's nation-state expands its violence throughout the world, enlarges its use of torture and police-brutality, and operates under the direction of a president who announces his rightful authority to kill persons of his choosing, one wonders if a point might arise at which even the most submissive follower questions the premises of the system? The nature of life — including its spiritual qualities — cannot be wholly repressed, no matter the degree of intimidation, force, and other influences brought to bear on behalf of the proposition "my country, right or wrong." No matter how deeply this life force is suppressed, it will eventually erupt with volcanic force to proclaim its primacy over the institutional sociopaths who want to control and manipulate it for their anti-life purposes.

How are statists to react to the growing expression of discontent and anger over the destructive nature of political systems? Bear in mind that a collective mindset is essential to the mobilization of energies upon which state power depends. Such thinking requires the conflicts that necessarily result from the division of mankind into mutually-exclusive identity groupings. When people organize themselves and their interests according to racial, ethnic, religious, gender, nationality, or other categories, such divisions generate the discord that superficial minds interpret as the confirmation of Thomas Hobbes' view of human nature as a constant struggle of "all against all."

Focusing upon the topic of "violence against women" reinforces the intergroup conflicts upon which politics is grounded. It is as though some transcendent principle is at stake in the outcome of the discussion or legislation. But who could possibly be in favor of such violence? Who might engage in such acts of cruelty? Why men, of course! Feminism has long been based on the proposition that, throughout human history, "men" have suppressed and exploited "women" for their distinct purposes. Without recognizing that it is the coercive powers of the state that systematically allows some to subdue others, many feminists now insist upon the "equal right" of women to be ground up in the machinery of war. Some have gone so far as to advance the illusion that the process of sexual reproduction — a product of millions of years of biological evolution and not male dominance — is a form of rape.

In order to reinforce the boundaries of collective identities — to keep the respective herds together — it is essential to continually reinforce the idea that other groups of people represent a collective threat to one's own. Racism, homophobia, bigotry, exploitation, terror, and prejudice are the more notable words used by some to describe the threats posed by others. When the eminent political philosopher, George W. Bush, declared "if you're not with us, you're against us," he was articulating the mindset that mature people long ago left on the grade-school playground.

"Violence against women?" What about the problem of violence against people, an issue that might dissolve intergroup identities and bring about a common purpose of men and women to confront the deadly practices — such as war — that are destroying humanity? Ahhh, but concern for "violence against people" implicates the political system that depends for its existence upon war. Randolph Bourne's warning that "war is the health of the state" was confirmed when, in the twentieth century alone, at least 200,000,000 people were killed by this depraved system through which so many continue to seek "meaning" or "purpose" to their lives. To inquire into the deeper nature of violence would raise questions that might soon put the established order out of business. Men and women may come to understand that violence is the very essence of government, and that political systems must regularly engage in its exercise in order to maintain and reinforce their authority over what Erasmus called the "many-headed multitude."

The destructive consequences of violent-driven behavior must be deflected to other causal explanations if the state is to sustain whatever credibility remains to it. This is why transference and projection are so useful to it. The current economic dislocations brought on by government regulatory and monetary policies become attributed to business "greed;" and as most people are totally ignorant of economics, they eagerly accept such an explanation. When a young man killed twenty children at a school in Connecticut, the boobeoisie accepted the proposition that guns were the cause, and that private ownership of such weapons — a long-sought establishment objective — must be eliminated. But when twenty-one children and fifty-some adults were murdered by the collective forces of the FBI and ATF, no voices were heard in the mainstream media, academia, or halls of Congress to abolish these agencies. Indeed, the song-and-dance one witnessed from these institutional voices was a condemnation of the victims for having "strange" religious views.

I believe most of us have an inner sense of the sacred nature of life, such that we are troubled — even unconsciously — when we see it purposefully destroyed or otherwise treated with disrespect. We can sympathize with the suffering of an animal because our ego identities are not drawn into conflict with it; but seek other expressions for — or choose to ignore — the miseries inflicted upon our fellow humans by the systems with which we identify our sense of being. Thus, David Koresh was to blame for the machine-gunning, gassing, and burning to death of the Branch Davidians; Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been justifiably killed for the offense of being, well, Iraqis and Afghans whose presence in their homes was not consistent with American and Israeli political ambitions.

As long as our conditioning drives us to separate ourselves into conflict-ridden groupings that institutional voices advise us are our "enemies" against whom we need the "protection" of the state, we shall continue the societal insanity that now defines "mankind." We must have the intelligence and courage to step outside the restrictive circles into which we compartmentalized ourselves. Only in so doing will we be able to withdraw our individual energies from the systematic violence with which we mindlessly destroy one another as well as ourselves.

The established order is desperately fighting for its survival against the individualizing and decentralizing energies that are causing vertical structures of force to collapse into horizontal networks of mutual connectedness. Its frantic efforts will intensify into an expansion of warfare, police brutality, surveillance, assassinations, imprisonment without trial, torture, and whatever other tools of violence it deems useful for maintaining its power over the rest of us. There is no level of theatrics, propaganda disguised as "news," contrived threats or disasters, or other means that will not be used to reinforce the collective mindset. One need only watch films of Hitler's harangues to stadiums filled with tens of thousands of men and women caught up in the fervor of a frenzied, mob mentality to see such powerful dynamics in action.

There are no limits to what the institutional elite may resort to maintain its power. Your first line of defense is to withdraw your energies from the violent and destructive games upon which the elitists depend. When such people refer to children as "our most important assets" or "resources," they are inadvertently telling you of your status in the political arrangement. You, too, are but an "asset," a form of state-owned property, a "resource" to be used for whatever ends suit the elitists, but certainly not for purposes of your own.

You will be encouraged to maintain your differences with other groups of equally-conditioned people, with the state intervening to referee the disputes it has carefully constructed. It matters not whether your groupings consist of "men" against "women," "blacks" against "whites," "gays" against "straights," "immigrants" against "native-born," "businessmen" against "consumers," "labor" against "management," or any of a seemingly endless supply of paired opponents. It is sufficient that you insist upon the priorities of your group and, in so doing, continue to keep the game going!

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives

Recently by Butler Shaffer: Schools as Black-Holes

"He knows what he's doing — we trained him."

~ Charlie Beck, Los Angeles Chief of Police

Los Angeles police officers and administrators continue to look over their shoulders, fearing the sight of one of their former comrades, Chris Dorner, who has threatened to retaliate for his firing from the department in 2008. His contention is that his employment was terminated without required due process, for the offense of reporting an alleged act of brutality by a fellow officer upon a suspect. Dorner — also a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy — is alleged to have killed three persons with ties to the police system. Angry that his name was tarnished by the LAPD action taken against him, Dorner has written: "You're going to see what a whistleblower can do when you take everything from him, especially his NAME!!!"

For a number of days, Americans have been fixated on this story, which has received far greater attention than would have been the case had a former police officer killed a few teenagers. Indeed, so irrational has been the reaction of some LA area cops that two women delivering newspapers — one a 71-year-old grandmother — had their pickup truck riddled with 30 to 40 bullets fired at them by police officers! Shortly thereafter, another pickup truck was fired at by other police officers who apparently had mistaken the driver for Dorner.

There is nothing comical about people being wounded or killed, but this saga does have a superficial theater-of-the-absurd quality to it, something one might expect from a low-budget Hollywood film. The police system and its lapdog media take seriously any threats or embarrassments to that system or any of its members. According to Dorner, it was his crossing of the "Blue Line" (the unspoken offense of reporting police wrongdoing) that led to his dismissal from the force. Police officers who brutalize or kill what Will Grigg calls the "mundanes" are rarely called to account for their actions.

But the Dorner/LAPD drama goes beyond just the inherently vicious nature of all police systems. The state is, by definition, an agency that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. As such, those who act to enforce governmental action — be they police officers or the military — are necessarily wrapped up in the exercise of institutionalized violence against people. Grade-school children are trained to chant the mantra "the policeman is your friend" which, out on the streets, is interpreted as "the policeman will probably not hurt you if you obey his every whim and call him u2018sir.'"

It is the entire political system that is characterized by the arbitrariness of violence. While states like to hide behind such abstractions as "constitutions," "bills of rights," "habeas corpus," and other pretended "limitations" on their powers, the harsh reality is that such language is always subject to interpretation, and government officials insist upon being the translators. This is how — and why — the powers of government are given expansive constructions, while supposed limitations on government authority are interpreted very narrowly.

The Bushobama years have revealed to millions of thoughtful minds — particularly those of the younger generation — the fraudulent, corrupt, vicious, and destructive nature of the state. It is increasingly difficult to find young men and women who can recite, with a straight face, the catechism "we are the government." Gandhi's observation that "nonviolence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another" is more widely understood by today's youth than by their grandparents.

I am reminded of the closing scene in Orwell's Animal Farm, where the livestock who had been systematically exploited by the pigs look in the farm house window to see their swinish rulers living it up with the humans from whom the animals thought they had been liberated. Every political system is a conspiracy, enforced by legally-defined violence, by which the few are able to promote their interests at the expense of the many. The Chris Dorner/LAPD theater has become a road-show, allowing many more people to discover the destructive nature of the game being played at their expense.

Dorner's lengthy manifesto is no challenge to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Paine's Common Sense, or Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. To minds unaccustomed to complexity — minds that are unable to distinguish explanations of events from justifications — no purpose will be seen in reading his words, or considering them in the context of the political environment in which we live.

In case anyone should fail to understand my point, let me emphasize that there is no justification for Mr. Dorner's physical attacks — or threatened attacks — on others. Whatever degree of anger and resentment he has against the LAPD does not warrant the wounding or killing of members of this group or of any one else.

But for the sake of intelligent thinking, ask yourself this question: where might this man have gotten the idea that his campaign had any legitimacy? Others in the political hierarchy have long been playing out the premises upon which his actions have been undertaken? I have written, for some time, about how our politically-dominated culture is in decline; how the top-down, vertically-structured systems of centralized control are collapsing into horizontal networks of decentralized cooperation. The political establishment continues to forcibly resist such peaceful, liberating transformations, calling upon its appointed sock-puppet, President Bushobama, to use whatever tools of violence at the government's disposal to maintain the established power-structure.

To this end, Bushobama undertook wars against Iraq and Afghanistan — nations whose residents posed no threat to Americans — and extended such brutishness into acts of torture and other forms of degradation against prisoners; imprisoning people without trial; and killing men, women, and children for no other "offense" than the bad judgment of having been born outside the United States! If American presidents are allowed to declare wars against nations of their choosing, why should we be shocked when Mr. Dorner declares war against the LAPD?

It is worthy of attention that, in the same week the Dorner/LAPD matter arose, another Chris — the Navy's most effective sniper, Chris Kyle, credited with the killing of 160 Iraqis — was killed at a shooting range, allegedly by another Marine who suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome. The federal government recently acknowledged that an average of some twenty-two soldiers and veterans commit suicide every day, a statistic confirming that the human costs of military violence are paid not only by those residing in foreign lands, but by the emotional and spiritual destruction of American warriors.

And while Mr. Dorner was allegedly fulfilling the details of his manifesto, a New York Times editorial was calling into question the reasoning behind President Obama's claimed power to order the killing of American citizens. In what significant ways do the rationales of these two men differ? Doesn't each operate from the premise that there may be persons who need to be killed in order to further important policies; that each man's considered judgment satisfies the legal niceties of "due process?" If presidents can engage in horrific acts against the millions without negative repercussions, why should other persons not feel qualified to emulate such conduct?

Those who have no interest in plumbing the sordid depths to which our culture has descended will find it easy to pass off Dorner's comments as nothing more than the rants of a mentally disturbed man, or to follow the lead of weak-minded men and women who blame inanimate objects — guns — for the violence that dominates our politically-dominated world. Dorner's words do not justify his actions, but they may offer a symptom of what our thinking has made of society and of our relationships to one another. He may be a mirror that reflects the logical extension of our unexamined assumptions about the necessary conditions for social order. The closing comments in this man's manifesto provide more of an explanation of our well-organized destructiveness than what I have heard from others: "I am the walking exigent circumstance you created."

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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Never let school interfere with your education.

~ Mark Twain

There is an old joke about how knowledge accumulates in universities: students enter college, knowing everything, and graduate knowing nothing. In this way does knowledge continue to grow within universities. My years of experience in what is referred to as "higher education" inform me that there is more than sophomoric humor in this description.

As I have recently written, my all-time favorite teacher and professor of anything was Malcolm Sharp, with whom I studied at the University of Chicago Law School. Malcolm was straight out of central-casting as a loving grandfather type, he was also a master of the Socratic method of learning. It was through the processes of continued inquiry, the refinement of one's questions, that his students began to experience the understanding that answers do not provide. Only discovering how to go deeper and deeper into the asking of questions does understanding arise. This is why learning how to think has far greater significance for one's life than learning what to think.

Ask yourself whether, at any stage in your formalized education, you were encouraged to think outside the boundaries of the assigned curriculum. Were the institutional keepers of the questions you were expected to pursue tolerant of any independent inquiries you might undertake? Might continued efforts to pursue your own agenda of discovery land you in the principal's office or, worse, subject you to behavior-modifying drugs or other treatment? At what point — if at all — did it become evident to you that the system of formal education to which you had been sentenced had, as its purpose, the turning of you and your fellow inmates into well-conditioned servo-mechanisms whose energies were to be devoted to fostering institutional interests?

