Oh, come now, you may say, but it's true: government has dictated so many details of our lives for so long that we are now largely inured to such intimate intrusions as having government regulators imperiously deny us the choice to purchase new toilets that can be counted on to flush reliably, or to find new shower heads for sale that will give us a heavy spray of water (see Jeffrey Tucker's delightful essay, "Hack Your Shower Head.")
On such vital matters as the level of risk the government permits us (and our physicians) in fighting disease, I am astonished by how we accept such life-threatening controls without protest. But it's true: if you are given a prognosis of six months to live, neither you nor your physician is allowed to decide whether to use experimental drugs not yet approved by the FDA.
How did this outrageous situation come to be? The short answer is that we the people have been sold a lie, namely, that government has the power, the information, and the wisdom to protect us better than we ourselves, and we are inclined to believe government's claims because we have accepted in our hearts another lie, which is that morality commands us to sacrifice ourselves to the lives of others, any others, and this idea trumps any claim we may have to our own lives.
I hear you saying, balderdash! But I ask you, what else can it possibly mean when the FDA denies you access to experimental drugs to save your own life?
Clearly, it means that your life is not the standard that counts.
So what is the standard that does count?
Right, the standard that counts is the lives of others. The standard by which the FDA judges whether to allow an individual access to a drug is not that of any single individual, it is the collective lives of everybody in society ... everyone, that is, except for you, yourself. It is the lives of the collective others that matter, in their undifferentiated millions across the land. There is no room for you as an individual in this collective standard. The drug has to be proven safe and effective for everybody before they will allow anybody, such as you, yourself, to get the drug that might save you in your terrified moment of greatest need. We the people agree that this notion of self-sacrifice for the common good is the measure of what's moral, and either we dare not, or do not have any idea of how to challenge this idea.
Two Automobile Franchises, Free Market versus DMV
Now, yesterday, down at my local Department of Motor Vehicles, I suffered a frustrating, dead loss of time and money. I needed merely to change a name on a car title, which they could not do, so I had to go back again today. The agent was friendly enough, but the system was hopelessly clunky and inefficient. When I went there today, the same clerk served me and apologized for a mistake she made that would have allowed her to finish the job and send the requisite bits to Albany, from where I could expect my completed forms in about six weeks.
This situation with the DMV illustrates the point I have often made about Air Traffic Control, where my complaints are not so much with the controllers, who, while trying hard to do a good job, are often hog-tied by their bureaucratic work design, and by equipment so old that their radar systems make ATC the world's largest consumer of vacuum tubes, if your study of history allows you to remember what electronic device preceded the invention of the transistor in 1947!
At the second automobile franchise, I had a scheduled appointment for maintenance. This was the dealership where I bought my car, and I came away feeling that we had done some business together that allowed both of us to feel better off than we had been before the deal. In other words we made a trade to mutual advantage. We were both better off for the trade. Quite a contrast to the one-sided and frustrating experience at the DMV!
The first building was a government office, not really a dirty room, but old and largely unchanged for 40 years. The benches were hard, and getting face-to-face with an agent required a long wait.
The second office was an attractive, spotless, comfortable space, offering snacks and beverages gratis, where a cheerful staff greeted me warmly and with eagerness to serve me. They delivered the service I requested, made sure I was satisfied before I left, and then, on the day after my appointment, they called me at home to verify that I was still happy with the service.
The government office is the embodiment of a self-sacrifice for the common good.
What? Self-sacrifice for the common good? How does this follow?
Because they claim that the money they extract from us by threat of force is entirely for the good of everybody driving on the road. Do you see? The whole enterprise is for the "common good," and you are compelled to sacrifice your money, allegedly for the good of all.
We are commanded to pay good money in a transaction that is neither voluntary nor a purchase of a good or service we could not otherwise have enjoyed. The DMV grants us a "privilege" to drive our own cars, but nothing in reality would otherwise prevent us from driving if there were not the guns of the police power, threatening to pull us off the road, unless we pay up and follow their edicts. The government takes money from us by force, and we get bupkis from them that we could not have enjoyed without them.
Permission to drive is not a good or service, it is the kind of protection racket you expect to get from Mafiosi, who take money from you in exchange for a promise not to break your knee caps. We accept this self-sacrifice because we are made to believe that the DMV sets standards that protect everybody on the road, a dubious claim.
By contrast, the private business is the embodiment of a profit-seeking company in our semi-free capitalist system. We voluntarily trade our money for goods and services we value more than the money we give, and the company provides goods to us that they value less than the money they get from us. We are both made better off for the deal.
