Posted on 05/07/2010 2:13:19 PM PDT by Noumenon
There will always be those who are easily seduced by the offer of wealth and unlimited power. But one of the lessons we can glean from an unflinching look at history and human nature is that power-lust inevitably trumps greed. The power to harm others – and to harm others without consequence - is irresistible to a profoundly evil subset of humanity. Real trouble begins when such people acquire power.
So here’s a bold assertion that many of you will dismiss out of hand: there are those in government - and those who seek control of your government - who simply want you dead. They would kill you if they could get away with it. Why? Because you are in their way. Failing that, they would settle for taking everything you have if they felt that they could do so without being held accountable. They would use the apparatus of the state to censor your speech, punish you for your politically incorrect thoughts, confiscate the fruits of your labor, seize your property, render you helpless and defenseless and in the end, dictate the very terms of your existence if they could do so with impunity. These are killers without conscience. We can come up with a long list of those whose outlook regard humankind as little more than chattel, but there are four individuals whose ideas connect the totalitarian dots in some interesting ways. They have a history and the ideas that animate them have a pedigree.
Karl Marx, father of modern communism, writing in the mid 1800s, described a world in which the central dynamic was purely economic. For Marx – and all those who followed him - human beings are things - merely the bricks and mortar from which a new utopia would be built. For Communists, human lives were – and still are – disposable. The values we live by - individual conscience and the rule of law - are obstacles to be overcome on the way to utopia and the New Socialist Man.
Sigmund Freud was the father of modern psychiatry, a cocaine addict and a suicide. To Freud we were little more than primitives ruled by our sexual impulses. Our civilized personae, Freud believed, is little more than a thin veneer, easily discarded. Freud’s ideas regarding human nature sowed the seeds of the family-destroying sexual revolution of the Sixties.
B.F. Skinner, an American psychologist, author, inventor and an advocate for "social reform" was born at the turn of the 20th century. Skinner's theory of behavior essentially reduced human beings to mere stimulus-response mechanisms. Skinner was also an advocate of scientific social planning and the use of operant conditioning in the raising of children. In his work, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner suggested that a "technology of behavior" could help to make what he characterized as a better society. To achieve that end, we would have to accept that independent moral choice is not the driving force of our actions. Ultimately, and in Skinner's view, we would be made to accept that idea - or any other idea the State deemed appropriate. Note that Skinner's ideas had and continue to have a profound effect on American education.
Freud, Marx and Skinner were atheists and all assumed that religion, the impulse that moved men and nations, the source of our notions of right and wrong - was a fantasy and always had been. And the common thread that runs through these men's ideas is the dehumanizing of humanity - the reduction of our hearts, minds and souls and all of our aspirations to something that can be either eradicated or molded to suit the states ambitions.
But it took another philosopher to highlight and to put into play one of the most destructive ideas to emerge in modern times.
Friedrich Nietzsche was also an atheist. But he saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty. He wrote in 1886: "The greatest event in recent times - that 'God is Dead,' that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe." The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who Nietzsche said would be ‘beyond good and evil’. Nietzsche knew that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum.
Who or what would fill that vacuum?
Nietzsche thought that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which he felt offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. The very concept of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak and inferior minds.
But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
Let's say that again: the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
And how did that 'will to power' express itself in our times? Jean-Francois Revel, writing over a century after Nietzsche, said of the Europeans in particular,
"It was they, after all, who made the twentieth century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of two World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race - the pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less than thirty years."
If we have learned anything at all from the sad and sorry history of the previous century, it is this: whenever and wherever a government assumes the power to violate your fundamental rights to life and liberty, those who wish to strip you of your rights and claim your life as the property of the state will sooner or later gain control of the apparatus of the state. And they will use it, as I have noted above, without restraint or moral considerations of any kind. Regardless of the scope of that authority, they will exercise it to its fullest extent. If that authority encompasses the power to kill hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people, sooner or later, these killers without conscience will make the fullest and most horrible use of it. The history of the 20th century bears stark and irrefutable witness to this fact. The record is crystal clear in this regard: 'state actors' will use and abuse whatever power and authority they have, to whatever extent they can, and they will actively seek the means and the opportunity to do so.
Those who are driven by the will to power typically disguise their intentions under the guise of 'achieving the greatest good for the greatest number' or social / economic justice. They may claim that they are 'doing the business of the people' or that they are acting according to 'the will of the people'. 'It's for the children,' you know. When it has come to creating the 'New Socialist Man,' those who advance such arguments remain untroubled by the oceans of blood they would have to spill and the mountains of corpses they would have to pile up in order to realize their dreams. They are all animated by the unrestrained and unappeasable ‘will to power’.