I have long been of the view that the earlier children are able to experience a free and unstructured environment for learning, the greater the likelihood they will carry an epistemological independence with them. Having experienced the joy and energy that accompanies an unfettered exploration of one's world makes a child less vulnerable to the people-pushers who see him or her only as "resources" to be exploited.

Our prior learning has the dual nature of both informing and constraining our inquiries. Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" reminds us that the observer is the observed; that what we see is filtered through the lenses of what we have seen previously; that our prior experiences provide the categories and other concepts with which we define the present. This is why — contrary to the faith of the Objectivists — we can never be certain that what we know and observe comports with "reality." That our learning may, in fact, be identical with "reality" does not overcome the inherent and inevitable character of the subjective nature of what we know. Such an awareness compels us to refine the Cartesian proposition "I think, therefore I am," into "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."

By definition, we are unable to contrast how much we know about the universe with what is possible to know. I shall nonetheless offer this analogy: imagine that what you and I know — or think we know — about the universe is contained within a child's marble. Then imagine this marble situated in the state of California. Believing in the sufficiency of our experiences within the marble, we presume that the rest of the universe operates on the same principles and dynamics as those with which we are familiar. Why do we do this? Whether one subscribes to the "Book of Genesis" or the "Big Bang" explanation for the origins of the universe, there is an underlying assumption that "existence" must have some identifiable point of beginning. Upon what do we rely for this presumption? Is it not evident that both hypotheses are drawn from our prior — and very limited — learning; that "reality" may exhibit itself in causal patterns that we cannot even imagine could exist?

The institutional establishment finds it essential to its interests to keep our knowledge of reality confined to within the boundaries of the marble it controls. To this end, the educational system is charged with the task of conditioning the minds of people to learn what is serviceable to members of the prevailing order. Students — whether they be children or adults — are provided with a great deal of knowledge, generally in the form of information, skills, doctrines, or other lore that can be utilized on behalf of institutional purposes. Learning that is not so useful tends to be treated, at best, as a form of entropy (i.e., energy unavailable for productive work) or, at worst, disruptive of established ends. Learning that fosters a deeper, institutional purposeless — or, worse yet, threatening — understanding is to be discouraged.

Most schools operate as little more than robot factories, training students to provide answers to the limited range of questions that prepare young minds to perform their roles as institutional automatons. The questions that students are permitted to ask are largely confined to enhancing performance in their assigned functions, but never to ask why they are robots!

When the County of Los Angeles published a pamphlet stating that children must be taught "that we are all part of one big social system," and "must learn how to participate effectively" within that system, it confirmed Ivan Illich's observation that "once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort." Another government school system informs us that those who resist such conditioning are to be fed into the "juvenile delinquency" system "to correct the pupils' maladjustments."

The idea of a coercively-enforced system of learning is so contrary to the self-interest-driven nature of life that many students seek to avoid it, whether by physically dropping out of school (that horrible crime known as "truancy"), or just not doing the assigned work, or otherwise pursuing one's own agenda rather than that of the teacher. Whatever alternative the student pursues, the more independent student is labeled as suffering from "attention-deficit disorder" (i.e., the unwillingness to remain bored by the prescribed curricula and the teacher's rote methods of teaching subjects of little interest to intelligent minds). For the more grievous offenders, the state's criminal-law system (i.e., juvenile courts) await. In the interim, students may find themselves subjected to Big-Pharma's collection of "behavior-modification" drugs in order "to correct the pupils' maladjustments." The connection that has been made between prescribed psychotropic drugs and school-shootings has been conveniently ignored by most establishment voices. Those who prefer to look for causal explanations in guns would do well to ask themselves why so many of these mass-killings take place at government schools!

The state continues its systematic corruption of our natural disposition for learning, insisting upon its agenda for conditioning minds into becoming institutional servo-mechanisms. The established order — consisting of political systems, major corporations, the mainstream media, organized religions, schools, and academia – has long been at war with the kind of learning that generates understanding rather than obedience, a battle that is, once again, being waged against the technology (e.g., Internet) that puts learning back into the hands of individuals.

Answers tend to short-circuit the processes by which minds dig deeper in search of the refinement of questions that foster understanding. But in our modern world, schools are not engaged in helping students learn how to clarify the quality of their inquiries, or to help them discover deeper, inner meanings to their lives. Most schools are in the certification business, attesting to the next level of institutional interests the qualifications of their graduates. High schools certify students to colleges; colleges certify their alums to either corporate employers or to graduate schools; professional graduate schools (e.g., medicine, law) certify students to state licensing agencies; while licensing boards certify these would-be practitioners to the public.

In the course of this institution-serving system of training, young minds must be inoculated against exposure to ideas that engender the kinds of inquiries, speculations, and discoveries that tend to a more individualized sense of being and purpose in life. Therein lies the breeding ground for understanding, and it is such existential awareness that must be kept out of the human psyche. Like black holes — whose gravitational forces prevent the emergence of any light — most schools work to suck understanding out of the minds of their students, a function whose successes are reflected in the confusions, conflicts, and contradictions of our world.

The nature of the struggle that goes on for control of our minds has been no better expressed than by the late creative genius Steve Jobs. In discussing his experiences with elementary school, Jobs said: "I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me." My modification of Twain's earlier comment reads: never let education interfere with your learning; never allow assigned knowledge to undermine your understanding of yourself or the world.

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

~ Mark Twain

My wife and I are very fortunate: we have two automobiles that have the kindest, and most congenial and responsible dispositions. In the years that we have owned them, they have neither gotten us drunk and crashed us into a busload of schoolchildren, nor have they driven us along a freeway at 120 mph, weaving in and out of traffic. I might add that none of our previous cars engaged in any such acts, leaving me thankful that they have chosen not to endanger our safety, or that of our children and grandchildren. Perhaps my wife and I know how to select "nice" vehicles; cars with a pleasant state of mind; unlike those that manage to extend their powers of causation to other drivers.

As I write this article, I am informed that a van carrying Chinese kindergarten children plunged into a pond, killing eleven youngsters. Are we to conclude that Chinese vehicles are more inclined to destroy human life than are those in the West? We do know that there are various substances — such as alcohol, drugs, and tobacco — whose use forces men and women into an irresistible submission to their powers. We are also being told — by those who most of us accept as being more knowledgeable than ourselves (e.g., politicians, academicians, people in the mainstream media) — that guns also have this capacity to exercise their wills over us; to make us do their bidding.

Why are so many of us inclined to accept the proposition that inanimate things and forces in the universe have the capacity to act through intentionality; to substitute their will for ours, and to make us do things we might never choose to do on our own? The answer to this question can be traced back to the patterned conditioning to which we were subject in early childhood. Like our tribal ancestors, we modern humans embarked on institutionally-defined and centered social systems, and have been conditioned to think of ourselves as extensions of the organizations that have succeeded in setting their purposes above our own. In so doing, we have not only made ourselves subservient to institutions, but have become what David Riesman defined as "other-directed" persons. Truth, moral principles, useful standards of conduct, our sense of being and purpose in life, and all other considerations bearing upon human motivation and behavior, are qualities prescribed and enforced by authorities in the organizational hierarchy.

The underlying premises of such thinking are constantly reinforced by our parents, teachers, friends, the news and entertainment media, and other institutions which have a vested interest in the universalization of such a mindset. Most of us find it difficult to think of ourselves as being independent of such attachments. The processes by which we become indoctrinated in this externalized definition of ourselves go back at least to Plato and his superintending "philosopher kings." The particular forms by which the few are allowed to dominate and subdue the many are largely the products of an intelligentsia that has — in furtherance of their own interests — created systems that confine intelligence to the service of institutions.

The system that has proven to be the most destructive in pursuing this organizational premise has been the state. The disastrous, anti-life consequences of political behavior arise from the underlying definition of the state: an agency that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. Because it enjoys a monopoly on the use of force, those who believe that their interests can be better pursued through coercion rather than consent, find themselves attracted to the use of the state's violent machinery. As more and more people find themselves seduced by the trappings of violence, society becomes increasingly politicized.

The exercise of coercive power has always been the essence of political behavior. In a free market system, the interests of different parties are subject to contractual negotiation, never to the use of violence. If a buyer thinks that a retailer's asking price for a widget is too high, he will make a counter-offer which the retailer is free to accept or reject. The two parties either arrive at a mutually agreeable price, or the buyer takes his business elsewhere. The idea that the retailer could pull out a gun and threaten the would-be buyer with death if he did not agree to the seller's demand, would be so unthinkable as to make the evening news programs. For the state, however, the gun is always behind the demands of government officials, and negotiation or withdrawal are rarely an option available to the individual.

In recent years, the violent nature of state action has greatly expanded. Having been conditioned to accept the legitimacy of — and personal identification with — a system that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence, most people find it difficult to conceive of limitations on the use of such defining powers. As a consequence, arbitrariness and absoluteness have come to characterize the modern state. Because of the uncertain and unpredictable nature of complexity — coupled with a growing awareness of the self-serving character of the corporate-state — the resulting conflicts, contradictions, and turbulence produces a failure of the popular expectations of political systems to produce societal order.

With the increasing inability of political systems to satisfy their expected ends, they begin to experience dynamics similar to those about which Thomas Kuhn has written regarding revolutions in scientific thought. Kuhn observes, in the context of a scientific theory, that "the failure of existing rules is a prelude to a search for new ones." He then emphasizes that a major paradigm shift in thinking occurs not solely from such a failure, but only when a better model is available to replace the old one.

The traditional model of a vertically-structured society under the centralized authority of the state has shown itself unable to satisfy even the narrowest definition of societal order. Wars, depressions, genocides, torture, police-state brutalities, assassinations, economic dislocations, imprisonments without trials, and a twentieth century death toll of some 200,000,000 victims of state power, attest to the failure of political systems to provide their promised protection of life, liberty, property, and the creative processes that sustain a civilization. When popular expectations and real-world conduct continue to diverge, the failure of the old model leads intelligent minds to seek a new paradigm.

It must be remembered that political systems depend on the widely-held belief that transcendent moral principles are being served by the state apparatus: divine will, natural law rights of people, utilitarianism, egalitarianism, social contract, historical determinism, being the more familiar. But, through a combination of political failures and the emergence of technologies that allow for the decentralized communication of information and ideas, millions of people throughout the world have become aware of the fraudulent nature of all political systems no matter the rationale upon which they have been founded. They have also discovered that the "greatest good for the greatest number" always comes down to the "greatest good for the greatest guy;" that the rulers have never represented the interests of the ruled, but want nothing more — nor less — than the unrestrained power to pursue their ends through coercively-enforced obedience. The fluff and fool's gold that has been used to sanctify the state has largely eroded and been blown to the winds, leaving thoughtful minds with the realization that the state is nothing more than the systematic organization of unprincipled violence. Having a vested interest in maintaining the ignorance of the many has not assured the rulers of the passivity of its conscripts.

A consequence of the increasing politicization of society has been that the violence that defines the state has precipitated into the rest of the culture. Movies, television programs, and computer games have not been the causes of the proliferation of violence, but reflect the pervasive mindset of death and destruction loosed upon society by the very nature of politics. Presidents assert — and act upon — a presumed personal authority to declare wars against nations of their choosing, and to kill persons of their choosing, and few voices are heard in protest. And yet, when a few young men with troubled minds resort to mass killings at schools, movie theaters, or shopping malls, otherwise intelligent people fail to see — or pretend not to see — the causal connections. Preferring to address the symptoms rather than the causes of our politically-generated collective madness, people with bankrupt minds look for explanations in the guns used by these killers.

Politicians, academicians, and media hacks were quick to exploit the murders at Newtown, Connecticut, feigning genuine sympathy for the kindergarten victims and their families in order to promote the long-held desire of establishment owners to disarm those they rule. These five- and six-year old murder victims should be mourned, but as an act of genuine human emotion, not of political opportunism. If there was any sincerity in those who use the deaths of these twenty children — and five adults — to plump for more violent government power over those who did not engage in the murders, why were their voices utterly silent when, in 1993, the federal government — acting through the FBI, the BATF, and other agencies — murdered twenty-one children and fifty-five adults at the Branch Davidian site in Waco? With the use of gas, tanks, armed helicopters, machine guns, and fire, the deaths of so many innocent people was met with a collective yawn by the politically-correct, who rationalized the slaughter on the grounds that the Branch Davidians had strange religious beliefs! If the murders of twenty children in Connecticut merit depriving peaceful people of their weapons, why doesn't the earlier killing of twenty-one children by the collective force of the federal and state governments warrant the shutting down of political systems; the agencies of violence upon which the establishment owners depend for maintaining their authority over the rest of mankind?

In order to institutionalize its powers of violence, the political order is dependent upon neutralizing the intelligence of those to be ruled, so as to discourage the questioning that fosters understanding. Government schools and the mainstream media serve these ends, programming minds that would never inquire whether there are any limits to state power, and relying upon government officials (e.g., the Supreme Court) to tell them if any such boundaries exist.

