The Good, the Bad, and the Half-Asleep

It was Aristotle who observed there are two kinds of ignorance: when you’re ignorant and know it, and when you’re ignorant and don’t know it. The second kind of ignorance is the dangerous kind, because people who are ignorant and don’t know it usually think they’re smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone else (as Rousseau wrote: "One is misled not by what he does not know but by what he believes he knows").

This ignorant-and-don’t-know-it is what makes the afflicted so dangerous. It’s as if they’re using arrogance to cover up stupidity.

Someone not knowing they’re ignorant is a fugue state – the person is in a deluded, half-asleep state but unaware of it. Many people know they’re not totally awake, because to be totally “awake” you’d have to know everything, to know what theologians call the Mind of God. For humans that is of course impossible.

People who understand their limitations and ignorance can be considered humble in the true sense of the word: not debasing yourself, just understanding how limited you are and how easy it is to make mistakes, which is inherent in being human.

The Greeks defined humility as Sophrosyne: "Know thyself," and "Nothing in excess." The more one “knows thyself” the less susceptible to propaganda he’ll be, and believing in Pure Good and Pure Evil always leads to excesses, because it invariably leads to dehumanizing “the Evil” as subhuman or nonhuman monsters.

On the other hand people who are ignorant and don’t know it, and instead think they know what they are talking about (and what they are doing) can be considered arrogant, or afflicted with what the Greeks called Hubris, and the Bible, Pride.

These days, the term for Hubris or Biblical Pride is “narcissistic grandiosity.” It’s only been noticed in the last century that people with this affliction split things into “all-good” and “all-bad,” into pure good and pure evil.

I have met some of these people and the havoc they wreak is astonishing. All have certain traits in common. The main one is, “It’s always someone else’s fault, never mine.” Another is that they never notice the trouble they cause.

When you get groups of people together they always, under stress (say, an attack such as 9-11), regress to narcissistic infants. They, or their tribe, or their nation, is all-good, and those they define as their opponents or enemies are all-bad. And there the problems start.

Since no one, or no tribe or nation, is all-good, or perfect, whatever flaws they have are projected onto their opponents. The word for this is “scapegoating,” which comes from a practice by the ancient Hebrews in which they projected their sins onto a goat and then drove it into the wilderness, believing their sins would disappear.

An example not so long ago is when the perpetually confused George Bush referred to the Evil Ones who attacked us “for our goodness.” Then the “Evil Ones” returned the favor by calling the United States “the Great Satan.”

In politics everything is either good or evil, with no shades of grey (just as in politics people are never murdered – they are collateral damage, obstacles to be removed). When the belief in either-good-or-evil is wedded to the force and fraud inherent in politics, along with the infantile narcissism and simplistic thinking inherent in the Mob, it is no wonder politics has slaughtered more people than everything else in the world put together.

As deluded as an individual can be, groups – tribes, Mass Man, the Mob, whatever name you call them – are truly the problem. As Jules Monnerot wrote, “There is no such thing as a collective critical facility.”

Jacques Ellul, Monnerot’s contemporary and author of “The Technological Society,” wrote, “Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can be easily set into motion.” This can only happen when people are not aware of what propagandists are trying to do to them.

The Masses are ruled by their feelings; they follow leaders not principles; and they are susceptible to the most simplistic propaganda in which they see their in-group as Good and the out-group (always insane homicidal maniacs) as Evil.

In the 20th Century, the two worst scapegoating philosophies were Nazism and Communism (and contrary to the accepted wisdom, Communism was ten times as bad as Nazism). The estimate of war deaths in the 20th Century range from 177 million to 200 million people, almost of them due to those two ideologies.

In Nazism, there were the all-good Aryans and the all-bad non-Aryans. So genocide was committed against the non-Aryans. In Communism, there were the all-good Communists and the all-bad non-Communists. And again -- genocide.

This “all-good” and “all-bad” split applies to religion, at least to the more primitive, dangerous, fundamentalist monotheistic religions, the kind which thinks there really is a Devil. Of course, since one is convinced they have God on their side, their opponents must have the Devil on theirs (in fact, be the Devil), so it’s okay to rub out all of them.

Religion at least has a decided tendency to oppose Hubris; wisely, they consider it the worst of all sins, since it is the basis of all others. There is no such tendency in politics (which celebrates war, i.e., mass murder), which is why politics has caused so much trouble throughout history.

On the libertarian side, the only narcissistic ideology is Objectivism, which is a political/religious cult. It splits people into Rand’s perfect all-good heroes and projects all problems onto her sub-human “looters” and “parasites.”

