Author: Ray

The following is what crony journalism looks like. These two things, which are going on right now (Feb 1st, 2021), should be international mainstream news — front page. Instead, virtually no mainstream sources are covering either of them.

No one will be shocked, surprised, or outraged, of course, when more counter-protests spring up.

As I’ve been saying for as long as I can remember: cronyism, by definition, is leftist. It is a type of socialism. It is favoritism in exchange for money and votes. It is rule by lobby groups and special privilege.

I look forward to all progressive-leftist partisans — so opposed to “authoritarian executive action” — defending this calamitous, outrageous joke of a government, and I look forward to the righteous indignation complete with the litany of phony causes, which create deeper division, strife, and cronyism.

It starts when the tide turns — when the majority shifts and become those who no longer stand for lockdown, oppression, suppression of individual freedom; when the majority sees through all the propaganda and becomes impervious to it because the majority can rely on the power and efficacy of their independent reasoning minds; when people who think for themselves, and who know that they are free and not pawns of government or government bureaus, become the majority.

Click the pic to watch:

It’s going to keep happening more. Do you know why?

Because it should.

If this sort of thing, which is totally commonplace, doesn’t infuriate you, I’d like for you to tell me why:

What is independent thinking?

Independent thinking is you, your car, and an auto-mechanic you don’t really know.

Independent thinking is you taking your car in for a biannual tune-up, strictly routine. After handing the auto-mechanic your car keys and then waiting in the lobby for approximately five minutes, this same mechanic comes into the lobby and says to you:

“Your oil is pretty dirty and it’s also getting low. I recommend an oil-change, which I can and will do right now for $25.00. It will take me about ten minutes.”

Observe yourself sincerely in this scenario.

Consider what you personally would be thinking in that situation. 

Not everybody would process this information the same, of course, and that’s part of the point: because individual evaluation and the importance that each individual assigns to a given piece of information determines, more often than not, the degree of independent thought. 

The primary factors are each individual context-of-knowledge and each value-structure contained within each individual person.

So: you may or may not check the dipstick yourself — to observe the oil-level firsthand and to see how dirty it looks to you, depending, perhaps, on how much you know about cars and dipsticks and oil-levels and the look of new oil versus old oil, and depending also on how much you care about your time and a “measly” (or precious) $25.00.

Or perhaps you’ve already deliberated over this particular thing, before you even got here, because you already assumed you needed an oil-change, based strictly upon the amount of time that’s passed since your last oil change. Perhaps you even have a soft little sticker on the top-left inside of your windshield telling you when you need an oil change, and perhaps you’ve been paying close attention to that little sticker.

Or perhaps you’ve noticed that the exhaust coming out of your tailpipe is whiter in color than it used to be. 

Or perhaps you think of a specific thing that your mother or father (or your brother or sister or your roommate or your boyfriend or your girlfriend) said to you about your car and your oil. 

Or perhaps you think of something else entirely that doesn’t even occur to me here. This is only meant to analogize — to concretize the nature of independent thinking and how it operates for all individual human beings. I realize more than ever now, in writing this book and driving deeper into the subject than I’ve done to date, that the issues are, on one hand, more complex than some people would have it; yet, at the same time, they’re also not as intractable as others make them out to be.

One of the first things that needs to be said is that independent thinking is not necessarily synonymous with original thinking, nor is it necessarily synonymous with contrary thinking, nor is it at all a question of brilliance or intelligence-quotient (so-called) or anything of that nature. 

It is a fact, as well, that we all rely on people with specialized knowledge – everyday – and we all take plenty of people at their words, without questioning every single piece of every single bit of information that comes our way, moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, year-in-year-out. 

The primary principle involved is in individually processing (or not) any information presented, and this, in turn, is primarily determined one’s context and one’s value-hierarchy (i.e. what each individual person regards as important).

The independent thinker is nothing more or less than the person who assumes responsibility for the ultimate contents of her or his own mind. It is entirely possible for someone who is a genuinely thoughtful and independent-thinking person to nonetheless take you at your word if you tell her some fact she’s not particularly interested in: a new song by a musician she doesn’t know or care about, for example.

So: after considering how you’d process the information the auto-mechanic gives you about an oil-change, imagine that next, for whatever personal reasons, you tell the mechanic to proceed with the oil change.

“You need an air-filter change,” the mechanic then says to you, halfway through the oil-change. “This will cost you another $25.00. But I have in the shop here the exact kind of air-filter your car requires, and it will only take me about sixty seconds to remove the old one and install the new one.”

The mechanic then shows you your old air-filter, which perhaps you take a moment to look at and observe, or perhaps not.

You may or may not know how dirty the air-filter actually is, depending upon your past experiences and your context of knowledge concerning air-filters — specifically, I mean, in whether you have a gauge or standard of measurement by which to determine if an air-filter is very dirty versus moderately dirty versus barely dirty versus clean. And so what do you do?

You may or may not call a friend or a family member, or you may or may not ask the mechanic questions, or you may or may not do a quick search on your phone — possibly to watch a video about when to change your air-filter, or to pull up an image of what a dirty air-filter actually looks like.

Or perhaps you don’t bother with any of that at all, and you just barely process what the mechanic said to you and you tell him to go ahead with the air-filter change as well — or perhaps you decided upon the very opposite of that: you barely think about what the mechanic said, barely paying attention to your air-filter when the mechanic shows it to you, and yet, even so, you tell the mechanic not to change it, because no matter how dirty it may or may not actually be, you simply don’t regard it as important.

If, however, you do nothing at all — not even glance at the air filter when the mechanic attempts to show it to you — but then nod in acquiescence and tell the mechanic to change it and charge you for it, observe what you’re doing in that instance:

You’re taking the auto-mechanic on blind faith. 

Now imagine that many, many more things are presented to you by this mechanic: You might want to consider your transmission fluid, this mechanic says, and your power-steering fluid, brake fluid, anti-freeze. 

Then imagine the mechanic bringing up other issues – things which are even more serious: Your muffler is about to fall off. Your battery is nearly dead. Your spark plugs are shot. Your fuel pump is going. Your transmission seems as though it might be about to die. Your electrical system is full of bad wiring. Your engine even sounds off and may need to be rebuilt. And so on.

Consider your personal reaction to all these hypothetical things — how you’d think about them, how you’d address them, one way or another — specifically, how much independent thought you’d put into each of them. Ask yourself: what determines how much thought and effort you’re willing to put in? Is it your interest level? 

And ask yourself: what determines that?

Now use this same analogy but with your physical health: a doctor at your annual health check-up tells you several things which need looking into. Observe how with your physical well-being you’re almost certainly more motivated to deliberate in your own mind and then decide for yourself how much you’ll investigate any, all, some, or none of the things you’re being told. But once you’ve decided, how do you investigate and evaluate? How specifically do you check and re-check? What determines which issues you’ll investigate more critically and with greater scrutiny?

If your condition is diagnosed as an urgent stage-three condition, which left untreated could kill you, would you go for a second or even third opinion? Would you research it to the utmost and learn as much as you possibly could? Would you choose a naturopathic practitioner for something like this, or would you choose, for instance, a world-class oncologist? Those questions are not put forth snidely but sincerely. Such a serious condition would almost surely, at the very least, by the majority of people, be investigated with greater depth and urgency than something diagnosed as “probably nothing.”

Transfer this same basic process into the realm of politico-economic claims.

Transfer it into the realm of historic claims.

Transfer it into the realm of religious or philosophical claims.

What determines the degree of seriousness and importance? 

Command and control? 

The abrogation of politico-economic rights? 

In the realm of human cognition, all knowledge is shaped and conditioned by the structure of the human mind, which operates by means of reason, which, to quote Mr. Spinoza again, is “a faculty for the integration of knowledge that human beings possess.”

Different people care about different things, to be sure. 

If, for example, a bartender says to you that the word “gin” is a shortened version of the word “genever” which comes from the Latin “juniperus” which refers to juniper, and this, the bartender says, goes far in explaining why the predominant flavor of gin is juniper berry – you may or may not take this bartender at her word, and you may or may not care, one way or the other. You may, on the one hand, be interested enough in this subject-matter to store that information in your mind (or perhaps even write it down), and then you may more thoroughly research it later. On the other hand, you may not.

Perhaps you’re in class, and a professor tells you that the highest mountain in Mexico is a dormant volcano called Pico de Orizaba, and what do you personally do with that information? How much does it matter to you? Do you remember it? Do you integrate it with what you already know about any number of other things? Or does that particular piece of information go in one ear and out the — you know — other? What if this same professor then told you that under Mexico’s highest mountain is one of the only remaining oil reserves left in North America, and that the entire planet’s reserves of oil are barely enough to last five more years? Do you think about and remember what this professor said in this case? Or not? Do you merely take her at her word? Or do you begin investigating this issue for yourself?

Different people, I reiterate, respond differently to different things. There is no problem with this — that is, until it leads to decisions of serious politico-economic policies which violate individual sanctity. 

It is my conviction that there are certain things — politico-economic things most commonly and controversially — which all humans must assume responsibility for understanding, and which in turns means independently and critically processing the relevant data, which I know requires a great deal of time and effort. It asks a lot.

Such is the demanding nature of independent thought.

Ultimately, the independent thinker is the thinker who assumes responsibility for the contents of her of his own mind.

The beauty of the transmission of knowledge, which is fostered by the division of labor, is that so many diverse ideas and facts from so many diverse people has created an exponential amplification of knowledge: different people interested in different facts and fields-of-study, any one of which when synthesized by the mind of another human being leads to a more profound understanding and depth of learning that surpasses what any of these different people possessed individually. 

This is the essence of civilization and human progress.

Knowledge forms a unity. It is deeply interwoven and interconnected, as it is also hierarchical. As such, not all knowledge is equal in its hierarchical importance.

The main issue of present-day societal conflicts is not rightwing or leftwing, which in the scope of things is meaningless partisan quibbling. The main issue is whether humans should give away freedom, private initiative, and individual responsibility, and surrender it to the guardianship of a gigantic apparatus of compulsion.

There are two infallible methods and measures by which to gauge the importance and necessity of independent thought:

First: matters of command-and-control over individual autonomy and the freedom to exchange. 

Second: catastrophizing, which should always be looked upon suspiciously. 