As wars proliferate against people who have caused Americans no harm; as government monetary and taxation policies continue to transfer wealth from those who have produced it to the privileged elites who want it; as the state insists upon acquiring more and more details of our private lives, while demanding the secrecy of its own behavior; when people's lives and liberty are put in jeopardy by the whims of presidents; it becomes increasingly evident that the alleged moral principles political systems are reputed to serve represent nothing more than the rationalization of power. When the image of government ceases being Edmund Burke's "contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants," and becomes what former Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, called "government by crony," the system loses any popular sanction, save for those who fashion themselves as beneficiaries of the looting and violence.

As the state loses the respect and awe in which we have been conditioned; as a new age of young minds — adept at employing the developing technologies that exponentially expand the flow of information and ideas — begin to question the existing order; and as the dinosaurs of "America's [so-called] greatest generation" take their politically-serving bromides and basic premises with them down history's "memory hole," a widespread loss of innocence about the nature of politics is accelerating. In the face of growing disaffection, along with the emergence of alternative, non-political practices, the state is resorting to increased violence in a desperate effort to shore up its collapsing foundations and sustain its dominance.

To borrow from Thomas Kuhn's work, I believe that Western Civilization is at a point where a fundamental paradigm shift in social thinking is occurring. Relating his study to the topic at hand, Kuhn tells us that "political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense . . . that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created." Kuhn adds that such revolutions "aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit."

If Kuhn is correct, we might ask ourselves to what source(s) young men and women of an emerging paradigm will look as they begin to flesh out new visions for a world grounded in peace, liberty, and the inviolability of every individual?

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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Recently by Butler Shaffer: Learning Begins From Within

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

~ Arthur Miller

How convenient for our political overseers: there has been another mass-shooting — this time at a Connecticut grade-school — in which many adults and young children were murdered. Members of the mainstream media, politicians, and other government officials are being turned loose to share their lack of critical thinking with a public conditioned to await their direction. With the kind of frenzy exhibited by a monkey that has been bitten by a scorpion, establishment sock-puppets quickly respond with proposals to further enhance state power while, at the same time, shrinking individual liberty. Taking the advice of the neo-Machiavellian Rahm Emanuel — that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" — the victims in Connecticut will join those in the Oregon shopping mall, Columbine and Aurora, Colorado, and elsewhere, to be exploited on behalf of disarming Americans.

The news coverage of this latest atrocity follows a predictable pattern: police officers, armed soldiers, and federal FBI and ATF functionaries, are on the scene as a reminder of the top-down system of order that the shootings have just refuted. The mayor, state governor, and president each holds a press conference to assure their respective herds that all is under control, their control. In a world in which vertically-structured institutions are collapsing into horizontal networks, the established order is desperate to reinforce its authority to control what it is clearly unable to do. The mantra "we will find out what went wrong and fix it so that it doesn't happen again" becomes less and less persuasive to those who understand that "insanity" is exhibited by those who keep repeating the same actions, expecting different results.

President Obama shed his crocodile tears for the latest group of victims. As he began to speak, and before the president pretended to wipe tears from his eyes, CNN informed us that "Obama Weeps Over School Massacre": sure, just as he continues to weep over the tens of thousands of children and other innocent victims of his wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and any other places he might arbitrarily choose to attack. He then spoke of the need to take "meaningful action" to prevent such murderous acts in the future. Gosh, I wonder what such "actions" might entail? Were he sincere in his professed concern for the killing of children, he might choose to reward — rather than attempt to destroy — Julian Assange who used his WikiLeaks site to show videos of American soldiers, in helicopters, machine-gunning journalists, innocent children, and other civilians in Iraq!

Seeking to limit the private ownership of guns is about as irrational a response to violence as would be a proposal to eliminate the private ownership of cars in order to prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of people who are killed annually in auto accidents. The LA Times informs us that, on the same day as the Connecticut shootings, a man in China attacked twenty-two schoolchildren and an adult with a knife, an occurrence that "was reminiscent of a spate of knife attacks on schoolchildren that took place across China in 2010." The same news story informs us that a young man had been arrested following the box-cutter slashing of a number of young women on a subway. The report ends with a reference to China's stringent gun-control laws.

Should these events engender restrictions on knife-ownership? And what about those who might resort to golf clubs, baseball bats, or pipe-wrenches to carry out their murderous intentions? Of course, it is a public armed with more powerful weapons — ones that would allow people to defend themselves against state weaponry — that troubles the statists. Dead children are but convenient victims to be exploited by the shedders of faux tears in an effort to further weaken the defenses of ordinary people.

I could offer my own "solution" to the mass killings with which the media entertains us: these shootings tend to take place within the confines of institutions and other large organizations. Government schools and universities, corporate businesses, churches, shopping malls, among other systems reflect what Leopold Kohr called the "size theory of social misery." Perhaps, drawing upon work done in the study of "chaos," it could be said that large organizations are "attractors" for violent activity; that we ought to be focusing our attentions on reducing the size of our social systems.

While I agree with such a systemic analysis of events in our world, it does not go deeply enough to explain the source of our difficulties. Like so much of our confusion, we focus attention on the consequences of our behavior, rather than upon such causal factors as the thinking that produces dysfunctional results. To continue going deeper for explanations for our troublesome conduct leads us, eventually, into the depths of our own understanding; into how we lead lives conditioned by those who would benefit from our having subservient minds. To such depths most of us fear to go, and so we settle for superficial explanations: guns, rock music, violent films, illegal drugs, television, produce the conflict and disorder in our lives! Such thinking presumes that we are little more than mechanisms upon which the inanimate world exercises its free will! The idea that "things" can cause us to act in ways we are unable to resist is a reversion to the kind of childhood thinking that sees power in our toys, blankets, and other material things. But it is precisely to that level of childish thinking to which we must be reduced if we are to remain subject to institutional domination!

Most of us are uncomfortable thinking beyond the infantile mindset that allows us to avoid the responsibility for our own actions. Our parents — or, in the case of political functionaries, our super-parents — will gladly bear this burden for us, in exchange for our obedience to their most arbitrary decisions. The distress that arises from the movement of thought within our minds is too much for most of us to tolerate. In a world of politically-defined "entitlements," we accept the implicit assumption that we deserve an unburdened and comforted mind; that the conflicts, contradictions, and dehumanized consequences of our thinking cannot be traced back to us; and that politicians and media gurus will "weep" for us — or pretend to do so — so that we need not experience the insanity of a roomful of dead five-year old children whose deaths were caused not by some twisted sense of responsibility found in guns, but by patterns of thought we insist on embracing! As is the case for so much of the normal neurosis of our culture, let us seek explanations in places other than the site we wish to avoid.

Most of us live lives that worship and are entertained by the systematic violence and destruction of others. What video games do not condition the minds of young people to rapidly push buttons that kill an endless supply of "enemies?" How many motion pictures embrace peace and love as themes, while the noisiest and bloodiest films abound? How many parents dress their children — as well as themselves — in the popular style of battlefield camouflage? What are children expected to learn from this ubiquitous celebration of the organized killing of those identified, by political authorities, as "the enemy?" What is the lesson to be derived from bumper-stickers that read "support the troops war;" or the mob-like booing — by make-believe Christians — of a Ron Paul who dared to suggest that America pursue a foreign policy based on Jesus' "golden rule?"

The day following this latest atrocity, media babblers began to inquire: "what could have motivated this young man?" While some reports inform us that this man — like so many previous mass-killers — was on prescribed psychotropic drugs that often produce violent and suicidal responses — little attention was focused on this fact. Such drugs are part of the arsenal with which the institutional order seeks to control its herd, and any mention of their adverse effects is thus to be avoided in seeking explanations. Not to upset the passive mindset of their viewers — something media employers insist upon as a condition of employment — the usual causal suspects will be dragged out for blame. But it is not in guns, motion pictures, video-games, or bumper-stickers that explanations are to be found. All of these things — objects lacking in will — are nothing more than expressions of the purposes and values to be found within our own minds. It is our thinking that generates demands for such things, and it is to our thinking that we must repair if we are truly desirous of ending our participation in the madness of our world.

A news report that followed the recent shooting at an Oregon shopping mall informed us that the killer had long desired a career in the Marines. The after-effects of a broken foot, however, disqualified him from the Marine Corps, a situation that made him quite angry. Somewhere in his youth, he apparently envisioned himself a participant in this vicious, life-destroying agency of the state. What learning — and from what sources — helped influence such thinking on his part? Being unable to join would-be comrades in the indiscriminate killing of strangers in the Middle East, did he decide to take out his anger upon other unknown persons at a shopping mall? Is there any intelligent mind that is prepared to argue that guns made him do what he did?

If for no other reason than the safety of their children, I suspect that the atrocities that occurred in Connecticut will lead many parents to take their children out of government schools — which are often the targets of such attacks — and enroll them in private schools or participate in the growing homeschooling movement. Such a move, by itself, will not end our institutionalized violence, but it may provide an environment in which one's child is less likely to become either a victim or a perpetrator of such insane acts as occurred in Connecticut.

The only solution to the collective madness of our world lies in the processes of individuation. Carl Jung made the point as explicitly as can be stated: "if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption." It is neither politicians, media voices with their make-believe expressions of grief, nor self-styled "experts" seeking "consolation" or "closure" that can restore our social sanity, but our individual selves — you and I — walking away from the mindless masses through which the established order pursues its ends while destroying our children.

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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Recently by Butler Shaffer: A Public ‘Thank You’

Never let school interfere with your education.

~ Mark Twain

Education is an ongoing confrontation between those who want to help children learn how to think, and those who want to teach them what to think. While there are numerous variations on these themes, the contrast can most clearly be found in the distinctions between child-centered Montessori systems, and teacher- and test-centered schools. Government schools usually fall into the latter category. Homeschooling, religious schools, un-schooling, and other forms tend to emphasize either the "how" or the "what" in their efforts with children.

Those who focus on learning how to think have in mind helping children develop their own methods of questioning and analyzing the world around them; to control their own inquiries and opinions; to the end of helping children become independent, self-directed persons. The role of the teacher in such a setting is to provide new learning situations (e.g., open up new subjects of inquiry when the student is ready to do so) and to facilitate the processes of questioning so as to help the students get to deeper levels of understanding.

People who have developed the capacity for epistemological independence are not easy to control for purposes that do not serve their interests. Institutions — which have purposes of their own that transcend those of individuals — require a mass-minded population that has been conditioned to accept outer-imposed definitions of "reality." Any deviation from this systemic purpose — as would derive from students questioning how the arrangement would benefit them — would be fatal to all forms of institutionalism.

The established order has, from one culture and time period to another, insisted on educational systems that train young minds into what to think. "Truth" becomes a set of beliefs that conform to an institutional imperative, and it becomes the purpose of schools to inculcate such a mindset. Whereas "how to think" learning that finds its purpose and focus within the minds of self-directed, independent students, "what to think" education derives from outside the students' experiences and analytical skills. As Ivan Illich so perceptively expressed it, "[s]chool is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

To this end, the established order has helped generate — with eager assistance from academia — a belief that all understanding is a quality requiring phalanxes of self-styled "experts" who, by virtue of their prescribed status, enjoy monopolies to offer opinions about their respective fields of study. Plato's designation of "philosopher kings" has been sub-franchised into categories of "experts" to be found in "history," "physics," "psychology," "economics," "law," and seemingly endless sub-groupings that negate the role once respected for those who had received a "liberal arts" education.

Entry into the sanctum sanctorum of the upper floors of this pyramidal high-rise is determined by a process of certification usually reflected in a graduate school degree provided by those already recognized. Of course, given the logic of any vertically-structured system, there is a hierarchy of certifying agencies, wherein Ivy League universities are presumed more capable of identifying and recognizing expert genius, than would Boll Weevil State University. Nor is tolerance exhibited toward any interloper who might dare to offer an opinion outside his or her area of certification. (When my book, In Restraint of Trade was first published some fifteen years ago, one reviewer — from a history department at a highly-respected university — spent the bulk of his time criticizing not the substance of my book, but the fact that I taught in a law school!)

The assumption is often expressed that, in a complicated world we must rely on "experts" to navigate through the turbulence and uncertainties that abound. But the study of "chaos" and "complexity" challenge this thinking, reminding us that complex systems produce unpredictable outcomes; that the most effective action occurs when decision-making is decentralized closest to the source of such turbulence. In a world currently being destroyed by centralized state systems of "economic planning," "military planning," misnomered "intelligence agencies," "health-care planning," among others, it is increasingly evident to people that the certified "experts" tend to supply answers to problems that their epistemological arrogance has helped to generate.

Systems premised upon outer- rather than inner-directed learning — training students what to think rather than how to think — turn children's minds into so much "mush" as to deplete their inherent creative energies. People become neutralized by a system that trains them to accept the inadequacy of their own minds to make empirical and analytical judgments about the world. The outer-directed approach, in which "truth" is presumed to be found within the opinions of the certified intelligentsia, is self-sustaining as long as students' minds remain in the default mode. Expertism is a circular process that makes it difficult for people to break the circle unless they have a sufficiently independent mind.

The method of learning I have found essential for encouraging the inner-directed (i.e., how to think) approach is found in the use of the Socratic method, which used to be used in most law schools. My all-time favorite professor was Malcolm Sharp, a law professor at the University of Chicago, one of the loveliest persons I have ever known; but who frustrated most of his students with his insistence on getting us to keep refining the quality of our questions. This was done through an ever-deepening level of inquiry encouraged by the creative us of the word "why?"

