Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Kennedarchy Part II.V: Tilting at windmills

I like John Kennedy, what I know of him. He's good and decent and gently humored and phlegmatic. I think he would make a good neighbor, and this is a compliment I can tender to few of the anarcho-capitalists I know of--a grace I might deny even to myself, were I to see myself from the outside.

But: I don't think John is a hugely courageous thinker. He has posted comments in reply to me, but they amount to characterization and coup-counting, rather than measured responses to my actual words--wholly unquoted. That's fine. I picked this fight, after all, and I answered every one of John's undigested objections in items I posted before I picked it. I told John (and you) that he wasn't paying attention, and I should not be surprised to discover that he still isn't.

But I despair of it, too, because the actual topic is fascinating to me. Tonight I was looking at old text on the subject of the (indefensible) "right to punish"--another essential feature of Statism that John hopes somehow to replicate in a society of (alleged) volunteers--and I ran across an old message from me to Dorothy Fanyo.

Dorothy is dead now, and I miss her terribly. She was amazingly courageous in the way that John isn't: She had the guts to question her most basic assumptions. Libertarians think of themselves as being outrageously radical, but to me they seem to question everything except what really matters. In his reply to me, John raves on and on about "evil" without ever bothering to define it. In this message to Dorothy, I define it in passing, on the way to other matters:

Acting in willful self-destruction, except to avoid an even greater injury, is anegoic.

I would say that differently now: Acting in willful self-destruction is always anegoic (and therefore evil), even when the purpose is to avoid an even greater injury.

Without doubt people will find that "confusing", to use John's term. I think that's because they treat abstractions as entities. In any case it makes for problems in understanding what really happens in real life, rather than what is attested to happen in the imagination.

This message is packed, both Dorothy's part and mine, and a thoughtful unpacking of it will repay the effort.

From: Greg Swann (gswann@primenet.com)
Subject: Re: Rand's last word on the Eskimo
Newsgroups: humanities.philosophy.objectivism
Date: 1997/10/03

In article <343521FC.A6B53C72@pldi.net>, defy@pldi.net wrote:

[clipped]

>So you want to live by the above principle -- no exceptions.
>
>Then by what contrary principle do 'we' arrive at saying that a criminal
>no longer has his _inalienable_ rights (a contradiction in terms,
>surely)... and that 'we' then somehow gain the right to punish him.
>
>I know the usual answer -- I've used it myself: The criminal gave up
>his rights when he infringed on the rights of another. The fact remains
>that _inalienable_ rights cannot be given up -- which is what most of
>the quote above is bent on making abundantly clear.
>
>So rights are, after all, conditional -- conditional on un-criminal
>behavior (others have said on rationality). Are we dishonest or insane
>-- or both? :-)
>
>Or is it possible that, under certain circumstances, a principle does
>not hold?

If instead you hold fast to the principle and jettison the contradiction
you end up in Janio's Agora. I don't uphold the idea of "rights", since
ideas are not objects and only objects have existence apart from the
mind, but I do jettison all contradictions, as should all thoughtful
people. I'm delighted to see _someone_ here probing these puerile
contradictions, more delighted that it's you. The task now is to follow
the argument. The Objectivist politics is not revolutionary, it's a
counter-revolutionary response to Marxism. Janio's politics is
revolutionary. The only life you have the power to control is your own.
Acting as if you can control another person's life is insane. If you act
upon an insane premise in like-for-like response to another person's
having acted upon an insane premise, you are nevertheless acting upon an
insane premise. This is self-destructive, both of the body and of the
ego. Acting in willful self-destruction, except to avoid an even greater
injury, is anegoic. This has nothing to do with the other party at all
except as a secondary consideration.

posted by Greg Swann at 10:00 PM

 
Further notice: How Libertarians make war

I define The West as that place where we might reasonably expect Socrates to drink the hemlock, rather than bow and bend to irrational authority. Yeshua the Nazarene was an Hellenic, of course, which is why we love the story: Jesus was Cain, not Abel. But if we limit The West to that region where the best of people put self before subservience (the land of Gilgamesh), we need another name for the much larger place where people can reap the fruits of The West even if they find the death of Socrates to be incomprehensible. Call it the Telecommunity, those places where people can receive telephone calls or radio or TV broadcasts. There are places on the Earth outside the Telecommunity, but they are small, and they are shrinking.