These experiences inspire a few thoughts.
Why Both Democrats and Republicans are Dismaying
Does this phrase shock you? It should not, if you have read Obama's books, particularly Dreams From My Father. The man is a self-avowed Marxian. Not my libelous contention, but rather his own label, worn as a badge of pride. His books clearly reveal a man who despises the idea of America, and now he has been elected twice.
I've hardly posted anything for a year because the re-election of Obama so badly reduced me to intellectual vertigo and to shaking my head in astonishment and dismay.
Mind you, I thought the Republican alternative was just terrible, but in a contest between a looming disaster and an epochal crisis, how are you going to vote ... if at all.
As the title of a book by P. J. O'Rourke puts it: don't vote, it just encourages the bastards! The trouble is that the winner takes his victory as a mandate to impose his whole agenda on the country. Well, that's part of the trouble.
The bigger trouble is that there are no candidates (who stand a chance of being elected) who are talking about chaining down government to its legitimate purpose, namely, the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.
And then there was this week's election! Geez! What's the point, I sometimes wonder. Shall we have government of huge, bloated, ever-growing, ginormously oppressive size? Or a government that is merely enormously oppressive, and growing bigger every day?
The Republican mainstream, with respect to the important matters of freedom and individual rights, is a pitiful, whining, toothless, clueless, unprincipled gang of compromisers. They may talk about some of our problems, such as the ruinous debt levels, out of control spending, and the staggering, unfunded obligations of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but they have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to address these problems in a serious way.
Moreover, speaking as the father of two daughters, when one looks at the mainstream Republicans and conservatives on their ideas regarding the reproductive rights of women, and the people's freedom to marry on the basis of love and commitment, regardless of one's sexual persuasion, the Republicans are Neanderthals.
(Footnote: Yeah, yeah, one's opinion on abortion is entirely a matter of where one comes down on the judgment of where life begins. Anti-abortion religionists claim that God arranged life to begin at conception, but I believe this is a matter for science, not the wildly disparate claims of religions, to determine. Moreover, the essence of the matter seems clear to me in the contrast between a germinated acorn, a sapling, and an oak tree: the acorn is potentially, but clearly not yet a tree, and the sapling is. The zygote and the embryo are potential, not actual human beings, just as the germinated acorn's relation to the actual tree. Only faith can lead religionists to their zealous opposition to abortion of an early pregnancy.)
Having thus condemned Republicans, let the record show that communists, whose kissing cousins are American liberals in general, and the committed Marxist in the White House in particular, are worse than Neanderthals. Communists in the last century murdered hundreds of millions of people. Conservative Neanderthals are mostly just obstructionist big jerks, meddling sanctimoniously with other people's love lives.
Again, if you doubt that Obama and company have communist tendencies, read his books. All his most important mentors and heroes, including his father, were communists.
The White House communications director, an Obama intimate, of course, Anita Dunn, achieved a certain notoriety for her talk to some school children in which she praised Chairman Mao as one of the two "political philosophers" she admires most, and to whom she turns most often for inspiration (the other one being Mother Teresa.)
I couldn't believe my ears when I heard this remark of Anita Dunn!
Imagine a White House official addressing a group of school children and citing Adolf Hitler as one of the political philosophers she most admires, and to whom she turns most often for inspiration, on the grounds that he, like Mao, faced tremendous opposition in his quest for power, and then, in a courageous statement of moral independence, told his opponents that he would fight his battles, and they could fight theirs.
Mao, let it be remembered, was the world's all-time champion mass murderer. Nobody else comes close, not even Stalin, and certainly not Hitler, who lags a distant third place, according to the authority on these matters, University of Hawaii professor emeritus R. J. Rummel, whose book, Death by Government sets the matter straight.
I am going to make the point below that perhaps the worst problem in the world is the alleged ideal of self-sacrifice for the lives of others. I will argue that this ideal leads to the notion of individuals as sacrificial animals who may rightly be eviscerated on bloody totalitarian alters. So Anita Dunn's choice of the atheist Mao and the Christian Mother Teresa as her heroes is not so strange after all, no matter how ironic, because these two shared a belief in self-sacrifice as the moral ideal.
As an important footnote here, one might argue that Nazis were on the far right, and that the millions of deaths they caused are part of the pedigree of the political right side of the aisle.