To the proposition "government is necessary in order to protect the lives, property, and liberty of people" the following questions could be asked: "how is property being protected if the state must forcibly take property from people (taxation) in order to support its activities?" "Can liberty be protected if the state can compel people to act — or refrain from acting — in ways contrary to how they would otherwise choose to behave?" "How can lives be protected if the state is able to engage in deadly wars?" "If the war system generates restrictions on human action, including the forced conscription of people as soldiers, how is individual liberty being defended?" "If it is our purpose to protect the lives, liberty, and property of people, can such ends be served by a system that regularly contradicts such ends? Are there alternative ways to accomplish such purposes?" As each question is asked, the response might generate additional sub-questions to be explored (e.g., is it possible to support a system through voluntary payments? Is the marketplace an example of accomplishing these ends without violating them in the process?)

Most of my students experience frustration over my methods of providing them with cases and materials, and then playing around with hypotheticals — and the factual modification of hypotheticals — to explore the ramification of case holdings and rules of law. "I came to law school to get answers, one student raged, and all you're giving me is more questions!" "How do you propose to deal with legal questions once you are in practice?", I asked him. "And if you think I am such a fount of understanding, how do you think I got that way; and do you think you might be able to develop such a skill?" It is encouraging to find some students who grasp, at the outset, that their success in the classroom and as lawyers depends upon this process of learning how to think. I often receive favorable responses from students years later. I had one student tell me "when I was a student of yours, I hated your guts. Now that I've been out in practice for ten years, I think I learned more from you than from anyone else." Just a few months ago, a former student wrote me — thirteen years after graduation — to thank me for what she learned from my classes.

Perhaps the most pleasant experience I had with a first-year law student came on the first day of class a few years ago. We had discussed a particular case, and I began playing around with the facts to see how the students might follow the process of discovering the boundaries of legal concepts. At this stage, most students are able to give a one-line answer, but can go no further. This young woman, however, took the inquiry to greater depths: "how does this square with what the court said in the earlier case?," and similar inquiries. I knew, at once, that she was a real "keeper;" that classes were going to be far more interesting with her ability to use the Socratic process to discover the kind of understanding one never gets from answers; that it is the endless pursuit and improvement of one's questions that makes for real learning.

I asked this young woman about her educational background: "I was homeschooled up to high school," she responded. "The best teachers I ever had were my parents." I suspect that she was the beneficiary of parents who knew that how to think was of greater importance to a creative and successful life, than being conditioned into what to think! The former approach allows men and women to develop, within their own minds, the skills not only for understanding the nature of the world, but to act competently. The latter method reduces people to the task of seeking the opinions of others — particularly the "experts" — to be informed of what they are expected to know.

After working through a series of hypotheticals, I still get a few students who ask "but what is the answer?" "Who cares?," I respond. "It is going through the process of constant questioning that is the purpose of what we are doing here? I don't know how the courts would rule in this situation, but I do know what noises to make were I representing one of the parties." The Socratic method helps students grasp the meaning of Milton Mayer's observation that "the questions that can be answered aren't worth asking."

Our world is being torn apart by men and women who naively try to integrate into some manageable whole their confusions, contradictions, conflicts, lies, evasions, corrupt and violent dispositions, and other destructive behavior. We live at a time when people become righteously indignant over the heinous murder of another, but wave flags and cheer for those who conduct wars against the millions; when Nobel Peace Prize grantors cannot distinguish Mother Theresa from Henry Kissinger as worthy recipients of such an award. Perhaps when our well-organized, expertly-run world finally runs out of answers to the destructive conditions it has created, we may — as Malcolm Sharp urged — undertake the search for improved questions.

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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Recently by Butler Shaffer: ‘I Want a Cost-Free Life!’

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

~ Margaret Mead

I was deeply honored to receive the Gary Schlarbaum Prize this past week. It was presented to me — as a "lifetime achievement award" — at the Ludwig von Mises Institute's "Supporters' Summit 2012" in Georgia. Not only am I thankful for the generosity of Gary Schlarbaum in providing this award, but it reinforces my sense of how creative change occurs in our world. I have long been of the view that civilizations are created by individuals, and are destroyed by collectives.

In our politicized world, the established order has helped condition our minds to the belief that significant social change can occur only if 51% plus of our neighbors are first convinced of the need for such a transformation. Such a mindset tends to neutralize our personal efforts, to cause us to marginalize our creativity. When I write or speak of the need for significant change in our world, I often get the response "but what can one person do about it?" On the basis of such thinking, those who insist on ruling others by violent means continue to have their way.

I remind people how the creative actions of individuals gave birth to Western Civilization including the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, among other epochs. These creative periods were largely prefaced by one Johann Gutenberg, whose invention of movable type made possible the mass printing and distribution of ideas that fostered the intellectual development of humanity. Nor can we overlook such relatively recent contributors to Western Civilization as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and other individuals too numerous to list.

I think it is correct to say that Western Civilization has collapsed; its creative, liberating, and humanizing foundations destroyed by the collective forces of institutionalized violence. American and European countries — long the seats of Western culture — are at the end of an entropic decline. At the same time, however, I have long suspected that we are in the early stages of a transformation in thinking that is producing major changes in how we live and work with one another in society. The vertically-structured systems of centralized authority are being replaced by horizontal networks that interconnect in decentralized, voluntary ways. The Internet — which has expanded the liberating and creative capacities inhering in Gutenberg's invention — is the most visible expression of what I think of as the "unfolding civilization."

It is this social transformation that is the "terror" against which the institutional order now wars. As our world reorganizes itself into peaceful and productive systems that respect the inviolability of all persons, and relies upon spontaneous and informal processes for generating order; the political systems that now dominate mankind with their powers of death, destruction, imprisonment, torture, brutality, and other forms of violence, will lose their seductive powers.

It is in the spirit of fostering the kinds of paradigm shifts essential to human well-being, that Gary Schlarbaum so generously created this award. There are numerous other individuals working on behalf of rethinking what it means to live in society. The Ludwig von Mises Institute — along with LewRockwell.com — is one of many organizations dedicated to living in a world of peace and liberty.

I have written of the etymological history of our language, in which I discovered, years ago, that the words "peace," "freedom," "love," and "friend" share an interconnected history. Perhaps our ancestors knew what our collectivist thinking has caused most of us to forget; memories that are being restored to our minds by such people as Gary Schlarbaum, Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and other individuals who know that men and women are capable of rediscovering what it means to live as human beings in civilized societies.

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

~ Murray Rothbard

While driving on the freeway the other day, I saw a sign on another car urging me to "demand free energy." Why the driver failed to include "free food," "free gasoline," "free designer clothes," "free cars," "free sex," "free luxury home," or any other whim was not made clear. This man's message expressed the whine heard from men and women whose parents never helped them to learn that the causal regularities of nature cannot be suspended for their momentary convenience; that the costs of the benefits we desire must be incurred by someone. Such infantile thinking underlies all political programs — the costs of which are forcibly imposed upon others. The self-serving demands for these programs are usually disguised more subtly as "general welfare," "social responsibility," the "public interest," or other seemingly selfless ends. On occasion — as was the case with this driver — the purposes are more patently expressed, albeit without the foot-stomping tantrums attending such displays in adolescent years. When I see or hear such demands, I am reminded of the childhood lyrics "I want what I want when I want it!"

This demand for "free energy" contained no reference as to how, or by whom, this resource was to be provided. I suspect that, had I been able to discuss the matter with this man, his explanation would have come around to the government (i.e., the taxpayers) incurring the necessary costs. In my freshman year in college, I saw an elaborate display — complete with architectural models — of how a nuclear power plant would operate. I was introduced to the lie that "because the costs of metering the resulting electricity would be greater than the costs of producing it, electricity would be provided free of charge to consumers." While still in my teenage years, I remember asking "who, then, would have an incentive to produce the facilities necessary to generate the electricity?" I was later able to figure out that such costs would be borne by the state (i.e., the taxpayers); that electricity, under this scheme, would be no more "free" than were government schools, highways, parks, or other such programs. Somewhere in my adult years, I read Jacques Ellul's observation to the effect "show me how electrical power is distributed in a society, and I will show you how political power is distributed."

To heap abuse upon my fellow motorist for his message would be to overlook the broader question: where might this man have picked up on the idea that his world should be rendered cost-free for the pursuit of his interests? Even a small child may come to recognize, upon reflection, that his or her lemonade stand has probably been subsidized by the parents. If mommy and daddy can be counted upon to supply all sorts of "freebies," might the kids grow up expecting a surrogate parent (i.e., the state) to relieve them of the necessity of investing their own resources in furtherance of whatever ends they wish to accomplish?

I suspect that, upon having a discussion with this motorized freeway lobbyist, I would have learned of a seemingly endless list of other projects for which others should be forced to pay: college tuition? medical care? rental payments for housing? day-care facilities for his children? Once infected with the mindset of living in a world in which the costs of one's preferences can be forced upon others, extending the wish-list to other projects is a simple matter. This, after all, gets us to the essence of all forms of politics: given the power to forcibly extract resources from others, politicians and bureaucrats can produce all kinds of wondrous things from pyramids to palaces to statuary to bridges and highways, . . . each of which carries costs about which it is considered impolite to ask questions.

Like the serial killer who "shocks" us with the same behavior engaged in by the "troops" we are urged to "honor," this freeway proselytizer was doing no more than emulating what passes for the state-directed economic policies that are helping to destroy civilization itself. The higher one goes up the corporate-state food chain, the less likely does one witness business firms having to respond to marketplace pressures such as competition from other firms, the shifting preferences of customers, and the continuing emergence of fundamentally new forms of products or methods of distribution. Recent years have made clear to us that the financial success or failure of large corporate enterprises depends more upon the political connections that assign positions at the government trough, than it does upon the informal processes of the marketplace. The "steel fist" of the state long ago replaced the "invisible hand."

In the disastrous Bushobama years, the American — dare I say Western? — economic system has eroded into little more than the corruption we now know as crony-capitalism. If major corporations experience financial losses, they know they will be rescued by a variety of government programs that amount to nothing more than bailouts. To the degree business firms are able to rely upon the state to cover their losses, they become like the Post Office, government schools, or any other political entity. What incentives would they have to maintain the competitive pressures that foster organizational efficiency? Indeed, in the absence of the discipline provided by the pricing system, how is it possible to even speak of "efficiency"?

In an economic system divorced from the demands and interests of private individuals, major businesses become as indifferent to people as do the clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles. With the state as the guarantor of their financial well-being, firms become less interested in addressing customer demands; the transaction costs that are central to any form of voluntary contracting can be minimized. Above all else, the business community has helped to institutionalize the proposition that the costs of doing business should be socialized, while profits must remain privatized. If government bailouts, tariffs, taxation, and other forms of transferring to the general public the costs that would otherwise have to be borne by business firms do not convince you of the socialistic nature of the corporate-state, consider the powers of eminent domain invoked to benefit corporate interests.

It is a common practice for shopping center developers, professional sports team owners, or manufacturing firms, to turn to the state to use its violent powers to take land from owners who do not choose to sell and turn it over to the politically-connected. How many sports stadiums have been built through this process, wherein the taxpayers are required to underwrite the costs of land acquisition and construction — a form of socializing the costs — so that the team owners may enjoy the profits from their business? Some time ago, I read of a city in the Midwest whose city council refused to allow a developer to use the powers of eminent domain to acquire the land for the building of a hotel. The developer decided to withdraw his plans for the building, saying that it would impose too great a cost on him to have to negotiate with a number of landowners.

Politics is the most pervasive means for mobilizing such anti-social forces as theft, coercion, killing, deceit, parasitism, torture, lying, conflict, inter-group hatred, wars, and insistence upon obedience to authority enforced by violence. The state's principal purpose involves forcibly taking property from owners and giving it to others, a practice that includes imposing costs on those who have not chosen to bear them. This system is inherently at war with the self-directed nature of life itself: forcing people to act as they do not choose to act, and forcibly restraining them from pursuing ends they do value. As history reminds us — and as we are discovering for ourselves – such behavior destroys civilizations.

That these practices are so honored and the institutions that engage in them are so revered by otherwise intelligent people, is remarkable. That those whose lives will be destroyed by such thinking are eager to emblazon their support for its underlying premises as they drive the freeways, is all the more curious.

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

~ G.H. Hardy

Two brother boll weevils were born and raised in a cotton field in Georgia. One of them went out into the world, earned a PhD in history, wrote numerous books — two of which won Pulitzer Prizes — and, ultimately, a Nobel Prize in literature. He was seen on many television talk shows and even had a program of his own.  He was a highly-respected and quite famous person, and traveled the world giving speeches. His brother, on the other hand, remained in the same cotton field in which he was born, and for the rest of his life was considered the lesser of the two weevils.

It is worth remembering this tale as we find ourselves in that quadrennial exercise of collective boob-hustling known as a “presidential election.” With Ron Paul removed from the contest by the political establishment owners, intelligent minds know that the presidential race collapses into the default mode governing all such make-believe “choices.” The electorate will again be bamboozled into making a selection between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, being fed the League of Women Voters' unfocused line “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote.” A variation of this theme is found in the equally vacuous admonition to choose between “the lesser of two evils.”  That the 2008 campaign was conducted on the theme “anybody but Bush,” while the 2012 race urges “anybody but Obama,” should inform us of the utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the game being played at the expense of all of humanity.

