Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Real Problem with Drugs

The real problem with drugs is not Mexicans supplying drugs, no matter how vicious and murderous the drug cartels are. When there is a demand, there is always going to be a supply. It's an economic law, and no one can stop it.

Neither is the problem the demand for drugs by Americans, no matter how many of them are the kinds of people who want to do nothing but take drugs. As a wise man once said two thousand years ago, the poor are always with us. Not financially poor, but poor in spirit and character.

The problem is that which gets in between the supply and demand: the State. Specifically, grossly overpaid, underworked, not-very-bright, self-deluded bureaucrats who think the force and fraud of the State can stop both the supply and the demand, though killing and prison.

Let's do a thought experiment and imagine all the Drug Warrior bureaucrats are shipped off to Hell, which is where all of them are going away, and quite deservedly so. Then let's make drugs legal.

What would happen?

Within one day the drug cartels would collapse, since their billions of dollars of profit would immediately disappear — poof, just like that. All the violent crime, including murder, associated with illegal drugs would evaporate on the spot.

The demand for drugs would still be there, but the crime associated with getting the money to pay for the drugs would disappear. Our prison population would cease exploding, since many of those incarcerated are there for drug offenses.

Would people stop using drugs? No. But the problems associated with getting the drugs would disappear. Would real crimes disappear? No. But crimes created by State interference would.

What has to be discovered is how many real crimes would remain when the "crimes" created by State interference cease to exist. Thought experiments can only go so far with that.

As Thomas Sowell and many others have noticed, there are very few solutions in life, only trade-offs. The problem with the lackeys who work for the State is that they think there are solutions, always involving laws, guns and prisons.

If drugs were legal, there might be an increase in drug use. No one knows. If there is an increase, that is the trade-off of making drugs legal. But at the same time, all of the horrendous problems caused by drugs being illegal would disappear.

There is one big problem that would be solved with making drugs legal: no more Drug Warrior bureaucrats. It's not even a trade off. It's one of the few cases in life where there is a solution with nothing bad created someplace else.

That is a solution I think everyone can live with. Except, of course, for the bureaucrats who would be off of the taxpayer dime and have to get real jobs. That is, if any of them are qualified for anything in the private sector, and I really doubt that.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

The No-So-Wild-Wild West

Robber: This is a stick-up! Give me your money!

Man: Do you realize there are now four people behind you pointing handguns at your head?

Robber: Here. You can have my .22.

Man: You're not from this state, are you?

Robber: I'm from Washington, DC.

Man: Figures. I guess you didn't know everyone is this state carries handguns. We have almost no crime anymore--almost no murders, or rapes, or robberies. We hardly have any prisons, because we don't have many prisoners. We even fired 90% of the police. The rest are what they're supposed to be--peace officers.

Robber: What are you going to do with me?

Man: You're lucky we didn't shoot you on the spot. Instead we'll take you over to the courthouse and have a trial. Take about half-an-hour. Then we'll hang you. After all, there are four witnesses that saw you try to rob me with a handgun.

Robber: Now wait a minute! You have to put me in prison! With cable TV, free dental and three square meals a day!

Man: Naw, those days are gone. We're going back to the old days. Why, back in Mark Twain's time--

Robber: Who?

Man: Public school graduate, right?

Robber: I dropped out.

Man: That figures, too. Anyway, back in Mark Twain's time he wrote a woman could travel from one side of the country to the other without being molested by even the roughest of men. You know why, knucklehead?

Robber: Uh uh.

Man: Because there was hardly any government in his time. The bigger and more interfering the government gets, the worse society becomes. You're an example of the kind of human being produced by government interference in society. Broken family, no father, raised on welfare, dropped out of the worthless public schools, belongs to a gang, sells drugs, armed robber...you know why people like Jesse James and Billy the Kid were so well-known in the past?

Robber: Uh, nope.

Man: Because they were so rare everyone knew of them. These days, people like them exists by the hundreds in every large enough city. You're one of them. You know how we fixed the problem?

Robber: Uh, nope.

Man: We've gotten rid of most of the government, and everything in society has gotten better. You can drop your wallet on the sidewalk here, with thousands of dollars in it, and it will be returned with all the money in it. Just like what happened when theat eight-year-old boy found a wallet with almost $2000 in it, in that Laura Ingalls Wilder book, Farmer Boy.

