Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
– Voltaire, rationalist & satirist (1694 – 1778)
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Samizdata quote of the dayJune 18th, 2009 |
 62 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Sorry, but what the hell does this mean?
To utilise an overused analogy, the Nazi’s made the German people believe in the third reich and just the German people commited atrocities.
That those with a good enough grasp of the use of propaganda can make you believe the sky is pink and make you torture anyone who disagrees with you. And the best bit? They’ll make you think that its your idea.
Alisa,
I think it was originally a comment about religion, although of course it is more generally applicable.
I tend to take apologists for Bourbon absolutism with a pinch of salt when they mouth off, but then I’m a religious nut.
Well, I happen to disagree. No one can make a person believe in something they are not inclined to believe in the first place. And no one can make a person commit atrocities unless they were already inclined towards committing them (unless it is done under threat of violence, which is a different matter).
And since someone else already poked our friend Godwin: Hitler and Co. did not make the Germans do what they did, they were the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.
And yes, Pa, of course it covers religion as well.
In other words, mandrill, that is your idea.
If Voltaire said it,
Believers will believe him
And without question.
Great quote!! Here is another good one from Voltaire: “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.”
Great quote!! Here is another good one from Voltaire: “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.”
Dang, if Voltaire had only lived a quarter century longer he could have pointed to his native France as Exhibit A.
Alisa:
Now, I don’t see that. Without taking away from individual responsibility, there are several ways to accomplish these things – at least with a high enough success-rate to raise an impressive mob.
You can make people believe things if you control their access to information, either by censoring or lying. Your success depends partly on their sophistication and their access to unpolluted data elsewhere, but therein lies Voltaire’s if. What is absurd to the well-informed may be sweetest reason itself, to those who are being fed a line and don’t know it.
More perniciously, you can attack their ability to consider certain data or come to certain kinds of conclusions. One non-violent way is to sell them a feelgood system of ‘thought’ that axiomatically shuns such unwanted parts of reasoning. Another, much more evil, way is to persuade people to raise their children as fervent believers in the feelgood system, disciplining them with violence or the withholding of love every time they show signs of the unauthorised rationality. That is a good long-term way to produce large numbers of people who are psychologically incapable of recognising particular classes of absurdity. Some will later be liberated through painful processes involving clue-by-fours, other not so.
Religions and their persecutors, popular movements, the cult of the State – all have lengthy form here, because these methods do frequently work.
And when you can make a person, even an otherwise mostly-decent person, believe the absurdity that some harmless third party is in fact a ravening monster – why then, you are half-way towards persuading them to do something absurdly monstrous about this threat to all things dear and decent.
I think Voltaire’s point is that, when you have a system that tends to make people blind to absurdities in general, you also have one which can slip monstrous ones by them in particular. I’m not sure, though, how far any belief-system that prospers in the real world is geared towards cranking out generalised absurdity-blindness, and to that extent I think your scepticism may be right on the money.
For the cult of Reason, too, has been known to slip a few monstrous absurdities by, whilst its votaries have been staring fixedly in the other direction.
“No one can make a person believe in something they are not inclined to believe in the first place.”
So Alisa, to take just one example that immediately springs to mind, how did Young make the Newtonians believe that light moved like a wave? The Newtonians were not inclined to that theory, being, you know Newtonians and thus holding that light moved as particles.
Obviously, the Newtonians were secret disciples of Young! They were luke-warm believers, who switched sides. Where is the mystery?
Alisa, I think you are wrong- if a person lives every day in an insane asylum, such as Germany became under the Nazis, then you would succumb. It is not that reality really is relative, but that we judge it by what personally know about it. Also, genes for going-along-with-the-majority exist in all of us, because of our tribal, and thus group-think, heritage.
Alisa, if you truly believe that you cannot be manipulated in a multitude of subtle and insidious ways, then they’ve really done a number on you.
I am quite willing to accept that I am, to some extent, a product of my environment, and that includes all the propaganda and advertising that I have been bombarded with since birth. A great many of my responses to certain stimuli are programmed, and involve no ‘free will’ at all.
An organisation which is adept at such programming will be able to manipulate you into do doing whatever it wants you to, without you even realising it. Denying that it isn’t so may well be your programmed response. The question then becomes one of who programmed you and why.
I’m not saying that free will is a complete myth, but how much of it is really your will?