Public opinion polls operate from this same stance: to choose between options either of which serves establishment interests: "do you favor an increase in income taxes, or a federal sales tax?" The idea of refining the question itself (e.g., "should all forms of taxation be eliminated?") is never allowed to surface, as witness Ron Paul's treatment at the GOP "debates." What if you were asked to select the greatest person in history, and were given the names Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Julius Caesar from which to make your choice? Boobus might discard Julius Caesar on the basis that all he accomplished was the invention of the salad that bears his name, leaving the choice between Attila and Genghis Khan to be decided on the basis of "the lesser of two evils."

Or, what if you lived in the Ukraine in the 1930s, and were told that you had to choose between Hitler and Stalin to rule you, each of whom desired to exterminate all Ukrainians? If — as many Ukrainians did — you favored Hitler over Stalin because of some mistaken belief that he might be a less immediate threat to your life, might a moment's reflection suggest to you a better question to be asked?

Or, imagine your son discussing with you his thinking about a career to pursue. Suppose he was trying to decide between becoming a pimp for street-walkers, or a dealer in illegal drugs: what questions might you ask him to consider, and what advice might you give him?

Or, reduce the inquiry to the most personal health considerations. Would you rather have emphysema or lung cancer as "the lesser of two evils?" I asked this question of my physician, and her response was that lung cancer would be the better choice because you had an outside chance of being able to overcome it.

The outcome of every problem we encounter in life can be greatly improved by refining the quality of the questions we ask ourselves. As I tell my students, don't let the opposition frame the legal issues for you: examine what they have to say, but then refine the inquiry to make certain that your interests are best served by the form of the question. Should you apply this strategy to the forthcoming election, you may discover that getting to choose between Obama and Romney will have no more life-sustaining meaning for you and your family than being "free to choose" between the guillotine and a hanging for the means of your execution. You may decide to follow the advice of George Carlin and just stay home on election day pursuing other expressions of self-interest!

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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The life which is unexamined is not worth living.

~ Plato

At the recent Ron Paul Rally in Tampa, Ron continued to generate the kinds of in-depth questioning I never dreamed would be heard in political campaigns: that the Austrian business cycle might overcome Willie Horton's furlough as an issue for a presidential contest was beyond my imagination. At this same rally, economist Walter Block's discussion of the abortion question has given rise to numerous blog/e-mail responses on that topic. My talk at this same forum — which immediately followed Walter's — focused on the importance of people further extending their inquiries into the nature of a society grounded in peace, liberty, and individualism.

The cause of peace and liberty requires each of us to take our understanding into ever-deeper levels. Ron is the most highly visible example of this practice, but he is not alone. There are many others — both living and dead — whose inquiries permit us to flesh out the details of our thinking on the topic. Ayn Rand, Robert LeFevre, and a renowned Marxist with whom I studied in college, played such roles in my life. While I was never attracted to Marx, my professor's seminar led me to more profound inquiries than could be found in bumper-sticker one-liners. Rand's ideas did much the same: only by examining them with energized effort was I able to answer questions implicit in her philosophy, a process that resulted in my rejecting most of her central views.

One does not have to agree with someone in order to learn from them! Whatever the subject-matter — be it the study of history, economics, law, philosophy; or gardening, auto mechanics, raising children, etc. — the quality of your effort will depend upon the continual refinement of the questions you raise. We live in a culture that demands answers to unasked — or unfocused — questions. As a consequence, most of us end up with little more than opinions, but no understanding.

Walter's "evictionism" approach to the abortion issue invites us to explore deeper levels of our understanding. That I don't agree with his approach or conclusions, does not detract from their value in helping us refine our thinking. When a few people booed his ideas — a tactic that should have reminded those at the rally of the treatment Ron received from conservatives in the audience at some of the debates — Walter was correct in criticizing them for their anti-intellectual behavior. One uses the ideas of others as vehicles for examining and questioning their own.

I also disagreed with Walter as to the place and time for raising this issue. This was a rally to celebrate Ron Paul — particularly on the eve of a Republican convention to which he was persona non grata to the political establishment — and the focus should have been on him as well as the eleven-thousand young people who came to honor his efforts. This refinement of the abortion issue was ill-timed only in the sense that it is the kind of inquiry that follows from earlier questioning about the nature of life, "who" is a person, what is property, etc. Walter raises one of many "lifeboat" discussions that are essential to refining the boundary lines of one's thinking. ("If your neighbor kidnapped one of your children and was torturing her, would you trespass upon his property to rescue her?" "Of course I would, but I would still treat my act as a trespass!") I am reminded of a number of young "libertarians" from the 1960s who insisted on introducing their ideas to others by jumping right to such deeper questions as "do you own your children and, if so, can you sell them?" Sound thinking necessitates and produces a refinement in the quality — the form — of the questions we ask. In the words of Milton Mayer, "the questions that can be answered are not worth asking."

The value of Walter's thinking on this topic is reflected in the questioning, debate, and puzzlement generated in the minds of others. David Kramer sent me two e-mails outlining some of his own thinking on the topic, and asked for my opinions. His e-mails have prompted me to make this response. Walter has accomplished what any intellectual effort should produce: further questioning of the subject matter at hand.

I have long regarded "life" as sacred; not "sacred" according to some formal religious doctrine — I am an agnostic in all matters, be they religious, political, artistic, or any other realm of opinion — but as a quality innate in, perhaps, all of existence. I remember as a small child feeling anger toward other kids who would step on ants or bugs for no other apparent reason than to kill them. Even today, my children — and grandchildren — call upon me to come "rescue" a spider crawling up our living room wall. Those who might regard the life even of an insect as not worthy of our interest might ask themselves: how might you respond if NASA's Martian explorer should discover a fuzzy caterpillar on that distant planet?

But narrowing the inquiry to the issue of when a given life form becomes a "person," I regard this as occurring upon conception. It is the point at which one acquires his/her unique DNA that the sense of "thingness" is transformed into a "personhood" that is relatively free of arbitrary definition. This is also why I am unable to regard a corporation — or other institution — as a "person." Such abstract bodies have no existence or will of their own, but are only tools through which their owners act. I like the bumper-sticker that reads: "I will accept the idea of a corporation as a person when they execute one in the electric chair."

I also believe that it is wrong to kill or use any form of violence against a person, which (a) helps to define my social philosophy and (b) makes the killing of an unborn child an act of murder. You will note, here, my refusal to dehumanize the unborn by referring to any of them as a "fetus." The treatment of slaves, American Indians, and Hitler's non-Aryans, by defining them out of the category of "persons," ought to awaken us to what we do to one another.

Because of my disapproval of all political systems — which are universally defined as agencies that enjoy a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory — I am unwilling to sanction the use of violence to either (a) physically prevent, or (b) punish a woman for having an abortion. At this point, I am often asked "are you saying that, in a society grounded in liberty, people are u2018free' to kill one another?" My answer is "yes." Even in our present command-and-control world of legalized violence, each of us is "free" to kill — or as a friend of mine once modified the proposition — "free to try to kill" — others. Such "freedom" does not mean that we may rightfully or morally do so, only that we have the capacity to inflict harm upon others. From a libertarian perspective, the question becomes (as it does in our daily lives): how do we exercise our freedom so as to minimize harm to others?

In my view of the world, a pregnant woman will make her own decision as to whether to abort. I may disapprove of the decision she makes, but I will not resort to — nor sanction — force against her to make her conform to my value. I ask only that she be willing to defend my freedom to make choices in the world.

I am also unable to accept Walter's characterization of the unborn child as a "trespasser." Such a person came into being through no act or will of its own (although I am open to the argument that the sperm had a powerful will to become a person by outracing all others in order to be the one to impregnate the egg). Whether the unborn child was conceived voluntarily — as an act of either love or lust — or through the violent act of rape, is irrelevant to the question of its sense of personhood. In the case of rape, the worst that can be said of the unborn person is that it is the product of wrongdoing, not a wrongdoer itself.

Treating the unborn child as a "trespasser" further begs the question. If someone was to deposit a newly-born baby on my front doorstep, would I be entitled to (a) ignore the child, or (b) place it on the curb, neither act worsening the plight of the child? However Walter might answer this question as a philosophic matter, I think I know him well enough to predict that he would not respond in either manner. Would he — or I — have an "obligation" to the child to come to its rescue? As a matter of some imposed "duty," I would answer "no" to both possibilities. But as a response to our self-interested needs to protect the value of life — which is what our philosophic principles should be about in the first place — I have no doubt as to how each of us would behave in this circumstance.

The argument on behalf of the woman being able to abort the unborn child often includes the proposition: personhood does not arise until the child is able to sustain itself independently. To this contention I reply: who among us — even as adults — is able to sustain our lives independently, without help from others? I could grow my own food, or produce my own clothing or shelter, or bandage up my serious injuries. But the reality is that I depend upon others — voluntarily acting within the marketplace — to supply such goods and services. It is because of specialization — the division of labor — provided only by exchange with others that we are able to enjoy a higher quality of life than any of us could create independently of others.

We have also learned — from studies of men and women in isolation — that we have such a profound sense of connectedness with others (we are, after all, social beings) that we can quickly become delusional or even mad if we are separated from other human beings for too long a period of time. Furthermore, who among us can truly say that work they perform is unrelated to the responses of others? Why do I teach and write if not to communicate to others? What farmer, physician, artist, restaurant owner, scientist, actor, or the provider of any other goods or services is able to accomplish their purposes without a dependence on others?

It is also argued that an unborn child is unable to physically sustain itself outside the mother's womb. That is true — particularly in the early stages of pregnancy — but the proposition would seem to apply to all of this: would any of us be able to survive without the society of others? A variation of this same pro-abortion argument is this: the unborn child is still in a stage of development. Just watching my children, grandchildren, and students — and especially talking with my wife — remind me that I, too, am "still in a stage of development." The psychologically healthy life is one in which learning — i.e., further refining the quality of the questions we ask of nature and one another — dominates us.

I cannot end this inquiry without discussing the inherently contradictory and conflict-ridden slogans that make the abortion question so confusing to those who refuse to look beneath the surface of issues. Those with a bumper-sticker mentality embrace either the phrase "pro-life" or "pro-choice" to explain their thinking. Most supposedly "pro-life" people are hostile to life. If you doubt this, ask them about their views of war, capital punishment, police brutality, or the free and spontaneous nature of what "life" is about. As for the "pro-choice" people, you will discover few who are prepared to defend the choice of people to not have to pay taxes, or to be forced to provide for abortions, day-care centers, etc.

As the weekend at the Ron Paul Rally reminded us, there is nothing so creative and liberating as the free flow of information, as well as the questions generated therefrom. Now that the presidential campaign is in full lassitude (i.e., the corporate-state establishment will not allow Ron Paul to be heard in whatever form of mutual babbling Obama and Romney will pretend to debate) it is time for intelligent minds to pursue their own lines of questions. As I recall looking into the faces of the eleven thousand young people at this rally, the fun is just beginning!

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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The law locks up both man and woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.

~ Anonymous

In the aftermath of the murders at the Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, a lot of counterfeit hand-wringing was expressed by members of the media, politicians, and men and women who could be counted on to appear on television, covering all the bases of politically correct opinion. Once again, we are treated to the spectacle of people engaging in that deadly practice of psychological "projection" (i.e., the effort to rid oneself of undesired "dark side" influences by presuming such traits to reside in others). Institutional deflectors of causal inquiries find the explanation for undesirable events in superficialities such as guns, rock music, lifestyles, alcohol or illegal drugs, clothing styles, or any other behavior that does not negatively implicate corporate-state interests.

Is the availability of guns the underlying cause of such seemingly random violence against strangers? In my youth — in the late 1940s — it was commonplace for teenage boys to own a rifle — usually .22 caliber in nature. While I did not own such a weapon, I learned how to use one at a Boy Scout camp. Many — perhaps most — of my friends owned a rifle or shotgun, and I do not recall any mass killings resulting therefrom.

The idea that material objects have the capacity to direct and control our behavior is so childish that you can see how nicely it fits into the state's interests in keeping us as obedient children. But if the proposition be true, none of us has "free will" (i.e., we are but billiard balls reacting — without intention — to forces outside us). Vector analysis, employing laws of physics, would be sufficient to explain human behavior. If this is so, what moral justification would the state have to punish anyone for anything that they do? If guns were responsible for the mass-killings in Colorado as well as in Wisconsin, why should those who pulled the triggers be held responsible? Perhaps we could revert to the practice in early England when, for example, if a gate collapsed and killed a man, the gate was put on trial and, if found guilty, punished for its "wrongdoing."

But if guns have the power to cause us to do things we would not be inclined to do in their absence, wouldn't the same logic apply to weaponry in the hands of the state? Perhaps it is the guns, bombs, rockets, aircraft carriers, missiles, bombers, and other inanimate tools of death and destruction that cause wars. Those who desire peace in the world should organize themselves on behalf of disarming the state; of taking from the military and police officers the tools with which they are driven by unseen forces to inflict violence upon others. Perhaps the power of inanimate "things" explains why the United States leads the world in the percentage of its population in penitentiaries: in the language of chaos theory, prisons may serve as "attractors" that draw men and women to be incarcerated therein!

It would be easy to dismiss my suggestions as empty foolishness except for the fact that they are quite logical extensions of the premises upon which the media and politically-minded persons operate. If guns make us their unwilling agents of violence in one setting, why not in the other? Such a mindset helps to explain why our behavior is so irresponsible: we are the passive "victims" of things that exercise their wills over us; material objects control us!