The art of independent thinking is the art of independently processing — processing, I emphasize, as distinguished from parroting without the mental effort and exertion of focus required to grasp and comprehend the meaning of the words one is using. That and that alone is the stuff of which independent thought consists.

Independent thinking is you, your car, and an auto-mechanic you don’t really know, and it is what you then choose to do with the information presented to you.

Even the New York Times Agrees that Joe Biden is acting like a dictator

The dangerousness of the time we’re living in can hardly be exaggerated or overstated.

The blinding hatred of Donald Trump, which has obsessed people and festered within for four years, has created a pendulum swing and backlash so extreme that the majority of people are now, because of this obsessive festering, perfectly prepared to believe and accept anything, provided it’s in opposition to Donald Trump, and the current administration knows this. You may be assured as well that this administration, which is explicitly big-government, pro-government, will not let this backlash and the vulnerability of people go to waste.

Please hear me: no matter what you think of Donald Trump and no matter what your opinion of SARS-CoV2, this methodology is not the proper way to govern.

It is absolutely bloody fucking dangerous.

It is the stuff of nightmares.

When you have a person — the leader of the once-free world — in clear cognitive decline and early-stage dementia signing in one week more executive actions than most presidents ever sign in a lifetime, you can be one-hundred percent certain it is the wrong path.

I ask you to divest yourself of all partisan thinking, even for just a moment, no matter where on the political spectrum you place yourself, and analyze the current era and situation with the full power of your independent, reasoning, thinking, critical mind, which is so strong.

You are a free person.

Freedom is your birthright.

You do not exist by permission — not by any government’s permission. You exist by right. Your life and your property are yours by right.

There’s an infallible method for determining whether an ideology or a policy is good and healthy, or whether it’s dangerous and destructive. This method crosses all partisan barriers:

First, ignore the terminology and the names and the platitudes that politicians and activists give to any particular idea or policy — ignore them because this terminology is explicitly crafted in such a way as to make any sane and compassionate person loathe to go against it: i.e. Compassionate Care Act, American Relief Bill, #BlackLivesMatter, Mask Mandates Save Lives (they don’t), Lockdowns Save Lives (they don’t), et cetera — and instead let the following be your guide and gauge: the stance on property.

It is here that the total ideology is fully disclosed.

Always check the proposed solutions of any and every policy and ideology that’s put forth, by any administration, in any era or place, because it’s there, in the endgame and in the proposed means of achieving the stated ends — which, never forget, always requires a specific attitude toward (and view of) property and property rights — that you’ll see the truth or falsehood, the goodness or harmfulness, of any and every idea and ideology.

Check that and ignore the rest.

The rest is noise.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

The endgame of #BlackLivesMatter and its explicit ideological guide — Critical Race Theory — is an utterly unoriginal and stupefyingly simplistic version of Marxism. And more: the impetus for virtually the entire movement was propelled by deliberate prevarication and suppression of the actual facts concerning police brutality.

The only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission.

I say to you again:

Always check the proposed solutions of any and every policy and ideology that’s put forth by any administration, in any era or place, because it’s there, in the endgame and in the proposed means of achieving the stated ends — which, never forget, always requires a specific attitude toward (and view of) property and property rights — that you’ll see the truth or falsehood, the goodness or harmfulness, of any and every idea and ideology.

January 27, 2021, to mark the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — the Nazi German death camp, where some 1.1 million people, mostly Jewish, were killed during the war.

Thinking and acting are for humans indivisible and inseparable. They can for the purpose of study be broken down into component parts, but in actuality — i.e. in how they function — thinking and acting are entirely unified and symbiotic: two inextricable pieces of an elegantly integrated whole.

Thinking and acting are another way of describing the spirit and flesh — or brain and body, if you prefer.

Human action is preceded by thinking.

Thinking means to cogitate beforehand over future action and to introspect afterward upon past action.

Thinking is reasoning.

Reason is the human faculty that integrates data, and it’s a faculty all individual human beings possess. The capacity to reason isn’t limited to any one race, sex, sexual-orientation, gender, skin color, or any other non-definitional human characteristic. The faculty of reason is the “sapiens” in the term “homo-sapiens.”

Reason is the defining characteristic of the human species and it is the common-denominator that unites us all as individuals.

All actions are performed by individuals.

Every action is always based upon some idea about cause and effect.

“One who thinks a casual relation thinks, by extension, a theorem. Action without thinking — or practice without theory — is unimaginable: even if the reasoning is faulty and the theory incorrect, thinking and theorizing are even then not lacking in action.”

Wrote Ludwig von Mises.

In this capacity, then — the capacity of a thinking, acting, discrete being — homo-sapiens came forth from her prehuman state: a social sapient creature yet individuated.

That there are clubs, churches, communities, cities, counties, nations, states, municipalities, and so on — and that there is contained therein social cooperation under the division of labor — becomes intelligible and comprehensible only in the action of individuals.

“Nobody ever perceived a nation” — as Ludwig von Mises also so sagely wrote — “without perceiving its members.”

In this sense, one may also accurately say that a so-called social collective only comes into being through the actions of individuals — which, however, does not mean that the individual is secondary or chronologically antecedent or temporally after-the-fact. It merely means that the definite actions of individuals constitute any and every community or so-named collective.

“A collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of various individuals, and as such it is a real thing. Yet there is no need to argue whether a collective is the sum resulting from the addition of its elements or more, whether it is a being sui generis, and whether it is reasonable or not to speak of its will, plans, aims, and actions and to attribute to it a distinct soul. Such talk is pedantic and idle.”

And why is such talk pedantic and idle?

“Because it is illusory to believe that it could in any way be possible to visualize collective wholes apart from the individuals who compose these wholes” (ibid).

Collective wholes are never visible.

Their intelligibility — their discoverability and cognition — is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting humans attribute to their acts.

We can, of course, see a group or crowd — i.e. a multitude of people — yet whether this group or crowd is a mere gathering or a mob or a mass or an organized body or any other kind of social entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning that they themselves, as individuals, attach to their presence.

This meaning is always the meaning of individuals. Always.

Not our senses but our understanding — which comes from the human faculty of reason, which is a mental action that each individual must perform individually, in the privacy of her or his own mind — this alone is what enables us to recognize social entities.

As such, individualism as a philosophy opposes governmental coercion and all other forms of politico-economic authoritarianism, no matter how purportedly admirable the cause, no matter how seemingly benign the force.

As a corollary of this, the philosophy of individualism is a full proponent of individual choice.

Individualism espouses the voluntary — nothing more and nothing less: voluntary human action specifically, as against coercion of any kind.

This alone is the defining characteristic of individualism.

Individualism does not mean you automatically or necessarily disagree with the ends or goals espoused by, for example, Quakers, Communitarians, Christians, Communists, et cetera. It means only that you do not believe in forcing any means whatsoever upon any individuals in order to achieve your stated ends or goals.

This one principle alone is absolutely critical in understanding accurately the philosophy of individualism and its corollary: the act of independent thinking.

Seen in this light, then — which is to say, the accurate light — it becomes blindingly obvious how absurd the litany of platitudes concerning individualism actually are. To wit:

“Unbridled” voluntary choice and voluntary human action.

“Rugged” voluntary choice and voluntary human action.

“Unrestrained” voluntary choice and voluntary human action.

“Unchecked” voluntary choice and voluntary human action.

“Lone-wolf” voluntary choice and voluntary human action.

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else, I ask you to please hear this and ruminate upon it — for the sake of your rational minds and the rational minds of your loved ones, if nothing else:

Individualism is not dangerous even when it’s “unbridled.” It is not rugged. It is not the lone wolf, not wild. It is not the kamikaze pilot, not self-destructive, not suicidal.

Individualism is not the unchecked monster under your roof — some slavering, insatiable, dog-like beast who would devour all cooperation and all humanity and peace, all harmony, all goodwill, all the warmth or benevolence which you so often feel.

On the contrary, in leaving people alone and in having the respect for each individual’s independence to make her or his free and voluntary choices, individualism as a philosophy creates and fosters these excellent things, these virtuous beings, gives them more confident and more independent voices.

Neither isolationist, nor antisocial, nor anti-society, nor atomistic, nor anachronistic, the philosophy of individualism, I say again, is not anti-family, anti-friend, anti-love, anti-ocean-below, anti-blue-sky-above. Neither is individualism something disconnected and completely discrete, without any context at all — which, from a purely metaphysical standpoint, isn’t even possible, first of all. When you distill it down to its essence, individualism is really one thing and one thing only: it is a belief in voluntary human action, as against (I repeat) action that is coerced, compelled, or forced.

Individualism is predicated upon the fact that only individuals think. Only individuals reason. “Societies” do not think. “The Community” does not reason. “The racial group” does not either — none of them do, apart from the individuals who compose each one of these groups.

No collective — no matter how venerable, no matter how numerous its members, no matter how frenzied its mob, no matter how hip and fashionable or cool — none collectively reasons or thinks, not any more than any one of them collectively eats or breathes or drinks.

The executioner, not the state, executes the criminal.

The meaning of those concerned is what discerns in the executioner’s action an action of the state.

Any given group or so-called collective operates always through the intermediary of one or several individuals whose actions are related to the collective as the secondary source. The meaning that the acting individuals — and those affected by the acting — attach to an action is what determines the action’s character. It’s also the meaning that marks one action as the action of an individual and another action as the action of the state or the municipality.

A group of armed people occupy a palace or place. It is the meaning of those concerned which imputes this occupation not to the individual officers and soldiers on the spot but rather to their nation.

If we analyze and study the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals, we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of a collective wholes. Why?

Because a societal collective has no existence and no reality outside the individual members’ actions.

The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals constituting its body. There is no group, gang, collective, community (et cetera) conceivable which is not operative in the actions of the individuals who compose it. The reality of a social integer consists in its directing and releasing definite actions on the part of individuals. Thus the way to understanding wholes is through an analysis of the individual’s actions.

Wrote Ludwig von Mises.

This is why the most self-destructive thing any human can do is subjugate the power of one’s own brain to that of another — to accept as fact the mere assertions of an authority, to treat as truth their authoritarian decrees, or to allow these to be the connective link between your mind and your life, your convictions and your actions.

