If you’re waiting for “Where did we go wrongs?” and honest soul-searching to offset the vitriol and rancor, you’re in for a long wait.
It was my first day at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, Boalt Hall. For the class on property law, we’d been assigned an article by Charles A. Reich, “The New Property,” (LINK). Mr. Reich observed that many people receive various benefits from the government, what he called the new property. Unfortunately, in Mr. Reich’s view, those benefits had inadequate legal protection. They should, he argued, be afforded protection akin to traditional property rights.
“What did you think of the article?” the professor asked the class of about two hundred students. Up went my hand and the professor called on me.
“Everything the government gives was taken from someone who produced it,” I said, or words to that effect. “If you don’t start protecting the property rights of the producers, you won’t have to worry about the property rights of the recipients.
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There was a chorus of boos and hisses. The professor looked askance. To his credit he admonished the class and restored decorum in his classroom. But from that day on, I was the “corporate stooge,” “Wall Street asshole,” and the ever popular “fascist.” Some used those names within earshot, and back in the early 1980s there were no safe spaces. Not that I would have gone to one if there had been; in a perverse way I enjoyed the antagonism. A year or two later, a woman stood up while I was speaking in a class on financial law and screamed: “Where do you get your ideas, in a bar somewhere?” I was so startled, I shut up. The gutless professor said nothing to the woman. After the class I confronted her and told her she had no right to interrupt me. She screeched something and walked away.
Since that time, I’ve often wondered what goes on in the minds of people who would silence those with whom they disagree. It boils down to the choice that we make every waking minute of every day: accept or reject reality.
Accepting reality begins with the realization that there’s a reality to accept, apart from one’s own thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. I can think there’s an ice cream sundae on my table, hope there’s a sundae, believe there’s a sundae, even “see” a sundae, but if there’s no sundae there’s no sundae. To get it, somebody is going to have to make it, that is, change reality. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll have to accept the fact that there is no sundae.
That’s the way it works when we perceive, accept, and try to understand reality. If it’s not to our liking, we change it if we can. That’s how progress—science, invention, innovation, enterprise—happens; people study and change reality to better their lives. In a well-lived life it’s a process that starts in early childhood and never stops. Feelings of competence, confidence, integrity, and self-sufficiency build as we become more adept at changing reality to suit our purposes.
Reject reality and the openness to perception required to perceive it, the intellectual honesty required to accept it, the experimentation and logic required to understand it, and the initiative and hard work required to change it, and what’s left? There is no growth flowing from openness to reality, only stultification and decay from shutting it out. A witches brew of random emotions takes control, and those are not “feelings of competence, confidence, integrity, and self-sufficiency.”
For those who reject reality, what are the emotions that reign supreme? Fear—of those unknown realities they’ve rejected. Self-loathing—the irrepressible remnant of their intellectual integrity’s assessment of their true character. Conformity—substituting approval of the crowd for self-esteem. Hatred—of those who choose to accept reality and have no use for them. Fraud and force—their methods of dealing with other humans, especially those who have made the contrary choice.
Exhibit A: the recent election and its aftermath.
In 1913 the federal government acquired the legal privileges of stealing income and counterfeiting money, putting in place the theft and fraud that are the foundations of statism, the globally dominant political philosophy. Statism is government without constraints. Its mode of governance is command and control.
Deluded US statists believe they can order the world to their desires and dictates. Even at the pinnacle of US power after World War II, a global pax Americana was an impossible dream, as the detonation of the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 and the Korean and Vietnam Wars demonstrated. Subsequently, the imperialist design has met repeated failures, a reality its proponents can’t permit themselves to recognize, much less acknowledge.
They did recognize the threat posed by Donald Trump, who condemned the Iraq war, questioned the need for NATO, and pledged to seek better relations with China and Russia. The imperialists threw in with a string of amenable Republicans, and after their defeat, Hillary Clinton. However, the effort to stop Trump gained no traction; most Americans don’t share their dream of a global empire.
Mental black-out prevents recognition of the government’s many other failures: the wars on terror, drugs, and poverty, eroding civil liberties, Obamacare, illusory prosperity funded by debt, unaffordable entitlements, counterproductive central bank nostrums, urban deterioration, crippling regulation, ineffectual command and control, crony capitalism, and pervasive degeneracy. Impossible mental gymnastics endorse theft from the productive while the thieves pose as superior to their victims. On one level Trump’s success was the revolt of the productive private sector, where reality is necessarily embraced, against the parasitic public sector, where such an embrace only jeopardizes career prospects.
The determinedly ignorant have built their blue bastions of obliviousness: Washington, decrepit Democratic urban enclaves, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and college campuses. The red revolt revealed that blue ramparts of approved incantation, politics based on skin color, ancestry, sexuality, and genitalia, faux humanitarianism, insider enrichment, unbridled arrogance, and perpetual misrule were crumbling and susceptible. Their fortresses breached, the mental distress has been extreme. Reactions have been incoherently emotional because that’s all they can be for those who reject reality—fear, fraud, hatred, and violence is all they’ve got. It’s pathetic and potentially dangerous.
If you’re waiting for “Where did we go wrongs?” and honest soul-searching to offset the vitriol and rancor, you’re in for a long wait.
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A thing is what it is = reality; a = a.
“Impossible mental gymnastics endorse theft from the productive while the thieves pose as superior to their victims. ”
http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov16/great-con11-16.html
Fine article with many useful and helpful integrations.