But what if the accelerated violence in our world has other explanations to be found in our thinking? What if our minds have created a culture of violence? What if we see the world as a malevolent place, characterized by ever-expanding conflicts with one another? What if we regard every undesirable condition as a cause for going to war — e.g., the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on obesity, the war on cancer, the war on child abuse, etc.? And if our world becomes a battleground within which to fight these endless wars, would our thinking not be attracted to ever-more-powerful weapons for the hostilities?

Given the pervasiveness of the thinking that sees war and violence as the nature of human beings in society, should we be shocked to find occasional individuals emulating the behavior of those who engage in such activity at political levels? When soldiers who kill innocent people in foreign lands are rewarded with medals and accorded the status of "heroes," why do we not extend the same approval to the man who kills his neighbor? Why would we be offended by a bumper-sticker that read "support the Sikh Temple killer," but not one that reads "support the troops"? Why are serial-killers rightly condemned for their mass slaughters, while those who play central roles in conducting wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children receive the Nobel Peace Prize?

Is our culture so dominated by systematic lies, contradictions, inconsistences, distortions, speculations-reported-as-facts, and twisted reasoning, that our minds remain in a default mode that accepts the proposition "a lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it"? Is truth something to be negotiated; to be defined by the outcomes of opinion polls? That paragon of militaristic absolutism, Napoleon Bonaparte, defined "history" as "a set of lies agreed upon." Given his record, do you understand why he found factual inconstancy so necessary to his purposes; and why the modern established order does so as well?

In such ways have we learned to metabolize the moral confusions inherent in our politicized world. When we identify our sense of being with the state — or with any other institution — we have to separate ourselves from those actions that our unconscious minds would otherwise condemn. If we think of ourselves as indistinguishable from the state, the wrongs of its officials become our wrongs; if the state engages in evil, our unconscious voices suggest to us that we are evil. I suspect that a good many alums of Penn State University — whose collective motto is "we are Penn State" — must be experiencing inner turmoil as a result of despicable criminal offenses charged against school icons.

How can we rid ourselves of these discomforting feelings? The mature route would be to engage in what Carl Jung called the process of "individuation," to withdraw one's energies from the collective mindset; to accept that each of us has a "dark side," the forces of which can be neutralized by the awareness that this is who we are. If we are uncomfortable acknowledging our shadow "selves," we can resort to the more common practice of projecting such unconscious sentiments onto a scapegoat, who can then be punished for our participation in collective guilt. A scapegoat need not be innocent of wrongdoing: he or she need only be seen as an acceptable substitute for the misdeeds of those we are fearful of directly confronting.

When American presidents announce to the world that they are entitled to declare war on the people of any other country; that they may torture and imprison others without any legal recourse; and may even order the assassination of anyone they deem to be persona non grata, how will those who identify themselves with the nation-state respond? Unwilling to condemn a system with which they identify themselves — an act that would amount to a personal condemnation — they are eager to find a proxy upon whom to unload their righteous anger. Those who engaged in mass killings in Colorado and Wisconsin were perfect surrogates: they were, apparently, guilty of engaging in these horrific acts. In addition to their own criminality, they can serve (unconsciously) as scapegoats for even more extensive wrongs against other innocent victim.

We are not to inquire, of course, into what might have motivated these troubled men to engage in their murderous acts of violence. It is sufficient that our attention can be diverted to guns, drugs, or dyed hair for explanations. But when presidents and other government officials routinely get away with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents, should we wonder where the idea of mass killing might originate? When the current president asserts the authority to murder anyone of his choosing, should we be shocked to discover young men emulating this policy in suburban settings? And when this same president went on national television and declared that we needed to do some "soul searching" for ways to "reduce violence," did any major political or media voice suggest that the American government might set an example by ending its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Is it denseness or moral cowardice that causes us to not see the causal connections between the violent, destructive, and dehumanizing nature of the practices of the corporate-state, and their reflection in the actions of men and women in our society? Can we stop looking for convenient explanations elsewhere than in the content and processes of our thinking that makes us revere the systems — and their elitist owners – that profit only by destroying us?

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives

I have to admit to having mixed feelings about this week's landing of NASA's research vehicle on Mars. The technological accomplishment as well as the scientific implications of the project impress me. Long before experiencing the guffaws of my junior-high school classmates (in the late 1940s) for arguing that humans would, during my lifetime, walk on the moon, I was interested in the exploration of space. As I grew older, I came to realize that the discoveries that had the greatest meaning for the quality of life were to be found within the unseen, dark side space of the human mind.

I regard mankind's movements into unknown territories — be they geographical or intellectual — as an expression of our spiritual needs for transcendence; for our need to connect up with all of existence. This is what energizes both religious and scientific inquiries into such basic questions as "where did it all come from, where is it all going, and what rules are in place in the present?" I go even further and, drawing upon Frederick Jackson Turner's work, believe that what made early America so free and prosperous was the presence of a relatively unstructured frontier into which creative people could move and exercise their liberty. Beginning, apparently, in Africa, this frontier-seeking behavior was doubtless responsible for sending our pre-historic ancestors on treks from one continent to another; from Asia to North America; from eastern Europe to western Europe; and from Europe (and elsewhere) into the open spaces of the "New World." So considered, mankind's movement from Earth to other worlds may be regarded as a continuation of this process of movement into openness, a phenomenon one finds contributing to the decentralization of cities into the suburbs.

How societies are organized and operate has been such a preoccupation of mine as to temper my enthusiasm for the latest Mars adventure. How this project was undertaken [i.e., by the forcible looting of taxpayers] and by whom [i.e., the corporate-state political establishment], and for what purposes [i.e., to extend the state's powers of coercive control beyond Earth] is most troubling. Had this project been carried out privately — such as by someone like Burt Rutan — I would be cheering the feat. But as with other government projects, there is something annoying in watching a gang of uniformed [they all wore blue shirts] state functionaries whooping and stomping as they celebrated the results of getting to play with other people's involuntarily-taken money.

In a televised interview minutes after the successful landing, one NASA official commented: "it's a great day for America and the world." It is the nature of nearsighted activity to focus on the immediacy of costs and benefits — particularly of projects extending over many years — and to fail to consider the longer-term, unforeseen consequences of what is being done in the present. I suspect that the successful splitting of the atom, and the resulting creation of nuclear weaponry, were celebrated by earlier myopic [and well-intentioned] scientists as "a great day for America and the world."

In a world dominated by material values and the grasping for coercive power to promote such interests, the longer-term implications of politically-directed action tend to get ignored. We live in a world centered around what economists call "short-term time preferences," and those who warn of the consequences of pursuing short-term benefits while disregarding the long-term costs, are dismissed as being "impractical" or driven by "ideology." If you have not yet figured out that the worsening economic mess — including trillions upon trillions of dollars of indebtedness — of Western countries; American Empire expansionist wars against the rest of the world; an ever-more-abusive and surveillant police-state; and the dictatorial powers asserted by presidents who declare their authority to torture, assassinate, and imprison without trial persons of their choosing; are all the long-term consequences that earlier thinkers warned would one day be visited upon future generations [i.e., us!]. That historians have long warned how such practices have brought down past civilizations has been of little interest to people whose temporal range of interest extends no further than inquiries into Olympic medal-counts, or contemplating who will be the next "American Idol."

All of this is a way of emphasizing the importance of engaging in what I call "the art of implicit thinking." The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are unable to satisfy our desires for predictability. But there are probabilities that attend all human activity. A man who drinks a quart of Scotch each day is not certain to develop cirrhosis, but such an affliction is implicit in his behavior, even though he might go on to lead a healthy life.

Atomic scientists could have been more responsible had their work been informed by an awareness of what was implicit in their designing weapons of mass slaughter for the state to employ. The state is defined [see Max Weber] as a system that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. Such agencies of unrestrained power serve as "attractors" to men and women whose ambitions are centered on their presumed authority to command and control others.

Perhaps those who pursue science and technology on behalf of the state could learn a valuable lesson from earlier scientists who failed to fully understand the character of their employer. The state is nothing more than a mechanism of violence; an apparatus that synthesizes all kinds of destructive, dehumanized, dishonest, anti-life thinking. Such an awareness on the part of those engaging in state-funded genetic research, for instance, might prove beneficial to all of humanity. The long-term consequences of government space programs – with their extra-territorial military implications — should also be considered by persons working in this field. Those who regard such a concern as alarmist might recall the post-doctoral employee of NASA who warned of the possibility of Earth being attacked by forces from another planet, due to our failure to heed the warnings of Al Gore and his "Gang-Green" religionists.

What young minds have not been adequately prepared — by numerous films and television series — to participate in the "Manifest Destiny" of Earth, or Earthly "Exceptionalism"? Today it's Mars; tomorrow the constellation of Andromeda!

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives

. . . if you believe them they will be completely in charge of their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretense of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.

~ Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793)

I don't know when I first fell in love with the leprechauns. It may have been in my youth, whether as a genetic gift from my Irish ancestors, or as a lingering sense of the enchanted nature of life so common to children. Whatever the origins, I have long been attracted to these wondrous beings, who managed to synthesize the importance of defending their property interests with their need for personal liberty. Should you discover and steal their gold, you can be assured that your life would be rendered miserable until they managed to recover their wealth. But in the course of doing so, the one thing these people would never risk was their liberty.

People who value individual liberty more highly than they do their material well-being stand in sharp contrast to most thoroughly modern men and women who find it difficult to imagine that such options have any meaning. The disparity between the two choices may be partially explained by some superficial ideas about money being the root of all evil. The Watergate years introduced us to the need to "follow the money" to discover the underlying motivations of political policies and programs. But "money" has no motivation, no will to act upon the world. Like "guns" — which shallow minds imagine to have their own deliberate, lethal purposes — money has value and importance only to minds that so value it. If you doubt this, please explain the diminished importance of Confederate currency in our modern economy. Nor do beads or tobacco continue to serve as money systems in America.

As with most of our difficulties in the world, the "why" question arises: why are so many of us willing to judge the propriety of our actions by the standard of how much money we will receive in the process? Why do we regard the motivations of the leprechauns with either amusement or disdain? Unlike a problem in mathematics, the answer does not have a self-evident quality to it.

The quality — even the existence — of life depends upon satisfying our material needs. This is why I have long regarded the Industrial Revolution as the most humanizing period in human history. When widespread deaths through starvation and disease — particularly among children — were overcome by industrialized production, our ancestors discovered the secret for resolving the economic difficulties inherent in politically-structured and restrained societies. Having learned how to live productively would understandably attract us to the systems we had created to serve such ends.

But why — and how — did such a creative episode occur? Did some proto-Keynesian philosopher-kings suddenly appear on humanity's doorstep with their complicated system of economic planning — which, of course, they intended to direct? Or did this inventive and prolific era arise because of the relative absence of such centralized controls? Was the process particularly fruitful in America because of the presence of a frontier that allowed men and women to continually move to less-restrictive territories?

But liberalizing environments, alone, cannot account for such life-enhancing creativity. What preceded our experimentation with systems for maximizing our material well-being was a major spiritual, artistic, and intellectual revolution. Johannes Gutenberg's 15th century invention of movable type initiated and/or sustained various expressions of an inner life force that greatly enhanced human understanding. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, owe much of their energies to Gutenberg's primal contribution to the second stage of mankind's uncovering of the powers of information.

As we are continuing to discover in ever-expanding technologies — including the Internet — there is nothing so creative and liberating as the increased movement of information. The First Amendment to the Constitution was a confirmation that the open expression of ideas and other information was essential to a healthy society. We have learned this truth, as well, from "brainstorming" sessions whose synergistic processes produce solutions to problems that no individual could have generated separately. In so many ways are we reminded of the powerful energies that inhere in life; a potency we often suppress by committing ourselves to institutional interests.

You and I are this life force — the spirit that continues to seek expression in the material world. Contrary to our divisive thinking that sees such a pursuit as a conflict between material and spiritual needs — a struggle to be resolved by a "balancing" of these supposedly competing ends – such attributes require integration in our lives. In furtherance of our attachments to institutional purposes which we have been conditioned to believe are essential to our material well-being, we have been taught to reconcile the ensuing contradictions; to rationalize our confusions; and to accept our resulting "normally-neurotic" behavior as an unavoidable problem to be dealt with through drugs, alcohol, or through watching mindless television programs. With such exceptions as are now occurring in technological innovations, the creative periods that helped to define Western Civilization are in decline. What was once thought of as "the American dream" has become a government entitlement or a winning lottery ticket!

If we are to live well — in both the material and spiritual meaning of what this implies – it is not a balancing of our contrary and disordered thinking that we so require, but an ending of our contradictory mindset. Only by integrating life-enhancing values can we learn to live with integrity.

This is where we can learn from the leprechauns. Unlike so many minds in our deranged culture that insist on trying to synthesize life-destroying insanity with social responsibility, the leprechauns live with a wholeness that is expressed with both material and spiritual passion. Our society is burdened by thinking that rejects the pursuit of "materialism" while, at the same time, degrading "spirituality" for its "impractical" (i.e., non-material) qualities. When I am challenged by advocates of either perspective, I ask the former: "who will feed, clothe, and house you?," and the latter "what is the material value of a baby?" In each instance, the response is a plate-glassed stare.