No matter the size and scope of any one person’s learning, it does not alter the fact that it’s each individual human brain which must obtain its learning, and which must, as a corollary, integrate individually and process this learning so that this learning becomes knowledge — because if it’s not independently processed and integrated, it is not fully knowledge. This is the difference between the parrot who learns to mimic and repeat human language and the human who learns the meaning of the language she or he is using.

The one who thinks and acts within the scope of her or his knowledge and learning — regardless of its size, regardless of how large or how small — and the one who then keeps expanding the limit of that learning and who does so over the long arc of life, that is the independent thinker. And that is what the philosophy of individualism espouses.

A democratic government is that system of government under which those ruled determine by vote the exercise of the legislative and executive power and the selection of supreme executives and other government personnel.

This is also sometimes known as vox populi — a Latin term meaning “voice of the people” — and the winner is of course determined by majority rule. 

Majority rule is stupendously dangerous. 

If, for example, a majority votes that the exercise of power remove the rights of a minority — let us say, for the purpose of illustration, the rights of women or the rights of gay men or the rights of jewish people — there is now nothing to protect that minority’s rights, which in reality are inalienable (they’re either recognized or not — and if they’re not, it is an act of injustice). 

Please allow that to sink it.

Democracy has become a junk work — a throwaway word — a word everybody uses (and uses, moreover, always in the context of a good and virtuous thing) but which virtually no one understands.

This is precisely why the United States is fundamentally, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “a Constitutional Republic”: because your life and your property are yours absolutely. They are not in any way, at any time, subject to vote, nor should they be.

The Constitutional theoreticians and philosophical architects didn’t have any great love for democracy, and they certainly didn’t believe in unlimited majority rule on primary issues, as I will show in a moment, and the reason they didn’t is that they didn’t believe that fundamental rights should be at the mercy of the majority.

Indeed, democracy was also called by some among them “the tyranny of the majority.”

As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:

“[Under democracy] there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.”

And John Adams, a “passionately outspoken enemy of slavery,” as he was described, accurately recognized that democracies “merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect preexisting rights.”

The immortal Benjamin Franklin, who was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, petitioned the first United States Congress for the “full abolition of slavery, and every species of traffic in slavery” because by right “no human is by nature the property of another.”

Thomas Jefferson himself wrote into the Declaration of Independence a serious and scrupulously reasoned denunciation of the slave trade, which was, however, edited out by congress. In 1784, Jefferson brought a bill before Congress which sought to prohibit slavery in all western territories, but this bill was voted down by a single vote. That’s democracy at work. 

Yet there is a certain sense in which the United States is both a democracy and a republic, and the component that makes it a partial democracy is the “procedural selection of personnel,” which refers to electing the officials whose job it is to implement Constitutional principles. But the principles themselves– most fundamentally, the principle of rights – isn’t ever, in theory, subject to vote.

Neither was the selection of personnel ever meant to be the colossal issue that it’s become today.

The fact that it has become so – when, for example, it is decided by vote if you may open your liquor store on Sunday, or when it is decided by vote if you can allow people to drink and smoke in your privately owned establishment – tells you how little our current politicians understand the nature of rights, and how far we’ve come from the original concept. 

More frighteningly, perhaps, it tells you how little the voting public understands it.

Inalienable means “that which cannot be taken away, transferred, or made alien” – not by vote, not by force, not by anyone. It any one does so, it is wrong — which is not just coincidentally here the opposite of right.

Right are inalienable in the following sense:

Persons unaccustomed to attach exact meanings to words will say that the fact that a man may be unjustly executed or imprisoned negates this proposition [of inalienable rights]. It does not. The right is with the victim nonetheless; and very literally it cannot be alienated, for alienated means passing into the possession of another. One man cannot enjoy either the life or liberty of another. If he kills ten men he will not thereby live ten lives or ten times as long; nor is he more free if he puts another man in prison. Rights are by definition inalienable: only privileges can be transferred. Even the right to own property cannot be alienated or transferred, though a given item of property can be. If one man’s rights are infringed, no other man obtains them; on the contrary, all men are thereby threatened with a similar injury (Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine, 1943).

The erosion of the critical sense — which largely makes possible the widespread mischaracterization of democracy and rights — is a serious threat to civilization. That the vote has become a weapon of destruction testifies to this.

Though a tyrant may temporarily rule through a minority if this minority holds superior arms and methods of force over the majority, in the long run a minority cannot keep the majority in subservience. The oppressed will rise up in rebellion and cast off the yoke of tyranny. Any system of government that would endure must therefore construct itself upon a system of ideas accepted by the majority.

And that is just one of the many dangers of democracy — i.e vox-populi, i.e. “the tyranny of the majority,” as it has been accurately described: the inalienable rights of the individual are not inalienable after all but can simply be voted away.

Hitler and Mussolini were well-liked by the majority of their people, for a long time.

No matter how silly and nonsensical you or I may find a given idea or ideology, so long as you and I are silent and unwilling (or unable) to counter these ideas and ideologies — relentlessly, thoroughly, forcefully, intellectually counter and refute them — we all remain vulnerable to the spread of these ideologies.

Call forth the colossal power of your critical faculty and unleash the full force of your thinking, reasoning, independent mind.

On June 4th, 2020, I wrote an article titled “Covid-19 Creates One of the Greatest Scandals in Medical History,” in which I cited an excellent expose piece written by the indefatigable Dr. James M. Todaro, an MD at Columbia, who helped expose one of the greatest medical scandals of all time. This scandal remains one of the greatest medical scandals in world history — in fact, it just became even more scandalous — and I encourage you to read the full article:

I bring it up again now, over six months later, because look what happened today, and not by coincidence, you may be absolutely certain of that:

Reader, this is not about left or right, and it’s certainly not about Donald Trump. 

This is about corruption and lies and a system of all-around regimented control and the majority of people acquiescing to this simply because they loathe Donald Trump and they’re ready to believe what they’re told.

The propaganda worldwide, ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else, is the worst it’s ever been — ever — and if you don’t see it, I submit that that’s a testament to how very serious it actually is.

This is one of the most dangerous times the world has ever faced — because the social media platforms have the reach and the power to get into so many minds: like never before. 

It has never been more important to unleash the full and awesome power of your critical faculty, your thinking mind.  

Don’t relinquish the power of your independent thought and judgement. Do not. 

Exercise it more than you ever have.

It doesn’t matter what side of the political aisle you place yourself upon — that’s irrelevant to this subject — and it doesn’t matter what your religious views are: please exert the amazing powers of your intellectual capacity, your critically thinking investigative brain.

Question everything you read and hear. Everything.

Don’t worship at the shrine of government — any government — don’t lionize or glorify or put upon a pedestal any of these politicians. Not any of them. They are corrupt by definition, and they will never stop lying to you. Ever. These are not good people. These are pandering, prevaricating, phony ex-people. They’re as crooked as they come. Joe Biden’s well-documented racial slurs and friendships with unapologetic racists leftwing and right — which even Kamala Harris called him out on before she was in his hip-pocket (and that should tell you everything you need about her scruples and her lack of principles); Joe Biden’s record and her record on marijuana prosecutions, as when Kamala Harris  laughed publicly about destroying innocent lives.

These are not good people.

Good people do not act the way that politicians do.

Don’t be fooled by crooked, corrupt, ignorant politicians. It’s beneath your brain-power to put any such trust or faith in such twisted, power-hungry people.

I urge you — I plead with you — to use the unbelievable power of your independent mind and your capacity to reason on your own. The power of your mind is more awesome than you maybe even realize.

Think for yourself.

Don’t just take on faith what these people are bombarding you with, minute by minute, and will continue bombarding you with, indefinitely.

These people don’t want you or me to think for ourselves. They fear this more than anything: because if you think for yourself, you can’t be fooled by them or anyone.

Question everything you read or hear in the media, and everything that comes out of any politician’s or bureaucrat’s mouth.

 

Politico-economic ideologies and their ramifications are never the cause but the effect — merely the end result and consequences of the spread of these bad ideas, which are philosophical in their provenance and as such begin in the minds of individual human beings, who then write them down and teach them, and in this way these ideas spread through the halls of higher education and into homes and across airwaves, the majority of people accepting them by default as much as by anything: because a thorough refutation would require a great deal of time and effort and thought.

Thus do ideas and ideologies — no matter how bad, ridiculous, or nonsensical they actually are — propagate and spread like mushrooms.

Yet at the foundation of every philosophical idea, there is a cogent issue — cogent in the sense that there is an authentic need within the human mind: a need which some ideas strive genuinely to clarify and other ideas strive genuinely to confuse.

The Danger of Democracy

A democratic government is that system of government under which those ruled determine by vote the exercise of the legislative and executive power and the selection of supreme executives and other government personnel.

This is also sometimes known as vox populi — a Latin term meaning “voice of the people” — and the winner is of course determined by majority rule. 

Majority rule is stupendously dangerous. 

If, for example, a majority votes that the exercise of power remove the rights of a minority — let us say, for illustration, women or gay men or jews — there is now nothing to protect that minority’s rights, which in reality are inalienable (they’re either recognized or not — and if they’re not, it is an act of injustice). 

This is precisely why the United States is fundamentally, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “a Constitutional Republic”: because your life and your property are yours absolutely. They are not in any way, at any time, subject to vote, nor should they be.

The Constitutional theoreticians and philosophical architects didn’t have any great love for democracy, and they certainly didn’t believe in unlimited majority rule on primary issues, as I will show in a moment, and the reason they didn’t is that they didn’t believe that fundamental rights should be at the mercy of the majority.

Indeed, democracy was also called by some among them “the tyranny of the majority.”

As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:

“[Under democracy] there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.”

And John Adams, a “passionately outspoken enemy of slavery,” as he was described, accurately recognized that democracies “merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect preexisting rights.”

The immortal Benjamin Franklin, who was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, petitioned the first United States Congress for the “full abolition of slavery, and every species of traffic in slavery” because by right “no human is by nature the property of another.”

Thomas Jefferson himself wrote into the Declaration of Independence a serious and scrupulously reasoned denunciation of the slave trade, which was, however, edited out by congress. In 1784, Jefferson brought a bill before Congress which sought to prohibit slavery in all western territories, but this bill was voted down by a single vote. That’s democracy at work. 

