“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
Victor Hugo.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
19 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I was obliged to comment on this in my French finals at college.
Clearly the “school solution” was to warmly agree with Mr Hugo and to come up with lots of good examples of People Power, figuring that the examiners were almost certainly the kind of people who still went misty-eyed at the thought of Paris in ’68, especially as Mandela, Vaclav Havel and that chap in front of the Tiananmen Square tank had given us some very recent examples.
In a spirit of contrariness, I took the opposite tack and pointed out that actually there are lots of good examples of authorities successfully stamping out “invasions of ideas” – ideologies, religions, political movements, cultures, languages, all wiped from memory.
I didn’t do well in that paper, not least because the other question was about Eurodisney (of which I warmly approved, while I suspect the right answer was that it was a “cultural Chernobyl”). I also left half an hour early in case Blackburn Rovers’ playoff final against Leicester had gone into extra time (it hadn’t).
Ah well.
Many of the most notorious terrorists, including islamofascists, received good educations in the west.
They seemed to have been able to be very selective about which ideas they absorbed.
“The glory of barbarians is to be conquered by humanity; the glory of savages is to be conquered by civilization; the glory of darkness is to be conquered by the torch.”
That does sound a bit like EuroDisney coming to Paris, doesn’t it?
“One day, before long, the seven nations, which combine in themselves the whole of humanity, will join together and amalgamate like the seven colors of the prism, in a radiant celestial arch; the marvel of Peace will appear eternal and visible above civilization, and the world, dazzled, will contemplate the immense rainbow of the United Peoples of Europe.”
Radiant celestial arches? a branch of MacDonalds, maybe?
You can fight an invasion of armies, but not an invasion of fast food restaurants.
A lot of our politicians (in all parties) appear to be highly resistant to Adam Smith’s idea of “the invisible hand”.
In some ways it’s a silly comment. As armies can be resisted with stronger armies, ideas can be resisted with stronger ideas. It is a battle between memes rather than organisms.
But despite that the invading ideas he was praising were socialist revolution and European hegemony under France’s wise guidance, he does have a point: That beliefs matter more than guns when it comes to government. No prince may govern without the consent of the governed, and if an enemy can erode that consent by the infiltration of ideas, the result can be more effective than any invading army.
I hope that this isn’t true because there are far many more bad ideas than good ones.
My first reaction was that this was trite nonsense, but on reflection –
Armies can be stopped, but ideas? They do get in, but this doesn’t mean the idea conquers. The battle of ideas occurs in situ, in the capital, not on a remote border somewhere.
Although this statement is rather an oversimplification tho.
The recent meeting in Prague would seem to support Hugo’s contention.
There was also a nostalgic memorial to the demonstrations in Tiannamen the other day.
But, of course, violence can kill anyone, and silence their individual voice. Ideas, however, for good or ill, seem to acquire a life of their own, and proliferate just as well, if more slowly, in the shadows as in the sunlight.
The difference between a free, open society and a closed, repressive one is that the former is unafraid of ideas, welcomes and examines them openly amid much contentious debate, and trusts to the judgement and common sense of the citizenry to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Sometimes this process works, and sometimes not so well. But who amongst us would trade it for the alternative—the fearful, paranoid delusions of the authoritarian/totalitarian mind and state, terrified that someone, somewhere, might have an independent thought, a different opinon, might make a decision other than the “approved”, a choice other than those permitted.
Are there those who wish to live in the shadows, bereft of light, kept from “harmful” thoughts, protected from all those dangerous ideas that demand changes in the “way things should be”? Of course.
But I would be loathe to believe many of that sort flourished in this garden.
It is man’s work to separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the nettles, the good and useful from the wicked and dangerous.
What whole man or woman allows these tasks to be usurped by another?
“Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.”
-Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
It is not really that ideas cannot be stopped, it is just that they are more insidious, as a result their defeat takes longer. How else can you explain, after all that has happened in the XX century, anyone showing support for Socialism with a straight face?
This quote reminds me of V, saying that ideas are bulletproof. From this perspective, it fits perfectly with (classic) liberal arguments for freedom of conscience: if your ideas are better than mine, then they should naturally win out in the marketplace of ideas, assuming we are both people of good conscience.
Of course, there are problems. If you have a nation trying to “make the world safe for democracy”, by forcing “freedom” on you at gunpoint, their actions may well speak louder then their words. This can be expressed as the converse of the ancient practice of shooting the messenger who delivers bad news. Frequently, people shoot the idea for being brought by a bad messenger.
An example of this in my life is my teenage leftward leanings. I knew that the government had no right to control my personal life. I knew it in my soul. So when I heard arguments for economic freedom made by those who wanted to impose their religion on me, monitor my bedroom and bloodstream for unauthorized activity, and generally muck about in my personal life, I shot the idea of economic freedom for having been brought by bad messengers. It was not until I began to recognize the internal contradictions on the left, between (for example) allowing people to make their own mistakes and then forcing others to pay their medical costs, that I revisited the issue of economic freedom, and realized that I had made a grievous error.
” one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
I would put it: one cannot resist the invasion of bad ideas.
The good ones, the libertarian ones, are resisted quite successfully.
Indeed, Jacob. The awful trouble with populism is not that it is dangerous nonsense, but that it is popular. More people entertain any of a dozen crackpot conspiracy theories than have any kind of considered libertarian position.
What matters (in politics) is not a few people getting ideas from certain parts of the internet (or whereever) but what most people think.
If statist ideas control the “education system” and most of the mainstream media it does not really matter (politically) that a few people do not agree with them.