The war The West must fight, the real war, not this little skirmish, is the war for the hearts and minds of the billions of people who are in the Telecommunity, but who are not yet of The West. It would be sweet to airlift satellite dishes to them (which are illegal in Iraq, among many other places), but a $3 solar-powered radio is more than adequate to bring the light of Reason to the perpetually benighted.

Undermining irrational authority. What could be more Socratic than that?
posted by Greg Swann at 7:44 AM

 
How Libertarians make war

From the Japan Times:

Activists are planning to smuggle up to 20 million radios tuned to the Voice of America into North Korea as part of efforts to destabilize the communist regime.

The campaign is aimed at giving North Koreans access to uncensored information about their own country and helping achieve regime change, Douglas Shin, a Korean-American Christian missionary involved in the campaign, said Monday.

The activists, who help North Korean refugees, say they plan to smuggle the radios, which will be solar-powered, from China via boats.

North Koreas face severe restrictions on their movements, and the frequencies of radios sold there are fixed to government-run broadcast stations, according to the activists.

VOA is an international multimedia broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government. It was pivotal in disseminating Western information to people in communist bloc nations during the Cold War.

Shin said that although only 10 percent of the radios may end up in the hands of North Koreans, they could still have an impact on democratizing North Korea by providing the people with uncensored information about their own country.

posted by Greg Swann at 11:54 PM

 
Kennedarchy Part III: All war is crime

John Kennedy responded to my challenge to him, but not in any kind of rigorous fashion. He ends up conflating three separate issues, and it suits me to unbraid them. I'll do the last first, because I haven't already beaten it to death.

John says:

I may consider war on the Iraqi regime justifiable in and of itself while recognizing that the means of mounting this war are unjust, but you cannot consider this war as anything but a great Crime and remain consistent with the principle you assert.

Ahem. All war is crime. I have never said otherwise. The War on Islam can be justified because it is the lesser of two crimes--because to fail to act now, decisively, is to risk the loss of the West in perpetuity--but this does not make it non-criminal.

Moreover, the War on Islam as it is being fought is worse than it might have been under different circumstances. For example, if the Greeks had fully embraced Reason, there might never have been an Islam (or a Christianity!). If the Christians had not sunk to savagery, Islam might never have amounted to anything. If the United States had followed the history L. Neil Smith wrote for it, 'shock and awe' would have been a much smaller and much earlier demonstration.

In an hypothesized Janioist culture, should a war-like crime come to be necessary, it would consist of decapitation-to-the-Peter-Principle: Assassination of war-seeking leaders until the only person willing to lead the war-seekers is incompetent to achieve that end. But: Even in this extremely limited circumstance, those murders would still be crimes.
posted by Greg Swann at 11:30 AM

 
Abel's world: Ahem...

From Radio Netherlands:

Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq generally welcome the US pledge to bring democracy to the country, according to a number of commentaries in the Arab media. After all, political freedom would pave the way for introducting the Islamic code of Shari'a.

posted by Greg Swann at 6:24 AM

 
Marines discover Iraqi 9/11 mural



From CNN.com:

NASIRIYA, Iraq -- U.S. Marines searching Iraqi military headquarters in this southern city that was the site of intensive fighting came across a mural depicting a plane crashing into a building complex resembling New York's twin towers, a news agency photograph showed Wednesday.

The plane's logo and coloring resembled that of Iraqi Airlines, said Getty Images News Service executive Brian Felber, based in New York.

posted by Greg Swann at 4:56 PM

 
Cain's world: China stirs

John Kennedy of no treason.com sent me to this aritcle by Arthur Silber at The Light of Reason, which in turn links to a news story called China readies for future U.S. fight at CNN.com:

State Council think-tank member Tong Gang saw the conflict [in Iraq] as the first salvo in Washington's bid to "build a new world order under U.S. domination."

Chinese strategists think particularly if the U.S. can score a relatively quick victory over Baghdad, it will soon turn to Asia -- and begin efforts to "tame" China.

It is understood the LGNS believes the U.S. will take on North Korea -- still deemed a "lips-and-teeth" ally of China's -- as early as this summer.