However, I am persuaded that Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Yaron Brook, and Don Watkins (among many others) are correct when they demonstrate that fascism is just another species of socialism. How can this be true? Because socialism is the broader concept here, having to do with government control or ownership of the means of production in a country. Under communism (which is international socialism, let it not be forgotten) the government has outright ownership of the means of production. Under fascism (or national socialism, which is the full term from which we get the contraction "Nazi") there is nominal private ownership of the means of production, but the government dictates every detail of who can produce what, in which quantities and qualities, employing whom, of which gender and race, at which wages, etcetera, etcetera.
If the soul of ownership is control, then there is no significant difference between any of these forms of socialism. Socialism entails massive government control of everything.
I can't leave this subject without a word on this week's jaw-dropping election of a Marxist as the Mayor of New York City. Bill de Blasio is a self-described "democratic socialist," a progressive who, in his youth, raised funds for the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas, and visited them in Nicaragua in 1988. When he got married, de Blasio could think of no lovelier place in the world to spend his honeymoon than in that socialist workers' paradise, Cuba. Wow.
De Blasio's election brings to mind the similarly left-wing politics of John Lindsey's disastrous mayoral tenure, which brought New York City to bankruptcy. The difference between Lindsey and de Blasio may be that de Blasio is farther to the left than Lindsey was, so his potential for awfulness looms even bigger than Lindsey's.
By definition, lefties are more inclined than conservatives to put bureaucratic central planners in charge of everything. These central planners exude a robust and righteous confidence that they know better than you how to run your life, a confidence which is exceeded only by their failure to make things work as promised.
Sorry. It's true. And don't tell me that Clinton's budget produced a surplus, which was, like most of the government's numbers, a big lie based on creative accounting and, in this particular case, the use of government trust funds, like the airports and airways trust fund, that were counted on the side of the ledger that would mask the full enormity of the federal plunder.
As more evidence for the ineptitude of government to make things work the way they are promise, just look at the unintended and awful consequences of nearly every well-intentioned government program ever devised. I grant, of course, that these terrible outcomes are not peculiar to liberals--the same unintended consequences attend the programs of Republicans too! And it is certainly no longer true that Republicans can be counted on to be champions of freedom, but they tend to be just a hair more modest in their claims for what it is possible for government to do.
So I am not arguing for the virtue of Republicans over Democrats, I am lambasting both parties, and arguing for the virtue of free markets over the clueless machinations of government bureaucrats and politicians.
Two Automobile Franchises: Government Versus the Free Market
Now, back to the matter that galvanized me into writing today: the contrast I found between these two vastly different outfits dealing with my automobiles.
At the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, my goal was simply to get my wife's name changed on a car title, from her old name to her new one. I had a stack of paperwork to document and authorize the change, including a letter authorizing the name change from the bank which made the auto loan, the already updated name-change of my wife's driver's license, and photocopies of the documents, just in case.
After taking a number from the crowd-control dispenser, I had a lengthy wait, sitting on a hard bench in a dreary, windowless room. The clerk who finally took my case told me, not without good manners and a hint of apology in her voice that she couldn't help me finish this matter off today. "Nope, sorry, you can't do it today, sir. You need to fill out another form, sign and date it, and return it to us here with copies of your wedding license and certificate of title," etcetera. I protested that I already had everything except a fresh signature from my wife! The form she was required to have me complete would have given the state no new information. My intuition suggested that the change I needed would require someone to type three words in a single field on a computer screen and press the Enter prompt. Shows how much I know about government red tape! Nope. Sorry, can't do it today, she said. Come back tomorrow. My wasted time? Sorry, sir. Next!
Common sense would have suggested that everything was already in order. But no, we're dealing with a government bureaucracy here.
And ... Exactly What Benefit Do We Derive From a DMV?
Now I ask you, of what earthly benefit is there for having a department of motor vehicles in the first place?
They exist to take your money, so the government is surely happy to get another source of income, and they ... what do they do for us?
Ah, I see, they give us permission to drive on the government roads! They don't build or maintain the roads, they grant permission to drive on the roads created by another agency.
And what good is this? If you say that the DMV regulates the quality of driving and thereby keeps everybody safe, then I counter that this view on regulation and safety reflects the ubiquitous poverty of imagination of our contemporary mindset, which is saturated to the dripping point with the statist assumption that, absent a government regulatory agency issuing edicts and threatening punishments, people would have no interest in learning to drive safely.
This mindset believes that if left free, people would have no incentive to learn how to drive safely.