Yet there is a certain sense in which the United States is both a democracy and a republic, and the component that makes it a partial democracy is the “procedural selection of personnel,” which refers to electing the officials whose job it is to implement Constitutional principles. But the principles themselves– most fundamentally, the principle of rights – isn’t ever, in theory, subject to vote.

Neither was the selection of personnel ever meant to be the colossal issue that it’s become today.

The fact that it has become so – when, for example, it is decided by vote if you may open your liquor store on Sunday, or when it is decided by vote if you can allow people to drink and smoke in your privately owned establishment – tells you how little our current politicians understand the nature of rights, and how far we’ve come from the original concept. 

More frighteningly, perhaps, it tells you how little the voting public understands it.

Inalienable means “that which cannot be taken away, transferred, or made alien” – not by vote, not by force, not by anyone. It any one does so, it is wrong — which is not just coincidentally here the opposite of right.

Right are inalienable in the following sense:

Persons unaccustomed to attach exact meanings to words will say that the fact that a man may be unjustly executed or imprisoned negates this proposition [of inalienable rights]. It does not. The right is with the victim nonetheless; and very literally it cannot be alienated, for alienated means passing into the possession of another. One man cannot enjoy either the life or liberty of another. If he kills ten men he will not thereby live ten lives or ten times as long; nor is he more free if he puts another man in prison. Rights are by definition inalienable: only privileges can be transferred. Even the right to own property cannot be alienated or transferred, though a given item of property can be. If one man’s rights are infringed, no other man obtains them; on the contrary, all men are thereby threatened with a similar injury (Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine, 1943).

The erosion of the critical sense — which largely makes possible the widespread mischaracterization of democracy and rights — is a serious threat to civilization. That the vote has become a weapon of destruction testifies to this.

Though a tyrant may temporarily rule through a minority if this minority holds superior arms and methods of force over the majority, in the long run a minority cannot keep the majority in subservience. The oppressed will rise up in rebellion and cast off the yoke of tyranny. Any system of government that would endure must therefore construct itself upon a system of ideas accepted by the majority.

And that is just one of the many dangers of democracy — i.e vox-populi, i.e. “the tyranny of the majority,” as it has been accurately described: the inalienable rights of the individual are not inalienable after all but can simply be voted away.

Hitler and Mussolini were well-liked by the majority of their people, for a long time.

No matter how silly and nonsensical you or I may find a given idea or ideology, so long as you and I are silent and unwilling (or unable) to counter these ideas and ideologies — relentlessly, thoroughly, forcefully, intellectually counter and refute them — we all remain vulnerable to the spread of these ideologies.

Power corrupts.

This is not partisan. I promise you it’s not.

Political power, aided by a lightning fast, relentless, and global campaign of propaganda, is so horrifyingly dangerous that you must fight against it.

But it will be broadcast here.

The following is how it begins — and as rapidly ends. But would you like to know why it ends so rapidly? Answer: because Critical Race Theory completely refutes itself — and not just because it’s so fatuously untenable, which it is, but because any sincere attempt to implement it can only result in tribal warfare and, worse, epistemological destruction.

Human beings are defined by their rational faculty — their faculty of reason — not their race or any secondary characteristic. Goodness is chosen, not inborn. The character of a human is built through a series of choices — we are defined by our actions which are shaped by our thoughts — not chance or chance-of-birth.

No, you can’t make this shit up:

Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory evolved out of the 1930’s Frankfurt School ideology called Critical Theory, which was, as it described itself, a “social theory … a Marxist-Hegelian critique of society and culture [seeking] to reveal and challenge power structures.”

Critical Race Theory uses these same terms to described itself but adds this: “Racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.”

This “power-structure paradigm” comes directly from Karl Marx, who himself obsessed over “economic power structures” – who, indeed, could not get over the fact that when individuals are left alone, alone and free to exchange voluntarily with other individuals who are also acting voluntarily, many among them will through this voluntary process grow wealthy. Their work and focus and effort may very likely, in fact, bring them excess capital, which they can save or reinvest, and as a result of which, they will often become even wealthier.

Neither could Karl Marx quite get his head around the idea that in a free society, wherein exchange is voluntary, the determining factor of the success of any and all businesses, no matter how small or large the business may be, is always the consumer, who either will or will not pay money for the goods or services being offered. As long as a society remains free and voluntary, the consumer is the one solely in control – because the consumer can choose to shop here or there or not at all.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

This Marxian view is now sometimes known as the “conflict doctrine,” which stands in stark contrast to the classical-liberal doctrine known as the “harmony doctrine” (or “harmony principle”).

In a society where human cooperation and coordination is voluntary, all rights-respecting individuals are allied.

Classical-liberal thinkers long ago successfully refuted the conflict doctrine – demolished it, in fact – and they did so by codifying and detailing specifically the ways in which business-owners, investors, and workers in free societies are not pitted against one another but the opposite: they’re natural allies in a vibrant and harmonious system.

Critical Race Theory doesn’t know this.

Because Critical Race Theory inherited the conflict-doctrine from its ideological predecessor, which in turn inherited the conflict-doctrine from Karl Marx, Critical Race Theory, like Critical Theory before it, doesn’t know the refutations that knock the legs out from under their entire ideological worldview.

In addition, Critical Race Theory stands ideologically opposed to the Civil Rights Movement, which believed in equality of rights and thus stressed the importance of treating each person as an individual, as against some unthinking cog in a racial collective.

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” said Martin Luther King, stirringly.

I do too.

Critical Race Theory, on the other hand, is concerned not with individuals and the “content of their character,” but rather with “inequalities of outcome,” which, as you have no doubt already guessed, are the result of “racial power structures.”

Every person should know at the very least that Critical Race Theory and its ideologues are racist to the core – by definition – and not only that: they’re racist in the most insidious way possible because they masquerade as something non-racist, and would have the rest of the world believe that this were true.

As one self-described “Raceologist” and Racial Theorist recently put it: “I need White people to understand that all White people are racist.”

Critical Race Theory, baseborn and misbegotten from the outset – and history will, you may depend upon it, cause future generations to wince at these CRT theories –  would in all sincerity have you believe that it can know the contents of every single individual human brain who has white skin, yet without ever seeing or knowing the person in any way at all. I ask you to pause a moment and process that.

This warped ideological belief, which is taught in public schools all across the world and taken totally seriously, is what enables Critical Race Theorists to lecture you and me with a straight face about racism, while simultaneously telling us that an entire race of humans is racist not because of the contents of their minds, but because of their skin color.

If you don’t see the horrifying ideological contradiction contained in that one thing alone, I urge you to reread it.

Contrast this ideological perspective and worldview with the “harmony doctrine” – knowing at the same time how successful the harmony doctrine has been and still is in anti-discrimination movements, at which it’s aimed laser-like to abolish inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to slavery, to Jim Crow.

Yes, the harmony doctrine has succeeded. It didn’t happen overnight, and the work is not completed, but nothing else can even compare. Nothing else can or will end discrimination.

Indeed, one of the greatest abhorrences (and that’s saying a lot) contained within Critical Race Theory – an abhorrence which has gone largely unnoticed – is that in promoting and pushing for violence and riots and looting, because, in their words, “the Civil Rights protests didn’t work,” it in so doing completely ignores how overwhelmingly successful the Civil Rights protests were. In ignorning this and pushing simultaneously for more violence and looting, they spit into the faces of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and many, many other heroes, whose principled stand and rational ideas won out and will continue to win out, even in spite of these CRT racists advocating violence and injustice.

Racial theorists, as I mentioned in a previous chapter and will continue to mention, are also inexplicably unwilling to denounce and condemn the countries and Marxist regimes in our present-day which continue to practice slavery:

There are 167 countries that still have slavery, affecting about 46 million people.

While over a hundred countries still have slavery, six countries have significantly higher numbers:

India (18.4 million)

China (3.4 million)

Pakistan (2.1 million)

Bangladesh (1.5 million)

Uzbekistan (1.2 million)

North Korea (1.1 million)

India has the highest number of slaves in the world at 18.4 million slaves. This number is higher than the population of the Netherlands and is approximately 1.4% of India’s entire population. All forms of modern slavery exist in India, including forced child labor, forced marriage, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups.

China has the second-highest number of slaves at 3.4 million, which is less than a quarter of India’s.

Other countries that have significantly high slave populations are Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Egypt, Myanmar, Iran, Turkey, and Sudan.

Why?

Why are Critical Race Theorists so deafeningly silent on the subject of present-day slavery, the practioners of which are so often Marixst or Neo-Marxist?

Here’s one possible explanation:

“We are trained Marxists,” #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors said.

And quoting the official #BlackLivesMatter mission statement:

• “A progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local state, and federal levels, to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth”

• “Reparations … in the form of a guaranteed minimum livable income”

• “Reparations … in the form of corporate and government reparations … and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing and land”

• “Reparations … in the form of mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and … the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs”

• “Federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized”

• “Real, meaningful, and equitable universal health care”

• “A constitutional right at the state and federal level to a fully-funded education”

Also the following, written right after the homophobic, murderous dictator Fidel Castro died, appeared on a BLM platform.

“We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante.”

The article continues:

“Revolution is continuous and is won first in the hearts and minds of the people and is continually shaped and reshaped by the collective. No single revolutionary ever wins or even begins the revolution. The revolution begins only when the whole is fully bought in and committed to it. And it is never over…. Revolution is rooted in the recognition that there are certain fundamentals to which every being has a right, just by virtue of one’s birth: healthy food, clean water, decent housing, safe communities, quality healthcare, mental health services, free and quality education, community spaces, art, democratic engagement, regular vacations, sports, and places for spiritual expression are not questions of resources, but questions of political will and they are requirements of any humane society.”

The article concludes with this eye-popper:

“With Fidel’s passing there is one more lesson that stands paramount: when we are rooted in collective vision when we bind ourselves together around quests for infinite freedom of the body and the soul, we will be victorious. As Fidel ascends to the realm of the ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength, and power as we recommit ourselves to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel Vive!”

In light of all this explicit Marxist and Neo-Marxist ideology – propagandistic to the core and which is an inherent part of Critical Race Theory’s ideological inheritance – one cannot help but wonder if any of the proponents of Critical Race Theory have a good idea about how racist Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were. (They were horribly anti-Semitic, as well, but that wouldn’t bother many of the Critical Race Theorists.)

