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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