Robber: Hey, I always liked farms! Everything sounds good to me! I'll all for it! You've convinced me! I'm a changed man! I promise I'll be good! Can I go now?

Man: Maybe we shouldn't hang you. I think we'll just give you a good beating instead and send you back to where you came from, as an advertisement to your kind to never come here. Unless, of course, you'd rather have a last cigarette before we slap the horse's rump?

Robber: This stinks! You're supposed to be victims!

Man: Not any more, buster...not any more.

Knucklehead-Be-Gone

I was considered odd when I was a little kid. I looked odd, too, since I had a huge lightbulb-shaped head, all full of Poindexter brains, that was always busy busy busy plotting, scheming and inventing.

My parents, intuitively understanding my overreved brains might overheat, made me wear a buzzcut, so my head would be aircooled, much like their '67 VW Bug.

You should have seen what I looked like when that hair grew out. I had Wild Jungle Hair, just like Boy in the old Tarzan films. My mother used to strop it down with a big glob of Dippity-Do and a brush.

Here's an example of my scheming: when I was five a neighbor asked me what I was doing with a car muffler. Making a robot, I told him. And the frog? he wanted to know. Well, obviously, robots need brains. Now, as to how I was going to hook the frog up to the robot I had no idea. But I assumed that I would, somehow, figure it out.

That robot never got anywhere, since the frog – whom I had named Max – went to Frog Heaven after three days. I honestly thought I was giving him the luxury treatment. I didn't realize a frog couldn't live in an empty doughnut box, even if it was full of grass for him to eat, and a bottlecap full of water for him to drink. I felt bad for a few days after I unwittingly committed Involuntary Frogicide.

Then there was the episode of the propane torch and the hot-water heater. The same neighbor wanted to know why a six-year-old boy was using his dad's propane torch on an old hot-water heater my dad had put in the trash. Submarines need hatches, I told him. Oh, he responded.

I had no idea how I was supposed to get my submarine to the lake. I suppose I figured I could talk my father into putting it into the back of his pick-up truck.

None of those plans came close to working. The closest was when I was about eight, when I realized if I hooked up 20 or so C batteries to a belt, I could use them to shock the neighborhood thugs, all of whom were jealous of my brainpower, and therefore chased me around attempting to beat me up.

I believe that plan would have worked, except for the fact that when I asked my dad to buy me 20 batteries, he asked why, and I answered, "Oh, nothing." The look on his face told me the jig was up.

When I was about 12, I wondered if it would be possible to invent what I called Instant Knuckles. It would be an aerosol can, like Raid, with about 2,000 pounds of pressure in it. When the button was pressed, something like Silly String would shoot out, turn into a fist, and BAP BAP BAP whomever I had pointed the nozzle at. If the can could have contained 20 or so shots of Instant Knuckles, I could have walked unmolested anywhere.

My plans continued to fail even into my 20s. My seven-year-old nephew and I once built a model rocket that was taller than he was. I put five engines into it. When we hit the ignition, the rocket didn't move, but the engines exploded through the top. Then the rocket fell over on its side. For all I know, the engines are orbiting the earth, or maybe are on the moon. We never found them.

When I got to be in my 30s, I realized what I wanted to invent most of all were two things: a can of Knucklehead-Be-Gone, to be followed by a shot of Brains-in-a-Can.

The following explains why.

SMART JAPANESE: You know, I don't think it's such a good idea for us to invade China so we can have an empire, and it's probably even worse of an idea to attack the United States, which has twice our population and all kinds of natural resources.

DUMB JAPANESE: You're a coward and a traitor! You support our enemies! All patriots must stand united behind our government and our soldiers! And if you don't like it, leave the country!

KNUCKLEHEAD-BE-GONE: Pssst.

DUMB JAPANESE: Hey, you know, maybe you have a point!

BRAINS-IN-A-CAN: Pssst.

DUMB JAPANESE (NOW SMART): By God, you're right!

Now, let's move to Germany.

SMART GERMAN: You know, maybe this Hitler is an idiot and we shouldn't listen to his warmongering talk. He's going to get all of us into a bunch of trouble.

DUMB GERMAN: You're a coward and a traitor! You support our enemies! All patriots must stand united behind our government and our soldiers! And if you don't like it, leave the country!

