Tag: Philosophy

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

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The Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge program again interviews Thomas Sowell on one of his books, this time it’s the second edition of Intellectuals and Society.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyufeHJlodE?rel=0]

If you don’t have time for the whole interview, I have a couple of excerpts transcribed, the first paragraph being today’s Quote of the Day:

Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals have a great tendency to see poverty as a great moral problem to which they have the solution. Now, the human race began in poverty, so there’s no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is why have some people gotten prosperous, and in particular why some have gotten prosperous to a greater degree than others. But everybody started poor, so poverty is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals. More than that, one of the things I wish I’d put more emphasis on in the book is that intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth, and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists – somehow. It’s like manna from heaven, it’s only a question of how we split it up.

(My emphasis.)  That paragraph stands alone, but there’s much more that goes along with it:

Peter Robinson: And why should that be? Why shouldn’t they find that question at least intellectually fascinating?

TS: Because it would destroy the whole vision that they have.

PR: Because it would lead to the answer of free markets…

TS: Well, it would say there are enormous numbers of reasons why people acquire the ability to create wealth, and they vary all over the world. And so, if you find for example that, centuries past, Germans living in Eastern Europe had much higher standards of living than the indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe, intellectuals would say that somehow the Germans had oppressed the people of Eastern Europe. Or the ones that were into genetic determinism would say that the Germans were born biologically superior to the people of Eastern Europe. But anyone with a knowledge of history would know that there are all kinds of reasons why Western Europe as a whole has far greater wealth-producing capacity than Eastern Europe. But of course, that would then cut out the role of intellectuals. They would then have to do what David Hume did, which was he urged his fellow 18th-century Scots to learn the English language because that would open up a whole world to them that they would not have otherwise.

PR: Which leads to another quotation that I found very striking here, in Intellectuals and Society. Part of this you’ve touched on. You write, although intellectuals pay a lot of attention to inequalities among racial and ethnic groups, quote:

“seldom…has this attention been directed…toward how the less economically successful…might improve themselves by availing themselves of the culture of others around them.”

That is a VERY arresting formulation. Poor people can improve themselves by availing themselves of the culture of others around them. What do you mean by that?

TS: I mean that the same things which allow some other people to prosper can allow them to prosper if they take advantage of those same things. The Scots were a classic example. They were one of the poorest and most ignorant people on the fringes of European civilization in centuries past. But once they, for whatever reason, began to educate themselves and especially to learn the English language – which became a passion, people all over Scotland, including Hume himself, were taking lessons in the English language.

PR: Hume’s first language was Gaelic?

TS: I don’t know if it was Gaelic.

PR: It was whatever they spoke in those days.

TS: Yeah. And from about the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, the leading intellectuals in Britain were Scots! I mean, you had Adam Smith in economics, Hume in philosophy, Black in chemistry, you go through the whole list. (Not to mention James Watt.) And so they could do that. But that was an EXTREMELY rare thing for an intellectual to say. Most intellectuals in most countries around the world see the issue as how those who are more prosperous should be brought down, rather than how… and moreover that the people who are lagging should cling to their culture. I don’t know how you’re going to keep on doing what you’ve always done and get results that are different from what you’ve always gotten.

Easy! The culture cannot be wrong, so you do it again, only HARDER!  “Assimilation” is availing oneself of the culture around you, and it is what immigrants to this country did for literally decades.  But now, around the world immigrants are moving into foreign societies and retaining their cultures.  And the intellectuals are telling them to.  Sharia law in England, violent sexual assaults on women in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and here at home the culture of inner-city blacks has resulted in a population with a homicide rate more than six times that of the surrounding cultures, but what are they told to do by their so-called “leaders”?  Not assimilate!

But we’re not done yet.

At the end of the interview, Robinson asks Sowell about the upcoming elections:

Peter Robinson: Do you have a candidate? As we record this, the Republican primaries are still grinding on.
Thomas Sowell: There is none of the candidates of either party that would cause me to dance in the streets.
PR: Alright, is there ANYTHING as you look at the current prospect for this country and the Western world that WOULD cause you to dance in the streets?

TS: If I thought that the voters had some sense of realism, and that they were concerned with the larger questions rather than whose ex-wife said what and so on, or what Governor Romney did or did not do when he was head of Bain Capital – if they had some sense of the loss of freedom which is infinitely more important than any of the specific issues by themselves, that is Obamacare really is a HUGE step towards the loss of freedom. And it happens in small ways, but constantly. We can’t have the lightbulb that we want in our own home. We can’t flush the toilet with the kind of toilet we want. We can’t take a shower with the kind of showerhead we want. We can’t put our garbage out except broken down by the way that some little Gauleiters have decided we ought to do it. It’s just the accretion of these things, many of which are too small to be significant in themselves, but in the aggregate you can see the tendency of this. The people who think they know better and they ought to be telling us what to do. Those people are the danger, and if you don’t see that, I’m not sure what the future’s going to be like.

We’ve spent a century deliberately constructing a population that has no sense of realism, and it’s not just here, it’s worldwide.  The only thing I’m sure of is that future won’t be pleasant.

Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that.

May Victims of Communism Day

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Today is the fourth annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is the beautiful dream lie.  R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million.  And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omlette.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them.  “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated.  But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns?  For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  —  Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

—

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog.  This is the third time I have put it up.

Last year, Sipsey Street Irregulars had a post to go along with this one.  STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

Capitalism and Morality

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In the comments to Confidence, Part IV, reader “ScottFree” left an impassioned plea:

I would agree with Mr. Bezmonov that “demoralization” is at the heart of American philosophical collapse. I would just place it WAY earlier in the timeline. Historically, the intellectual bottom fell out at the Great Depression. Nothing of that scope had ever happened (certainly in America.) And for over 10 years Americans were fed the “practical” definition of insanity: keep doing the same thing over and over yet expect different results.

EVERYONE’S standard of living fell dramatically, unemployment varied somewhere between utterly ridiculous and totally insane, and there was NO fundamental, lasting hope of improvement throughout the entire period. .Gov had seized the money supply and regulated the economy to within an inch of its life — but there was no INTELLECTUAL defense of the capitalism that had existed prior to government control of the country. There were basically no significant marches, no protests, no strikes, and no even small-scale opposition organized to fight against socialism — hell, no one even DARED call the system that existed socialism, let alone what it actually was: fascism.

Why? Because no one could (or would) MORALLY refute it.

And no one is doing so now. No one is refuting the notion that Socialism is the ONLY social system that addresses the alleged “deficiencies” of capitalism, specifically the idea of “social justice”. Messrs Levin, Murray, Sowell, et. al. are splendid classical liberals who attack the legion of failures inherent within Socialism and espouse a litany of virtues for capitalism. But, fundamentally, all of their arguments rest on the flawed notion that capitalism is PRACTICAL, NOT MORAL.

The Crisis is here, Kevin. It has been here all along, right in front of everyone’s nose. The magnificent brilliance of the Founders was that they devised a structural method to ensure that morality was kept out of the government and everyone was then free to pursue their own moral beliefs and they did so by stripping the government of all powers except the absolute minimum necessary to BE a government (i.e., the protection of individual rights.) Where “we” failed as a people, morally, is when we began to believe on some level that we are our brother’s keeper. The Progressive movement secularized this moral belief and, with the Progressives’ takeover of the education system, it has been ingrained in us ever since.

Americans have to come to a point where they have the intellectual fortitude to question the fundamental moral beliefs that they’ve been taught and come to the (even more unlikely) conclusion that they MIGHT be wrong — because all of the rest of “conservatism” is just smoke and window dressing if you cannot validate capitalism MORALLY.

To paraphrase Rand so eloquently, America needs not to return to morality but to discover it.

Awhile back I quoted the Dalai Lama on the subject:

(Marxism has) moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits.

The whole quote, from news.com.au, is this:

“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived today with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

“(Marxism has) moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.

However, he credited China’s embrace of market economics for breaking communism’s grip over the world’s most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to “represent all sorts of classes”.

“(Capitalism) brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people’s living standards improved,” he said.

There’s a pretty powerful philosophical voice stating that capitalism isn’t immoral, but amoral. That’s an important distinction, and it’s not an insult. Immoral means “violating moral principles”.  Amoral means “not involving moral questions; neither moral nor immoral.”

And while I will grant that the promise of Marxism is that it has “moral ethics,” in actual practice it produces the exact opposite, to the tune of over a hundred million corpses in just the past century.

Back when I wrote the Überpost  What We Got Here is . . . Failure to Communicate, an exploration of Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, I quoted Dr. Sowell extensively on the topic of “intentions vs. results.”  Sowell’s book is based upon a (he admits) crude binary division of humanity into those who hold that humanity is constrained by his nature, and those who believe mankind is unconstrained.

So in the Constrained vision human nature is flawed, and while some flaws in some – even most – men can be ameliorated with time and teaching, this does not hold true for the whole of mankind. We are imperfect, and being imperfect the systems we establish, the institutions that we build, the traditions, laws and rituals that we practice carry along with them vulnerabilities to our inherent flaws. In order to achieve social benefits those institutions, traditions, laws and rituals must offer individuals some incentive. But more, those institutions, traditions, laws and rituals must also carry protections against abuse by those in which the flaws are extreme. In the extreme Unconstrained vision, intentions are more important than results, and results without intention are “scarcely worthy of notice.”

The Dalai Lama apparently rolls with the Unconstrained Vision.

But he is in error. He is in error because he’s comparing apples and oranges. Marxism and capitalism are not two opposing economic theories as many people believe. Marxism is a religion, and capitalism is an economic theory. Moreover, capitalism is an economic theory THAT WORKS. As even the Dalai Lama admits, capitalism in China “…brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people’s living standards improved.”

Capitalism is amoral because it is an economic theory. Marxism has a morality because it is a religion.

re·li·gion – noun: a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

Note that this definition says especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies…. Said agency is not required for a religion to exist. Whereas:

the·o·ry – noun: a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena

Marxism says that if everyone just behaves perfectly, then we will have complete equality and utopia will exist. Capitalism says that if two people make a trade, both come away better off than they were before they made the trade. Marxism says that the economy is best run from the top down. Capitalism says that the economy is best run from the bottom up. Marxism says that everyone should be a perfect altruist. Capitialism says that looking out for your own best interest is better for everyone in the long run.