Thanks. I like Charles Hugh Smith and repost him frequently on SLL.
Reblogged this on The Grey Enigma.
Another exelent article and scathing but honest critique of that mindset.
I read something recently that said when someone knows they are living a lie and you attempt to expose it they will hate you even to the point of murder. Seems to fit.
1913 I believe was the year of the troika of laws that were indispensable to today’s problems. Income tax, federal reserve and the little noticed 17th amendment that reduced the states to yes men because the senate no longer answered to the states and were subjected to the tyranny of direct democracy driven by the kind of mass hysteria we just saw.
I don’t know if You agree or not but its how I see it.
Keep doin what you are doin.
Thank you. I probably should have mentioned the 17th Amendment, because it has certainly been problematic and was ill-advised. The Founders hated direct democracy.
You have eloquently described the effects and cogently analyzed, at one level, the cause: those who reject reality. I’d be interested in your thoughts about the cause at a deeper level: Are such people born that way, or made that way? If not predominantly the former, how – and why – do they become so?
ikdr
My best answer to your query is: that’s a good question. I have speculated for many years about the causes of individuals’ choices, including my own. That includes not just the foundational choice–to accept or reject reality–discussed in this article, but other important choices we make in life. My speculations have encompassed various pathological and self-destructive choices such as addictions, narcissism, status and power seeking, etc, as well as positive and productive choices.
Unfortunately, sometimes straight line logic can only take you so far. I believe the reasons underlying choices are varied and complex. They may involve genetics, biology, including the biology of brain chemistry, upbringing and environment, and psychology, to cite some factors that often influence people without their conscious knowledge of them, as well as conscious observation, deductive reasoning, logic, calculation, introspection, imagination, and creativity. To illustrate with a personal example: when I write, I am always conscious of what I want to say and how I intend to say it, but once I start, all sorts of things well up that I cannot fully account for, especially when I’m writing fiction. Bad writers fight it, good writers go with it as one of the joys and wonders of writing.
I’m not evading your question, but merely saying that its answer is complicated and beyond my current state of knowledge. I zeroed in my analysis on the foundational choice–to accept or reject reality–because that is far as I was able to go and I had concluded it was responsible for the behaviors I described. To determine, beyond a deep examination on an individual-by-individual level, what underlies that choice would be difficult. It appears impossible to make a categorical assertion for any number of people greater than one. Even for most individuals the choice usually varies, and probably the reasons for the choice. Sometimes they accept reality, sometimes they reject it. Few if any of us consistently choose accepting reality all of the time. Many are not even aware of the choice and make it by default.
Bob
>I’m not evading your question . . .
Not to worry. The question was solely intended to clarify what I meant by “at a deeper level”, and I thank you for taking the time to respond at such interesting length. I’m not at all sure it even can be answered, beyond ‘it depends’ or perhaps ‘it’s too early to tell’. My own attempt at an answer would be along the line of John Gallien’s, but I can see difficulties with that, also, about which more later . . .
I couldn’t agree with you more. However, I would like to make two points:
1. Let’s stop using the term “crony capitalism”. We seem to allow the leftests to define our terms for us. I’ve read recently that the term Capitalism actually came from Karl Marx. If true, I can’t say whether this was an honest attempt by him to differentiate his theory that labor brought value to goods and/or services vs. accumulation of capital, or whether he wanted to obscure the fact that Capitalism is a system that forms when people are free and have the right to their own lives. In any event, since Capitalism is the free market, and if we consistently called it that, the term “crony free market” would be an oxymoron, as would all the other distortions used to describe Capitalism.
2. If I may weigh in on the discussion on whether people are “born that way” or “made that way” in relation to accepting the facts of reality. I would weigh in on individuals accepting ideas throughout their life that are anti-reality and never questioning them. So, I would say “made that way”. I can point to my own personal experience where I grew up a Catholic and attended parochial school for grades 1 through 8. I accepted the principles of altruism down to the root and the guilt that went along with it until I read “Atlas Shrugged” after graduating from college. So, I went through a complete 180 degree turnaround in my thinking about morality and politics.
Per your point 1, I just addressed the same objection on another website that links to SLL. It is a valid objection, and as I replied to the person on the other site, in the future I will go with crony socialism, which is certainly not a contradiction in terms.
Crony socialism has a good ring to it.
As for point 2. I did both. Early on I never questioned the narrative given to me and it never once occurred to me that I should. When that was suddenly and completely shattered against my will and not having a faith to fall back on I promptly began denying reality by every means at my disposal for 14 years until I was totally broken and near death. So in response to Ikdr and John G. I would say wryly “it depends”.
I was not all wasted, the experience gives me hope that many of today”s SJW’s can and will snap out of it if we experience what I think is in store for us even if we get the good scenario. Great question at any rate.
Robert
I have become a fan of both your style and substance that You put into your articles and I randomly clicked one You did in aug 2015 titled keep it simple when I realised You remind me a bit of Alan Ableson one of my old favorites. I used to buy Barons just to read Up and Down Wallstreet.
Both of you are superb wordsmiths but You deal in more pressing and important topics. Just thought I’d put that in here while I’m on a roll.
Frank,
Thank you, I appreciate that. I work hard on the craft part of writing, the word smithing. Sometimes I get it where I want it to be, but not always. I try to keep the stuff that’s not up to snuff unpublished, but it occasionally creeps in.