KNUCKLEHEAD-BE-GONE: Pssst.

DUMB GERMAN: Hey, you know, maybe you have a point!

BRAINS-IN-A-CAN: Pssst.

DUMB GERMAN (NOW SMART): By God, you're right!

Now let's move to modern-day America.

SMART AMERICAN: You know, I don't think it's such a good idea to invade foreign countries that haven't invaded us. It just makes us into an empire, gets our soldiers killed, wastes billions of dollars, and makes possibly permanent enemies out of those we conquer.

DUMB AMERICAN (AKA NEOCONS AKA RUSH LIMBAUGH AKA SEAN HANNITY AKA DAVID FRUM AKA ALL OF THEM): You're a coward and a traitor! You support our enemies! All patriots must stand united behind our government and our soldiers! And if you don't like it, leave the country!

KNUCKLEHEAD-BE-GONE: Psssst.

DUMB AMERICAN: Hey, you know, maybe you have a point!

BRAINS-IN-A-CAN: Pssst.

DUMB AMERICAN (NOW SMART): By God, you're right!

Unfortunately, I expect this plan to fail just like all the rest of my plans.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Self-Deluded Ambitious Spinsters

It's always pretty much always pandemonium in the world -- hey, it's the history of humanity -- but you'd think America would have enough sense to avoid most of it. After all, we do have the whole of history before us to guide us. Right? Right?

Then why do we keep making the biggest mistake of all, the one that has brought down society after society after society? What I mean is this: the growth of the State, which, as it grows, always damages or destroys society. And I do mean always.

Whatever the State gets involved in, it will always hurt that thing. And also always, if the interference goes on long enough, it destroys. And that includes one of the things that is the basis of any stable society -- the relationships between men and women.

If the State stayed out of those relationships, men and women would fall into their natural roles, contrary to the delusions of leftists who think that people who believe in freedom are actually just wankers (I am reminded of a comment by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: "Leftists don't merely misunderstand human nature; they don't understand it at all").

Since the State does intervene massively, current roles are anything but natural.

For an example: wages stopped going up in 1973 (and, yeah, wages do have an effect on relationships). This collapse of wages is 100% the State's doing. It's been estimated by economists whom I actually respect and that means they aren't utterly incompetent autistic whackjobs out of Harvard, Yale and Princeton (e.g. Paul Krugman), that if wages had continued to go up, as they would have if we still had a free market, the average salary would be about $90,000 a year. Now imagine that!

With that kind of money a man could easily support a family. If his wife didn't want to work, no problem. They could have a middle-class house, a yearly vacation, and everything else that used to be part of the American Dream.

Those days are gone. Gone, gone, gone.

There are other problems (there are always "other problems"). Over the past few decades (about 30 years, I'd say) the law (sic) has benefited educated, intelligent (perhaps "high-IQ is a better phrase, since this kind of women aren't exactly smart) women (but not lowly-paid, not-so-bright women) at the expense of men. This has caused some pretty big problems. Really big problems.

As a woman's socioeconomic status has gone up, many if not most of them expect a potential husband's not only to keep pace with hers, but to be higher. He is supposed to be taller (always), just as good-looking if not better-looking, have just as high-paying of a job if not higher...and also support her career, etc., etc.

You know exactly what I'm talking about; I don't have to go on and on and explain all the bullshit in detail.

However, the law is now against men. For example, Affirmative Action means "White Men Need Not Apply." I have seen the truth of this several times, often from men who at first thought it was a fair thing but who now are rabidly against it.

I have seen men with Master's degrees who could find nothing but part-time jobs, for several years, while they watched, at first unbelievingly, as less qualified (and sometimes unqualified) women (and minorities) were promoted over them.

I've had more than one man tell me the men at the job had to carry the women, many of whom thought working was holding meetings and talking and drinking coffee. I've seen it myself. More than once.

What's ironic about men carrying some women at work is that these women, who believe they got their positions completely on their own, generally do not consider the men who work for them to be marriageable. Now that is a tragicomedy if there ever was one.

And of course the marginally-qualified, indeed the unqualified and therefore inept, never know they are. I've seen it several times, and so have you.

What this means is that while the socioeconomic status of educated women is going up, the exact opposite is true of many men. So many of these women look up and up and up for a husband...while most of them are down below.

