When Brave New Worlds Collide

Progressives, Greens and other socialists may quarrel amongst themselves from time to time, but they are united in their reverence for a book by David Korten entitled, “When Corporations Rule the World”. A revised edition has recently reached the shelves.

This book must be on Stan Lee’s nightstand. Its title is reminiscent of a science fiction novel; an unholy cross between “When Worlds Collide” and “Brave New World”. It depicts Libertarians and other free market advocates as quislings or ‘useful idiots’ in a capitalistic conspiracy to rule the world. It portrays them as zombies under the spell of evil capitalists. “Market liberals give corporate libertarianism its cast of moral legitimacy”, says Korten.

We can agree that Market Liberals have no interest in morality or philosophy. Market Liberals, as Korten says, are oligarchs concerned with protecting the rights of the rich, not with defending Capitalism. They ride the coat tails of the laissez-faire movement knowing that the ignorance that defines Capitalism as ‘manufacturing’ or ‘commerce’ affords them undeserved virtue; and they seek freedom from responsibility for the social and environmental consequences of their actions by extolling the virtues of trade and commerce at all costs.

The book reports the obvious when it warns that Market Liberals seek to establish an immoral, untouchable and unaccountable ‘Oligarchy of the Rich’ and should be burned as witches. He is only vaguely aware that Market Liberals advocate a return to the Trusts of the privileged industrialists that were created by the government in the 19th century. He senses this is bad, but has no clue as to why. But even in ignorance, he does us a service and we can agree that these elites should be boiled in oil.

The book should stop there, but it doesn’t. Korten perseveres by dumping Capitalists and Libertarians into the same cauldron; claiming that Market Liberals, the bastard children of government and business, are sired by Capitalism and defended by Libertarians. Korten’s subsequent arguments fail because of this inability to distinguish between Capitalism and the rationalizations of so called ‘Market Liberals’.

“When Corporations Rule the World” uses Capitalist, Market Liberal and Libertarian interchangeably perpetrating a false analogy. (In any analogy, if two items (concepts, events, etc) are shown to be similar. Then it is argued that, if one has a certain quality, the other(s) possess that quality as well.) His fans seem oblivious to this deception.

Capitalism is the only system yet devised where wealth is not acquired by looting, but by production; and not by force, but by trade. It is the only system that stands for man’s unquestionable right to the ideas his mind produces, and to the fruits derived from those ideas and from his labor. Commerce is only a manifestation of Capitalism. Without protection for the rights of the individual, you can have manufacturing and commerce, but not Capitalism. Capitalism is not mercantilism.

According to Korten, Capitalists believe “People are by nature motivated primarily by greed”, not achievement. “A number of valid ideas and insights have become twisted into an extremist ideology that raises the baser aspects of human nature to a self-justifying ideal.”

His solution? “We can rightfully look to the market as a democratic arbiter of rights and preferences only to the extent that money and property are equitably distributed.” There you have it, the same tired socialist argument: one man succeeds only at the detriment of another. Who defines equity and who does the distributing? Don’t expect an answer. Korten is a latter day George Eliot longing for the noble savage and the pastoral countryside of pre-industrial Europe, with a comic book understanding of evil scientists and greedy industrialists.

The classic definition of Greed is someone preoccupied with the accumulation of material possessions, primarily money or wealth. Today’s dictionary defines greed as: An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves. In Korten’s world, who gets to decide what is more than one needs or deserves?

In answer, the author has conjured up a utopian, anarchistic world of sheep with no shepherds; a communal, egalitarian existence with no one in charge and everyone sharing in whatever manages to get produced. He is the key player in the Fellowship of Intentional Communities and Yes Magazine dedicated to promoting the ideas of Eastern and Middle Eastern mystics such as Joanna Macy, Jamal Rahman, and Michael Nagler.

Their literature tells us that, “Communities make a wide variety of choices regarding standard of living--some embrace voluntary simplicity, while others emphasize full access to the products and services of today's society.” The assumption is made that once Capitalists are turned into mulch these products and services will still exist.

“Communities tend to make careful choices about the accumulation and use of resources, deciding what best fits with their core values. Regardless of the choices made, nearly all communities take advantage of sharing and the opportunities of common ownership to allow individuals access to facilities and equipment they don't need to own privately (for example power tools, washing machines, pickup trucks, and in some cases, even swimming pools).” A fact lost on these anti-capitalists is that all of the things they ‘don’t need to own privately’ could not be created without the industrial system they decry. If they truly get their wish they will be living in caves or mud huts, not sharing pick-up trucks and swimming pools.

It gets better. “Evidence is mounting that to make our societies sustainable we will have to restructure our systems of production and consumption to largely eliminate: Dependence on personal automobiles; long distance movement of goods and people; the use of chemicals in agriculture; and the generation of garbage that we cannot immediately recycle. . .Who wants to give over their living spaces to automobiles, take long business trips, eat contaminated foods, or live in a garbage dump?”

Is there a stronger word than hyperbole? Aside from the business trips, do you know anyone faced with these choices? The truth is finally told, when we hear “We can rightfully look to the market as a democratic arbiter of rights and preferences only to the extent that money and property are equitably distributed.” Korten is no lover of liberty what he is proposing is egalitarian and socialist.