This nearly universal bias against freedom leads people to assume that without the government to boss everybody around, the roads would be a bloodbath of confusion, anarchy, destruction and death. Hell, without the government, people wouldn't even agree on which side of the road to drive! Without the DMV, could the people be counted not to drive down the road in reverse gear?
This bias is ridiculous, but nearly everybody shares the belief that only government regulation keeps us safe from predators who would otherwise be trying to stay in business by killing their customers.
Consider a little thought experiment on this assertion:
Think about it: in a competitive market, a business needs to attract customers, and then keep them coming back again and again. So imagine the following line of thought, and the insanity it would require to arrive at this conclusion:
"How can I keep my customers coming back again and again? I know!-- I'll kill them!"
But people actually believe this is true because they believe that capitalism is evil and must be controlled by the saintly regulators, who, of course, are assumed to have no interests of their own, such as empire building. Absurd.
Now, by contrast, an hour after I left the DMV, I drove up to the Subaru dealership for my appointment. They welcomed me, directed me to the waiting room where, as I mentioned, I found comfortable seating with drinks and snacks. The staff could not have been more eager to please me and make sure that my every wish was attended to.
We are led to believe that the public sector is devoted to civil service and the promotion of the common good. It is widely held that such noble service is the opposite of profit seeking.
For example, a radio ad for a Jewish funeral home, long broadcast in the New York City market, captures this bias by its closing words, proudly proclaiming that the company "is run as a service, not a business." The word "business" is delivered with a lowered tone that buzzes and hisses with an audible contempt normally reserved for words like Nazi, holocaust, KKK, profit, and capitalism.
Now, Subaru is a profit seeking, capitalist business. The point to remember is that the continued existence of such a company vitally depends on pleasing their customers, who are free to take their business elsewhere.
The DMV does not have to bother itself with the dirty business of profit seeking. They are not run like a business that stands a chance of going out of business for failing to satisfy their customers, so why should anybody be surprised that they don't?
Not to mention that the DMV offers nothing to their so-called customers except for their kindly refraining from jailing all who enter their offices.
The business model of a mafia protection racket has nothing over the DMV, in this regard.
If Subaru, or any other private company, treated their customers as the DMV does, they would be punished by having their customers take their business to other companies. Subaru stands a real chance of going broke and disappearing altogether for failing to please their customers for any length of time.
Freedom Works Better than Government Coercion, But Try to Tell People!
Picture this famous satellite picture of Korea taken at night. Here, have a look:
https://www.google.com/#q=satellite+picture+of+korea+at+night
North Korea looks as dark as the ocean. It looks like a country at war which installs black-out curtains on every building. Except that there are just no lights to black out. Their darkness is because communism has rendered them so unspeakably poor that there are virtually no lights to turn on in the first place!
South Korea, by contrast, presents a dense array of shimmering clusters of light, filling the country from border to border.
This contrast between the two Koreas is like a lab experiment of the rarest kind in the social sciences, an opportunity to test for an active ingredient, where only one factor is varied. Korea, like Germany, east and west, after the second world war, is a country with essentially the same population, the same culture, and the same values, before the communist takeover of one side of the country. The primary difference between them lies in the difference of freedom enjoyed in the two regions of the country. In Korea, the north is destitute and starving as a result; the south is thriving and waxing fat and happy.
So everybody knows that freedom works better than government coercion, and as Yaron Brook puts it, they know it works better across all times, all places, and all cultures.
But lefties don't give a damn about this evidence because they are pixilated by a crazy vision of "fairness" above everything else, a fairness they feel is utterly lacking in the working of free markets. This unfairness cries out for the government's redistribution of wealth. This egalitarianism is the same thing as Obama's idea that among the main purposes of government is to "spread the wealth around."
The left holds that our duty is to be our brother's keeper, but they strangely believe that this charity should not be a matter of an individual's choice. Lefties of the caliber of John Rawls, Robert Bella, Amatai Etzioni, to pick a representative smattering, seem to believe that government is properly the agent of the citizens' charity. The funding of such charities should be discreetly directed to the recipients so as not to have to call it charity, which might injure their delicate sense that they are entitled to the money. Any demand that the recipients display outright gratitude for such assistance would damage the social fabric, in the opinion of these lefties. So charity should not be left to the vagaries of an individual's voluntary choice to give it. On the contrary, charity should be extracted from us by the police power, against the individual's will, if need be, as might be the case with, say, retrograde conservatives with big hats from Texas.
