“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. . . .Certainly if the harm done by willful criminals were to be computed, the number of murders, the extent of damage and loss, would be found negligible in the sum total of death and devastation wrought upon human beings by their kind. Therefore it is obvious that in periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object. . . . Certainly the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants, would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions. . . .
It may be said, and it may be true, that [the Nazis and Communists] are vicious hypocrites; that their conscious objective was evil from the beginning; nonetheless, they could not have come by the power at all except with the consent and assistance of good people.
The Communist regime in Russia gained control by promising the peasants land, in terms the promisers knew to be a lie as understood. Having gained power, the Communists took from the peasants the land they already owned – and exterminated those who resisted. This was done by plan and intention; and the lie was praised as “social engineering,” by socialist admirers in America. . . .
The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action….
…If the full roll of sincere philanthropists were called, from the beginning of time, it would be found that all of them together by their strictly philanthropic activities have never conferred upon humanity one-tenth of the benefit derived from the normally self-interested efforts of Thomas Alva Edison, to say nothing of the greater minds who worked out the scientific principles which Edison applied. Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors, and organizers, have contributed to the comfort, health, and happiness of their fellow men — because that was not their objective.
When Robert Owen tried to run a factory for efficient production, the process incidentally improved some very unpromising characters among his employees, who had been on relief, and were therefore sadly degraded; Owen made money for himself; and while so engaged, it occurred to him that if better wages were paid, production could be increased, having made its own market. That was sensible and true. But then Owen became inspired with a humanitarian ambition, to do good to everybody. He collected a lot of humanitarians, in an experimental colony; they were all so intent upon doing good to others that nobody did a lick of work; the colony dissolved acrimoniously; Owen went broke and died mildly crazy. So the important principle he had glimpsed had to wait a century to be rediscovered…”
Category Archives: Art and Ideas
Davy Crockett On Government Giving
Colonel David Crockett tells this story of himself:
“Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made homeless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.”
“The next summer……… I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but as I thought, rather coldly.”
“I began: ‘Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and-‘
‘Yes, I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for your the last time your were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again.’
I begged him to tell me what was the matter.”
“Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me…….”
“I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.”
“No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live here in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true?”
“Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.”
“It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer his is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose…..”
Chapter 12, “The Freedom Philosophy” (1988) by The Foundation for Economic Education (Crockett’s story is taken from “The Life of Colonel David Crockett, compiled by Edward S. Ellis (Philadelphia; Porter; Coates, 1884, via Freely Thinking.com
Kennedy On Going Past Politics
“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”
– John F. Kennedy
Comment
Fixing the blame for the past is sometimes necessary, though. If you don’t know what you did wrong, how will you know which path to take in the future? And which ideas worked and which didn’t? How will you tell the shepherds trying to save the flock from the wolves intent on devouring it?
Blame is necessary. So is judgment. What isn’t necessary is condemnation and hatred.
Gandhi On Business Without Morality
The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. –Mahatma Gandhi
Libertarian Laura Nyro
“Give me my freedom for as long as I be. All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
and all I ask of dying is to go naturally, only want to go naturally.”
Laura Nyro, “And When I Die”
Libertarians of the World Unite
You have nothing to lose but your parasites….
(Outraged now not so much at the government and banks, as at the media, which invokes calm and reason when there’s even the teeniest ding in their Ferrari lives, but when it comes to mass murder, bombing and pillaging, or looting our own treasury – where are they? )
Buchanan On the Real Crisis
“In this deepening crisis, what is being tested is not simply the resilience of capitalism, but the character of a people.”
MindBody: Mirror Neurons And The Notion of Souls
Thanks to Leslie Marsh of Sussex University for a video at his highly-recommended site, manwithoutqualities, for this passage by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandra, Mirror Neurons and The Brain In the Vat:
“Iaccomo Rizzolati and Vittorio Gallasse discovered mirror neurons. They found that neurons in the ventral premotor area of macaque monkeys will fire anytime a monkey performs a complex action such as reaching for a peanut, pulling a lever, pushing a door, etc. (different neurons fire for different actions). Most of these neurons control motor skill (originally discovered by Vernon Mountcastle in the 60’s), but a subset of them, the Italians found, will fire even when the monkey watches another monkey perform the same action. In essence, the neuron is part of a network that allows you to see the world “from the other persons point of view,” hence the name “mirror neuron.”……….Dissolving the “self vs. other” barrier is the basis of many ethical systems, especially eastern philosophical and mystical traditions. This research implies that mirror neurons can be used to provide rational rather than religious grounds for ethics (although we must be careful not to commit the is/ought fallacy)……
Intriguingly, in 2000, Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda and I were able to show (using EEG recordings) that autistic children lack the mirror neuron system……
Mirror neurons also deal a deathblow to the “nature vs. nurture ” debate (I like Matt Ridley’s suggested replacement “Nature via Nurture”) for it shows how human nature depends crucially on learnability that is partly facilitated by these very circuits. They are also an effective antidote to sociobiology and pop evolutionary psychology; the assertion that the human brain is a bundle of instincts selected and fine-tuned by natural selection when our ape-like ancestors roamed the savannahs…… But, the notion that human talents and follies are governed mainly by instincts hard-wired by genes is ludicrous.