This is all true, but exagerrated. An essential objective of 'Shock and Awe' is to help the Red Chinese to discover that their high-tech weapons race is racing the United States to 1975. In due course, the Chinese will come to understand, as the Russians eventually did, that they cannot compete with the United States in the development of capital-intensive high-tech weapons systems. In the same respect, North Korea will be disarmed by the functional equivalent of three diplomats in Brooks Brothers suits. War is over--now.

Silber asks:

Who knows what other unintended consequences will flow from the onset of this conflict with Iraq?

He is misled in thinking these consequences are unintended. They were baked in the cake from the very first. Communicating with Islam is an objective of the war. But communicating with the Chinese is the objective of the war.

Here is what I have foreseen for this war:
War with Iraq:
The Cain Doctrine:
1. The 'wrest' of the story
2. Taking a better grip
3. Why the Bush Doctrine will prevail--and fail
4. A Just and Libertarian war...
posted by Greg Swann at 9:02 AM

 
Scott Ritter jumps on grenade for McCaffrey!

Whether it's a matter of dumber-trumps-dumb or just the ravages of a raging limelight-addiction, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has jumped on the grenade tossed Monday by Retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey, lately Bill Clinton's Drug Czar, claiming that coalition forces would suffer 3,000 casualties in Baghdad. In an article in Middle East Online, Ritter insist that the US will lose the war:

The United States does not have the military means to take over Baghdad and will lose the war against Iraq, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said.

"The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we can not win," he told private radio TSF in an interview broadcast here Tuesday evening.

"We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable," he said.

"Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost," Ritter added.

I can't imagine what will be the next level of excitation in this escalation of idioicy. "The Iraqis have taken Harrisburg!" "North America adjusts to Iraqi occupation!" "Iraq gains control of entire Milky Way!"

Here in the real world, Iraq's forces are in a condition of uninterrupted retreat. The goal of the allied coalition is regime change. If there are persistent guerrilla actions after the regime is changed, that will be bad. Bit the regime will have been changed.
posted by Greg Swann at 8:13 AM

 
Memorandum to John Kennedy

I said:

"If I swipe your purse, to forcibly recover it, you would have to force you way into my home and compel my person. Your purse is yours, and you have every right to recover it. But my house is not yours, nor is my body. The injuries you inflict upon things that are not your property are Crimes."

I'm sure there is busy-work aplenty on the deck of the Titannic, but the issue of human liberty is here.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:00 AM

 
Islam watch: Arab Cartoonists Reflect on Politics

From Al-Jazeerah's new English web site:


How Abel sees Cain.


How Cain sees Abel.

(The captions are mine, of course.)
posted by Greg Swann at 8:43 PM

 
Abel's world: Not quite the end of history...

From The National Interest, a fascinating article contrasting 'The End of History' with 'The Clash of Civilizations' as seen in the Islamification of Indonesia:

This disturbing disjuncture between the external and internal aspects of the liberal democratic reaction to Islamism might be termed the Paradox of Liberal Olympianism. It holds that, in domestic politics, minority difference must always be tolerated. Such tolerance, it is maintained, will erode white prejudice and enhance our increasingly diverse yet communitarian democracies. The liberal pluralist sees all values as ultimately compatible, and believes that universal truth and justice will emerge through tolerance. Moreover, since all values are at least potentially equal from this ultimately relativist viewpoint, minority understandings must be afforded equivalent status and receive affirmative action in the shape of state subsidies. Yet at the same time, in practice at least, Olympian pluralism maintains that cultural minorities possess the communal right to their own separate and, if necessary, illiberal development, even at the expense of the polymorphous cosmopolitanism that sustains them. To do, or even to think, otherwise would be at best intolerant, at worst racist.

Enlightenment philosophes, it might be recalled, preached tolerance not out of a corrosive relativism, but out of the belief that reason would ultimately prevail over outmoded custom and religious fanaticism. That is not the view, however, that informs the contemporary promotion of difference, which actively facilitates intolerant enthusiasm of an Islamist hue. Meanwhile, what Liberal Olympianism perceives as the enlightened promotion of difference, Islamists see as "hideous schizophrenia", to use Qutb's phrase for it. To Islamists, Western tolerance is weakness, and secularism a form of spiritual death requiring Islamic salvation. Simply put, while Western liberal sensibilities posit a multi-sum game, Islamist sensibilities are zero-sum. The difference is that traditional Muslims would not have even understood the multi-sum proposition, while today's Islamists understand it very well indeed, and are determined to take full advantage of it. The Londonistan crowd thus finds liberal multiculturalism deracinating, but considers it wonderfully helpful all the same.