By contrast, the right tends to be nearly as ignorant of sound economics as the left, and they display no more understanding than lefties for why freedom works. "We're all Keynesians now," left and right, as (the Republican) Richard Nixon openly declared on that momentous, long ago day in 1971 when he imposed wage and price controls, and severed the last tie to the gold standard in America. Now they nearly all believe that the road to prosperity lies down the path of government deficit spending, government control of the monetary system ... and this eternal "quantitative easing," in the current argot of the thieves down at the Federal Reserve System.
What Unites the Left and the Right, Secular and Religious
And besides, nearly all the moral leaders of left and right, secular and religious, share the same essential belief in the fundamental virtue of self-sacrifice for the lives of others, so why should anybody expect anything but a government that demands ever more sacrifice?
The Insanity of Believing Humans are Sacrificial Animals, and its Antidote
This is the essence of the matter, another one of those crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses that I am always talking about, spreading misery, madness, and mayhem throughout the world: the idea of Homo sapiens as a sacrificial animal on the alter of the common good, to be disposed of according to the judgment of the authoritarians in charge. This is an idea as old as the philosopher kings of Plato's Republic.
The True Meaning of the Morality of Self-Sacrifice
Until a better moral code is widely accepted, we will never get beyond a system in which gangs of predators fight each other for control of what they believe is a zero-sum game, where one person's gain is seen as necessarily coming at someone else's expense.
Being a sacrificial animal is not the answer to our problems--it is itself the very problem that must be solved.
The idea of sacrifice is a conundrum because there is an equivocation on the meaning of the word, two variant meanings that confuse the matter. Sacrifice is commonly believed to mean working hard, or delaying gratification in pursuit of a greater value. But the literal meaning of the word sacrifice means giving up something of greater value in exchange for something of lesser value, like taking a penny in exchange for a dollar.
Rational Self-Interest: a Cure for World Insanity and Misery
The world is suffering from this terrible infection, the morality of self-sacrifice. The best antidote I know for this raging fever is Ayn Rand's morality of rational self-interest. Rand's system of morality validates the understanding that all of us can flourish by pursuing our own happiness in a climate of voluntary trade of genuine values for mutual benefit. So long as we respect the idea that everybody who lives peacefully and responsibly has an inviolable right to his or her own life, liberty, and property, we could have a hugely and rapidly rising tide of prosperity. But this prosperity is choked off by these destructive demands for sacrifice. Moreover, as Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, and others have pointed out, when such sacrifice is held as the moral ideal, there are predators who are inspired to come crawling out from under their rocks, eager to collect these sacrificial offerings.
So which is it? The DMV, backed up by the police, happy to steal your stuff and operate at their convenience and your loss?
Or the car dealership, desperate to please you, so that they can win your money in a peaceful, voluntary trade of the stuff you both want, for your mutual pleasure.
Freedom, Oppression, Happiness, Prosperity
You can have both oppression and freedom, as we do today, but the presence of an oppressive government vastly lowers the level of happiness and prosperity that would otherwise be available to us. Worse than this, as von Mises pointed out so presciently a century ago, this oppression tends to feed on itself and cause things to become more oppressive as time goes by. Why do we put up with it? Ignorance. And these crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses...
There is no good reason to tolerate being shackled by the government apart from the fear of punishment, and feeling helpless to change the world by ourselves. But I do what I can to spread the best ideas I know, in the hope that someday an improvement in our stock of wisdom will cause enough people to demand politicians who will respect the freedom of all, and unlock the shackles we all wear.
We get totalitarian-minded politicians because we do not clearly know how to articulate a better alternative that respects freedom. Such ignorance kills.
Getting the World (and the Politicians) We Deserve
We will get politicians who respect our freedom when we ourselves, enough of us anyway, learn how to articulate a clear and powerful vision of our inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property. We ourselves must learn that our rights are rooted in our nature as human beings, and are common to every individual on the planet (so long as they respect the same rights in others, and do not lash out with a first-strike force against others.)
We will get better politicians when we abandon the crazy idea that there can be an entitlement to take other people's property. We must learn that it is wrong to initiate force against peaceful others. We must learn that it is evil to use other people against their will, for predatory advantage.
We will get politicians who practice all these virtues when we ourselves embrace them and learn how to put these ideas into words with clarity.
We will get a better world when we abandon the notion that self-sacrifice for the lives of others is the highest moral ideal (which leads to the blood-stained use and abuse of others as sacrificial animals.)