This is one of the reasons why 49% of all people in the United States are not married (and soon it's going to be 50%). It's not the only reason, but it's the main reason why educated, highly-paid women are living alone in apartments with cats taking the place of the kids they'll never have because their ovaries have shriveled up.

These problems between men and women were taken care of in the past by society when men were highly paid and women were kept out of most jobs. Since women's socioeconomic status wasn't that high, the available pool of potential husbands was much larger.

Nowadays, if a woman is a lawyer (shudder) or a doctor or an MBA or has a PH.D. or a CPA or a CEO, she is going to look around by a man who's even higher up...and then finds they are not there. And if they are there, what man in his right mind would marry a female lawyer?

When men go home they want peace and quiet and a little bit of happiness. That ain't asking for much, I don't think.

These women, unable to find a man they consider marriageable, then get hostile and blame their problems on men. And I'm seen that, too, more than once. And so have you.

These women in fact are turning themselves into spinsters. That's not a word used anymore, but it should be. Not only spinsters, but self-deluded, ambitious spinsters, who justify their being alone with fantasies about how men don't like "strong women" (read unpleasant and hostile) or "successful women" (read unpleasant and hostile).

If these women wish to get married, then they will have to lower their standards. However, they cannot do it. They cannot love a man they consider not up to their standards; they cannot respect him, and they are in a self-induced, self-deluded rage at everything but their own ignorant selves.

What is ironic, and almost completely ignored (or denied as untrue or due to a non-existent "oppression" by "patriarchy") is that men are responsible for civilization.

As Camille Paglia so famously noted, without men, women would still be living grass huts. And as P.J. O'Rourke noted, more humorously but just as accurately, without men civilization would last until the next oil change.

Also ignored or denied is that, as Charles Murray (and others in the past) noted in his Human Accomplishment, for the past 500 years (and probably longer) European men and their descendents across the world have been responsible for 97% of all the inventions in the world.

This is not due to "oppression" of women, preventing them from all the accomplishments they would have achieved. Anyone who believes that has fallen for 40 years of Marxist/feminist/ lies.

For that matter, the words "freedom" and "liberty" are strictly Europeans concepts. The ideas have never existed anyplace else in the world.

You'd think women would be grateful to men, admire and respect them? Nope. Instead, for the more educated ones, more! more! is their motto. "The more you give give me, the more I want from you."

Of course, this means high-paying indoor jobs. It doesn't mean digging coal or working on an oil rig. Nothing dirty and dangerous, of course.

Since indeed men are responsible for nearly all (for all practical purposes, all) advances in society, when they are not allowed to do so, by force of law, it is logically inescapable that society will go backwards.

Men will always dominate in what is known as STEM -- science, technology, engineering, math. And of course these men are always considered geeks and nerds, and of course are not the heartthobs of almost all women.

Of course we can go back to the past when the free market gave men high-paying jobs (good idea) and women were kept out of most jobs (not so good of an idea).

People might want to keep in mind that is mistranslated as "the pursuit of happiness" is really the Greek word "eudamonia," which can mean "a system to pursue well-being or flourishing." The way to do this is "arete," which translates as "excellence." (The word "phronesis", often translated as "practical or moral wisdom, is also used.)

Or as the philosopher Brand Blanshard put it, "I'm inclined to think the person does the most for the world by being his own self in the fullest measure." In order for this to happen, there must be freedom. Not the law benefitting one group and oppressing another.

Spinoza noticed the same thing Blanshard did a long time ago: "Men, I repeat, can wish for nothing more excellent for preserving their own being than that they should all be in such harmony in all respects that their minds and bodies should compose, as it were, one mind and one body, and that all together should endeavor as best they can to preserve their own being, and that all together they should aim at the common advantage of all."

In others words, liberty allows people to fall into their natural roles, allows them to exercise their excellence to their fullest, and therefore be happy. This not only allows them to be as happy as they can be, it also benefits society.

So of course the State should get the hell out of people's lives. And then -- watch what happens! It'd be a much better country if liberty and freedom again became American values, not just the empty words they are so often today.

It sure would be a lot better country than the one we have now.

In the meantime, the women looking for Mr. Perfect ("rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart...having his way with a protesting but willing but stuggling but yielding temptestuous female"*) can find him in women's pornography...also known as romance novels.

