Internet addiction is real, says the website yourbrainonporn.com.

Not only is prolonged use of the net inducing reversible changes in the frontal lobes of users (my physiologist mother warned me of this many years ago), it is creating long-term psychological effects whose full impact on our lives we might not yet understand.

Is the web driving us mad?

“We may appear to be choosing to use this technology, but in fact we are being dragged to it by the potential of short-term rewards. Every ping could be social, sexual, or professional opportunity, and we get a mini-reward, a squirt of dopamine, for answering the bell. “These rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, much like the frisson a gambler receives as a new card hits the table,” MIT media scholar Judith Donath recently told Scientific American. “Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist.”

“……In 2008 Gary Small, the head of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center, was the first to document changes in the brain as a result of even moderate Internet use. He rounded up 24 people, half of them experienced Web users, half of them newbies, and he passed them each through a brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Web users displaying fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. But the real surprise was what happened next. The novices went away for a week, and were asked to spend a total of five hours online and then return for another scan. “The naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” he later wrote, musing darkly about what might happen when we spend more time online.”

That means it’s probably a good thing for your brain to just get off the internet completely, every so often, for a good length of time.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve automatically been taking breaks.

But there’s more bad news:

“The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found “abnormal white matter”—essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.”

What are the changes induced? Impulsiveness is one. But there’s also been a rise in OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), up over 66% in the past decade.

“And don’t kid yourself: the gap between an “Internet addict” and John Q. Public is thin to nonexistent. One of the early flags for addiction was spending more than 38 hours a week online. By that definition, we are all addicts now, many of us by Wednesday afternoon, Tuesday if it’s a busy week.”

That throws an interesting light on last week’s brouhaha over Jeffrey Tucker’s remarks and the volley of rebuttals, counter-rebuttals and threads it spawned. I admit to having actively participated. With some regret. At the end of the week, someone had simply changed the dichotomy “brutalist-humanitarian” to “absolutist-contextualist,” as though this improved the situation much.

What was the point of the argument, I wonder, if the opposite side simply ignores the objections raised and restates the original assertion in a politer form?

It shows that no one actually listened to the critics.

And this piece suggests why.

Bloggers are simply firing away on the net for the sake of the dopamine squirt inside their heads and the high-fives of approval from their own side. No one is actually trying to have an interchange.  Blogging and commenting is – to put it crudely –  group mental masturbation.

The solution is self-evident: disconnect.

Something is not working in the model of the internet as enlightenment.

This week’s web uproar proved it: a nutty assertion coming out of nowhere. A flood of objections. A step-back. And then a reiteration of the original statement, without any acknowledgement of the validity of the criticism.

Web users, in other words, show signs of not functioning optimally.  The article suggests it’s actually much worse than that: people are suffering mental problems because of web usage:

” A recent American study based on data from adolescent Web use in the 1990s found a connection between time online and mood disorders in young adulthood. Chinese researchers have similarly found “a direct effect” between heavy Net use and the development of full-blown depression, while scholars at Case Western Reserve University correlated heavy texting and social-media use with stress, depression, and suicidal thinking.

In response to this work, an article in the journal Pediatrics noted the rise of “a new phenomenon called ‘Facebook depression,’?” and explained that “the intensity of the online world may trigger depression.” Doctors, according to the report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, should work digital usage questions into every annual checkup.”

I can second this. After a bout of intense blogging and commenting, I feel exhausted in a very unpleasant way. Not the happy exhaustion that comes from working in the garden, doing something with your hands, or writing a poem alone.  Web exhaustion is  wearisome and frustrating. It gives you a sense of having wasted precious time and lost touch with reality:

“Children describe mothers and fathers unavailable in profound ways, present and yet not there at all. “Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text,” she told the American Psychological Association last summer. “A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.” She added, “Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.”

Teenagers, whose brains are still being formed, have it worst:

“”With consent of the subjects, Missouri State University tracked the real-time Web habits of 216 kids, 30 percent of whom showed signs of depression. The results, published last month, found that the depressed kids were the most intense Web users, chewing up more hours of email, chat, videogames, and file sharing.”

One student thought of his life as “just another window” he kept open. With that attitude, it’s a wonder that more don’t feel like shutting down the window.

“Recently, scholars have begun to suggest that our digitized world may support even more extreme forms of mental illness. At Stanford, Dr. Aboujaoude is studying whether some digital selves should be counted as a legitimate, pathological “alter of sorts,” like the alter egos documented in cases of multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder in the DSM). To test his idea, he gave one of his patients, Richard, a mild-mannered human-resources executive with a ruthless Web poker habit, the official test for multiple personality disorder. The result was startling. He scored as high as patient zero. “I might as well have been … administering the questionnaire to Sybil Dorsett!” Aboujaoude writes.”