“This splendid territory [the Balkans] has the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization. Slavonians, Greeks, Wallachians, Arnauts, twelve millions of men, are all held in submission by one million of Turks, and up to a recent period, it appeared doubtful whether, of all these different races, the Turks were not the most competent to hold the supremacy which, in such a mixed population, could not but accrue to one of these nationalities” (Karl Marx, “The Russian Menace to Europe,” 1853).

“The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend,’ even though his interest and capital were guaranteed…. It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like” (Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester,” 1862).

“Tremaux proved that the common Negro type is the degenerate form of a much higher one … a very significant advance over Darwin” (Karl Marx, in a letter to Friedrich Engels, August 7, 1866).

“The expulsion of a Leper people from Egypt, at the head of whom was an Egyptian priest named Moses. Lazarus, the leper, is also the basic type of the Jew” (Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, May 10, 1861).

“Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs, do not belong at all to the Indo-German race, but are des intrus [intruders], who must again be hurled back beyond the Dnieper, etc” (Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, June 24, 1865).

“The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way,” wrote Karl Marx, in a scarcely disguised espousal of genocide.

 In his 1877 Notes to Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels elaborated his thoughts on the subject of race, saying “that the inheritance of acquired characteristics extended … from the individual to the species…. If, for instance, among us mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child and in no need of proof from evidence that is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit,” wrote Adolph Hitler.

Intellectual sincerity means to take ideas seriously — which in turn means to live a life guided by the ideas you hold to be true.

I ask you to ask yourself this: are you willing to live your life day-by-day, consistently, guided by explicit convictions such as those listed above — i.e. overtly racist convictions.

Ideas have consequences.

Finally, I’d like for readers to observe an important philosophical point and principle, which doesn’t often play out as fast as it has these past several months and days, and so we can see, almost in real-time, how it comes about:

The destruction of individual rights and the corollary freedom that comes with the full and legal recognition of those rights almost never happens through the tyranny of some despot seizing control against the will of the people and then imposing his or her own version of law. It’s the polar opposite: freedom dies because the majority reject it — they don’t want freedom. They vote against it. They vote it away. This is why the majority don’t rise up against these horrific and arrantly unjust lockdowns — because the majority of people are okay with the state decreeing that it now has this power. The majority doesn’t mind. They don’t want real freedom. It’s too much responsibility. The majority wants comfort — not freedom — the comfort of not having to think about such things.

And that is just one of the many dangers of democracy — i.e Vox-Populi, i.e. “the tyranny of the majority,” as it has been accurately described: the inalienable rights of the individual are not inalienable after all but can simply be voted away.

Hitler and Mussolini were well-liked by the majority of their people, for a long time.

Though a tyrant may temporarily rule through a minority if this minority holds superior arms and methods of force over the majority, in the long run a minority cannot keep the majority in subservience. The oppressed will rise up in rebellion and cast off the yoke of tyranny. Any system of government that would endure must therefore construct itself upon a system of ideas accepted by the majority.

Reader, no matter how silly and nonsensical you or I may find a given idea or ideology, so long as you and I are silent and unwilling (or unable) to counter these ideas and ideologies — relentlessly, thoroughly, forcefully, intellectually counter and refute them — we all remain vulnerable to the spread of these ideologies, which are far more dangerous than any coronavirus conceivable, no matter how ridiculous and nonsensical these ideas actually are at their root.

Why do I say so?

Because thoroughly examining, analyzing, and thinking through the nature of ideas and ideologies requires a great deal of effort, a continual effort, which is precisely what most among the general population are unwilling to do, and because the politico-economic ramifications are never the cause but the effect — merely the end result and consequences of the spread of these bad ideas, which are philosophical in their provenance and as such begin in the minds of individual human beings, who then write them down and teach them, and in this way these ideas spread through the halls of higher education and into homes and across airwaves, the majority of people accepting them by default as much as by anything: because a thorough refutation would require a great deal of time and effort and thought.

Thus do ideas and ideologies — no matter how bad, ridiculous, or nonsensical they actually are — propagate and spread like mushrooms.

Yet at the foundation of every philosophical idea, there is a cogent issue — cogent in the sense that there is an authentic need within the human mind: a need which some ideas strive genuinely to clarify and other ideas strive genuinely to confuse.

Don’t relinquish the awesome power of your magnificently independent mind.

Don’t.

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights are a specification of human freedom within societies.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

“Any State interference in private affairs, where there is no immediate reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned” (Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 1852).

What Wilhelm von Humboldt describes is sometimes referred to as “negative liberties”—or “negative rights”—so named because the only obligation it imposes upon others is of a “negative” kind: each person must abstain from infringing upon the equal rights of others.

Justice is nothing more or less than the legal recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and her own property.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term rights as, in part, “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain manner.”

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

The primary thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Compulsory taxation, for instance, means that you are not free to do whatever you wish with your own money, because the government may at any time legally compel you to give to government any amount it specifies.

Voluntary action hinges upon the principle of individual rights:

Are we each free to live as we choose, provided we do not infringe upon the equal rights of others?

Or not?

The most fundamental political question is this: Do we rightfully own ourselves, or do others rightfully have jurisdiction over us?

To ask that question is, I believe, to answer it.

At root, there is only one way to infringe upon another’s rights, and that is through the instigation of force. Quoting the 19th century political philospher Auberon Herbert:

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it—so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership—force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

As Auberon Herbert notes, force can be direct, as in assault and rape, or indirect, as in fraud or extortion. There’s no other way to breach rights than through the (direct or indirect) instigation of force.

Laws that restrict freedom of production and trade (such as prohibitions on interstate commerce) are an indirect use of force.

Trade tariffs are an indirect use of force.

Military conscription is a direct use of force.

Compulsory education is a direct use of force.

Rights, I repeat, are a formal codification of human freedom. This of course includes the freedom to trade—or, as Adam Smith phrased it, “to truck, barter, and exchange.”

Rights are ethical principles, and they are political principles. As such, rights specify human freedom in large groups.

This latter thing is emphasized because rights would not need to be discovered if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society.

Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one—because rights are inalienable in the literal sense of the word: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked, transferred, or made alien.

Rights are either recognized or they aren’t.

If they aren’t recognized, an injustice has been committed.

In the final analysis, there is ultimately only one right, and that is the right to your own life. All others—from free speech, to liberty, to property, to the pursuit of happiness—they are all an extension of that one.

Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible (Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, 1884).

The crux of freedom is rights.

The crux of rights is human individuation and moral agency.

A deep connection exists between the right to life and the right to property. The importance of this connection cannot be overstated, yet it is precisely this connection that the leftwing and rightwing are both equally ignorant of.

Quoting the French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat:

Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is property (Claude Frédéric Bastiat,The Law, 1848).

Property is “not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases” (The Electric Law Library).

That identifies precisely why the locus of freedom and free-exchange is found in private property. Property, as even Karl Marx understood, is most fundamentally of all the right to a type human action: to get, maintain, use, and dispose.

This helps explain why environmentalism, as all other forms of socialism, is inherently anti-freedom.

The reason that laissez faire is the proper social system is not because it “works best,” as many nominal defenders of free markets often phrase it. Laissez faire is proper, rather, because it is just. Laissez-faire is the only economic system that respects and protects the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and free exchange.

One must never forget: money is property. Money is the symbol of your labor.

The root of real wealth is production.

Compulsory (as opposed to voluntary) taxation is a breach of property rights.

Individual rights and the principles behind these rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light. Yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient, and they will continue to do so. The reason they’ve remained resilient is that they are in a certain sense self-evident: we each “have a property in our own person.”

That is the fundamental principle behind rights, and property is an extension of person, nothing more and nothing less.

If you believe in human freedom, you believe by extension in the freedom to exchange and trade—fully—because if humans are not allowed to trade freely, humans cannot be described as truly free.

No freedom or justice can exist if rights, including property rights, do not exist.

The very word rights has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus, as in justice. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.”

Rights formally warrant all holders to certain freedoms—specifically, the freedom to act in a certain way. Please take note of the phrase “freedom to act.” It is an important part of the definition, since rights do not assure anyone of anything except the freedom to try, and also the fact that if you succeed, the fruits of your success are yours inalienably.

What, though, is the fundamental stuff of rights? Of what rough material made?

It’s important to note that rights are not primaries: they are second-order principles that derive from something deeper. That something is a thing specific and unique to the human condition. It is the faculty of choice.

If human behavior were purely instinctive and automatic, as it is with animals, there would be no question of rights because any action we undertook would not be chosen. Human action would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, and rights would therefore not exist.

The grizzly bear who mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

The material from which rights are made is the material of the human mind, which operates by means of reason, which is a volitional apparatus, a conceptual apparatus, and which is the uniquely human method of maintaining life and flourishing.

Thus rights form the logical link—a link of causality—between ethics and politics. Which is why Herbert Spencer and similar freethinkers regarded rights as “politico-ethical precepts.”

Quoting Samuel Adams:

Among the natural rights are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property. Together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are another of these things that everyone thinks she understands, but which in fact almost nobody does, the principles undergirding rights deeply philosophical and complex.

To get some idea of how poorly understood the nature of rights is, one need look no further than the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and observe the sheer number of times one would have to breach the rights (usually in the form of property expropriation—i.e.: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”) of some individual somewhere to achieve even a fraction of that Declaration’s stated goals. These are usually known as “positive rights.” Positive rights don’t actually exist.

Positive rights are a government confabulation.

Only negative rights exist: the only duty or obligation, I repeat, that negative rights impose upon others is of a negative type — i.e. we must abstain from violating the same rights in others. By definition, “positive rights” require the violation of actual rights since in order to implement them, you must expropriate without consent.

Positive rights (so-called) require the instigation of force. By definition—by their very nature—“positive rights” require force.

Leftwingers tell us we have the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a smoke-free work environment, the right to a certain wage, and so on, whereas rightwingers say we do not have the right to open our liquor stores on Sunday, neither the right to consensual sex (with any other consenting adult, whether money is exchanged or not), nor the right to gamble, and so on.

Despite what you’ve been told, these views are not polarized. They’re variations of a theme, and their common denominator is this: Humans do not possess the inalienable right to their own life and property, and government bureaucrats are better suited than we ourselves in determining how we should conduct our lives and our business.