I do not agree with Guy that most people tend to reject libertarian arguments, my position is that most people never hear such arguments.
Take the example of “health care” an important issue in the United States at the moment.
People hear arguments for “reform” (which is defined as various new subsdies and regulations) and sometimes (not so often and only in a few places) do they hear arguments against such “reform”.
But arguments for real reform (for rolling back Medicare, Medicaid, the “free” E.R., the vast web of regulations ……….) most people will never hear such arguments.
So it is not really a matter of rejecting libertarian arguments – it is a matter of very rarely (if ever) hearing them.
Even in fairly “academic” matters debate is rather limited.
For example, the debate the Austrian school and the Chicago (“Monetarist”) school on inflation and the economic boom-busts/
There was an article in this week’s “Economist” (of course I did not buy the disgusting thing, but it was laying on a table so I looked at it) on money and inflation.
The “monetarist” school was misrepresented, and the Austrian school was not mentioned at all.
Instread we were told how central banks “target inflation” via interest rates….. (and so on).
It is from worthless artcles of this sort that most people get their knowledge of economics (indeed most people do not even read this level of stuff).
“But if is different at university” – not in my undergraduate days it was not.
There were decent books in the library (if one looked for them – and many of them have been purged now) but the “lectures” and other such were a waste of time.
As recently as the 1970’s mass market newspapers explained not only that “rising prices” (what most people think of when the word “inflation” is used) are caused by the expansion of the money supply, but that such credit-money expansion is the cause of boom-busts.
Newspapers no longer print such things, because the men who wrote them are dead or retired.
I am not so critical of democracy as many libertarians. I think that it is possible that most people would go along with libertarian arguments (at least some of the time). But it is a matter of getting these libertarian arguments to them.
In Britain where all the broadcasting stations (including private ones like “Classic F.M.”) are dominated by the “liberal” left, this is difficult.
There are still supposedly pro free market newspapers – but, as stated above, the better journalists tend to be old (or dead).
The new journalists are university types.
Still, the crackpot ideas come and go while the good ideas stand the test of time. Ars longa, vita brevis. Humanity has lived under “statism” (broadly interpreted) for centuries, so it will take quite some time to die. But the better ideas aren’t going away.
It helps if the idea is linked to the individual’s ego in some way. The best meme is linked to the idea of me-me!
Tyrants are not often overturned by the people (although there have been a few examples of this). It was not Nicky the First of Russia or Louis XIV of France who got overthrown – it was the weaklings Nicky the Second and Louis XIV.
Also, contrary to David Hume, tyrants do not tend do depend on the tacit support of the majorty.
As Saddam showed in Iraw a ruler can remain in power (for year after year) even if the majority of people actively hate him and try to get rid of him.
In a minority is better armed, or just better organized, than the majority it will win and stay in power.
The National Socialists in Germany and the Japanese military government system were not going to fall by some internal action (although individuals might come and go in power struggles).
First of all even now it is possible to control what information most people have (what a few clever people can find via computers does not count), and secondly it often does not matter what most people think anyway.
Often (although not always) the only way to get rid of a tyranny is by invasion.
This does not mean that invasion is the right policy – but one must be honest about it.
“I deeply care about the people of Iraq, but I oppose invasion because I know they will become free by their own efforts” is dishonest (off the chart dishonestly actually).
But “I oppose invasion because it will lead to a lot of our own people being killed and lots of money wasted, for the sake of a bunch of Arabs who will not be greatful anyway” may be nasty, but at least it is honest.
Then call me nasty:-| I was for overthrowing Saddam, but because I thought (and still think) that it was in our interests. But the whole “nation building” and “democratization” thing always seemed silly to me.
I was even more nasty Alisa.
I was against the whole operation. And, yet, now I am in favour of carrying on – not because I love the Arabs or even the Kurds (I do not), but because to fail would be an utter humiliation and would make both the Sunni and the Shia radicals look like Supermen in the Middle East and in the rest of the world.
It may well be that it is “lose in Iraq and we lose everywhere else, starting in Afghanistan” And this would include the Muslims who live in the United Kingdom and the United States – if we leave Iraq with our tails between our legs then we can kiss farewell to any chance of these “communities” in the West becomming part of the West in any meaningful sense.
“But the surveys show that most Muslims are intergrating” (according to the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media). The same studies show that most Muslims do not even believe that Muslims carried out the 9/11 attacks (rather more important than if they like Western sports, as the 7/7 bombers did, or say they like living here – which the 7/7 bombers said as well). A person may be born in the United States or the United Kingdom but in no way be part of the nation (he may say “I am American” or “I am British” but his basic beliefs make that claim quite false) – that has to change if there is going to be a peaceful future.
The interpretation of Islam (both Sunni and Shia) that says that nonMuslims and moderate Muslims are to be exterminated or enslaved must be taken on and defeated.
Sadly winning means building democracy in Iraq has to work. Although I am at least as doubtful about the whole project as you are.
As the Irish side of my family (my Mother’s forefathers) would say “I would not start from here”, but Iraq is where we have chosen to fight (I still think that was a mistake – but it is too late now) and we have to win.
At least things are open now.
For example, the Iranian regime is supplying Sunni radicals in Iraq as well as Shia ones – and it is supplying the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan.
It is not the division between Sunni and Shia that matters – it is the division within both the Sunni and the Shia.
The division between those who hold that Islam demands that non Muslims and moderate Muslims should be exterminated or enslaved, and those who reject this interpretation of Islam.
OK, now it’s going to be “naive”, in addition to “nasty”, but here we go: shouldn’t we have just knocked Saddam out and left?