I consider it a law of human nature than when people split things into an all-good and all-bad, pure good and pure evil, it’s automatic that the unacknowledged flaws of those who define themselves as good will be projected onto those they define as evil, with, at the worst, an attempt at genocide against them.

Unfortunately, it’s been the history of the world. It’s what comes from people being half-asleep and not knowing it.

The Narcissism of Politics

“Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason,
and invective for documentation than in politics. This is a realm, peopled
only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray
is a forbidden color.” John Mason Brown, Through These Men (1956)

I sometimes entertain myself with a thought experiment in which people are evolved from dogs, with their sunny goofy manic natures. We couldn’t be any worse than the genocidal primates we are now.

Would intelligent dogs be as narcissistic as humans, splitting things into a non-existent pure good and pure evil? I don’t know. Would they believe in the force and fraud of politics? It’s impossible to tell, because there are no intelligent, self-aware dogs.

Would dogs have a “Garden of Eden” myth in which the first thing they felt when they became self-aware was shame because they were exposed? Would they have a “Cain and Abel” myth in which murder was bought into their world because of feelings of humiliation and the desire for revenge? Who knows? We can only imagine.

Still, I just can’t imagine dogs going to war. Cats are a different story, like the Kzin in Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” series. They might do it out of pure feline carnivore meanness.

Not only is politics based on force and fraud, it is also, as Brown pointed out, based on the belief in pure good and pure evil. It’s why
so many of the people who supported a buffoon like George Bush and thought he was a great President were horrified that Obama was elected to office (“He’ll destroy the United States!”) and why those who supported Obama were shocked to discover he was just a continuation of Bush, only a little worse.

When it comes to politics, the mass of people never learn, because the mass of people cannot think, only feel; they don’t follow principles, only leaders. And they are always convinced their guy is Good and his opponent is Evil.

After splitting everything into pure good and pure evil, the next step is to see yourself (meaning your political party) as the Good Guys, meaning you have to project all badness onto the other party. It’s why I encountered people who said Bush was a psychopath, or evil, or stupid – and why I encountered people who said the same thing about Obama.

In reality there’s about a dime’s worth of difference between Bush and Obama. Neither is evil, just incompetent (I am reminded of what Napoleon said: “Never attribute to evil that which can be explained by incompetence”).

I don’t think it’s particularly hard to manipulate mobs of people. Tell them they’re under attack by evil people, tell them they’re good (the way Bush said the United States was attacked for its goodness by the Evil Ones), and watch them regress into simple-minded narcissistic infants and then march off to war.

I see as incredibly dangerous any philosophy that defines the world as good versus evil – Nazism, Communism (which was ten times as bad as Nazism), or, among some libertarians, Objectivism.

It’d be a far better world if politics didn’t exist. But even the existence of politics isn’t the real problem. The real problem is the narcissism of human beings and their tendency to split everything into pure good and pure evil, with the result of projecting “evil” onto people and attempting to destroy them through force.

Koros to Hubris to Ate to Nemesis

“The fear of humiliation appears to be one of the most powerful motivators in individual and collective human behavior.” ~ Donald Klein

There is no light on human nature more pitiless and perceptive and accurate than mythology. Through hundreds if not thousands of years all the dross was burned away, leaving some very acute observations about human nature.

Unfortunately mythology is not taught in schools or the churches or by parents. Too bad, since there is wisdom in the stories, wisdom that doesn’t exist at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, places that produce “the Best and Brightest” now busy destroying the United States.

The ancient Greeks outlined this sequence: Koros to Hubris to Ate to Nemesis. They argued about what exactly each word meant. Scholars still argue today.

I’ve heard Koros described as a kind of greed -- and had those ancient Greeks been Christian, they would have called it one of the Seven Deadly Sins. I’ve also heard Koros described as what happens to people of unsound character when they gain great wealth and power (meaning, more than anything else, political power, which ultimately is the power to “legally” kill people).

Examples (which are another name for stories) work best. I consider George Bush, who started two unnecessary wars, to have an unsound character. An ex-alcoholic who was never treated for it (which makes him a dry drunk), who is apparently brain-damaged by that alcoholism, with rumors of past heavy cocaine use, who never had a legitimate private-sector job in his life, who was (is?) on psychiatric medication, who believes he is a Christian who is “saved”…and he became President.

To use just our last three Presidents (Obama, Bush and Clinton) as examples, they are portraits of what Friedrich Hayek meant when he wrote his famous article, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It’s also why the Founding Fathers were opposed to the leftist delusion of “democracy” – again, the worst get on top.