We’ve already discussed what capitalism has done for China in a very brief period of time, but by far the best illustration of the difference between the religion of Marxism and the economic theory of capitalism is this singular image:

Capitalism in and of itself is amoral, but for capitalism to work best it requires a pretty specifically moral populace. Capitalism requires freedom – the freedom to choose for oneself that which he or she will trade. Capitalism requires honesty, and trustworthyness. You can’t make a profit if your vendors and customers rip you off, or if government officials must be bribed.

Capitalism works even where such a populace is thin on the ground – black markets, after all, work everywhere, even under the most severe dictatorships. It’s human nature. But where freedom is greater, the better capitalism works.

But capitalism itself is amoral. The benefits it brings to the entire economy – rich, poor and everyone in between – are not brought about by the intention of those out there trying to improve their own lot. They’re a side effect.

And thus, apparently, don’t count.

The intentions of Marxism are morally pure – the equality of man, man!

And the results it brings are, more often than the Marxist ever want to admit, death in the millions and tens of millions.

I understand there’s a certain equality in the grave.

So no, capitalism is not “moral.” It’s completely amoral. But it functions best where the Golden Rule is the morality people actually live by, and market forces incentivize that particular morality.

No Change in Strategy or Tactics

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In the comments to “Freudian Slip Much?” Lyle comments:

Following all your links and watching the videos, it’s all “Top down, Bottom up, Inside out”. They’re prepping their herds for the next step, which is chaos. The people will demand that government take action to do something about it (“Bottom up”) then it’s “Inside out”– totalitarian socialism will be offered as the only way out.

The socialist/eugenicists never went away. They just changed tactics.

No. No they didn’t. They haven’t changed tactics or the overall strategy. What we’re witnessing is the culmination of ninety-plus years of ideology playing out. Remember the poster:

That lie has lodged deep in the human psyche for a very long time. Karl Marx codified it in the late 19th Century, and by the turn of the 20th, it had swept across the world.

But at the end of World War I, its adherents were straining to understand why, despite Marx’s insistence on communism’s historic inevitability, the Proletariat put on the uniforms of their nation’s armed forces instead of rising in revolution against the bourgeoisie. In order to answer that question, a group of young Communists formed the Frankfurt School. The answer, they concluded, was that a comfortable proletariat was a non-revolutionary proletariat, and Western civilization produced material comfort. Therefore, Western civilization had to be destroyed, and the best way to do that was from the inside.

The target of this destruction was Western culture, and the vectors for this destruction would be the education system, the arts, and media, aided by the infiltration and destruction of governments. By the 1930’s, the seeds were already sown. America’s Great Depression had seen to that, and Marx and Engels’ ideas had spread worldwide. Many were disillusioned by the perceived failures of capitalism, and the promise of socialism seemed the ideal answer. I am currently reading Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century, and even I am shocked by how prevalent the acceptance of socialism was as far back as the 20’s. Some of the young converts of the 1920’s and 30’s became the college professors of the 40’s and 50’s, and by the 1960’s they were turning out more converts, fellow travelers and “useful idiots” who were themselves school teachers, playwrights, actors, editors, reporters, etc.

Regardless of the source, the 1985 warning delivered by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov rings absolutely true to me:

Ideological subversion is the process, which is legitimate, overt, and open; you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of thrillers.

But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people… the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

We now have a country in which two-thirds of the population believes that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is part of the Constitution. Where a majority believes “the rich don’t pay their fair share” of taxes. We have a country that is progressively balkanized (pun intended) into victim groups to be exploited for political gain. And all of this traces back to the strategies and tactics that sprang from the Frankfurt School and its disciples: “Critical Theory” (Critical Race Theory, Critical Literary Theory, Critical Gender Theory), Political Correctness (“Shut up,” they explained…), the Cloward-Piven strategy, etc.

Marx understood and stated plainly that Communism, historically inevitable or not, could only come about through violent revolution, so the conditions for violent revolution had to be fomented. A small, dedicated, ever-changing group of true believers has been working since the turn of the 20th Century to bring Western Civilization to its knees, and it has almost achieved it. The players have changed, but the strategy hasn’t.

Brilliant!

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Dr. Sanity has a timely repost of the explanation behind the different ways the Right and the Left deal with shame and guilt. Excerpt:

“Conservatives believe they have better ideas. Leftists believe they are better people.”

This is extremely relevant to a discussion about the differences between the Democratic Party culture (which has become primarily, though not exclusively, influenced by the political left) and the Republican Party culture (which is predominantly influenced by conservative ideas and values).

Eventually for the shame-avoidant person, reality itself must be distorted in order to further protect the self from poor self-esteem. Blaming other individuals or groups for one’s own behavior becomes second nature, and this transfer of blame to someone else is an indicator of internal shame.

Go, RTWT.