We will get a better world when we uphold the idea that all of us should strive for our own happiness by unfolding our talents, by our own lights, and making our way in the world through peaceful, voluntary trade with others for our mutual benefit.
I believe that we can get all these good things when, for starters, we demand of ourselves that we believe in nothing that does not make sense by the light of reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience.
The crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses make no sense! This is why they are crazy ideas! Moreover, the crazy ideas are unmasked and destroyed when exposed to the light of reason!
Dragging Mental Vampires into the Light of the Intellectual Dawn,
These intellectual viruses are like vampires who are doomed to die when they are pulled out of the midnight shadows of the mystical and the epistemology of faith (faith meaning belief in the truth of a proposition when there is no evidence for its truth.)
But we seem to live in a time that is helpless to dispel these crazy intellectual vampires because our age is pixilated by the abysmal condition of philosophy.
An auspicious intellectual dawn will be on the day the world begins to embrace a philosophy of reason and logic applied to the evidence of experience.
Philosophy, the mother of everything, after all, ought to be the solvent that cleans out all the crud in a mind made gooey by the insane ideas to which all of us are exposed while growing up.
All human beings are vulnerable to the evolutionary fact that as children we are hard-wired to believe whatever our parents and teachers tell us, and as youngsters we are ill-equipped to test these ideas for validity. And it may be that a huge percentage of the ideas out there are crazy intellectual vampires!
How to overcome this terrible problem? Philosophy is this technology of intellectual validation, but, as I say, philosophy remains in a condition of largely raggedy-ass ineptitude and incoherence.
Philosophy, any decent philosophy, ought to offer standards by which one can judge whether an idea makes enough sense to be worthy of discussion.
Let me hasten to add that we should remain open to revisiting our existing beliefs by the light of new evidence, but there are nevertheless standards of plausibility for evidence and argument.
If this sounds like the closed mind of a bigot who would create his own mental echo chamber, let me assure you that it is not, and here is the explanation for why this is so:
Suppose you assert that the earth is the center of the universe, and the sun therefore orbits the earth. Good epistemology demands that the burden of proof lies on those who make an assertion. So why do you believe the sun orbits the earth?
If you say you feel it's true, you have not advanced any plausible evidence for your claim. You said you feel it's true. We now know that emotions are automatic, psychosomatic reflections of what we already believe to be true. Emotions do not give us new knowledge, they emphasize what we already know, or think we know anyway. So your emotions are not a good reason to defend your assertion. Emotions are out, as a standard by which to judge what is true. By themselves, unaided by logic and evidence, emotions can lead us into the arms of crazy ideas.
If you tell me that you believe the earth is the center of the universe because Psalm 93 tells you that the earth does not move, you have recapitulated the argument that Cardinal Bellarmine, Galileo's persecutor, made against Galileo in the inquisition against the great scientist's claim that truth is discovered through evidence and logic. Bellarmine said, no, if one wants to know the truth, truth is what is revealed to us in the Bible. Galileo said, just look in my telescope and you will see for yourself. Nope, don't need to, said the Grand Inquisitor, and added that you better recant or we're gonna burn your buns alive at the stake, just as we did to hapless Giordano Bruno. Believe! Have faith. Questioning is a sin, obedience a virtue. If Cardinal Bellarmine's is your line of reasoning, then you are making an argument that depends on faith, which, again, I remind you means belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence. Faith is not an adequate basis for establishing the truth of an idea. Faith is out. So faith, in this technical sense of the term, like emotions, can also lead us into the arms of crazy ideas.
Making the case for good philosophy requires volumes of thought, but the essence of the matter is simple: knowing the truth about anything requires logic applied to the evidence of experience. Anything less can lead us to fall down rabbit holes into the world of vampire ideas, and thereby to a world of crazy death and destruction ... something like where we are in much of the world today.
Logic applied to the evidence of experience. This is intellectual shorthand for volumes of life-serving philosophy.
This idea of logic, evidence, and experience, is the life-saving stake you need to drive into the heart of these intellectual vampires, these blood sucking killers of human potential and happiness.
You can live for a time with steel shackles on your ankles, but it makes dancing much less joyful than it should be. And may the gods (metaphorically speaking) help you if you ever have to swim to safety.
E P N
Very well put. The contrast between a non-caring governmental agency who just takes your money and provides only a modicum of grace compared to the business of a car dealership that puts the customer first - very revealing as to where we are in this country today. Sad. Frustrating!
ReplyDelete