A man or woman, a weakling of unstable character, who gains great wealth and political power, then next suffers from Hubris -- another name for the towering, grandiose Pride that afflicted Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Hubris is arrogance, moral blindness, wanton violence, which creates in the afflicted the ability to cruelly and brutally humiliate people without any qualms – the way Herod and Caligula did. They always rationalize as a necessary thing how even the innocent suffer terribly, which is why there exists the ironic observation (which both Jesus and Aesop noticed) that all tyrants call themselves benefactors.

The Greeks, with their usual intelligence and perspicacity, banned representations of brutal public humiliation from their theater as obscene – and the original definition of obscene meant something that should not be shown in public.

Not so surprisingly, the root words of “obscene” and “humiliation” both mean “dirt” – to treat someone as dirt. Humiliation also means “to mortify,” which means to “make dead,” not necessarily physically dead, but worse, dead in psyche, as in the walking dead – zombie or vampire, which is how those whose souls have been murdered by vicious humiliations describe themselves.

I am reminded of the sociologist C. Wright Mills when he wrote about what he called “crackpot realists” -- fools who are convinced they know what they are doing but don’t, and instead destroy in their attempts to save. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (and currently Van Jones) are fine specimens of that.

Seeing wrong as right is Ate -- madness. When a politician starts unnecessary wars in which they become even richer (again, the greed of Koros), in which tens of thousands of innocent people are killed and many more impoverished, and the instigators claim they had the “time of their lives” (as both Bush and Clinton said), that is Ate.

Bush was far more arrogant than Clinton or Obama (he was, after all, referred to as Smirk). The more arrogance one shows, the more it is covering up feelings of humiliation. As the psychiatrist James Gilligan so perceptively wrote, “The most dangerous men in the world are the ones who are afraid they are wimps.”

It has been noticed for many years by many people that bullies cover up their cowardice with braggadocio – arrogance on top hiding their feelings of humiliation. When such people gain political power millions can die because of their attempts to replace shame with pride (Hitler had one testicle, Stalin had badly pocked skin, fused toes on one foot and a withered arm, and LBJ escalated in Vietnam because he was afraid his critics would consider him “chicken” if he didn’t).

Now we come to Nemesis. Nemesis is the goddess of fate and retribution. You can use many other names: revenge, vengeance and retaliation, payback…perhaps even justice. (As an aside, the Greeks called justice Dike, and it exists because of the criminal acts created by Hubris.)

I find it significant that Nemesis means “fate.” That means cause-and-effect, although I believe it is more accurate to define it as a cybernetic system, specifically a positive feedback system: humiliation leads to revenge, then those who are the objects of revenge seek revenge in turn, and so in, an escalating spiral of death and destruction.

Humiliation doesn’t always have to lead to revenge, if the object of humiliation can maintain his or her innocence, as in such stories as “Cinderella” and the first Harry Potter novel (in both cases they are stories that illustrate the saying, “Living well is the best revenge”).

But when it comes to groups of people – ethnic groups, religions, nations – immunity to feelings of humiliation can never be maintained and revenge will always happen. Mobs cannot think, only feel; they never follow principles, only leaders, and they always fall for propaganda that portrays them as innocent victims and their attackers as evil, subhuman monsters bent on death and destruction.

Osama bin Laden said the Islamic countries in the Middle East had been humiliated by the U.S. for 80 years, and that the revenge of 9-11 was “a copy” of what the U.S. had done. Then the U.S. sought revenge for the humiliation of 9-11, and now those the American government is killing in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting their revenge by killing our soldiers in return. Those who are blinded by political fanaticism cannot see this (because they perceive all political problems as Good versus Evil), and as long as they are deluded, they never will be able to see the truth of things.

In a nutshell, when you brutally humiliate people and make them suffer cruelly, and don’t even know you’re doing it, and instead of relieving their suffering you see it as something good and necessary, you’re going to be pretty damned surprised when the people you are oppressing and exploiting and killing rise up and kill you back. You’ll be outraged and consider it ingratitude; they’ll consider it justice.

When unsound people (meaning about 98% of all politicians) get political power, they always seek to expand it. This is why the State throughout history has always expanded its power, always at the expense of people and society.

There have been quite a few people throughout history (Marcus Aurelius for one) who have been able to handle political power. Unfortunately, Clinton, Bush and now Obama don’t belong to that admirable group. Those who consciously seek political power are avaricious, self-deluded weaklings and can never handle it properly. As Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I prefer the sayings, “Power intoxicates and immunity corrupts,” and “Power is the horse that evil rides.”
As Dostoevsky put it in The House of the Dead, "Tyranny...finally develops into a disease. The habit can...coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate...the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible."