Compellingly, researchers have suggested that life on the Internet mimics life in a city – a big city, like New York.  We all know that big-city living is far more stressful than living in a small town, where people are familiar. Then, imagine the stress of living in a city so big it encompasses the whole globe, stays awake 24 hours a day, non-stop, and lets you wander into hundreds of avenues and by-lanes, simultaneously, with everything in them from pawn-shops to libraries to bungee-jumping, cruises, serial-killer documentaries, historical novels, war movies, and ancient metaphysical texts.

Wouldn’t such a city simply overwhelm you and burn you out?

“The Gold brothers—Joel, a psychiatrist at New York University, and Ian, a philosopher and psychiatrist at McGill University—are investigating technology’s potential to sever people’s ties with reality, fueling hallucinations, delusions, and genuine psychosis, much as it seemed to do in the case of Jason Russell, the filmmaker behind “Kony 2012.” The idea is that online life is akin to life in the biggest city, stitched and sutured together by cables and modems, but no less mentally real—and taxing—than New York or Hong Kong. “The data clearly support the view that someone who lives in a big city is at higher risk of psychosis than someone in a small town,” Ian Gold writes via email. “If the Internet is a kind of imaginary city,” he continues. “It might have some of the same psychological impact.”

Crisis Magazine:

” You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else—not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation.

I deplore, for instance, the persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression.

Were we to construct such a thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes straight?

One does not possess or attain rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by virtue of one’s human nature—not due to any other specificity regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.

If the United States wishes to promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay” rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact, by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries, including Christianity and Judaism.

If we wish to make this part of American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but here, as well.

But, of course, democracy is not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.

Gays versus homosexuals::

“Unmasking militant gays, however, has nothing to do with sexuality, much less with an irrational fear of homosexuals (the true meaning of “homophobia”). On the contrary, if History teaches us something, it is that whenever gays take political control of a country, non-militant homosexuals are the first ones who end up interned in concentration camps. It happened in Nazi Germany, it happened in Castro’s Cuba, it was attempted in Japan,[29] and it will happen here in America if pro-NWO, militant gays are allowed to grab power.

Help your brainwashed homosexual friends to liberate themselves from the gay mental straitjacket. Tell them who their true enemy is.”

Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer, published last year in June, a review of the evidence in favor of  intelligence design, was a smash hit.

Then it was at once  savaged by the intellectual establishment.

But the book, which exposes the holes in the dogmas of the evolutionary establishment, has put the recent l GORILLA-GOD dichotomy in libertarian theory (also known as the brutalist-humanitarian, thin-thick, absolutist-contextualist pseudo-debate) into the proper Sunsteinian context.

[Cass Sunstein, termed Obama’s Information Czar, authored books and papers advocating that groups of anti-government conspiracy theorists be infiltrated to diffuse the most extremist of them with misinformation and division.]

“Darwin’s Doubt” also brought the real gazillion pound gorilla in the room, GOD, into the context.

Now, it becomes easier to understand what was behind the puzzling effort to intimidate  traditionalist voices in the political debate –  the recent attack by the former Mises Institute vice-president on so-called “brutalists.”

Could it be that the cracks opening up in the materialist intellectual establishment are sending reverberations elsewhere?

Science is increasingly undermining the materialist perspective and the accompanying scientistic (as opposed to scientific)  perspective of the social- sciences. This scares some members of the left, whose grip over the intellectual establishment has always relied on its being regarded uncritically as the party of science.

But books like “Darwin’s Doubt” and  new discoveries in particle physics suggest that science is not leftist.

The public debate is changing….and God is no longer the provenance of hicks and charlatans.

God is the context denied both by the absolutists of the evolutionary establishment and the absolutist  neo-Jacobins of the humanitarian-interventionist establishment.

It is that humanitarian-interventionist establishment that Sunstein represents. And it is from its partisans that infiltrators are drawn to muddy and dilute any exposure of the government’s own conspiracies.

That might explain why certain people have gone on a counter-offensive, culminating in the Brutalist trope ..a trope that was received with a tidal wave of derision that apparently has had no effect on the author(s). They’ve simply reiterated their assertions more cleverly, but with the same unwarranted self-righteousness.