To the extent that we endow the state with power, we invariably create the opportunity for those who wish to acquire and abuse power to do evil. You may recall that a politician once said that, "... a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." The greatest tragedies in recent history have come about in this manner. In the last century alone, more than 260 million people - say it again: more than 260 million people - unarmed, non-combatant civilians - were murdered by those exercising the power of the state. They were starved, gassed, tortured, shot, impaled, burned alive, frozen to death, hacked apart with hoes, axes and machetes - a litany of brutality and atrocity beyond human imagination. Hundreds of millions more lived their lives enslaved, impoverished and in despair. No few of the survivors may have come to envy the dead.
Virtually without exception, these cruel and murderous regimes have been - and continue to be - collectivist totalitarian autocracies of one sort or another. The crimes and the horrors of collectivism in all its forms - socialism, communism, national socialism, fascism - have been demonstrated beyond dispute by their murderous trajectory through history and the ruin, slaughter, and untold human misery left in their wake. This is the undeniable and irrefutable truth of our times.
If you try to wrap your mind around the nature and the extent of the murderous results of these totalitarian regimes, you'll soon discover that concepts like genocide and mass murder pale before the reality of historical fact. Professor R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii coined the term democide in order to give us a framework to understand nature and the scope of the worst slaughters of the 20th century. Rummel offers these definitions:
Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).
Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes.
Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government.
Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.
As Professor Rummel has shown in Death by Government, democide has been committed in the name of many causes, beliefs and ideologies. Historically, the slaughter of entire populations has been a matter of national, racial, cultural, religious and political policy. But democide is seldom aimed at an individual. It is always the group that is the target. Democide is possible only where individuals have been defined in terms of a group identity. Where this is not the case, mass violence is virtually unknown.
No one wages war on humanity in the name of individualism - R. J. Rummel
We now live in a nation where policies and politics of the 'progressive', Gramscian Left have been formulated expressly to promulgate class and gender warfare, ignorance, passivity, racial division, poverty, envy, and hatred of the good for being good. It is the prerequisite for the acquisition and exercise of unlimited authority and power. It is, in fact, precisely the outcome desired by Gramscian Marxists who now comprise our cultural elite. They are the heirs of those who had had previously helped unravel the moral and philosophical fabric of traditional Christian Europe, creating the frightful void that communism, socialism, national socialism and fascism would fill. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, writing of the influence of the Left on American foreign policy, referred to the influx of 1914 -1918 émigrés whose ranks were swollen during World War II -
"And, as pointed out earlier, the majority of those belonged to the leftist camp and were soon intimately tied to the American Left. More often than not, these men had previously helped undermine the fabric of traditional Christian Europe, creating the frightful void that communism, socialism, and later National Socialism would fill. Deserted altars are inhabited by demons.”
History is very clear as to precisely what these civilizational underminers have in store for the rest of us. What demons inhabit our empty altars? What should worry us most is that the majority of our fellow citizens openly applaud this same course – whether they know it or not. The rest of us sanction it by our silence and inaction – and that is the silence of the damned.
Yet, for anyone who cares and dares to look closely, the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible: the evils and horrors that arise from the abuse of power far outweigh whatever good that power might achieve. Accordingly, any attempt at achieving positive cultural and societal change without risk to the right of the individual to his life, liberty and private property cannot proceed until the authoritarian power of the state has been de-fanged, muzzled, shackled and cast back into a constitutional prison.
Power seldom goes unabused. There are, have been, and will always be those willing to commit such monstrous crimes. If they refrain from doing so it is only because they lack the opportunity and are suitably constrained by the rule of law backed by men who will enforce it. When the opportunity arises, or when the power-lusters can create the opportunity, they never fail to step up and seize the moment. As Rummel has said, "Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely." In this nation and at the beginning of the 21st century, the face of evil is defined best by those who seek that adulterine power to control and destroy and by those who assist, applaud and enable them.
Perhaps you've seen the well-meaning, ignorant appeasers and applauders - individuals who operate upon the basis of whim and emotion and who don't care to consider the consequences of their actions and beliefs. You've seen their faces in the German newsreels of the '30s and '40s. You've seen them at the Democratic and Republican conventions of the last few decades. They've all signed up for the 'program', and in a particularly tenacious species of denial, they've mapped their own personal versions of intellectual bankruptcy and moral and ethical squalor onto the rhetoric and practice of tyranny. But don't pity them at all. We all know the fate of their German counterparts after the fall of the old Weimar Republic: how many were devoured by the same beast they whelped into the world with their ignorant approval and applause?