Truth be told, it is "hideously schizophrenic" to maintain political and ideological tolerance for the intolerant at home while practicing pre-emption against their foot soldiers abroad. The homefront, after all, is, pace Gibbon, not immune from danger, and a new decline of laws and manners stands to do us no less harm than it did to the glory of Rome. Liberalism, civil society and Gellner's "modular man" are the exceptions rather than the rule in history; they are relatively new and still fragile in the human experience and, we must suppose, ultimately vulnerable to baser displacement. At least since September 11, 2001-if not before-we should therefore be allowed to wonder whether Western values have any natural or universal constituency. History, it would seem, is not quite yet at its End, and the historical dialectic is meanwhile bound to remain in a somewhat capricious state that does not always lean to the side of freedom.

It is important to recall that the instant war is purely prophylactic. Its purpose is to buy time for the larger battle, assimilating Islam into liberal society. The radical Islamists insist that this is what we are doing, and they are right. Secularism is essential to the West. Theocracy is essential to Islamism, if not to Islam as such. The two are necessarily incompatible. 'The End of History'--a risible notion--will be delayed.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:33 PM

 
Islam watch: War and apocalypse

A nice analysis piece from Foreign Policy:

An invading army is marching toward Baghdad--again. The last time infidels conquered the City of Peace was in 1258, when the Mongol horde, led by Genghis Khan's grandson Hulegu, defeated the Arab Abbasid caliphate that had ruled for more than five centuries. And if the ripple effects of that episode through Islam's history are any guide, the latest invasion of Iraq will unleash a new cycle of hatred--unless the United States can find ways to bolster the credibility of moderate Islamic thinkers.

Continuing:

Since the 13th century, Islamic theologians have argued that military defeat at the hands of unbelievers results when Muslims embrace pluralism and worldly knowledge. The story is drilled into Muslim children from Morocco to Indonesia: nearly 2 million people put to the sword; the caliph trampled to death; and the destruction of the great library, the House of Wisdom. The Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 for the same reason Muslims lost Baghdad in 1258: The rulers and their people had gone soft, approaching religion with tolerance and accommodation rather than viewing civilization as divided between Islam and infidels.

Very good reading.
posted by Greg Swann at 5:06 PM

 
Abel's world: Sayyid Qutb and the resurrgence of Islamic antiquity

This is from a huge and very detail-packed article in the New York Times Magazine about Sayyid Qutb, the Koranic philosopher who, more than anyone else, is the founder of Islamic fundamentalism.

The most radical of the Pan-Arabists openly admired the Nazis and pictured their proposed new caliphate as a racial victory of the Arabs over all other ethnic groups. Qutb and the Islamists, by way of contrast, pictured the resurrected caliphate as a theocracy, strictly enforcing shariah, the legal code of the Koran. The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists had their similarities then, and their differences. (And today those two movements still have their similarities and differences -- as shown by bin Laden's Qaeda, which represents the most violent wing of Islamism, and Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which represents the most violent wing of Pan-Arabism.)

While liberal apologists for terrorism insist it is rooted in poverty and ignorance, thougthful people know this is untrue: Qutb had a Master's degree. Osama bin Laden is very wealthy and had been a student of Qutb's brother. Mohamed Atta was an architect. And American Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had a doctorate in Math. Consider how much Qutb mimics Kaczynski:

Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness -- this wretched split between man's truest nature and modern life?

A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason -- an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life.

Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem.

The problem with Christianity--can't you guess?--is the Greeks:

Jesus' disciples and followers, the Christians, emphasized Jesus' divine message of spirituality and love. But they rejected Judaism's legal system, the code of Moses, which regulated every jot and tittle of daily life. Instead, the early Christians imported into Christianity the philosophy of the Greeks -- the belief in a spiritual existence completely separate from physical life, a zone of pure spirit.

But wait. There's more:

Europe's scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ''hideous schizophrenia'' on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery -- the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe's leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well.

Where does it lead?

It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950's and 60's, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past -- the agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated -- a life of confusion unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.