This parallels the modus operandi of the leftist reviewers of  “Darwin’s Doubt,” most of whom didn’t actually address any of the arguments made in the book…..but simply launched into ad hominems:

Evolutionnews.org:

“……. you might expect that if your own incivility was the cause of someone’s turning away from a viewpoint you want to advance, then you’d try to win them back by being civil and making a respectful, strictly fact-based appeal. If so, then you’re not Nick Matzke. That’s not how Darwin-defenders think. When confronted with the reality that their style of argument is actually turning people off, Darwin lobbyists often double-down on the nasty rhetoric, evidently thinking the problem was that they weren’t harsh enough to begin with. Thus Matzke wrote in response to Miller:

“If one is already familiar with the science, it’s pretty annoying to see someone like Meyer come in, do a totally hack job which misunderstands or leaves out most of the key data, statistical methods, etc., and then declare that the whole field is bogus. That’s why critics are annoyed. And, it’s annoying to see other conservative evangelicals blindly follow in his footsteps. Sometimes I think an intelligent design person could say that the idea that the moon is made of rock is a Darwinist conspiracy, and you guys would believe him.

So ID proponents are conspiracy theorists who might say the moon isn’t made of rock? And Pastor Miller follows those crazy people? Nick Matzke must think that the best way to bring people over to your side is by demonizing and bullying them –– the more, the better.

Pastor Miller had a fitting response:

“Actually, Nick, I read Meyer, and you’re misrepresenting him through flippant rhetoric rather than simply engaging the facts. You and I both know that he didn’t “declare that the whole field is bogus.” And your insistence on mischaracterizing his work is a sign that you’re not confident that the facts alone discredit him. As opposed to folly, following the motives and methods of debaters gives you real psychological insight on what they’re trying to accomplish, and the scientific enterprise has always prided itself on its objectivity, something we haven’t seen from you.

I have the sense that you are actually a brilliant mind. Balance it with character and humility and you’ll have far more credibility. I personally would be glad to hear what you have to say if I didn’t have to wade through the disrespect.”

This recalls the old saying, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the facts aren’t on your side, pound the table.” People know this intuitively. Pastor Miller was discerning enough to see how Nick Matzke’s disrespect and table-pounding showed that Matzke’s viewpoint has a problem with the facts.”

Ann Williamson at LRC blog gives fascinating insight into the situation in Ukraine, explaining how the Bolsheviki in the US State Dept. overplayed their hand in Russia’s historical backyard, why Germany can exit the EU with little loss and isn’t  likely to play along with the neo-con’s fervent desire to resurrect the Cold War, and how Putin can continue to outfox the Bolsheviks by building up the Eurasian zone of former Soviet republics into a true, unhampered, decentralized trade-zone that would end fears of Russian expansionism in the neighboring republics:

“Interestingly, the Financial Times reported that the City’s skittishness in the wake of John Kerry’s idiotic ultimatum to Putin to renounce in advance the results of the referendum in Crimea put ‘half a dozen live deals to fund some of Russia’s biggest companies” in limbo.”  But the FT article highlighted one deal that was not put in limbo: “South Stream announced that it had signed a contract worth about EUR2 billion with Saipem of Italy to build the offshore stretch of the route under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. Construction is scheduled to start in June.”

Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller has been quoted as saying that the two projects in combination with the already-existing Belorussian “Beltansgaz” pipe would turn Ukraine’s network of gas pipelines and biggest strategic asset into “scrap.”

In other words, Germany’s verbal support for the west’s initiatives costs Germany exactly nothing.  Any actions beyond the symbolic would cost Germany. Therefore, there will be no EU sanctions of consequence.  Even were Germany on side for a US-decreed suicide mission, twenty-eight nations’ governments are not going to agree to economic policies that will take the cost out of their own hides. In other words, no State Department neo-con princess is going to ‘’F**k the EU.”

With the Nord and South stream projects in hand, Germany, which has prospered mightily from the euro, but whose taxpayers are weary of bankrolling the sinking Mediterranean countries’ loans made by the prosperous north’s banks, has positioned itself remarkably well; in an EU financial pile-up, exiting the EU wouldn’t amount to much more than a fender bender.

Now that west has adopted Bolshevik political tools, the Russians ought to keep turning the tables and counter with what the west advocates only with words, i.e. freedom and economic competition.

An EAU based on free trade in which there are no tariffs, no quotas, and no favoritism by or for any member and which allowed for associate members would put the Soviet boogieman back in the closet.  A free trade pact would allow Russia and the former republics to reap the benefits of the spontaneous order that the world’s people are building daily on the internet without any state’s direction or even much of an awareness of what they are doing.”