The opposite of Hubris is humility, or what the Greeks called Sophrosyne. It can be described as “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself,” meaning having a clear understanding of your character, your strengths and limitations. It means treating people with respect, not brutalizing and humiliating them, and when it comes to relations with other countries, to, as our Founding Fathers advised, trade with them but otherwise leave them alone.

Unfortunately, if you flunk history (which so far has always happened), you have to go through the whole mess again. The U.S., which has the whole of history before it, is ignoring all its successful lessons and is instead repeating all its failures.

Ayn Rand, Proto-Fascist

What a philosophy claims and what it delivers are often two different things. Marxism was supposed to create a heaven on earth but instead created a hell. I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, would also create a hell on earth.

Rand divided people into two groups: her perfect John Galtian heroes, and everyone else – whom she described as “sub-humans” living in “a hell.” She projected all “evil” onto her “looters” and “parasites” and reserved all goodness for her heroes. Such a division does not exist in real life.

In fact, this division into human/sub-human is one of the foundations of all wars. This all-good/all-bad split is also the basis of all propaganda, which is why Atlas Shrugged is in many ways a vast propaganda tract. (A good current example of propaganda was when the terminally addled George Bush claimed “the Evil Ones” attacked the United States “for our goodness.”)

Rand apparently truly believed when the world collapsed after her two dozen or so heroes withdrew into Galt’s Gulch, they would emerge to rule over the ruins. Would they rule benevolently and establish a permanent free market?

The answer: no.

The only true, eternal social division that exists is between the “elites” (I use that term neutrally) and the “masses.” I believe it is far more fundamental that “left” and “right.”

I’ve heard this split defined as “ranchers” and “cattle.” For thousands of years, way back to Jesus and Aesop, it’s been called “wolves” and “sheep.” Vilfredo Pareto referred to the elites as “wolves” and “foxes.”

The purpose of the elites is to maintain their economic and political power – to maintain what James Burnham in his book The Machiavellians called their “power and privilege.” This means using the power of the State to exploit the masses, which are mostly inert until pushed too far by the elites’ lust for blood, power and money. Then many times there is violent payback.

All politics is based on force and fraud. As such, the elites will always use those two weapons against the people to maintain their position – force is violence and fraud is lies and propaganda. All States are founded on, and run on, lies and violence.

Could Rand’s “perfect” elites be trusted to rule? No. They would use their political power to exploit everyone else to enrich themselves. Her perfect heroes are purely fictional – they don’t exist in real life.

This exploitation of the masses by the elites using the power of the States has been the history of the world. Even if Rand’s heroes established the free market their descendents would overturn it.

I am reminded of Lord Acton’s saying: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I prefer the saying, “Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts.”

As Dostoevsky put it in The House of the Dead, "Tyranny...finally develops into a disease. The habit can...coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate...the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible."

Political science (perhaps political economy is a better term) should start with how things are, not how scholars and writers want things to be. By starting with how things are, political economy becomes a science, and being a science, cures or prescriptions can be formulated.

In physics and chemistry scientists start with how things are. Yet, in economics and political science, thinkers/tinkerers often start with how they want things to be, or how things will be if their prescriptions are followed. It’s why there exists that old saying, if you took every economist and the world and laid them end to end, they’d all point in different directions.

Rand did not start with how things are. She started with how she wanted things to be. Like all leftists (and she was in many ways a leftist, in addition to being a narcissist) she did not understand human nature, which is why she thought a vanishingly small minority could rule over humanity, permanently establish political and economic liberty, and not become corrupted by unlimited power.

This is why there is a very strong probability Objectivism would turn into a fascist State.

The State as Morality Play

I look at life in the aggregate, that is, when you include the whole human race, as a tragicomedy. I don’t look at it as morality play, which I define as seeing life as a contest between Good and Evil. In fact, life is a tragicomedy because so many people see it as a morality play!

Here is an example. The State has defined drugs as “evil.” So now we have the “War on Drugs,” (a morality play) with all the attendant tragicomedy (trying to control supply and demand through violence). This “war” is an attempt to get rid of Evil and replace it with Good. It’s an impossibility.

Another example: the United States on 9-11 was attacked for its Goodness by the Evil Ones, as the permanently addled George Bush apparently truly believes. The two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are morality plays, with the ensuing death and destruction.

The most pernicious aspect of the State, besides having a monopoly on “legal” violence, is that is tries to define everything as a contest between Good and Evil. That is in fact the essence of politics, and, for that matter, propaganda.

Unfortunately in politics, unlike as is in life, there are no shades of grey. Everything in politics is black or white, good or evil. Isn’t that what all war is about – morality plays about good versus evil?

