Making Our Way Through the Ruins of Thought

Every society is born with enemies who accompany it in silence until they ambush it at night and slit its throat.

Somewhat random reflections:

Churchill famously remarked that We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm. 

It's always the resentful worms that have it out for the glow-worms, whether Booth and Lincoln, Chapman and Lennon, or Robinson and Kirk. I suppose we can go back to our foundational cultural exemplars, Pilate and Christ, and before that, Socrates and the chinless Athenian court that condemned this truth-seeker to death for seeking truth. 

But it is a fact that the good always suffer at the hands of the evil: Kirk wanted good for everyone, including Robinson, but not vice versa, so it's never a symmetrical relationship between good and evil. As they say, law enforcement has to be right every time, but the terrorist only once.

Evil has only the reality of the good that it annuls.

That can sound naive or dismissive, as if to say evil is just an illusion, but it is much like falsehood, which by definition has no real reality, even though it obviously exists in some sense. A delusion is real insofar as it exists, but it conforms to no reality. If I say 2 + 2 = 5, there it is, right on your computer screen. But its content is nil. 

These days -- actually, in all days -- people believe a great many things whose content is nil. For example, from what we know of Charlie Kirk's assassin, he believed that the set of "fascists" included Kirk and presumably all people who align with his beliefs, which is roughly half the country. Thus, the assassin was motivated by something that simply does not exist. 

Conversely, Kirk was motivated by what does exist, which is to say, truth. But prior to this comes a metaphysic, whether implicit or explicit, that says reality exists and man can know it: that the world is intelligible, and that our task is to unpack this intelligibility, from science to philosophy and ethics.

All of this seems so elementary, and yet, each of these claims is contested by political nihilists who are passionately committed to unreality -- for example, to the unreality of transgenderism. To which we might add the unreality of catastrophic climate change, the unreality of a racist judicial system, the unreality of Trump's collusion with Putin, and the unreality of social justice.

In fact, Hayek wrote a foundational text on The Mirage of Social Justice. It's not that social justice warriors are merely wrong, rather, that they are advocating for something that does not exist and cannot exist, and inevitably redounds to its opposite, contributing "to the erosion of personal liberties and encouraging the advent of totalitarianism." To quote the Aphorist,

"Social justice" is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

As one reviewer puts it,

The concept of social justice has no meaning in a free and prosperous society, and no society can be free and prosperous if it is planned on the basis of some notion of social justice.

In fairness, let's give equal time to an adverse reviewer: "Hayek is the worst." He is

Greedy and selfish. His work reflects the ease with which white males in the West can thrive in a society that is set up for them to win -- all the time.... If you are bigoted and spiteful, you'll probably love Hayek. 

So, Hayek's opinions are not even in the realm of "true or false," rather, a reflection of greed, selfishness, spite, bigotry, and white male privilege. This illustrates the principle that if you want to preemptively dismiss an argument, the easiest way is to impute sinister motives to the person holding it. If the person persists in holding it, then out come the fangs. Or guns.

Likewise, "socialist economics" is an oxymoron, because without the price mechanism determining costs, there is no economics, precisely. Or something like that. Gemini?

Mises argued that without a price mechanism determined by private ownership of the means of production, a socialist system would be unable to perform economic calculation. In a free market, prices emerge from the voluntary interactions of individuals, and they serve as signals that convey information about the relative scarcity and value of goods and resources. These prices allow entrepreneurs to calculate the costs and profitability of their ventures. 

In a socialist state where the means of production are collectively owned, there would be no market for capital goods. Without a market, there would be no prices for these goods, and therefore, no way for central planners to rationally determine which resources to allocate to which production processes. This problem, often called the economic calculation problem, would lead to a chaotic and inefficient allocation of resources, making rational economic planning impossible. 

Essentially, Mises argued that economics, as a science of choice and resource allocation, is fundamentally dependent on the existence of a price system, which he believed was incompatible with a socialist system. 

So, socialism is obviously real, only impossible. As is true of most progressive beliefs. Just as "socialist economics" is a null set, so too is "transgender women" or "human fetuses that are not human beings."

A trivial but illustrative example yoinked from Instapundit: a Kirk supporter on a college campus with an innocuous sign reading "People Should Not Be Killed Over Opinions." 

The aggressor warns the crowd that supporters of free speech will "keep doing this forever until somebody stops them." Of course, we have constructed a whole society on the basis of a belief that people are permitted to have opinions, even if their opinions are incorrect. Well, opinions are one thing, but "YOU CAN HAVE THE WRONG FUCKING OPINION, DAWG!," and then what? The aggressor proceeds to tear down the sign. The free speech advocate got off easy.

The left by definition opposes free speech, but it hasn't been that long since they began saying so out loud. I distinctly remember the initial rumblings during the Obama presidency, which at first I dismissed as a fringe phenomenon that mainstream Democrats would reject. For example, I can remember nothing of the sort being advocated by Democrats in the 1990s. But since then, the fringe has moved to the center, and we now have a major political party committed to the policing and banning of speech. 

But to ban speech is to outlaw curiosity and even thought itself. Or, you can have the thoughts, just don't utter the thoughts out loud or try to persuade others that your thoughts comport with reality. For that is all Kirk did: argue that his ideas were more in accord with the nature of things than those holding the contrary opinion.

Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.

Is there a moral universe in which Kirk's assassin "did the right thing"? Yes there is. The following is from an old post from eighteen years ago, when I wrote in longer paragraphs:

Chesteron writes of the socialist that although he may have a "large and generous heart," it is "not a heart in the right place." And only a human being can have a heart dangerously set in the wrong location. It generally occurs "when a religious scheme is shattered" as a result of their intense skepticism. When this happens, "it is not merely the vices that are let loose." Rather, "the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage." Just because someone has a moral code, it hardly means that they are moral.

Schuon would agree with Chesterton that the leftist is "really the enemy of the human race -- because he is so human." Of all the animals, only a human being can sink beneath himself -- and even beneath the animals. And he does so primarily by imagining that an animal is all he is, for when human intelligence is in the service of animal instinct, the result is hell on earth -- and bear in mind that Chesterton was writing before the great atheistic movements of the 20th century -- the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, et al, so he clearly grasped the principle before it actually played out in history.

"The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought."

Chesterton writes that "there is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." It is the thoroughly irrational thought that our thoughts have no relationship to reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings. This radical skepticism was "the ultimate evil against which religious authority was aimed," which is why, "in so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof that cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum."

For if the converse were true -- e.g. the blind materialism of natural selection -- "it does not destroy religion but rationalism," for it nullifies the mind that can know truth. It is the equivalent of "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

Thus, "it is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin." For we have already seen the effects of this gloriously unbound, "free" thought, since the results are strewn all around us. Indeed, we must try to get through the day -- and our lives -- by making our way through its ruins.

Free thought is only free to the extent that it comports with reality; it is freedom to know truth, so freedom is obviously constrained by this telos. Or, it can be constrained by the leftist who believes such freedom -- and the belief that it is ordered to, and even rendered possible by, the Absolute -- is a dangerous thing that must be stopped.