Leprechauns are not burdened by such contradictions. They are driven by both material and spiritual energies. But to these marvelous beings, the spirit is not some abstract set of ideas with which to entertain themselves, but the manner in which one acts upon the world. To them, spirit is a verb, unavoidably connected to the action necessary for spiritual fulfillment in the physical world. This is why the human spirit finds its expression in individual liberty, a system that allows one to pursue one's interests in human society. This is why "spirit," "liberty," and privately-owned "property" become synonymous concepts. The leprechauns understand this. They know that the liberty to live a spiritually-directed life, and to enjoy respect for the inviolability of the material rewards received from their self-interested pursuits, is the very essence of what it means to live well in the world.

Liberty and the fulfillment of the human spirit are qualities whose pursuits are confined to individuals; they do not translate into anything of use to the institutional order, whose interests are more focused on acquiring and controlling material values. In order to secure the participation of human beings in their schemes, institutions twist words and practices into self-contradictory forms with a superficial attraction to them. George Orwell's "war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength" is, perhaps, the most familiar example of this. In exploiting young men and women to participate in life-destroying and dehumanizing wars, the state will resort to such slogans as "be all you can be in the Army," an ersatz appeal to personal fulfillment. Domestically, Boobus has been conditioned to think of "freedom" as the availability of 24-hour convenience stores, or getting to choose between "paper or plastic" at the grocery store — a limited choice that many cities have begun to prohibit!

Another spurious means by which the state exploits people for institutional advantage is found in the paper money system. Unlike Boobus — who remains convinced that if the money supply increases by 20%, while his salary goes up by 5%, that he is better off than before — the leprechauns have a devotion to systems grounded in reality. This explains why protection of their gold is so important to them. They are more motivated to guard their twenty ounces of this basic element than in possessing a one hundred trillion dollar bill issued by the Zimbabwe government — an "asset" that might allow them to purchase a loaf of bread!

In our politically-directed world, empty appearances prevail over substance. Institutions lack the spiritual, passionate, and other emotional qualities that are found only in life. Such artificial organizations are driven solely by materialistic pursuits; by values that can be measured and expressed in terms of numbers. In order to enlist Boobus's support for its dispirited undertakings, the established order must convince people to identify their interests with institutional purposes, and to repress the inner voices that warn them of the dangers implicit in their systemic attachments.

What courses through the veins of institutions and energizes those who identify with them are material values such as the pursuit of money. Those who give their lives over to the established order accept such purely physical rewards as money, medals, trophies, job titles, diplomas, positions of power over others, certificates of accomplishment, and other testimonials in exchange for ignoring the inner voices that insist upon their liberty to act in the world.

Leprechauns are unwilling to sacrifice the inner sense of their beings. What courses through their veins is energized spirit, that innermost power that can neither be seen nor measured. To such beings, state-issued money is simply another way to manipulate them in furtherance of purposes not of their choosing or under their control. But leprechauns are not hair-shirted ascetics. They know that their self-interests must be pursued in the material world; that their rewards come from cooperating with others for mutual benefit. But they also know that such rewards require protection from those who might resort to looting rather than voluntary exchange. Gold (as well as silver) while being a material substance of the world, is not as subject to the predations of the state as is paper currency. Unlike the practices of governments with their printing presses, the alchemists confirmed to us that there is no manufacturing process by which the supply of gold can be arbitrarily increased.

The leprechauns long ago learned how to integrate their needs for liberty and for safeguarding the wealth generated by their self-interested pursuits. Gold — not decorated paper — is the material embodiment that helps to preserve the value of what liberty and respect for property ownership has created. No contradictions to be "balanced" here. If you want to learn more from these creatures, invite one to lunch. They are all around you, if you but know where to look!

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

~ Arthur Miller

One of the myths that helps to sustain our vertically-structured culture is that academia houses the clear-headed, rational thinking necessary for an intelligently run society. Since at least the days in which Plato created the blueprint for a world managed by "philosopher kings," this premise has been embraced — particularly by academicians who fashion themselves such intellectual monarchs. FDR reinforced such thinking during the New Deal, as Ivy League "experts" constituted his "Brain Trust" to formulate state-imposed rules for bringing society to order.

The idea that academia is comprised of men and women who employ focused reason – rather than fear-driven reaction — in addressing social problems is an article of faith embraced by most people who have never spent much time on university campuses. The reality is that a PhD confers upon its recipient no greater capacity for wisdom and thoughtful reflection than is to be found off-campus. The truth of this observation was revealed in a newspaper story informing us that the Big Ten Conference — a group of twelve of some of the most prestigious universities in America — is considering a proposal that would give its commissioner the power to fire coaches at any of the conference's schools. The proposition is being advanced, of course, as a knee-jerk response to the recent scandal at Penn State University. Some may object to coalescing athletics and scholarly pursuits; that sports programs are not synonymous with what goes on in academic departments. But the reality is that such extra-curricular activity — particularly the football team — brings far greater amounts of attention, money, and alumni support to the school than do research botanists or fine arts professors. The concern underlying all of this is, as the news story informs us, to punish schools whose behavior harms the conference's reputation. In our institutionalized world of false-front affectation, the image of those who sit atop the pyramid must be protected at all costs.

Among other thoughts being considered by some Big Ten officials is that Penn State be kicked out of the conference. Should Penn State be prohibited from playing football games in this, or any subsequent season, is another idea that might help restore the desired shine to the Big Ten name. Should those who participated in the sexual abuse of boys be punished for their actions? Among decent and intelligent persons, such a question contains its own answer. The more telling inquiry, however, has to do with what kind of response is appropriate. In a world driven by dark-side forces and reptilian reactions to events, clear thinking is too often confused with trying to justify the wrongdoing. Once the reptilian-brain has been aroused, the response of "see, act!" is all that is allowed.

The idea that the sanctity of a contract between a university and one of its coaches should be disregarded and that one who is not a party to the agreement could terminate it, is so goofy that one would have to suspect its academic origins! Perhaps such power should be bestowed upon usurped by the President of the United States. But is this enough of a sanction? Why not go further, and require Penn State alums to tear up their diplomas and, perhaps, have the rest of the academic community in America shove Penn State down the memory hole? Another option to consider is to have Penn State retroactively forfeit all of its football victories going all the way back to its first season! Do you find such suggestions troubling? What's the matter with you: are you in favor of molesting young boys?

As I am writing this, news of the shooting at a Colorado movie theater is being brought to my attention. A dozen people have been killed and fifty-nine more wounded, allegedly by a young man now in custody. We are also being informed that he was an honor college graduate with a degree in the sciences. The television networks are bringing academicians and other "expert professionals" on camera, not so much to help Boobus understand the underlying causes of such violent behavior, but to provide him with the "official" explanation he is to internalize as his understanding.

This shooting occurred in Aurora, a suburb of Denver. In 1999, in another Denver suburb, two students at Columbine High School, murdered thirteen young people before committing suicide. The failure to ask the right questions in 1999 led some to seek causal explanations in such factors as teenage bullying, teenagers wearing long coats and, of course, guns. I can only wonder how many lives might have been saved in Aurora, last night, if just one of the other movie patrons had also been armed! But clear, rational thinking will not be heard in the mainstream media; we shall have more of the nitwitted commentary such as was expressed by one network newscaster who referred to the alleged shooter as a "gentleman." Another news channel provided details about how this young man had dyed his hair red and wore black clothing, while another voiced the Hollywood concern that this might discourage people from going to movies. (Do you really wonder whether Western Civilization is in collapse?)

President Obama's former chief adviser — and now Chicago mayor — Rahm Emanuel once declared "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." This is a premise upon which political behavior has long relied. To illustrate the point, Obama rushed to network television cameras to inform America that, yes, he was against these killings and, yes, he is against the terrorism and rampant violence that is destroying the sanctity of life. That neither he nor media voices suggested that America's wars against the rest of the world; wars whose casualties include many American soldiers who, like the Columbine killers, end up committing suicide; wars whose bipartisan enthusiasm is nothing if not an all-out exercise in terror and war against life itself; that all of this might provide troubled young minds with a role model for the destruction of themselves and others.

But, alas, there was no such introspection from anyone in the political establishment; nor will there be. Mr. Obama stated that now is the time for u201Creflection,u201D but the reflection he has in mind is of the narcissistic form, not an examination of the assumptions underlying one's thinking. How convenient it is for the Aurora killings to take place just as Congress is considering an international arms control treaty, and as federal and state gun-control efforts continue. Indeed, no "serious crisis" will be allowed "to go to waste" in our world.

On the other hand, perhaps there is something to be learned from the Big Ten Conference's current musings. The idea that Penn State might be thrown out of the conference because of its alleged wrongdoings, might also be considered as an appropriate response to the latest Colorado mass-shootings. This is the second time the deadly violence of young people has resulted in so many deaths in that state. Perhaps President Obama could stand up for the principles he pretends to embrace, by kicking Colorado out of the Union!

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

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Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.

~ Irene Peter

Operating on the assumptions (1) that Ron Paul will not be the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, and (2) that he is likely to retire from future presidential campaigns, I focus on the question: where are those who advocate peace and liberty to now direct their energies? With three daughters, their husbands, and five young grandchildren comprising my sense of the future of mankind, I am quite interested in how they — and other members of their generations — can best advance the values and social systems that serve their interests rather than the interests of members of the corporate-state.

My experiences and inquiries keep me convinced that trying to dismantle political thinking from within the system is both a futile and contradictory undertaking. I do acknowledge that Ron Paul, using the political process, has done more than any other individual to help intelligent men and women discover the harsh and destructive nature of the state. The central "issues" that whisked George H.W. Bush into the White House in 1988 — whether Willie Horton should have been let out of prison and the sacred nature of the pledge of allegiance — can still arouse applause from aged defenders of the status quo, but the younger generation knows that the quality of their lives depends on more important questions. There is enfolded into the life force of humans a need for fundamentally new thinking and social practices that is — thanks primarily to Ron's concise and principled analysis — unfolding in the kids. At my age, everyone is a kid.

Anyone who believes that Ron Paul has simply dreamed up an ideology that young people find attractive has no understanding of what is transpiring in this movement. Ron has tapped into an energy source that could be likened to a Rupert Sheldrake "morphogenetic field." At both a conscious and unconscious level, tens of millions of people throughout the world are sharing in the spontaneous eruption of opposition to the dehumanizing, oppressive, violent, and destructive nature of the corporate-state systems that exploit human beings for institutional ends. Peace, liberty, private property ownership, and respect for the inviolability of the individual, are qualities insisted upon by growing numbers of persons, not only in America, but elsewhere in the world.

Ron Paul did not invent this mobilization of the human spirit, nor will the energies subside after November's elections. If members of the established order look upon this movement as a "fad" that will disappear when Ron Paul retires, they are sadly disillusioned. The question before us, however, has to do with how this energized spirit will find expression in the following months and years. How will those whom I affectionately refer to as "the kids" advance the cause of peace and liberty when there is no presidential campaign to attract them?

Those who are drawn to libertarian sentiments and ideas are generally in agreement that there is no definitive answer to the question of how free men and women will live. When people ask me the kinds of questions about "how will streets be provided for?," or "how will children be educated?," or "how will the impoverished be cared for?," I respond: "I don't know. I suspect that in a society of free people, there will likely be many different ways in which such services will be provided." F.A. Harper stated the matter quite succinctly: "the man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free." We ought not be surprised to imagine that, in a society of unqualified liberty, millions of people will find a multitude of ways of living. Uniformity and standardization do not characterize the nature of life.

Libertarians have a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate — both from reasoning and empirical evidence — that human beings are capable of organizing and creating ways of accomplishing whatever they value and to which they are willing to commit their own resources. All that the state can accomplish, in this regard, is to (a) restrain such efforts in order to protect the interests of those who enjoy access to state power, and/or (b) shift the costs of providing such goods or services to those unwilling to pay for them. The history of privately-built roads, alternative schools, early 20th century health-care systems, private fire companies and security firms, are just a few examples of how men and women can resort to voluntary practices to accomplish what politically-conditioned minds believe can only be done through state coercion.

So it will be with the future of libertarian thinking and behavior. The man I have long considered to be the father of modern libertarian thinking, Leonard Read, was of the view that the most successful way to promote the cause of liberty was to be — in your behavior — the kind of person that your philosophy espoused. This is another way of encouraging people to live the centered life; to live with integrity; without contradiction between your ideas and your actions.

My friend — the late Karl Hess — had an interesting metaphor with which to address the question of how libertarians might act to promote their philosophy. Recognizing that there will be all kinds of approaches people might take — from engaging in peaceful demonstrations, to running for public office, to writing op-eds or letters-to-the-editor, or teaching, or writing articles and/or books — we ought to be supportive of any efforts, consistent with peace and liberty, to which different people are attracted. "Imagine that you are boarding a train and want to proceed to a destination of u2018total liberty.' There are some people who will ride with you all the way, but others who will be more comfortable getting off early; going as far as they feel like going." Karl went on to point out that as long as the other passengers are going in the direction of liberty — and not trying to reverse the direction of the train — the rest of us should welcome their support.