It gets worse:

He blamed the Jews. In his interpretation, the Jews had shown themselves to be eternally ungrateful to God. Early in their history, during their Egyptian captivity (Qutb thought he knew a thing or two about Egyptian captivity), the Jews acquired a slavish character, he believed. As a result they became craven and unprincipled when powerless, and vicious and arrogant when powerful. And these traits were eternal. The Jews occupy huge portions of Qutb's Koranic commentary -- their perfidy, greed, hatefulness, diabolical impulses, never-ending conspiracies and plots against Muhammad and Islam. Qutb was relentless on these themes. He looked on Zionism as part of the eternal campaign by the Jews to destroy Islam.

The United States does not escape criticism:

His deepest quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal society.

The truly dangerous element in American life, in his estimation, was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women's independence. The truly dangerous element lay in America's separation of church and state -- the modern political legacy of Christianity's ancient division between the sacred and the secular. This was not a political criticism. This was theological[.]

What explains the conflict between Islam and the West?

The true confrontation, the deepest confrontation of all, was over Islam and nothing but Islam. Religion was the issue. Qutb could hardly be clearer on this topic. The confrontation arose from the effort by Crusaders and world Zionism to annihilate Islam. The Crusaders and Zionists knew that Christianity and Judaism were inferior to Islam and had led to lives of misery. They needed to annihilate Islam in order to rescue their own doctrines from extinction. And so the Crusaders and Zionists went on the attack.

From his point fo view, he's right:

Border disputes did not concern him. He was focused on something cosmically larger. He worried, instead, that people with liberal ideas were mounting a gigantic campaign against Islam -- ''an effort to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function.''

But all is not lost. Qutb proposes a solution to rescue and restore Islam:

Islam's apparent weakness was mere appearance. Islam's true champions seemed to be few, but numbers meant nothing. The few had to gather themselves together into what Qutb in ''Milestones'' called a vanguard -- a term that he must have borrowed from Lenin, though Qutb had in mind a tiny group animated by the spirit of Muhammad and his Companions from the dawn of Islam. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to undertake the renovation of Islam and of civilization all over the world. The vanguard was going to turn against the false Muslims and ''hypocrites'' and do as Muhammad had done, which was to found a new state, based on the Koran. And from there, the vanguard was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.

Qutb's vanguard was going to reinstate shariah, the Muslim code, as the legal code for all of society. Shariah implied some fairly severe rules. Qutb cited the Koran on the punishments for killing or wounding: ''a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear.'' Fornication, too, was a serious crime because, in his words, ''it involves an attack on honor and a contempt for sanctity and an encouragement of profligacy in society.'' Shariah specified the punishments here as well. ''The penalty for this must be severe; for married men and women it is stoning to death; for unmarried men and women it is flogging, a hundred lashes, which in cases is fatal.'' False accusations were likewise serious. ''A punishment of 80 lashes is fixed for those who falsely accuse chaste women.'' As for those who threaten the general security of society, their punishment is to be put to death, to be crucified, to have their hands and feet cut off, or to be banished from the country.''

At this point it is my unhappy duty to adivse you that Sayyid Qutb was writing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Shariah, in a word, was utopia for Sayyid Qutb. It was perfection. It was the natural order in the universal. It was freedom, justice, humanity and divinity in a single system. It was a vision as grand or grander than Communism or any of the other totalitarian doctrines of the 20th century. It was, in his words, ''the total liberation of man from enslavement by others.'' It was an impossible vision -- a vision that was plainly going to require a total dictatorship in order to enforce: a vision that, by claiming not to rely on man-made laws, was going to have to rely, instead, on theocrats, who would interpret God's laws to the masses. The most extreme despotism was all too visible in Qutb's revolutionary program. That much should have been obvious to anyone who knew the history of the other grand totalitarian revolutionary projects of the 20th century, the projects of the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists.

How to achieve Qutb's Utopia? He gave his followers a method and left it to them by his example: Martyrdom.

These people believe that, in the entire world, they alone are preserving Islam from extinction. They feel they are benefiting the world, even if they are committing random massacres. They are certainly not worried about death. Qutb gave these people a reason to yearn for death. Wisdom, piety, death and immortality are, in his vision of the world, the same. For a pious life is a life of struggle or jihad for Islam, and struggle means martyrdom.

Paul Berman, the author of this wonderful article, ends on a compelling note:

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.

Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

Sadly, the West cannot defend itself until it dares to be itself. What we call Judeo-Christian culture is in fact a veneer of faked Abel-worship pasted onto the self-ashamed effigy of Cain. We are of the Greeks--acknowledging that the Greeks themselves did not dare wholly to be of the Greeks--and Cain cannot defend himself from Abel by means of an insincere genuflection toward everything Cain is not.

Cain will win the war. That's assured. But Cain will lose the world if he does not dare to stand firmly, proudly for everything Abel despises: Rationality, Egoism, Individualism, Capitalism, Secularism, Pluralism, Political Liberty and Equality. When Cain genuflects to Abel, he does it by spitting on himself--and on everything that makes the truly human life possible.
posted by Greg Swann at 1:16 PM

 
Cain's world: Understanding 'shock and awe'



If you're waiting for fireworks, wait on. The doctrine of 'shock and awe' is encapsulated in this photo. What is says is this: If you are the head of a state friendly to anti-Western terrorists, and if you use your state or its territory or its treasury to assist those fanatics, you will be presented with a precision-guided weapon aimed somewhere between your larynx and your epiglottis. So swallow hard and reconsider, why don't you? Freelance terrorism may persist for a while; it's a policing job, and that takes time. But state-sponsored terrorism is over.
posted by Greg Swann at 8:45 AM

 
War news and nothing but war news

For an example of weblog technology at its absolute best, visit The Command Post. War news and nothing but war news, delivered in a way that no mainstream resource can provide it. Why? Because it's a conglomeration of all mainstream resources--all in one place, filtered for importance, vetted for accuracy by self-selected experts, accumulated for comparison and comprehension. This is the 'researcher' concept, first seen in the Clinton/Foster/Reno scandals, brought to a more-accessible fruition. I'll be linking to the site for the duration of the war.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:48 AM

 
We will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them...

John Venlet at Improved Clinch raises some questions about the issues of political philosophy I've been discussing between the war snippets. John is an extremely nice person, and I deeply admire his restraint.

This is not the most fundamental argument I make, but I think it is sufficient to the issue at hand. This is in its essence a "black box" argument. It doesn't require people to share fundamental philosophical premises or conclusions, but simply to acknowledge the commonality of interests among human beings.

To start with, we must accept that a stateless culture entails mutually voluntary association. We are so accustomed to involuntary association that we unthinkingly presume that this and other common features of statist culture will persist once we have resolved to live without the state. This cannot be so. John Kennedy at no-treason.com cites some poindexter at lewrockwell.com raving on about achieving anarchy by secession. This is the kind of flavor-of-the-month presto-chango miracle to be expected from the befuddled poindexters at lewrockwell.com. To presume that a rational anarchy of any sort will come about without a radical cultural transformation among its to-be-stateless denizens is absurd. One of the changes necessary will be the acceptance that, for the polity to exist in whatever form it does exist, the members simply cannot abuse each other. They are each separately volunteers--like partners in a business or a marriage, like members of a club--and each one of them can quit. How do we know they can quit? Because a club you cannot quit is a state.

John Venlet wants to know what he can do when he perceives himself to have been injured by his neighbor, but the more interesting question to me is this one: What will John volunteer to permit his neighbor to do to him, should that neighbor perceive himself--perhaps in error--to have been injured? As I said the other day, libertarians love to indulge themselves in fantasies, so it's possible for someone to say, "Go ahead, lock me up! I'll take my chances in court!" The problem is, I will not say that, nor will any non-fantastically-indulgent rational egoist. So by this alone, we know that we cannot construct a mutually-voluntary polity in which forceful dispute resolution is legitimated.

I've said this again and again to John Kennedy: "No one volunteers to be pushed around against his will." If your system of dispute resolution requires non-consensual force, then it cannot be an anarchy. It is conceivable that people might at first volunteer to belong to a Friedmanical Sado-Masochistic Free-Market-Mafia Cult, but they would escape, one by one, as its nature became obvious. The Cult would then either deflate from depopulation, become non-coercive, or, most probably, forbid escape, thus becoming a state. If association with a polity is voluntary, and not coerced, then that polity must resolve disputes non-coercively.

As I said, this is a practical, "black box" argument, not a fundamental philosophical defense. I've done this at length elsewhere, but the "black box" argument is useful in other respects. For example, it is possible for members of the polity to associate with people who are not themselves volunteers to that polity, however it is contrived. I call this the problem of the stranger. If, in your own behavior among other people, you only take actions that are either mutually-voluntary or are solitary-in-essence, you cannot have committed a crime against those people, irrespective of the lack or presence of any agreements among you about dispute resolution.