Yet there is nothing—absolutely nothing—in nature, neither human nature nor nature apart from humans, that gives government bureaucrats legitimate authority over the person or property of any other human being.

To say that we have the “right to healthcare,” or the “right to a job,” or the “right to a smoke-free work environment” is the same as saying we have the right to the life, labor, and property of another, which we do not and cannot—by virtue of what rights are.

Rights by definition preclude any claim to the person and property of another, even if that person is a doctor. This is what is meant by the old-fashioned yet completely accurate terminology that described rights as “compossible.”

Rights are compossible.

Compossibility is one of the defining characteristics of rights.

To say that humans do not have the right to open their liquor stores on Sunday if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to have consensual sex with another consenting adult if they both choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to gamble and use drugs if they choose, is the same as saying your life is not yours by right but belongs in some measure to bureaucrats, and that humans to that extent exist only by the permission of those bureaucrats—this in spite of the fact that no government and no governmental bureaucracy and no bureaucrats or politician in the history of the humanity has ever proved itself more capable of running each individual’s life better than the individuals themselves.

Government compulsion, rightwing or left, is the antithesis of individual rights.

There are no such things as “collective rights,” not in any variation, just as there are not “white rights,” “black rights,” “gay rights,” “women’s rights,” or anything of the sort. There are only rights.

Rights, by definition, can only belong to individuals—specifically, the individuals who make up any “collective”—and any attempt to subvert this becomes, also by definition, a form of tribal-collectivism.

That is why even the term “individual rights” is pleonastic in the ultimate purport—though perhaps necessarily so, given how poorly understood the principle of rights is: it’s pleonastic because the very definition of the word rights presupposes individual, since it is only individuals who possess rights.

Quoting the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, in his description of the principle of individualism, from his book Human Action:

First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of the collective whole. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions.

And the economist George Reisman, who is echoing Ludwig von Mises, his former teacher:

Only individuals exist; collectives consist of nothing but individuals. Only the individual thinks; only the individual acts…. All rights are rights of individuals.

The individualistic method — or methodological individualism, if you prefer — does not, however, claim that only individual human beings are real and that social phenomena do not exist. It holds, rather, that each individual human being is alone able to think, feel, and act.

Methodological individualism rests upon the principle that the relevant object of political and ethical inquiry are the individual human beings in question, as distinguished from a society, race, class, sex, or any other group. Quoting Karl Popper:

“Social phenomena] should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc. of human individuals, and we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives’ (states, nations, races, etc.).”

The reason this principle is so critical to ground in the facts which give rise to it (and to thereafter deeply defend) is this: any other view of humanity — which is to say, any view that doesn’t recognize the individual as the proper standard by which societies are gauged and maintained — results in command and control: other humans, purveyors of force, seizing control over other individual human lives.

As it happens, there exists an absolute and foolproof method for determining if something is a right or not:

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you follow that simple principle, and if you remember that property is nothing more than an extension of person, and that money is also property, you’ll never confuse the issue of rights.

Laissez faire is first and foremost a beautiful notion: leave the world alone — it manages itself.

In many ways this idea is the very seat of human civilization.

The deepest roots of laissez faire extend clear back to ancient China —specifically to a man named Zhuang Zhou (also known as Zhuangzi, 4th century BC) who, following in the footsteps of Lao Tzu, is credited by many as the first to puzzle out one of the most important principles in all of history concerning social interaction and human cooperation: that principle is the principle of spontaneous order.

Spontaneous order is “the order that emerges naturally as a result of the voluntary acts and activities of individuals.”

“Good order,” wrote Zhuang Zhou, “results spontaneously when things are left alone.”

Zhuang Zhou also wrote:

“There has been such a thing as letting humankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing humankind with success…. The world does not need governing. In fact it should not be governed.”

Zhuang Zhou’s discovery of spontaneous order has been greatly developed and elaborated upon by any number of economists, most notably of the Austrian School, of whom Friedrich Hayek drove deepest down of all, and largely for this reason — for his detailed work on the subject of spontaneous order — Hayek was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics.

(In December of 1958, a clever fellow named Leonard Read wrote an essay entitled “I, Pencil,” in which the principle and process of spontaneous order is demonstrated in an unforgettable and irrefutable way — it is the total practical (as opposed to moral) argument against centralized planning, the utter futility of it, and it is an argument impossible to overcome, and that’s why I recapitulate “I, Pencil” below.)

Spontaneous order is the driving force behind the idea of laissez faire.

The term laissez-faire (pronounced lay-say-FAIR) derives its present-day meaning from Vincent de Gournay’s forgotten codification: 

Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même.

“Let it be and let goods pass: the world goes by itself.”

People who believe in total, unadulterated laissez faire, as I do, believe that society contains within itself the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development.

This includes ecosystems of every stripe and variety, which are clearly best managed by a system of full private property rights, and not centralized planning committees or an elite bureau who determine everything for the rest of us.

It follows thus that people should enjoy the liberty to manage their own lives, associate as they please, exchange with anyone and everyone, which includes — and please listen closely — owning and accumulating property and otherwise being unencumbered even when one grows wealthy.

For all the lip-service they pay anarchism, the egalitarians, the communitarians, the agrarians, and all other similarly minded groups, they simply do not tolerate hierarchy, neither in wealth-and-property accumulation, nor in employment structure — blotting out in their minds, of course, the incontrovertible fact that human beings possess varying degrees of motivation, drive, desire, ambition: the greatest factors in “inequality and privilege.”

It is for this reason that implementing egalitarianism in any form requires the diametric opposite of laissez faire: it requires force.

Laissez faire asks only this: you leave others alone.

Laissez faire is deeply connected with the concept of individual rights.

Laissez faire states that your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

There are, in the present day, two main alternatives to laissez faire, neither of which is more convincing than the other:

There is the so-called Left, which, to speak generally, believes that if we let the economic sphere be free, the world will collapse. The Left then hypothesizes all manner of disaster that will befall humankind without government control.

And then there is the so-called Right, which is every bit as misbegotten, convinced as it is that state control must happen in, for instance, your bedroom, or the world will collapse into debauchery and crime and war.

Laissez faire rejects both views — for semi-obvious reasons:

“The harmony of interests,” as Claude Frédéric Bastiat called it, which make up the social order. And the fact that human freedom is a birthright.

Laissez faire is the view that the artists and creators, the merchants and business-people, the philanthropists and farmers, the entrepreneurs and property-owners — all, in short, should be left alone.

It is the view that everyone, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, beauty, brawn, color, class, creed, or gender, possesses the inalienable right to her own life and property — and only her own life and property — and this is the only way for all humans to live freely.

I, Pencil

What goes into the making of a single pencil?

In 1958, Leonard E. Read asked himself that very question — and wrote an elegant explication:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

In his piece we’re taken step-by-step through the entire process of how a single pencil is produced.

First, there are the many materials required to make a single pencil, among them: wood, rubber, paint, lacquer, graphite, metal, zinc, wax, and many other things.

We are then shown how these materials are really only the beginning of the process, for a whole industry is in turn required to produce each of those materials.

There is, for example, the lumber industry needed to produce the wood; the mining industry to mine and mill and smelt the zinc and lead and metal; the rubber industry, of course, and the paint and graphite, and so on.

Then, within each of these industries, there are numerous subdivisions, such as chemical industries, which make up the groundwork for paint and lacquer, and the engineering companies to supply all the tools, and the shipping and transportation companies, and even the lighthouse workers to guide the ships safely into port.

Of course there is also the singular fact that our solitary pencil could neither be manufactured nor produced without all the various other forms of transportation required to get the products from place to place, and of course this transportation requires its own set of industries (not just oil), and on and on, all of which industries — and please take a moment to process this — are, in turn, no less involved than the manufacturing of the wood or graphite or rubber.

So that when everything is said and done, the making of one pencil requires thousands and thousands of people, most of whom have specialized knowledge and specialized jobs, in thousands of different industries.

Furthermore, these people come from all over the world. No centralized planning committee or commune imaginable, even with an army of super-geniuses, could organize the countless factors that go into the making of that one small pencil.

And yet in this country, as in all developed countries, pencils are so cheap and abundant that nobody thinks twice about them.

How is this so?

The answer is devilishly simple: private property and the freedom to trade that property. 

It is what economists have come to call “spontaneous order.” Spontaneous order is elegant and beautiful. Spontaneous order arises from the division of labor, which is the fundamental social phenomena. The freedom to produce and trade and then reap the subsequent rewards are what bring these thousands and thousands of people, from these thousands of different industries the wide-world over, into peaceful and mutually beneficial cooperation with one another in order to produce a single pencil.

Think about that.

Think long and hard about it, I beseech you.

In fact, I insist you do.

Your entire understanding of human existence — whether you’re a billionaire, a bartender, or an artist, and whether you live in a cult, condo, or commune — depends upon it.

Your life depends upon it, I submit.

Think about some of the things you use in your day-to-day existence. Think about your private path of least resistance.

Think of your eyeglasses, which Galileo and Spinoza would have given their eyeteeth for.

Think of the exercise mat upon your floor. Think of the ab-roller for your core.

Think about the utensils you use to cook and clean your food, the cups you use to drink your potable water, and the faucets you use to turn that water off and on.

Think of the hoses and the sprinklers for your lawn.

Think of sponges and your soap.

Think of rope.

Think of your chocolate truffle and think of the package that it comes in.

Think of packaging again and again (and again).

Think of your clothing, no matter how fine or how shabby it may or may not be. Think of your underwear, down to the tag we do not see.

Think critically.

Think about your toothbrush and your toothpaste, and its tube. And the cap that goes on that tube.

Think of your lube.

Think about your medicine: aspirin, ibuprofin, Pepto, Lipator, antihistamines for the cough and wheeze.

Think of braces for your elbows and your knees.

Think of your transportation — bicycle, train, plane, bus, boat, automobile, jumbo jet, or even your walking shoes — and think of the sheer number of discrete parts that each of these things contain, and which you use.

Think of other technological breakthroughs.

Can you?

How about your jacket and its worn buttons, the lovely denim of faded blue, the toothpicks and the gum you chew?

Your bedding and your hygiene and your make-up.

Think of the alarm clock that every morning helps you wake up.

Think of your books and your paints and paintbrushes. Your chisel and hammer.

Your megahertz of memory if your a computer programmer.