Thanks to mirror neurons the human brain became specialized for culture, it became the organ of cultural diversity par excellence. It is for this reason (rather than moral reasons or political correctness) that we need to cherish and celebrate cultural diversity. To be culturally diverse is to be human…..
I will conclude with a metaphysical question that cannot be answered by science. I cannot decide whether the question is utterly trivial or profound. I call it the “vantage point” problem foreshadowed by the Upanishads, ancient Indian philosophical texts composed in the second millennium BC, and by Erwin Schrödinger. I am referring to the fundamental asymmetry in the universe between the “subjective” private worldview vs. the objective world of physics………
…… It’s a fair assumption that the identity of your conscious experience (including your “I”) depends on the information content of your brain, “software” representing millions of years of accumulated evolutionary wisdom, your cultural milieu, and your personal memories; not on the particular atoms that currently constitute your brain…… [Lila: atoms that are replaced regularly]
Now imagine speeding up this replacement process so that I destroy your present brain and replace it with a replica/simulacrum with identical information. There would be no reason to believe your conscious experience would not continue in that other brain…..
….The possibility of multiple “minds” in a single brain is not as bizarre as it sounds. It often happens in dreams. I remember having a dream once in which another guy told me a joke and I laughed heartily even though the “other guy” was my mental invention, so I must have already known the joke all along!
The question of whether “you” would continue in multiple parallel brain vats raises issues that come perilously close to the theological notion of souls, but I see no simple way out of the conundrum. Perhaps we need to remain open to the Upanishadic doctrine that the ordinary rules of numerosity and arithmetic, of “one vs. many”, or indeed of two-valued, binary yes/no logic, simply doesn’t apply to minds — the very notion of a separate “you ” or “I” is an illusion, like the passage of time itself.
We are all merely many reflections in a hall of mirrors of a single cosmic reality (Brahman or “paramatman”). If you find all this too much to swallow just consider the that as you grow older and memories start to fade you may have less in common with, and be less “informationally coupled”, to your own youthful self, the chap you once were, than with someone who is now your close personal friend. This is especially true if you consider the barrier-dissolving nature of mirror neurons. There is certain grandeur in this view of life, this enlarged conception of reality, for it is the closest that we humans can come to taking a sip from the well of immortality….
Will you choose the vat or the real you? This exercise might not provide an obvious answer, but fortunately none in this generation or the next will have to confront this choice. For those in the future who are forced to answer, I hope they make the “right” choice, whatever “right” means….”
NB: Again, apologies for a bit of splicing and reduction of the original passage in the interests of clarity. No meaning is altered by it, and the original is easily compared from the link.
Von Mises On Marxist Dogma
“Marxism gives philosophers before Hegel about the same place which Christianity gives to the prophets, and grants Hegel the same position which Christianity assigns to the Baptist in relation to the Redeemer. Since the appearance of Marx, however, all truth is with the Marxist, and everything else is lies, deception, and capitalist apologetics.
III.21.9
This is a very simple and clear philosophy, and in the hands of Marx’s successors it becomes still simpler and clearer. To them science and Marxian Socialism are identical. Science is the exegesis of the words of Marx and Engels. Proofs are demonstrated by the quotation and interpretation of these words. The protagonists exchange accusations of ignorance of the “Writ.” Thus a real cult of the proletariat arises. Engels says: “Only in the working class does the German theoretic mind persist unstunted. Here it is not to be exterminated. Here no regard is paid to career, profit-making, gracious patronage from above. On the contrary, the more regardlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds the more it finds itself in unison with the workers’ interests and strivings.”*104 According to Tönnies “only the proletariat, i.e. its literary spokesmen and leaders,” suscribe, “on principle, to the unscientific view and all its consequences.”*105
III.21.10
To reveal these presumptuous assertions in their proper light we have only to recall the socialist attitude towards all scientific achievements during recent decades. When about a quarter of a century ago, a number of Marxian writers tried to cleanse the party doctrine of its grossest errors, a heresy hunt was instituted to preserve the purity of the system. Revisionism succumbed to Orthodoxy. Within Marxism there is no place for free thought….”
Von Mises in “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.”
Comment:
Von Mises is a little unfair to Marxism here, it sounds to me. But then maybe it was true at the time he was writing. More to think about.
Von Mises On Time
“Time for man is not a homogenous substance of which only length counts. It is not a more or a less in dimension. . . . It is an irreversible flux the fractions of which appear in different perspective according to whether they are nearer to or remoter from the instant of valuation and decision.” – Human Action