Humanitarians from “advanced civilization”  using peaceful “non-coercive,” beautiful, elevating, spiritual, non-brutalist tactics – FEMEN (radical feminist group, probably trained by CIA) in action:

Brutalists from “backward” traditionalist culture, voicing degrading, primitive, oppressive hierarchical  values, according to a leading CATHOLIC scholar and so-called LIBERTARIAN:

“We aren’t banning anything, we aren’t rounding up anyone, we have no criminal punishment for such relations unlike many other countries,” he said. “One can feel relaxed and at ease, but please leave the children in peace.”

Vladimir Putin begs homosexuals to leave Russian children out of their evangelizing. “Tis truly a shame when a KGB strongman understands American constitutional freedoms, civil and civilized liberty, and Christian sentiment better than a Catholic choir director, former Mises Institute vice-president, and editor of a liturgical magazine.

Note: Putin himself was charged with having been a paedophile by journalist Alexander Litvinenko, who was later poisoned. But the story appeared on a website associated with Putin’s enemies in a break-away province, so it might be nothing more than libel or disinformation. On the other hand, Putin himself is said to be a tool of the New World Order, at least, on the more conspiratorial blogs.

Brutalist humanitarians are of no concern to Maximilien Tucker. He straightens his powdered wig and points a bony finger only at those who defend traditionalism or criticize the establishment’s ideological coalition (Jews, blacks, gays, feminists).

Criticism of the ideological establishment is “brutalism,” but actual brutality  is “humanitarian,” in the double-speak of the Tuckerite Cheka and their genetically-modified Franken-culture:

1. Seattleites celebrate Gay Pride week by proudly beating up Christians.

2. American evangelist arrested in London for preaching homosexuality is a sin.

3. Christian teen says gay activist made girls cry.

4. Violent mob of pro-abort feminists attack praying men defending cathedral

5. Feminist professor now claims moral right to attack 16-year-old abortion foe, destroy sign

6. Gays promote violence against Christians

7. The liberal media finally finds a shooting it doesn’t care about.

8. Cultural imperialism on the march.

9. Josh Williams arrested for preaching the Christian gospel in public.

10. Street preacher arrested and held in custody for mentioning sexual sin

11. Missouri preacher arrested for preaching the gospel

12. Christian street preacher arrested three times

13. American Christians face “hate-crime” for preaching gospel

14. Street preacher arrested for preaching homosexuality is a sin

15. Christians arrested for giving out gospels in Michigan

16. Florida teacher investigated for expressing religious beliefs on Face-book

Just to clarify, while I accept the Biblical teaching that homosexuality is wrong and don’t believe it falls in the same category as the teachings about shell-fish in the Bible, I also believe in the rights of those who commit homosexual acts to do whatever they want with their own lives – including marry, form their own churches, and adopt children.

However, I equally support the rights of Christians to enunciate their traditionalist beliefs, free of harassment.

If people then want to boycott Christians, they are free to do so, as long as they also allow Christians to boycott them.

As for evangelizing, which Western Christians feel compelled to do, I think the “witnessing” that Jesus asked people to do was a much simpler and more natural thing than knocking on doors and proselytizing. I think it was simply giving counsel, when needed, as needed, and explaining your beliefs, in the right place and at the right time.

Remember, Jesus also condemned people who proselytized and made others “ten times the child of hell” that they themselves were.

In other words, we are to fix our own selves and families, before worrying about the morality of anyone else.

One more thing. The Bible explicitly counsels against giving spiritual instruction to people not prepared to hear it. It says to shake the dust off from your feet and leave them to their own fate.

We always have the option to leave, if we don’t like something.

So I while I defend their right to be free from assault, I haven’t much sympathy for people who go to gay- pride events with signs condemning gays.

That’s not necessary and it’s as morally exhibitionistic as pride parades are often sexually exhibitionistic.

In any case, with hetero pornography consumed avidly by the mainstream, millions of broken heterosexual families, heterosexuals have more than enough to fix in their own back-yards without crusades against a trivial portion of the population.

So, why do I publish critical voices against homosexuality?

Sheer anti-establishment contrariness.

When I see the establishment silence any strand of thought, I feel compelled to put it on my blog.

The real brutalists are the Christophobes, says Bonchamp at The American Catholic, whom the Catholic convert Jeffrey Tucker has joined:

“The truth here, and it is almost unbelievable that Tucker misses it, is that his description of brutalism applies a thousand times more to the libertine left than it does to the traditionalist right.

Gay pride parades, “slut walks“, tampon earrings, kiss-ins, public fornication with frozen poultry – the list could go on indefinitely – this is anti-social behavior, this is the ignoring of “civic standards of public engagement”, this is the exercise of “the right to be uncivilized, to be rude and crude” in the name of personal liberty. Meanwhile most of the people he is complaining about want nothing more than what Justice Brandeis called “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men”, the right to be let alone.