I have long been of the view that trying to reform the political system, or running for political office, is counter-productive. I continue to hold to this view even as I greatly admire what Ron Paul has been able to accomplish within the political system. His accomplishments, however, are to be found in helping to raise the conscious awareness of millions of people to see the state for the vicious racket that it is. It must also be noted that Ron is a very exceptional case: he understands the problems of statism with an intellectual depth few others share. Those who cling to faith in electoral politics should be forewarned to pay little attention to the make-believe "libertarians" who bandy about phrases they neither understand nor embrace. There is an important distinction to be drawn between making compromises as to strategy (i.e., how best to advance peace and liberty) and principles. One must learn how to distinguish the two, as there will be many eager for political power who will sound like principled libertarians even as they help advance statism. (Does the name "Ronald Reagan" ring a bell?)

As people weigh the options for advancing libertarian principles, I offer this advice: bear in mind the comparative advantage these ideas have in today's world. Statist programs grounded in socialistic thought and economic planning have had whatever respectability they once enjoyed among most intellectuals dispatched by decades of empirical experience. Even the case for superintending regulatory systems is now understood to be little more than a cover for industry-desired cartelism. The consequence of the failure to maintain a separation of economy and state has been to foster recessions/depressions, inflation, and increased taxation, and to discourage the creativity and production necessary to the survival of civilization itself. In a word, the modern state is economically bankrupt.

But the bankruptcy runs much deeper than what can be quantified in material terms. Our modern culture suffers from a moral bankruptcy as well. Wars against any nations selected by the whims of an empirical president; expanded police-state practices; the use of torture, imprisonment without trial, and assassination of persons selected by the president; increased surveillance, wiretapping, and censorship; the war against the unimpeded exchange of information, combine to reveal an institutional order that has lost whatever moral foundations it might have once enjoyed.

But beyond these more obvious examples of a culture in entropic collapse is to be found its most vulnerable trait: the spiritual depletion of a politically-dominated society. Because the state is defined as an institution that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory, such power is dependent upon having no impediments to its exercise. The idea of a "limitation" on the exercise of state power is purely illusory, offered to give Boobus the feeling that his liberty and individuality are bounded by a cushion of inviolability. But the reality is to the contrary: a limitation on state power is necessarily a denial of its monopolization of the forces of violence. Almost by definition, then, the state must treat its human subjects as assets to be exploited on behalf of the purposes of the state and its institutional owners.

This, I suggest, is where the modern state is the most defenseless and subject to criticism. It is, I believe, the state's war against the human spirit that has so energized not only the Ron Paul movement, but much of the Occupy, Arab Spring, anti-war, Tea Party, pro-Wikileaks, and other widespread, peaceful expressions of civil disobedience and opposition to state power. While the institutional self-serving economic consequences of governmental policies are also helping to drive these various movements, Murray Rothbard's deeper, spiritual sentiments are also being voiced. Forty years ago, he accurately prophesied that "the young kids out there are not going to go the barricades in defense of lowered transaction costs."

With a growing awareness of the dehumanizing and destructive nature of all political systems, and the demonstrated failure of centralized banking and regulatory practices to produce economic well-being, there is a wonderful opportunity for the defenders of liberty to articulate a coherent case that addresses the economic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of the failures of statism. The bankruptcy of state collectivism has left many otherwise intelligent minds without an intellectually respectable basis for their thinking. As we are witnessing in the "war on terror" as well as efforts to advance the "global warming" religion, the statist cause has reduced itself to little more than an attraction to institutionalized violence. What better time to advance an intellectually sound philosophy that values principled integrity more highly than public opinion polling and special-interest funding as the basis for their actions?

As our civilization — and the thinking that's bringing it down — continues its downward spiral, there is a vacuum to be filled by ideas and practices that sustain life. It is in response to such emptiness that Albert Jay Nock's "Remnant" will help to discover alternatives to our politicized mass-minded destructiveness. I have been in attendance at Ron Paul rallies and seen thousands of young faces in the audience, and realized that I was looking upon the Remnant; the future of truly civilized people. What a contrast is found in comparing the attitudes of the young who see their lives enhanced by such transformations, while those who have chosen to become part of the life-destroying military are responding with ever-increasing acts of suicide. What better images to put before our children as they embark on the preparations for their futures!

But to be a part of this metamorphosis will require great effort, not so much in trying to organize and change others, but in developing one's own understanding. The defenders of the ancien regime — having no intellectual foundations for their ambitions for power — will be unable to sustain themselves in intelligent discourse. As we have already seen, they have had to resort to name-calling — "racist," "anti-Semitic," "hate-monger," etc. — as a substitute for clear, principled thought.

The best advice I can offer to those participating in this new renaissance is to devote your energies to the expansion of your awareness of the conditions necessary to a human-centered culture. This involves moving beyond the recitation of clichés and bromides; abandoning ideologies, dogmas, and gurus; and discovering that a creative understanding is to be found not in answers, but in refining the quality of your questions. Two of my favorite quotations are Thomas Pynchon's "if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers," and Milton Mayer's "the questions that can be answered are not worth asking." Learn to employ my favorite word in the English language: "why?" Learn, as well, how to take this question into the ever-deeper inquiries your thinking will take you.

At the same time, do your homework! No matter how knowledgeable you believe yourself to be in various subject areas, keep expanding your awareness. Read with greater depth in such fields as economics — even challenging yourself with Mises' Human Action — history, psychology, philosophy, religion, the genuine sciences (e.g., physics, biology, chemistry, brain/mind studies, geology). There are many sources that can assist you in your inquiries: Mises University, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, the Independent Institute, along with hundreds of other Internet sites.

I am convinced that any emerging life-sustaining renaissance will have its primary focus on the liberation of the human spirit. It is the confrontation between individualism and collectivism that will be the focal point in efforts to civilize and humanize an uncivilized and dehumanized world. As such, extend your inquiries into areas with which many libertarians are unfamiliar or uncomfortable: poetry, art, music, dance, depth psychology, and other spiritual dimensions of what it means to be human. I suspect that what most attracted readers to Ayn Rand's novels was not her logical reasoning, but her passion. Rediscover the liberating works of Shelley, Whitman, Goethe, cummings, among earlier poets, as well as the more recent poetry of Seamus Heaney and Lilija Valis. For spiritual accompaniment on your journey, I offer "The Seedkeepers," written by an unknown Palestinian:

"Burn our Land. Burn our dreams. Pour acid on our songs. Cover with sawdust the blood of our massacred people. Muffle with your technology the screams of all that is free, wild and indigenous. Destroy our grass and soil. Raze to the ground every farm and every village our ancestors had built. Every tree, every home, every book, every law and all equity and harmony. Flatten with your bombs every valley. Erase with your edits our past, our literature, our metaphor. Denude the forest and the earth till no insect no bird no word can find a place to hide. Do that and more. I do not fear your tyranny. I do not despair ever. For I guard a seed, a little live seed, that I shall safeguard and plant again."

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives

When I heard the learned astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

~ Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learned Astronomer

My wife and I recently took a trip to northwest Arkansas to visit relatives. While there, we went to the Crystal Bridges art museum in Bentonville. Focusing its collection on American artists — from the colonial period to the present — this museum is the creation of Alice Walton, the daughter of Wal-Mart's Sam Walton. Works by such artists as Winslow Homer, Gilbert Stuart, Asher Durand, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Norman Rockwell, Jackson Pollock, and Thomas Eakins, among numerous others, provided more than 400 paintings and sculptures that occupy the museum's 50,000 square feet of galleries.

Ms. Walton's project bringing great works of art to the Ozarks has received universal praise, right? No? While it seems to be greatly valued by local residents, the aesthetic wing of the institutional establishment has managed to get its designer fabrics into a twisted knot and to find a troublesome pebble in their Jimmy Choo's. Jeffrey Goldberg — writing on Bloomberg.com — characterized Crystal Bridges as a "moral blight" and a "moral tragedy." Other critics complained that Alice Walton was using her money to buy paintings that should be kept in their home (i.e., eastern establishment) cities, rather than being taken to (gasp!) the backwoods of Arkansas. In speaking of Crystal Bridge's $35 million purchase of Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits," the New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman, treated the sale as akin to demolishing Penn Station! I can imagine some members of the art establishment comparing all of this to the Burt Lancaster film, The Train, in which World War II Nazi generals try to steal European paintings.

Jeffrey Goldberg wastes little ink outlining the basis for his moral outrage. His indictment is laid at the feet of Alice's father, Sam Walton, a more recent entry into that vaguely defined category identified in Matthew Josephson's 1934 book The Robber Barons. A close reading of this work reveals Sam Walton to have committed the same "sins" as his predecessors: beginning as a small five-and-dime retailer in a small town, he managed to turn his company into a multi-billion dollar enterprise and, worse yet, to insist upon controlling his own wealth. That's it! Such is the "wrongdoing" of which the anti-capitalists have railed against the successful for centuries! Where the "robbery" occurred in all of this is rarely identified. While some of these men employed the powers of the state when it was advantageous to them to do so, the bulk of their great fortunes arose in the marketplace rather than through the ministrations of the state. Like the modern anti-capitalists who urge successful business people to "give back" to the community — implying that their wealth has been wrongfully taken from others — it is enough that the wealthy have sizeable sums of money and can be forced to disgorge it on behalf of purposes favored by the anti-capitalists!

One cannot understand the anti-Wal-Mart hysteria without addressing the two major themes of the attack: [1] as I mentioned above, Sam Walton personifies the capacity of creative men and women to become very successful in a free market economy. What Wal-Mart critics are fearful of acknowledging is that this company's success has been due to customers, suppliers, and employees engaging in voluntary transactions with one another for their mutual self-interests. Such behavior underlies what used to be thought of as "the American dream," a state of mind that has since been redefined as a "government entitlement," and/or a "winning lottery ticket." Sam Walton represented how individuals can mobilize their own energies to serve their own purposes. Collectivists cannot live with that image.

[2] Wal-Mart has been strongly condemned for maintaining an opposition to labor unions organizing its employees. (For purposes of full disclosure,the law firm with which I once practiced represented Wal-Mart in its labor policies and that was the section in which I worked.) Labor unions, with the backing of the federal government, are a destructive force that employ violence — and the threat thereof — to obtain benefits at the expense of non-union workers and, ultimately, the economy itself. The consequences of unionism can be found by visiting the communities that now comprise the "rust belt" of America. Sam Walton had a continuing opposition to unions, an attitude that helped to make Wal-Mart as profitable as it is.

Artistic expression has long been valued for its appeal to aesthetics, intuition, and the emotional and spiritual dimensions of what it means to be human. But, like schools that help students develop an intellectually grounded capacity for self-directed learning and analysis, such qualities tend to be monopolized by members of the institutional establishment. Great art is to be housed, and great schools provided, in the great cities (e.g., New York, Boston, Philadelphia). People in the "sticks" are expected to satisfy themselves with curious forms of amusement — rather than art — and to have schools that will train their children to perform the work necessary for the institutional order.

But now comes Alice Walton with the audacity to bring some of the greatest artwork produced by Americans out to the (gulp!) hinterlands, the boondocks, the sticks. Not only that, she has chosen to house these works in a beautiful series of connected buildings, located in a ravine served by a running spring. When I first saw this facility, my mind kept racing back to the poet Goethe's definition of architecture as "frozen music."

I have long been annoyed by the elitists who refer to the faceless others they contemptuously characterize as "Joe Six-pack." I have asked audiences of people whether any of them think of themselves in such a collective, dismissive way. I have never had anyone admit to such an identity. But for members of the institutional, corporate-state establishment who insist upon pretending that they give a rodent's backside for the well-being of ordinary people, what is transpiring at Crystal Bridges must engender shivering paroxysms. The day we visited, there were at least as many people present as we would encounter at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. There was no admission fee at Crystal Bridges, thanks to a gift from Wal-Mart (do you suppose the company will get credit for such a policy, or only more condemnation for encouraging attendance by "ordinary" people)?

At the top of my list of Broadway musicals I cannot stand is Camelot. I wonder if the east coast establishment elitists have occasion – as they contemplate the specter of Crystal Bridges — to hum the song from that musical "What Do the Simple Folk Do"? I can tell you something of what we saw there: people arriving in pickup trucks with license plates from Missouri or Arkansas; people wearing Oklahoma Sooners baseball caps; others with T-shirts that read "Don't Mess With Texas." I saw no evidence of designer clothes, most people probably having selected their wardrobes at Target or Wal-Mart!

But this multitude of diverse individuals did seem to enjoy their experiences at Crystal Bridges. I overheard a number of thoughtful questions and comments, indicative of the museum's capacity for helping others to expand their consciousness. I was reminded of the cartoon I once saw in Omni magazine. An artist was on the street working on a very abstract painting. A passerby asks him what the purpose of his painting was, to which the artist replied: "to get people to think." "To think about what?," the passerby inquired. "See, it's working already," said the artist.

When people who live in what the institutionalists regard as "fly-over" country begin asking questions that are discomforting to the ruling elites, the established order is in trouble. Crystal Bridges is another example of the decentralization, the centrifugation, taking place in our world, helping to reduce society to a human scale of organization. Perhaps this museum will help people to discover dimensions to their lives that have heretofore been confined to the great palaces and pavilions in the great cities. A warning of the coming changes may be found in letters Alice Walton received from two children who had visited this wonderful museum. "We thought that was for rich people," one commented, while another wrote "we didn't know they would let us in."

What citadels of power can withstand the questions of children?

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Butler Shaffer Archives