Think of your keyboard and your mouse, your voice-recognition software.

Think of filters for your water and air.

Think about your entertainment: wine and wine bottles, dark beer. Think of all the brandy that you’ve consumed or stored.

Think of your playing cards or tarot cards or magic cards, your hoops, your chess-or-checker-board.

Think of packaging again. Think of the packages that all your things arrive in.

Think of your gardening equipment, or any other metal or wood or plastic or glass items you may use.

Think of your ball-peen hammer and your nails and your screws.

Think of your tape measures and pliers, your wrenches, your saws and your multicolored chalks.

To say nothing of your electricity — the lights, the cameras, the watches, the clocks.

Your computers and modems, MP3’s and stereos, word-processors and photo-editing software — and of course your phone, your phone, without which you’d be alone.

And televisions and lights (“More light!” said Goethe, then died) and musical instruments and medical equipment and rocket ships and edible water bottles…

Think of anything. Think of airplane models.

Look around you. Is your chair metal or wood? Does your desk or table have bolts and nails?

Notice details.

I insist, I positively insist.

Think of me as a kind of oculist.

Because I promise you — I absolutely promise — that the filthy, hardcore industry, which I believe in and love so much, the industry that went into producing, for instance, just one small component of your phone, or your bicycle, or the paperback book in your hand, or the shoes on your feet, or the glasses on your face, or the contact lenses in your eyes, or the ring in your navel, nose, or nipples, or the needles which tattooed your skin, that industry was amplified a thousandfold compared with one solitary pencil, no matter how cheap or how thin.

So please take one more look — and then look again.

Take one more look at the blue-black ink across your skin.

There’s a moral to this story and that moral is this:

Embrace technology.

Look suspiciously on the buzzword ecology.

Technology got us to this point. Only technology can get us beyond.

It is a magic wand.

There’s something profoundly paradoxical in the quest for less technology and a more simple way of life, while flying the world in jumbo jets. In fact, it’s about as paradoxical as it gets.

Celebrate, rather, human progress and specialization.

Celebrate the division of labor that technology creates, thereby freeing us all to pursue the things we most enjoy and at which we excel, since we are no longer each yoked to the task of day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month survival, but can trade freely and peacefully with those who have the things we need and want, in exchange for the things we ourselves have in turn worked to produce — being no longer condemned to a life of drudgery and tedium.

(Money is only a medium.)

Celebrate individualization.

Celebrate civilization.

Civilization is the progress toward independent, private lives, wherein we are no longer dominated by the group, gang, tribe, or community but live freely: free to associate with others as we please, or not.

This is the fundamental thing you’ve never been taught.

It’s the only thing that’s truly sustainable. It’s what you’ll never hear from any of the postmodernists, the intellectuals, the politicos, the hipsters, the academic phonies and imposters:

Celebrate human freedom and the independent mind that freedom fosters.

No private action is an act of censorship.

Only governments can censor.

No private individual or platform, no magazine or press, no agency or business may rightfully suppress another publication by force. (Competition or competitive advantage does not equal force.) Only governments have the power to enforce silence and suppress with impunity.

When governments do this, it is an act of censorship.

Private companies can ban or reject whomever they decide. It is their right.

Nobody has a right to a Facebook page or a Twitter profile or a Tiktok application or whatever.

In the same way — and for the same reason — that nobody has the right to an organ transplant, so nobody has the right to a social media platform.

It is a voluntary transaction consensually entered into.

It is an arrangement you are free not to enter.

When and to the extent that a private platform or publication does conspire or collude with government to silence and suppress, it then becomes censorship. This is precisely what happened in Mussolini’s Italy: the state and the corporations were wed by force, so that businesses were no longer private. This was Mussolini’s version of Syndicalism, which is a thoroughly leftist-socialist economic doctrine.

It is pure poison. It is also sometimes known as cronyism, which is a leftist ideology, tacitly sanctioned by the right.

If you wish to see the precise way in which the left nullifies and usurps private-property rights — including the right to ban people from a private platform — keep watching. The great myth that fascism is “rightwing” will evaporate before your very eyes, and I predict also that you will discover the true meaning of the word “privilege,” which is far from the bastardized version you’ve had hammered into your head these past several years: i.e. hatred of any and all successful people, even if you’re a billionaire, like Oprah Winfrey, or a former President of the United States, like Barack Obama — the homeless bag-lady has more “privilege” than even these two because she is white. (Forget the systematic abuse and destitution this white woman grew up among, she is nevertheless more privileged.)

The collusion of government and business creates actual privilege.

In such a case, government’s role is no longer the protection of individual rights. Government is now officially in the business of granting privileges — or not — and in such businesses, which is also known as cronyism, the prospects go on forever.

I ask you to please never forget this: socialism in any and all of its forms, whether democratic or not, is by definition an ideology of force: in order to implement any of its stated goals, socialism must expropriate.

It can operate in no other way.

It can function by no other means.

Force is the handmaiden of any and all forms of socialism.

It must expropriate.

Expropriation is utter, unadulterated force, and so is nationalization.

Socialism is force.

Socialism is the negation of voluntary human action.

Socialism is the boot that stomps out consensual choice.

Socialism destroys the incentive to innovate and invent.

Socialism creates shortages.

I promise I am not wrong about this. I promise you.

The destruction of the philosophy of freedom was accomplished by means of a century-long system of state-financed education, one generation to the next, which has successfully inculcated into the minds of a majority the deadly doctrine that we all must be forced (by the state) to live for one another. State-forced egalitarianism — and not private initiative, not success and the right to keep what others have voluntarily paid you for because they value your work — state-forced egalitarianism is the total goal.

The enforcers are the ones who permit us to exist.

Why?

Because humans do not exist by right. The only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission.

The only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission.

The only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission.

Ask yourself: whose permission? And why?

In the history of the entire world, no good answer has ever been given to that question, and do you know the reason?

The reason is that no good answer for it exists.

The doctrine that destroyed freedom can be summed up in this one word: anti-individualism.

When egalitarianism is the goal, individual choice is not permitted and cannot be permitted.

Voluntary transactions cannot be permitted.

Consensual interactions are deemed illegal.

And why is that?

Because when humans are left free, humans naturally stratify. This is healthy and it is good, and it creates vibrancy and diversity and fosters ingenuity and invention.

The reason the anti-individualism lie proliferated and won-out in the minds of so many is that the principle was conceded by the left and right alike: the principle that each individual human being does exist by right. They let it go. They were unable to defend it against the onslaught of attacks.

That is the thing all major political parties have conceded.

Individuals exist not by right but only by government permission.

Individuals are either granted the privilege to exist or not.

The greatest threat to free speech isn’t Facebook or Twitter or AWS or Snapchat or Instagram or any of the others. It is the near-unanimous call, from all sides of the spectrum, for government control of these platforms.

Censorship, I repeat, means the forcible prohibition of speech, and this is something of which only governments are capable.

Freedom of speech guarantees that no one may rightfully silence you. It doesn’t guarantee you a publication or platform — not any more than the right to freely exchange guarantees that you’ll have customers.

Discovering a platform and building an audience for your words (i.e. your speech) is no simple task. Social media, however, has made it much simpler — and so has Amazon — and they’ve done so free of charge (Amazon takes a percentage after sale). The result: people using these very platforms to call for the destruction of the platforms they’re using.

It is a sad but incontrovertible fact that twitter and all the others have without any doubt derailed themselves. They’ve undermined their cause and case — specifically, I mean, in their total inconsistency and their inability to take a principled moral stand: let us ban Donald Trump, they say, but let us still allow the full proliferation of horrific Chinese propaganda and the full-throated voice of Iranian tyrants, who call for the deaths of all infidels and the forced mutilation of the female sex. Let us expunge any and all suggestions of violence made by right-wingers, but let us tolerate all such violent calls from leftwingers. Let us profit from freedom, while simultaneously supporting and funding explicitly anti-freedom viewpoints, like those expressed by Robin DeAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates.

These contradictions are embarrassing and enormously destructive, and yet even this does not warrant state-control of social media.

Just as individuals do not relinquish their rights if and when they exercise their rights in an irrational manner, so social media does not become a “public utility” in providing a platform for billions of people. If this were the case, it would mean that government alone determines all online speech. (A public company on the stock market does not mean what many think: it only means that anyone can buy into that company and own shares in it.) And if that were the case, it would mean that the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Donald Trump — they, I repeat, and not Jack Dorsey, are in charge of twitter. They, not the open market, grant Parler and Gab the privilege to exist and to compete, or not.

In such a nightmarish scenario, all companies and all businesses — even one-person businesses, no matter the industry — exist only when government grants them the privilege. All private enterprise is state-determined. All of it.

That, reader, is the total nullification of human freedom. It should horrify you senseless.

There is no issue now more important to freedom than free speech. This right acts as a guardian to all other rights. Today’s cancel culture and woke mobs desire nothing more vehemently than to shut-off and silence all speech they deem incorrect or unacceptable or hateful. Their opponents likewise want to forcibly compel social media to promote their speech.

The political function of the right to free speech is not to subsidize people and their speaking platforms — that, I emphasize, is not included — but rather to protect dissenting voices and unpopular minority views from forcible suppression, either by government or other people. Many if not most lawyers and judges, as I’ve recently discovered, do not know this. But even more disheartening and appalling is the level of their apathy concerning the overwhelming importance of such issues.

Here is small sampling of what America would look like without the absolute and inalienable right to free speech, which does include so-called hate speech:

In Pakistan, people are arrested and sentenced to death for “blasphemy” for insulting Islam, while in Egypt, individuals are arrested for “debauchery” for waving rainbow flags at concerts.

Then, there are the thirty Turkish journalists currently facing consecutive life sentences for their anti-government articles, as well as the Kyrgyz author imprisoned for “inciting hatred between religious groups” for publishing a book questioning God’s form.

Don’t forget about Germany, where just this year police raided dozens of people’s homes for “hateful postings over social media,” or the United Kingdom, where a man was convicted for his anti-military Facebook comments, or France, where a man was fined for holding up a sign saying “Get lost, jerk” to French President Nicolas Sarkozy — words Sarkozy himself said to a critic who refused to shake his hand during a public event.