Be wary of the haters of mankind who've mapped their own insecurity, self-loathing and sense of inferiority onto the rest of the human race. They are merely another species of willing participant in the bonfires of human sacrifice. Their view of the world and those who inhabit it are colored in terms of spite and envy. These are the ones who've looked into the mirror that others' success and achievements present. Rather than take the challenge to raise their own state of being, they choose instead to shatter the mirror in a fit of pique and resentment simply because they don't like what they see in the reflection of their own souls. Rather than achieve, they seek to destroy. The urge to destroy what they cannot understand or rule becomes their raison d'etre and their governing passion. This type has always found ready employment in the service of their new masters - for a time. But the sacrificial bonfires burn for them as well.
Consider the cynical and knowing apologists for tyranny and atrocity, sitting behind easy grins, excusing the worst sort of depravity and corruption with a wink and a smirk, secure in their faith that they are the new nomenklatura and are thus exempt from the 'solutions' to messy problems represented by those of us who would resist the idea that our lives are not someone else's property.
Finally, we come to the power-lusters themselves - the so-called 'progressive' elites. These individuals are often driven by a profound self-hatred which they direct outwards and project onto humanity in general. Their own self-loathing drives their passion to rule and to subjugate and to destroy, thus opening the door to the commission and justification of the most unimaginable of atrocities and crimes against God, man, nature, justice and reason. Another species of power-luster seeks to impose their own overweening sense of moral rectitude upon a resisting and supposedly ignorant public. C. S. Lewis, writing in God in the Dock eloquently warned us about this last type:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the 'good' of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Eric Hoffer, noted American philosopher, grants us another perspective:
"It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression."
This is how a long, dark age begins. An age of horror and human sacrifice. Never underestimate the sheer impatience and hubris of the radical utopian 'reformers' who seek nothing less than dominion over every sphere of human thought and endeavor. Remember, these monsters want to reshape Man in their image and according to their ideals no matter what the cost. There's no room in their scheme of things for those who would disagree. Those of us with even a modest knowledge of history and understanding of human nature know where that mindset took humanity in the last century. It's where we're headed now, and we are headed for Hell on earth.
The time is coming when we must either begin the "long march" back through the institutions to reclaim them and to restore the principles of freedom and human dignity to their rightful place, or we must separate from the killers without conscience and those who condone them. My own world-view is contradictory to, and irreconcilable with, that of the criminal totalitarians - the heirs and disciples of Machiavelli, Marx, Gramsci and Alinsky - who promote the politics of envy and victimization, and whose goal is the destruction of our culture and institutions.
We cannot co-exist in the same society with such monsters.
"The great misfortune of the twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought."
Jean Francois-Revel, The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information - 1991, Random House
There seems to be a sort of 'virtual secession' is underway even as we speak. It usually begins when, one by one, we arrive at the same ideas that I have summarized so far. It's the understanding and acceptance of the fact that we can't 'just all get along' as a certain Mr. R King once suggested. We're well past that. We're well past the point of reasoned debate, appeasement or compromise. Those who feel they have the right to dictate the terms of existence to everyone else are on a deadly collision course with those of us who understand that no such 'right' exists. The history of the 20th century stands in mute witness to the brutal tragedy of appeasement and the folly of compromise with totalitarian monsters. We are in fact at war, realize it or not, like it or not. At the most fundamental level, that war is being waged not so much for control of our economic lives - although that is certainly part of it - but for the hearts and minds of our children. The battlefields are: popular culture, our public schools, our institutions of higher learning, our churches and even our homes. The casualties are your kids' intellectual and spiritual sovereignty - their inner life and their freedom.
A bold conjecture: that we will descend into a Balkanized nightmare of chaos and destruction as the entitled classes, egged on by the elites, try to cash those very bad checks that liberal socialists and their 'change agent' stooges have written for years and handed out in our schools, churches, culture and inner cities. Those checks - the wages of the sins of class hatred, gender warfare, phony self-esteem and racial division are going to bounce sky high when the goodies they've promised aren't forthcoming. It's the price many of us will pay for both cheering and applauding the transformation of this society into a mob of cannibals and looters, or for simply standing silently by in de facto approval while it happened under our very noses. Some of the fence-sitters, applauders and appeasers may actually understand this and regret their choices in their last few moments as they helplessly watch the mindless mobs their very bad ideas have enabled rape and slaughter their families by the light of their burning homes.
Open warfare in this country is inevitable because there is no reconciliation possible with those who claim that your life simply does not belong to you. You cannot make peace with those who demand not only your economic submission, but your intellectual and spiritual surrender as well. The price of surrender has been and always will be more than anyone of reason and good will can ever care to pay. As Sidney Hook once wrote:
"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they would not betray to stay alive..."