Who does not see this, sees nothing.

Tucker says that “everyone needs to decide” if their libertarianism will be brutalist or humanitarian. I say that everyone needs to decide if they will use their liberty to proclaim and defend the natural moral law, the right of individuals to associate in communities that explicitly acknowledge that law, to resist the totalitarian ideology and unjust mandates of the Christophobes and egalitarian collectivists in positions of power, and to do it with all of the force and zeal of the prophets of the Old Testament; or, alternatively, to twiddle our bow-ties on the sidelines and maybe even lend a helping hand to the enemies of civilization.”

It is my sincere hope that Mr. Tucker clarifies his position.”

UPDATE: Apparently, The American Catholic joins me in smelling the stench of blood in Tucker’s declaration.:

“Tucker’s remarks about a “fundamentalist sect reminds one of the traditional suspicion and hostility of classical liberalism towards corporations of any kind: churches, guilds, universities, orders of chivalry and the rest.

Witness the French National Assembly’s famous declaration of August 18, 1792: “A State that is truly free ought not to suffer within its bosom any corporation, not even such as, being dedicated to public instruction, have merited well of the country.” As with the corporations, so also with the communes, the towns and villages. Village property—there was a great deal of village property in France—was exposed to the dilemma: it belongs to the State, or else it belongs to the now existing villagers. So too of voluntary associations of all kinds.

The only type of association that aroused no suspicion was the trading partnership or company. F W Maitland has noted the paradox that the liberal state, “saw no harm in the selfish people who wanted dividends, while it had an intense dread of the comparatively unselfish people who would combine with some religious, charitable, literary, scientific, artistic purpose in view” and subjected them to a strict regime of licensing and surveillance, when it did not suppress them altogether.”

Lila: Why is this? Why is it that pornography and its violence, the drug trade and its violence, and corporate/ financial looting and its violence don’t seem to Tucker to be brutalist?

The only brutalists are traditionalists and their voluntary associations that hurt no one and steal from no one.

It is because porn, the drug trade, and Wall Street are intimately connected with the state (the shadow state) and  Tucker is dispensing STATE (read, intelligence) propaganda.

ORIGINAL POST

Jeffrey Tucker’s recent article, “Against Libertarian Brutalism,” positions left-libertarian, life-style libertarians, such as himself, as “humanitarians” and contrasts them with libertarian “brutalists.”

He defines brutalists as those who prefer homogeneous religious or racial groups, defend traditional sex roles, and dislike homosexuality.

I posted (March 16) that this was an attempted purge of Christian libertarians

It would take too much time to dissect every nuance of the disingenuity and confusion on display in this piece, and, since it was trounced by a majority of libertarians on the net outside Tucker’s own circle, it’s emphatically not worth the effort.

Tucker’s writing, since he joined the Agora network, shows all the hall-marks of propaganda and do not merit serious consideration, except as propaganda. I  don’t think it’s worth getting monitored to deconstruct writing from an ideology whose tenets no longer interest me, let alone internal politics.

But the fall-out is sure entertaining.

Are libertarians (the kind I respect) in for some kind of purge, as Bionic Mosquito suggests?

Of course.

Purges are ongoing in any totalitarian society and Tucker’s black-and-white demand, “You’re either with us or against us” (even while semonizing against black-and-white thinking) is an indication of which way the left-lib wind (and I mean wind) blows.

But for those who buy into theoretical hocus-pocus, I am pleased to inform you that the definitive rebuttal of all Tuckerian pretensions to exclusive and extraordinary humanitarianism has already been made by libertarians themselves, and by American libertarians, no less.

There was Ayn Rand:

...if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his cowardice is humanitarian love, that his subservience is unselfishness, that his moral treason is spiritual nobility, he is hooked.

But, better yet, there is an American female libertarian (God, what pleasure it gives me to sic one of those on a male gynocrat) who has done the job – Isabel Paterson.

The Humanitarian With The Guillotine.”

“The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.

But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people, if unperverted, positively do not want to be “done good” by the humanitarian. When it is said that everyone should live primarily for others, what is the specific course to be pursued? Is each person to do exactly what any other person wants him to do, without limits or reservations? and only what others want him to do? What if various persons make conflicting demands? The scheme is impracticable.

“People always give away a good deal, if they have it; it is a human impulse, which the humanitarian plays on for his own purpose.”

Perhaps then he is to do only what is actually “good” for others. But will those others know what is good for them? No, that is ruled out by the same difficulty. Then shall A do what he thinks is good for B, and B do what he thinks is good for A? Or shall A accept only what he thinks is good for B, and vice versa? But that is absurd. Of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”