(* from Neil Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon")

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

"Good-Natured Unambitious Men"

If Pareto's 80/20 law is correct (and history has shown that it is) then while 80% of men are good-natured and not overly-ambitious, there will be that 20% that are more ambitious than the average. And if you take that 20%, and use it as 100%, then 20% of them are the really ambitious ones.

These super-ambitious types aren't necessarily a good thing. In fact, I'd say they're far more bad than good. Think politicians, most of whom are very ambitious and almost always immensely destructive. Think lawyers. Think MBAs. Think of the ambitious in our finance industry.

If none of these people had never existed, would it be a better or worse world? I'd say it's pretty obvious it's be a better world. A much better world.

Even if a man is good-natured and mostly unambitious, they should still be highly paid. I knew a man who spent his career as a janitor at my high school, and he led a middle-class existence with a two-story house, a wife who didn't work, and two kids.

These day, janitors are paid mostly minimum wage. In reality they should make $50,000 a year, which is what my high-school janitor made.

Don't laugh. Wages stopped going up in 1973, courtesy of government interference in the economy. Had they kept going up as they should have, one economist (whose name I have forgotten) estimated the average wage would be about $90,000 a year. So the idea of a janitor making $50,000 is not outrageous at all.

I also knew a cab driver who started driving in the 1950s. When I met him, he told me that when he started driving a taxi, he wondered, "Where has this job been all my life?"

He made what today would be about $50,000 a year. One month out of the year, he went on vacation. He put his wife in the sidecar of his motorcycle and off they would go.

Today, with the influx of 85-IQ Third Worlders, the yearly wages for driving a taxi are below $20,000 a year. It used to be a very good middle-class job; now it pays nearly poverty wages and is a lower-class job for anti-American immigrants, who are obsessed with their "rights" and have no understanding of their obligations and duties.

I also knew a man who told me "I could have been rich but it wasn't worth it." He was a general contractor who build four houses a year. He said he could have built entire subdivisions, worked 60 hours a week including nights and weekends, and become rich in about ten years.

I understand his sentiment. He decided there was more to life than working your ass off just to be rich.

Some economists support these destructive things. My experience with economists is that the people who least understand economics are the Ph.D.s; those who don't understand economics at all are the Ph.D.s from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Eric Hoffer, in his "The Ordeal of Change," wrote, "It has been often stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability. For not only are the untalented more numerous but, since they cannot transmute their grievances into a creative effort, their disaffection will be more pronounced and explosive."

In other words, if there is no place is society for the untalented, i.e. those good-natured unambitious men. thenthey are the ones will rise up and turn into blood-thirsty sheeple.

Not only is the middle-class is in trouble, thanks to the incompetents in government, so are the relationships between men and women, again thanks to the government.

It used to be not so long ago, a man could work 40 hours a week and live a middle-class existence. His wife didn't have to work unless she wanted to and they could raise as many kids as they wanted.

Those days are gone, again thanks to the government.

It now takes two incomes to live a middle-class existence, and as for the children they have to be farmed out to preschools, which means you're putting them in the hands of strangers.

Poorly-paid strangers, I'll add. If they were paid $50,000 a year to take care of your kids there wouldn't be any caretakers. No one would pay for them.

I've known people who've opted out of these horrors. I know one couple who live in a rural trailer and homeschool their children, which consists of the mother taking them for walks, showing them nature and discussing things with them, and getting them books from the library.

It may not sound like real schooling, but look at it this way: kids are in school from five to 17. What exactly do they learn in 12 years? Can you name anything that takes 12 years to learn?

With the destruction of middle-class jobs comes the destruction of families and children's lives. Forty-nine percent of people in the U.S. are unmarried. Might this have anything to do with the destruction the middle class?

I think it's pretty obvious that it is. As high-paying middle-class jobs for good-natured unambitious men are outsourced and destroyed, families will not form.

Many women will opt to have children on their own, with them of course being paid for by the State. And there is huge problem with this.

One is that the word "bastard" has two meanings: a boy with no father and a cruel, heartless man. It's been noticed for a long time that boys without fathers quite often become cruel, vicious men.

Without fathers, society and civilization will always go backwards.

Without the middle-class, and high-paying jobs for all those good-natured unambitious men, society will separate into two classes: the superrich and the superpoor. And the superrich will live in gated communities and use the police and military to keep everyone else under control.