In response to the objection that such oppression would never happen in the United States, we at FIRE would argue that, well, it already has: Look no further than efforts to address hate speech on American colleges campuses, which have ensnared a professor for blogging about same-sex marriage, students for their racially-themed humor at a party, a student-created satirical play promoted as “offensive or inflammatory to all audiences,” and a student newspaper for printing political satire.

But what if outlawing such expression is the price we must pay for a more tolerant society? If only that were true.

Those urging a crackdown on hateful speech must explain why such laws are routinely used to target minority viewpoints and have done nothing to reduce levels of hate or intolerance in other countries. A 2014 article in The Daily Beast makes a salient point about how such laws actually have the opposite effect:

So one would assume that racial discrimination has been dumped on the ash heap of history in France, considering racist thoughts and symbols have been made illegal. How, then, does one explain that the National Front, whose former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was found guilty of Holocaust denial, is now the most popular party in the country?

Advocates of hate speech bans should not be surprised to find that governments, when given the immense power to punish intolerance, have used this weapon against their critics. Investigative journalists, controversial politicians, political activists — these are the most frequent targets of hate speech laws. Even nongovernmental actors, such as Facebook, are inclined to use their hate speech policies to censor marginalized users.

(Source)

 

Bad ideas, reprehensible ideas, evil ideas — they only pose a threat when people don’t articulate and stand up for good ideas.

It is my opinion that socialist-progressive doctrine has only been successful — successfully indoctrinated into the minds of the majority, whether explicitly consciously realized or not, beginning in grade school — because of this one thing more than any other: the opposition’s inability to fully ground (fully, intellectually, and philosophically ground) the inalienable fact and nature individual rights, which are rooted in the human quiditty: our individuality and the individual reasoning mind, which possesses the faculty of volition, which gives rise to rights.

The rub is that the spirt of individuality and free-enterprise — the right to exist by right, as distinguished from government permission, and the right to succeed and grow wealthy and make something of yourself and provide wealth and prosperity for your loved ones — it is all still such a deep part of the American psyche and spirit and fabric that the attempt to supplant this spirit of independence and individuality with socialist dogma and force (precisely what the corrupt regime coming into power has already begun), it will tear the United States asunder.

It won’t be absorbed.

Even in spite of the Herculean effort and the relentless campaign of indoctrination and dogma, which is a hundred years old or more, it simply won’t be absorbed.

Nor should it be.

The attempt will create another civil war.

What do you think? Shall we defund the police?

Or how about Senator Tom Cotton’s suggestion back in June (2020)? Do you remember clear back then, when Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he suggested the U.S. military be deployed for the rioting running rampant across American cities?

If you have forgotten, here are a few headlines of outrage concerning Tom Cotton’s opinion:

What do you think of Senator Cotton’s suggestion now?

And how, in general, do you feel about hypocrisy? Do you abhor it, as I do?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this a month ago:

Here are a few other items I remember from the past year:

You know what I think? Use the video footage, identify every single person — right or left, it doesn’t matter since justice is absolute and can take no qualifier without destroying it — identify every single person, I say, perpetrating force and committing violence, and arrest them, completely irrespective of which side of the so-called aisle they place themselves upon. Left-wing perpetrators along with the right. Expunge the laughable double-standards and the endless equivocations and the outrageously nonsensical partisan grandstanding.

This is not complicated. In fact, it’s stupidly basic. You know what it’s like? It’s like a fucking joke to me.

I also think it’s a fairly predictable situation: lock a supposedly free people down for almost a year; people’s life-savings wiped out; people going bankrupt; schools not permitted to open, churches likewise, while rioters loot, kill, and burn down cities across the country and are not held accountable. The political elites who permit us to exist and the people who support these elites — they virtually ensure that violence will keep happening.

There is truth to the following, whether or not everyone turns it into a pissing contest:

Ideas have consequences.

I agree with this as well:

I ask: Where in the hell is the outrage over the apparent excessive force for this? Where?

The most popular fallacy in the world today is the idea that it’s inevitable that humankind is being carried toward socialism, and that this is a good thing. The books that have been written up to now have not succeeded in countering this thesis. You must write new books. You must think of these problems. It is ideas that distinguish human beings from animals. This is the human quality of all people. But according to the ideas of the socialists the opportunity to have ideas should be reserved to the Politburo only. All the other people exist only to carry out what the Politburo tells them to do.

It is impossible to defeat a philosophy if you do not fight in the philosophical field. One of the great deficiencies of American thinking — and America is the most important country in the world because it is here, not in Moscow, that this problem will be decided — the greatest shortcoming is that people think all these philosophies and everything that is written in books are of minor importance, that it doesn’t count. Therefore they underrate the importance and the power of ideas.Yet there is nothing more important in the world than ideas. Ideas and nothing else will determine the outcome of this great struggle. It is a great mistake to believe that the outcome of the battle will be determined by things other than ideas.

— von Mises, Unmasking Marx

The word fascism is a derivative of the Latin word fasces, which means a bundle of sticks (usually birch or elm, and often with an ax in the middle, from an ancient Roman symbol), and that metaphor — the bundling together of individuals pieces — is significant.

Benito Mussolini, who as you know popularized the term “fascism” for his political party, was, as you may not know, a devoted socialist that began as a marxist, was expelled from the socialist party proper, and, like his friend Adolph Hitler, remained a devoted socialist to the day he died.

This is one of several reasons for the love-fest between Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with whom Mussolini was also good friends, and if you’d like to read more about this subject — specifically, how FDR modeled much of the New Deal off of Mussolini’s fascist-economic ideas — I cannot recommend highly enough the book Three New Deals, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Wolfgang Schivelbusch is an independent scholar from Berlin, Germany, not affiliated with any school or academy and is totally non-partisan. He’s also an extraordinarily scrupulous writer — scrupulous in his gathering and presenting of historical facts and data. I repeat:

If you truly want to understand fascism and its historical roots — and you should, especially in this day and age of deadly “anti-fascist” protestors who advocate the same politico-economic tenets of fascism proper — and, more specifically, the protracted propaganda machine that has successfully convinced the world that fascism was somehow “Republican-Conservative,” you should read this book. You will not think about fascism the same ever again, and that is a good thing: because you will actually understand it more.

Mussolini’s so-called Corporatism was his version of Syndicalism, which is the type of economic structure many if not most democratic-socialists today advocate. Please don’t confuse 1920’s corporatism with the anti-corporation mentality so in vogue now. Corporatism is a word which ultimately derives from corpus (for “human body”) and dates clear back to Ancient Greece and Rome. For Mussolini, and others, it was, I say again, a form of Syndicalism, and that is one reason the Wikipedia entry for Corporatism lists itself as “part of a series on Syndicalism”:

Italian Fascism involved a corporatist political system in which the economy was collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at the national level. Its supporters claimed that corporatism could better recognize or “incorporate” every divergent interest into the state organically… When brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State…. [The state] is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual…  This prospect of Italian fascist corporatism claimed to be the direct heir of Georges Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism…

The difference between marxism versus the Nazi socialists and the Italian Fascist socialists was, as Hayek and von Mises were about the only two to first point out, purely a difference of form: the marxist preached the proletariat (i.e. workers) as primary, whereas the Nazis and the Italian Fascists preached “the nation.” But the common denominator among them all was the same common denominator, as it is also the common denominator to this day which unites every and all strains of socialism.

Do you know what it is?

It is the subjugation of the individual to a so-named collective.

It is collectivism.

It is control over the means of production, which is economics, in the name of a collective — any collective.

I implore you to commit that to memory.

“Basically, National Socialism and Marxism are the same,” said Adolph Hitler.

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit,” said Adolph Hitler.

“Profit is the source of all evils,” said Joseph Goebbles, whose hatred of laissez faire was stupendous.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate [i.e. worker] power,” said Benito Mussolini.

It was by means of the Food Estate guild, the Estate of Trade and Industry guild, and the Labor Front guild that the Nazis were able to take control of every group of producer and consumer in Germany.

German and Italian socialism assumed complete control of the means of production, while maintaining the facade of a market economy. The crucial point here, however, which one must never overlook, is the fact that prices and wages were all “fixed by the central authority.” Thus, they were only ostensibly prices and wages — meaning: in actual fact, prices and wages were determined by order of the socialist government, not the free-market and free exchange. In this way, both systems masqueraded as systems of free-enterprise, but in reality they was socialist up to their gills.

The difference between National Socialism (Nazism), Italian Fascism, and communistic socialism is, I say again, purely a question of form: the Nazis, unlike the Marxists, did not advocate public or governmental ownership of the means of production. Nazism, rather, openly demanded that government oversee and regulate the nation’s economy. The issue of ‘legal’ ownership, explained Adolph Hitler, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control.

“Under Nazism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under Marxist socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it — at least until the next purge” (Dr. George Reisman, economist).

George Reisman continues:

This system of de facto socialism, carried out under the outward guise and appearance of free enterprise, in which the legal forms of private ownership are maintained, has been aptly characterized by Ludwig von Mises as socialism on the German pattern. The Germans under Ludendorf and Hindenburg in World War I, and later under Hitler, were the foremost practitioners of this type of socialism. (The more familiar variant of socialism, in which government openly nationalizes the means of production and establishes socialism de jure as well as de facto, von Mises calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.)

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that [Fascist Italy and] Nazi Germany was a socialist country and that the Nazis were right to call themselves National Socialists. This is something everyone should know; yet it appears to have been overlooked or ignored by practically all writers but von Mises and Hayek.

In Nazi Germany, the government controlled all prices and wages and determined what each firm was to produce, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to turn over its products. There was no fundamental difference between the Nazis and other socialists.

The quasi economist Paul Krugman, corrupted irreparably by tendentious partisan nonsense (and who, incidentally, used to understand 101 economics, such as the facts about minimum wage and even wrote articulately about it in one of his early books), recently complained that it’s “difficult to have a conversation” with any side other than his own, when the other side only ever charges you (him) as socialist. Cry me a fucking river, Paul. Because the fundamental fact remains, and it must be dealt with:

There are at root only two types of government — only two: the government that recognized the primacy of the individual over the collective, and the government that doesn’t.

The rest is strictly a question of details. This is why the fight is always a fight for principle, and that principle is this: should the individual be subordinated to the so-named collective — any collective — or should each individual human, regardless of race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, possess the full and inalienable right to her own life and property?