The concept of ‘Group’ rights is ridiculous, unless you believe that rights derive from numbers rather than people. Such a theory would conclude that a mob of 251 individuals had more rights than a group of 250. The group with the largest membership would then be in charge of everyone else unless or until a larger group formed.

Groups do not have rights. One can not collect the rights of others. Only individuals have rights, which can not be delegated. One can delegate a vote, but not a right. When rights are a function of group affiliation rather than of personhood, only those with status, celebrity or membership in the mob will have rights. Further, there is no such thing as a right to education, a right to a living wage, or a right to decent housing, only the right to the unfettered means to provide them for yourself. A man is only entitled to that which he produces for himself by his labor or his mind; anything else is theft.

Capitalism is a moral and ethical philosophy of free markets and free trade founded upon a reverence for private property rights from which all other rights derive. If one has no right to his income or even a part of his income, he is a slave or a sharecropper without the right to personal property.

To imagine such rights exist, would require imagining the slaves to provide them. Man’s life and his happiness belong to him. If he chooses to share what is his that is his right, but no one has an automatic claim. One is not required to share with those who won’t work or create, nor is it a virtue unless you consider plantations, a society of charitable slaves providing for needy masters, a virtue.

Unwed mothers crank out whelps by the dozens; we applaud their courage and issue a check. The indolent lay claim to psychological disability, we feel their pain and issue a check. The richest class of Americans per capita, the elderly, want us to cover their prescriptions. We no longer contest the blackmail; we simply quarrel over the size of the check.

These demands have been made before. They are what history has termed the ‘Tyranny of the Mob’, a worldview that had its greatest adherents during the Reign of Terror, in Communist Russia, and National Socialist Germany. Benjamin Franklin, who campaigned for an American Republic, dismissed collectivism succinctly with, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” Unless books like this are challenged, there is no hope for the America our Founders envisioned.

Unable to accept the verdict of history that has assigned socialism to the ash heap, we now hear that Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and Red China were not failures of socialism but of big government; thus the oxymoronic appellation Libertarian-Socialist. Ironically, these are the same voices that are running for public office while bemoaning the fact that big government is not doing enough for the people. Korten and his friends are also quick to remind us that the ‘civilized’ nations, meaning European, have National health care, but fail to mention they also have double digit unemployment. Insurance is not free.

Unfortunately, those who might expose these deceptions are few and far between. In the battle for liberty the weapons are ideas, and Libertarians barely contribute to the din of the battle. They are too busy fighting among themselves over issues akin to transubstantiation, or with the anarchists. Start by asking why anarchists are naming themselves Libertarian, not Democrat, Progressive, Conservative or Republican. The answer might be that they know their real enemy.

Today’s philosophers who should be defending individual rights are hooked on the irrational swill from the ‘Old World’ or mired in political correctness where one man’s idea is no worse than anyone else’s. Some support redistribution schemes in which a bag of gold, claimed by all and deserved by none, is passed from hand to hand like a ball in some sporting event. Still others spend time on their knees beseeching their deity to deliver them, when it is probably true that God helps those who help themselves.

Umberto Eco tells us that simultaneously held contradictions are liberating. Jacques Derrida assures us, “that [a] text is incoherent because its own key terms can be understood only in relation to their suppressed opposites.” In other words what an author says is not what is meant, but rather its opposite. It is a ‘Bizzaro’ world where one has to say the opposite to be understood correctly.

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth, " says Umberto Eco. He delivers the coup de grace with “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”

The multi-culturalists, whose status is determined by the collective to which they are accidentally born, silence those who would dissent. The rest are suffocating in a cesspool of situational ethics, where no action is intrinsically right or wrong; or they have been stealthily buried in rejection slips by publishers with no ethics at all. This why books like “When Corporations Rule the World” are not only published, but are wildly popular.

2 posted on 10/13/2003 7:59:28 PM PDT by visualops (If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. -Thomas Paine)

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Read Walden II by BF Skinner. Pretty well demonstrates what happens even to a small commune, when people with ego's are invloved.

Jacques Derrida assures us, “that [a] text is incoherent because its own key terms can be understood only in relation to their suppressed opposites.” In other words what an author says is not what is meant, but rather its opposite.

No. It's more along the lines of: there could be no word cold if there wasn't a word hot. Note that the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Struass (whom Derrida criticized extensively) also noticed, in his vast field work of primitive cultures, that primal societies were based on many pairs of opposites.

No. It's more along the lines of: there could be no word cold if there wasn't a word hot. Note that the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Struass (whom Derrida criticized extensively) also noticed, in his vast field work of primitive cultures, that primal societies were based on many pairs of opposites.

Yeah, but they also found that you could have "red" without "green," and "yellow" without "purple." FWIW.

Yes, but the framework for what we call "opposites" (for example, a color wheel) may be different from what the primal people use. Levi-Strauss commented that some primitive people consider green and brown to be close to each other because green plants turn brown.

I grant you that this single quote may be limited in the way you suggest, however, Derrida believes that no author's work can be taken at face value. He believes that in order to understand a piece of writing one has to know the background and philosophcal mindset of the author and from that insight one derives the author's intended meaning, despite what actual words appear on the page.

Wolf

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