I fully expect that our virtual secession will break out into the open in approximately the same time frame that those bouncing checks drawn on the banks of envy and phony self-esteem reach critical mass - any time from right now to another 8-10 years. There will be no turning back once this starts, and the cost in lives and property will be truly staggering. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover from such a scenario. But then, and only then can we successfully engage in our own 'long march' back towards a society where human dignity and freedom aren't mere bagatelles to bartered away for a mess of liberal socialist pottage, but are fundamental values worth living, striving, fighting - and dying for.
There are many of us, and I include myself among them, who constitute an entirely different class of humanity than these killers without conscience and their enablers. We are neither interested in power nor its abuse. We are satisfied to live our lives in peace with ourselves and with others, and we derive great satisfaction in seeing others enjoy life as we do. We believe that our lives and our minds are sovereign, and that the fruits of our labors are not forfeit to the first thug who demands them at the point of a gun. We are never the initiators of violence. We judge others solely by their competence and by their character.
The final first-principles question is this: To whom does the world belong? Does it belong to those of us who wish to live free of coercion or to the killers without conscience? Does it belong to those who uphold man's life as the standard of their values, or those who uphold the standard of death?
Can those of us who are passionately committed to the ideals of life, liberty, and the sovereign state of the individual hope to persist in the face of such an inevitable tragedy? Our one hope is that this pack of snarling communist dogs will turn upon themselves and consume one another before they have time to get to the rest of us. Those of us with the wisdom to prepare and the courage to step forward and rebuild our uniquely American civilization after the fall of this republic are our best and only hope for a decent and humane civilization.
I conclude with a quote from G. Warren Nutter, the late, great University of Virginia economist and proponent of liberty:
"The greatness of a society does not come from its monuments but from the kind of people it produces. Justice, responsibility, and humanity - these are the qualities of greatness in a people. Only the humane can remain free, and only the free can remain humane..."
Some formatting didn't translate from MS Word exactly as I would have liked, but there you are.
5.56mm
That's pretty much it, the rest of the discussion revolves around how they try to get it done.
Bump for later.
Up until 1870 Harvard Law School taught that God was the origin of all morals and laws. That is when case law began to be taught when Christopher Columbus Langdell was appointed Dane Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. The reason this was done was because the previous method of teaching students were taught about the law and Constitution as solid and unchangeable because the law was based on absolutes given to us by God.
Langdell and the man who appointed him, Charles William Elliot, were both believers in Darwin’s Origin of Species and sought to remove God from the law and from the public. The farther men go from God, the more atrocities they are capable of committing.
Our Founding Fathers understood this and attempted to make a limited central government tied down as much as possible to keep it away from power. It's been a good run of a little over 200 years, but it's ending now. Those who seek power have finally found a way to take unimpeded control of our government.
Why? We have a heck of a military and a LOT of money. That translates into so much power that those who crave it have salivated for years over it. And the not ha-ha funny thing is how they did it. They took what the Founders thought would keep us free and subjugated it to their will: the press.
Awesome!
Excellent essay.
However, I think you underestimate the extent to which many of those who desire power deceive themselves, this being more true of the followers than the top leaders.
Many if not most sincerely believe they are working for the greater good of humanity. This, however, makes them more dangerous, not less.
As CS Lewis pointed out, there is an inherent limit on greed. There is none on those who want to do us good.
Muslims?
A Noumenon BTT. I’d cut Nietzsche a little slack, myself. When he was sane, he saw Europe rejecting God and called it like he saw it. After that, not so good - he went from fantasizing Superman to screaming in a mental institution.
Thanks for posting this ... printing it out for my bedtime reading.
BTTT BFLR ASAP ETC
“They took what the Founders thought would keep us free and subjugated it to their will: the press.”
Yes, and the MSM is dying. We can overcome this. Many of our children, especially the best and brightest, reject the hegemony of the MSM.
You wrote this? Wow. You are, sir, a true scholar. May God bless you in your journey.
Thank you. This explains philosophically why this country will hit the train wreck and the inevitable CW2. The old school liberal is gone, replaced by the New Left who is not interested in “getting along” or working on any common ground, but instead getting in our faces, “by any means necessary”.
This is why even though I live in Minnesota and have a business in Minnesota, I do not consider myself to be a Minnesotan (even though there are many fine conservatives up here).
btt
Have you submitted this to Human Events? I think you should submit it to some publisher, and Jason Mattera has taken over Human Events.
Excellent essay by a fellow FReeper.
I agree. The people who choose to harm by doing good have convinced themselves they are the rightous saviors of mankind when they are anything but.
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