It won't last all that long, though. The economy will collapse, again courtesy of the federal government. Unfortunately, things will get a lot worse before they collapse. And this includes the relationships between men and women, marriage, and worst of all, the damage done to our children.

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Story of Human Sacrifice

I spent a few years reading a lot of True Crime books, especially those
by Ann Rule, a woman who knew and worked with Ted Bundy, and who
discussed with him how the police were searching for a serial killer --
who turned out to be Bundy. I was puzzled by first-degree murderers, and
most especially by serial killers, whom to me made no sense at all.

What I found is what I will call, for want of a better word, a Story.
But then, apparently, everything is a Story: they have a beginning, a
middle, an end, and a meaning. But this particular Story about all
serial killers goes like this: I am a malign, grandiose god without a
conscience. Underneath all that grandiosity is an enormous amount of
hate and envy. I project my problems onto others, and murder them in
hopes of removing my hate and envy.

Their attempts to fix themselves never work, no matter how many times
they repeat them. That makes their Story a very bad one indeed. It
reminds me of that half-joking definition of insanity: "Trying the same
thing over and over even though it never works."

After thinking about this problem for a long time, I refined the Story
to this: I am grandiose; you are devalued. I project my problems on you,
scapegoat you, then human-sacrifice you.

That Story exists in every human being, in greater or lesser degree. It
is a very bad Story, and one that I think is the cause of most of the
problems in the world. Indeed, it's the best explanation I know of for
human evil.

Bits and pieces of that Story exist in various myths (when I use the
word "myth" I don't mean "not true"; I mean "universally true"). The
story of the Garden of Eden is one. Adam blames his problems on Eve,
then Eve blames her problems on the serpent, which is a symbol of hate and envy.

That is a profound story. It impresses me immensely. Whoever wrote that
story knew exactly what they were writing. How they knew, I don't have a
clue. But they knew that envy leads to scapegoating. At first I thought
the whole sequence was: envy leads to scapegoating which leads to human
sacrifice.

The clearest expression of that sequence I have encountered is in Ayn
Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." It could be used as a textbook on
psychopathology. Rand, who was an exceptionally disturbed woman, split
her characters into her grandiose heroes and her devalued looters and
parasites. All the world's problems (all evil, actually) are projected
onto her looter/parasites, who are then scapegoated and human-sacrificed
in a John Galtian orgy of destruction.

The book is actually the psychology of a serial killer mapped onto a
novel. It is a microcosm (one person or one novel) used to explain a
macrocosm (entire societies). From the novel I able to refine the
sequence even further: Hubris (the old Greek name for grandiosity) leads
people into splitting other people into all-good and all-bad. All evil
is projected onto the all-bad, then they are scapegoated and
human-sacrificed.

The all-bad, in addition to being devalued, is also seen as an
exaggerated threat. It explains why in "Atlas Shrugged" her looters and
parasites are devalued as "subhumans" living in a "hell," yet somehow
they have gained control of the world. The word to describe this is
"paranoia," a condition that Rand was diagnosed with.

So, after several years, I was able to refine the Story to this: the
main problem of the human race, its worst sin and probably the only true
crime that exists, because it is the basis of all others, is hubris.
Hubris, or what the Bible calls "pride," is the sin of Satan, who
thought he could overthrow God and take his place. Underneath it lies
envy and hate. In that hubris people split others into all-good and
all-bad. Of course, to them, they are the good ones, and other people,
the bad. Not just bad, but subhuman, even non-human. To maintain their
"goodness," people must project their envy and hate -- what they call
"evil" -- onto others, see them as an exaggerated threat, become
paranoid about them, then scapegoat and human-sacrifice them.

Let's take that Story and apply to the current wars. Some, people, say
former President (who was, and still is, tongue-tied and brain-tied), claimed the WTC and the Pentagon were attacked because we are "good" and they are "evil." It's not that simple, except in the fantasy world of the blind leading the blind.

A better explanation is that our enemies hate and envy us because we are
strong and they are weak. They think they are Good, and we are Evil.
They projected their problems onto us, scapegoated us, and
human-sacrificed all those people in the WTC and the Pentagon. Because
they envy us, they wanted to "bring us down," and that is exactly what
they did with those three buildings.

But why do they hate and envy us instead of admire us? As the Greeks
noticed thousands of years ago, admiration is the benign form of envy.
Shouldn't they admire us instead, and want to emulate us?