Whenever people say, “He/she/they did that because they are evil,” I automatically know they support some kind of war – as long, of course, as they don’t have to fight in it.

Whenever people think there are political solutions to things (which don’t exist), they are instantly falling into the trap of supporting war – death and destruction. And it’s because they believe in Good and Evil – with them of course being Good, and the people who disagree with them being Evil.

The essence of this morality play is that when people define themselves as Good (which means self-righteousness) they don’t see any problem with abusing, humiliating, imprisoning and murdering those they define as Evil. It is, after all, to get rid of Evil and replace it with Good.

Spinoza once said they most people define evil as what they don’t like. He was right. And because of that, people who unwittingly see life as a morality play have turned it into a tragicomedy.

The Arrogance of Empire

After thinking about this for several years, I have concluded brutally humiliating people is the worst problem in the world. It is, however, the reverse side of the coin. On the other side is hubris—arrogance, moral blindness, wanton violence.

Hubris always leads to humiliating people. And I do mean always. Then it's followed by revenge. This observation is not new with me; it's why the ancient Greeks said the Hubris is fated to be followed by Nemesis—vengeance. It's also the story of Cain and Abel, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, Stephen King's Carrie, John D. McDonald's The Green Ripper, and Alfred Bester's The Stars my Destination. It's one of the oldest stories in the world: revenge on your oppressors.

The United States, which is now an empire, is following the path of every empire in history: attempting to impose its world-view on other countries, under the guise of "civilizing" them. As both Aesop and Jesus noticed, all tyrants call themselves benefactors.

Attempting to impose your views on people, by force, is brutally humiliating them, even though it's done unwittingly and for "good" purposes. It's ignoring the wisdom of that old saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Shame rather than guilt appears to arise when a person finds himself condemned to an identity he wishes to repudiate but cannot," wrote the psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

Traditionally, hubris, or excessive pride, has been considered the worst problem in the world—and it is, because hubris comes first, humiliating people comes second. But I cannot separate one from the other. As I said, they are the obverse and reverse sides of the same coin.

When people in other countries are condemned to a humiliated identity they wish to repudiate—say, as uncivilized backward wogs who have to be slaughtered and dragged by their corpses into the 21st Century— they are going to regain their pride and dignity by killing us. That is, they are going to humiliate us the way we humiliated them—by violence, destruction and murder.

Humiliation is bad enough when one person does it to another. Add political power and advanced technology, and you end up with the saying, "Power is the horse than evil rides."

I do not understand why this tragic flaw exists in human nature, as exemplified by the saying, "I'm going to beat some sense into you." How can the U.S. "beat" sense into other countries by slaughtering innocent people? It's the same with the misnamed "War on Drugs": we can "beat" sense into people by imprisoning them for years? Or "beat" sense into children by abusing them? Just astonishing.

I do know this flaw has something to do with power: "Power is the horse that evil rides." Lord Acton wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I think a better saying is, "Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts."

Since power corrupts and intoxicates, the bigger and more powerful the State gets, the worse it is for everyone. Hubris plus the State, and you're looking at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trampling over everybody.

Patriots, Sheeple, Traitors

Roughly but still accurately speaking, I divide people into three groups: patriots, sheeple, traitors.

When a country has been around long enough, the traitors take over the government. That has what has happened to America. They comprise politicians, corporations, banks, and churches that support the government and its policies. They use the power of the State for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else.

The sheeple are the mass of people who don’t particularly know what’s going on. Sometimes they think they do, but don’t, not really. They often tend to think the people in the government know what they’re doing.

The patriots are always the opposition party: they oppose those in power and their exploitative policies.

What I’ve outlined is a variation of elite theory: the only politics worth examining is the relationships between the Elites (the term is neutral) and the Masses. The people who study these relationships are usually known as Machiavellians, since Machiavelli founded the discipline with the publication of “The Prince.”

However, what he noticed is not original with him. You can find his observations in Aesop and most especially in the Bible, specifically the Gospels.

In those days there were the Traitors: the Romans and the rich, politically-connected Jewish elites who were their go-betweens in Palestine; the Sheeple, who were the mass of men; and then the Patriots (who are always the opposition party) who was exemplified by Jesus.

There is a lot you can learn about human nature from the Bible.

While proper government is a good and necessary thing, the State, if anything exemplifies the Seven Deadly Sins: excessive pride, greed, murder, theft, etc. Anyone who supports those things, though the power of the State, belongs to the Traitors, be they politicians, corporate executives, or religious leaders.

Those who are opposed to the policies of the State, when they are used to support murder, theft, greed, lying, etc., are the Patriots.