In this way, we can achieve the effect of a mutually-voluntary polity without any sort of formalized--or even verbalized--agreements. And--miracle of miracles--you do this all the time, every day, everywhere you go. When you nod your way into the elevator, you don't even know if the other passengers are nodding back in the same language!

Because John Venlet is a nice guy, and because I want to be nice to him, I'm going to answer his next question without making him ask it: If a mutually-voluntary polity cannot use force, how can it resolve disputes?

I'm going to answer by quoting myself at length from a message I posted a long time ago in Usenet. I don't remember who I was writing to, if it was anyone in particular, but it will become obvious that I am not nearly as nice a guy as John Venlet.

From: Greg Swann
Subject: You will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them...
Date: 2001-05-07 22:04:16 PST

As we are seeing, discussions of non-coercive dispute-resolution tend to be polluted by what I identify as persistent thoughtlessness and ugly bravado, but it remains that the argument for coercive "justice" is undefended and indefensible. Even stripping away the centuries of ignorance and manly posturing, while advocates of coercive "justice" may be seeking good as their end, in the end good cannot be achieved by evil means.

That's the first point: Coercive "justice" is necessarily destructive of the egos of the people who attempt to effect it, and it is therefore evil in se. There is a distinction that must be made between response to violence as it is happening and retaliation after the fact. This is a distinction advocates of coercive "justice" consistently occlude. Nevertheless, I disagree with Jim Klein somewhat; I don't think a violent reaction to violence is amoral. It is an ego-destructive and therefore immoral action. It can be less immoral than failing to act, but the choice between less ego-destruction and more ego-destruction is a calculus of loss. That the one loss is preferred does not make it something other than a loss.

For a second thing, no human being can ever have the capacity to control the purposive behavior of another, and so the objectives sought by coercive "justice", as with all objectives sought by coercion, cannot be attained. This is an aspect of the identity of volitional beings as things, an inviolable law of nature.

Third, and more easily grasped, you simply cannot argue that you have the righteous political authority to do the things you wish to do.

You do not have the right to hurt people.

You do not have the right to effect retribution.

You do not have the right to exact revenge.

You do not have the right to demand recompense for injuries that might have occurred but didn't.

You do not have the right to make an example of Joe so that Jerry will be deterred.

You do not have the right to teach anyone a lesson.

Other people's lives are not yours to dispose of. Not ever.

Two wrongs do not make a right. Not ever.

The political philosophy undergirding coercive "justice" is undefended. There is simply no rational basis for saying that Jill is free in her person except when my ox is gored, but I am free in my person even when Jill's ox is gored. This is simply Rotarian Socialism, and there is nothing new or "radical" about it. See me at Meet the Third Thing.

Fourth, and obviously--and I weep for my fellowmen that this is so obvious and so little understood: You will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them. Your political philosophy is not only inane and undefended, is is hideously impractical for achieving the objectives you (claim to) seek. You will not rid the world of violence violently.

I advocate a particular model of non-coercive justice because it appeals to me, but it is not the only possible model. I've presented a number of others here, and one that makes a particular kind of sense is to react after the fact solely by correcting the newly-identified defects in your passive defenses; iteratively, you will achieve a safety far safer than anything ever known in human history. (Incidentally, this is exactly what you would do about an "evil" such as lightning or an insect infestation; it is worth your while to consider how much your love of retribution is rooted in religious ideas of vengeance.)

Janioism is more active than this, using the credit-reporting mechanism to post and collect judgements of restitution for injuries. The surmise is that people in groups will want that kind of lubrication when there are conflicts, but the modus vivendi is that we will never act upon another human being coercively after the fact. If someone defaults on a judgment, he will lack all access to the marketplace, to the trading medium, to all rights of way, to all commerce. His options then will be to make good on the judgement, run away, or starve. But there will be no involuntary social contact, no coercion, no institutionalized or ritualized crime.

We gain nothing--and lose a great deal--by responding to other human beings as they are not. But we stand to gain a great deal more than ever we have lost, once we resolve to respond to other people as they truly are. In the instant matter, we cannot have a stateless culture while retaining the essential error of the state. We will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them.
posted by Greg Swann at 12:40 AM

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