They hate us because we are using the same Story they are. We are using
the same Story against them they are using against us. As I said, that
Story exists in all people. That's why the story of the Garden of Eden
is universal -- I will deny my responsibility for what I've done and
blame it on you. I am the victim, even if in reality I'm not.

The United States has decided it is Good and others are Evil. Look at
the abuse heaped upon Germany and France because they disagree with us.
It's almost as if those countries are considered evil and cowardly.
("French rifle for sale: never fired, only dropped once.")

When the WTC and the Pentagon were attacked, of course it had to be
because we are Good, and they, being Evil, hate us. Instead, the truth
is that the U.S. had been bombing and blockading Iraq for ten years,
leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, supporting
Israel and ignoring the Palestinians, and had troops stationed in Saudi
Arabia.

It wasn't only because of envy we were attacked; it was also an attempt
to draw us into a guerrilla war, to bleed us dry of blood and treasure,
so we would withdraw from the Islamic world. But envy, I am convinced,
was a large part of the attack.

The United States sees the rest of the world as an exaggerated threat.
It's paranoia. I suspect that's what all empires are based upon, in
large part. We must dominate the world because they want to destroy us
because we are so good and strong, and they are sniveling envious
weaklings! So, we have to have some 750 military bases in three-quarters
of the world, making us an empire not of colonies but of military
outposts.

As proof, I've had more than one person tell me, "Islam is going to
conquer the world! We have to stop them!" To which I respond: you are
exaggerating the threat. You're paranoid. With what are they going to
conquer us? They have no armies, no navies, no air forces. All the
Islamic countries combined have an economy less than that of Spain.
They're a thousand years behind the West, and always will be. (And yes,
I do know there are Muslims who think they are going to conquer the
world. Pinky and the Brain thought they were going to conquer the world,
too. That particular problem can be easily solved by changes in
immigration policy.)

I wouldn't say the U.S. exactly envies all that oil in the Middle East. I
think a better word is "covet," because the area has more oil than we
do. We covet their oil, saw ourselves as Good and them as Evil when we
were attacked, projected all problems onto them to maintain our illusion
of purity, scapegoated them, and are now human-sacrificing them.

And they are trying to do the same thing to us. And therein lies the
problem: each side is saying, "We are Good, and you are Evil." Not just
saying it, but convinced of it.

Hubris on top, hate and envy underneath. Split everyone into grandiose
and devalued, project evil onto others, scapegoat them...and then
slaughter them.

Gary North, in his article, "Libertarian War Cannibals," quotes one of
his respondents: "American lives are more valuable than foreign lives.
One American life is worth more than 1 million foreign lives."

One million evil, subhuman foreigners in trade for one American. The
first thing I thought: what if that American is Richard Simmons, or
worse, Michael Bolton? But this man's hate-filled, and envy-filled, view
is based on the belief, we are Good and they are Evil, indeed non-human.
Project all problems onto the "evil," scapegoat them...then
human-sacrifice them, even if it's a million (since some 3,000 Americans
died in the WTC, this comes to three billion foreigners). However, the
measure we use to judge others is the measure they use to judge us. Tit
for tit. What we do to others they will do to us. If we tell them we can
kill one million of them, they will return the favor.

I am going to quote Freda Utley's comment at the beginning of Gary's
article, because it says exactly what I'm saying:

"It is conducive to spiritual satisfaction and self-respect to view past
or present enemies as the only transgressors against the laws of God and
man. To admit that the capacity for evil is inherent in all mankind
would destroy our sense of superiority. So we have gone far toward the
adoption of the Nazi theory of 'racial' differences, and have ourselves
assumed the position of a superior or master race."

That's a good definition of mass hubris: people believing they are "a
superior or master race." Necessarily it means those "outside" the race
are non-human. That's been the history of the world: all tribes have
called themselves "the People" or "the Human Beings." Those outside:
non-People, non-Human Beings. And, to some, more than one million
non-People aren't worth one People.

Hubris is bad enough for an individual. It's far, far worse when it
afflicts entire societies. And it reaches its peak when people believe
society and the State are the same thing. The word for that is
"fascism": everything, as Mussolini said, inside the State, nothing
outside. When that happens there will always be orgies of destruction.
That was the history of the 20th century, which was the century of
worship of the Idol of the State.

And idols, of course -- like Moloch -- are always hungry and always need
human sacrifice.

When Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the Temple he also drove out
those who sold pigeons for sacrifice to God. We may snigger at people
who sacrificed birds, but it was a lot better than a thousand years
before, when babies were rolled into the flame-filled stone belly of
Moloch.

Europe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the start of World War
II in 1914, enjoyed a century of peace. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who
has influenced me more than I can say, claimed that peace was due to two
things: mature monarchies and mature Christianity.

But with the overthrow of the both of them in the early 20th Century we
entered into the worship of the State, a worship that led to up to 200
million people being sacrificed in various wars. At least Lenin,
Trotsky, Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin, and Hitler had the decency to be
atheists.

Two thousand years ago we had it down to sacrificing birds. Two thousand
years later we had retrogressed into sacrificing people by the hundreds
of millions, not to a god but to the state.

Now, today, in the 21st Century, we've retrogressed even further, and
are now at the point where some people conflate society, the State and
God. In Jerry Falwell's mind, they are the same thing, which is why he
writes articles such as, "God is pro-war." He has no idea what he is
saying, or to what his beliefs will lead. He has forgotten the
Commandment which reads, "You will not use God's name for vain causes."
The State indeed is the vainest of causes.

I try to look for first causes, for the root of the problem. The
beginning of the Story, as best as I can tell, is based on hate and
envy. But what is the end of the Story?

The Greeks saw it as hubris (grandiosity) to ate (a madness in which
wrong appeared as right) to nemesis (destruction). The Bible claims,
"Pride goes before a fall, and a haughty spirit before destruction."

That, in some form or another, will be the end of the story. It won't be
of the U.S., because countries always survive. It will be, if anything, of
the idol known as the federal government (which is no longer a
government, but a State), because of its hubris that leads it to believe
it can invade countries and remake them in its idolatrous image, its
insane inability to tell right from wrong, its hysterical paranoia that
leads to 85-year-old grandmothers being searched at airports, and its
unshakable belief that it has the right to human-sacrifice any number of
innocent foreigners.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

A.E. van Vogt's "The Violent Male"



Back in the early 1950's the science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt conceived of what he called "The Violent Male." In essence it was the man who thinks he is always right and can tolerate no dissent. This type of man, although they may think the human race is no better than an animal or insect, always think of themselves as gods.

He mentioned such people as Stalin and Hitler as some of the worst examples. They were capable of such destruction because they gained political power.

Colin Wilson picked up on van Vogt's idea, wrote a novel about it called The Killer, and mentioned the concept in some of his other books.

Both van Vogt and Wilson are correct in what they noticed, yet I would find it odd had these types of men have not been noticed for thousands of years. I believe they have.

As far back as the Old Testament these kinds of men were afflicted with Pride, as in "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Not surprisingly both van Vogt and Wilson noticed these men tended to destroy not only themselves but many others.

The ancient Greeks also noticed the character of these men. They considered them afflicted with Hubris -- the god of arrogance, lack of restraint, insolence and wanton violence, which is followed by Nemesis, the goddess of fate and revenge.

Wilson writes of these men: "Essential here is that the 'Right Man' must always have his way and is afraid of losing face above all ('How dare you talk to me this way?'): anything that might be an indication of his infallibility or erroneous ways, something that he can never admit."

"Losing face" means these men are motivated not by guilt (of which they have little if any) but instead by shame. And shame and humilation, as the psychiatrist James Gilligan has noticed, is what motivates murderers -- as is shown in one of the oldest stories in the West: that of Cain and Abel.

The Violent Man is always a scapegoater: i.e., he always blames his problems on someone else. He projects his own problems on them; they are the cause of his discomfort. And as M. Scott Peck noticed, "Scapegoating is the genesis of human evil."

Every political ideology that I am familiar with is based on splitting things into all-good or all-bad, on scapegoating, on the belief in always being right. Whether it is Marxism or Nazism or Republians and Democrats, it is all based on avoiding shame and humiliation and destroying those who oppose its "rightness."

Not surprisingly, this is one of the reasons why politics will never solves any problems, not when we see yourself as absolutely right and your opponents as evil.

As Gary Gibson writes, "Politics...thrives by amplifying divisions, creating social friction within and war without."