Believing absurdities requires overriding one’s skepticism, critical thinking, reasoning, and judgement. Precisely the things which prevent individual’s from engaging in atrocities. Would that there were more Voltaire’s around today, we could use them.
Mike, you just made a category error: what atrocities were ever committed, or are even likely to be committed in the name of the wave-like quality of light? What Voltaire was clearly referring to were philosophical/ideological (in his case most likely of the religious variety) beliefs that have no grounding in reality – hence the term ‘absurdities’.
Mandrill, the above should also be a partial answer to your point, so feel free to take it from there – or not.
Mike,
Alisa is right. At the very least you chose a very odd analogy. Young’s diffraction experiments did for the old corpuscles. Physics soldiered on with this duality aware that it was maybe a bit of a loose end until QM solved the duality with it’s own even odder one.
What the Nazis did was whip up anti-Jewish hysteria with absurdities like blood-libels and, the demonstrably faked Protocols and the bizarre idiocy that Communism and Capialism were both Jewsish entities in league with each other. Once they got that to wash they could make the German people believe anything.
The quote is too general as it stands, but it would not be quite so pithy if he’d hedged it around with the necessary caveats.
Some religious people can be made to commit atrocities once they are convinced to believe in the particular absurdities that their fanatic leaders espouse. But then so can some atheists, Stalinists, Maoists, Greens, AGW believers, NuLabourites, Obamaists, and so on and on.
Most of the believers, and most human beings, will not happily go along with the atrocities, but the problems arise when the fanatics take secular control and the mass of the population is convinced that they either go along with, (or even join in with), the atrocities or they will end up on the receiving end.
So what the quote boils down to is that some people are evil bastards and the good guys, (i.e the normal, venal, bulk of humanity), should keep the evil-doers well away from the levers of power.
Unfortunately this is a lesson that the human race seems to need to re-learn with depressing regularity.
“Mike, Alisa is right. At the very least you chose a very odd analogy.”
Alright, it was merely the first thing that came to mind. Let me try and knock the ball out for a corner kick then…
“What Voltaire was clearly referring to were philosophical/ideological (in his case most likely of the religious variety) beliefs that have no grounding in reality – hence the term ‘absurdities’.”
Ideological beliefs are clearly different from beliefs on the nature of the physical world. However, both sets of beliefs refer to reality (if they do not, then they are not beliefs but fantasies) and therefore both are subject to rational investigation. Somebody who cannot change a particular ideological belief despite a proof of its’ falsity is irrational. That’s the ground I stand on here, and that’s why I still think, even without shifting the context, that Alisa’s statement that a person cannot believe something unless they are already inclined that way is wrong.
Mike, neither Voltaire’s quote nor my comments deal with people changing their beliefs to more rational ones, or for that matter changing any kinds of beliefs on their own, but rather with people causing other people believe in absurdities. Two entirely different things.
Communism.
Eugenics.
Etc, etc.
“Mike, neither Voltaire’s quote nor my comments deal with people changing their beliefs to more rational ones, or for that matter changing any kinds of beliefs on their own, but rather with people causing other people believe in absurdities. Two entirely different things.”
That objection is misplaced, although I will concede that maybe my language wasn’t quite clear enough for you. Perhaps the following will help. Change this:
“Somebody who cannot change a particular ideological belief despite a proof of its’ falsity is irrational.”
To this:
“Somebody who cannot change a particular ideological belief, despite being given a proof of its’ falsity, is irrational.”
Might I ask where you are from, Alisa? Please understand, I am not trying to be rude to you.
Anyway, my points are simply that (1) ideological beliefs are just like any other beliefs in the fundamental sense that they aim to describe some aspect of reality (there is no category error here), and that (2) they may therefore be subjected to rational criticism, so (3) such ideological beliefs are not an arbitrary matter of preference, except (4) where rational criticism is being purposefully avoided – in which case ‘beliefs’ may actually be fantasies and therefore quite arbitrary (e.g. Nazi ideology).
Whoa, Nellie! My ideological beliefs are based entirely within my beliefs of the nature of the physical world. Prior to your comment I would have thought that same connectivity applied to almost everybody here. Perhaps you meant to say that some people believe there is a spiritual world also?
Who gets to judge whether my beliefs “refer to reality”? Is there a bureau of scientific approval somewhere? Not for individualists. Everybody builds there own idea of “reality” and (IMO) some eff it up very badly. “Beliefs” are by definition what somebody believes to be true, ie “reality”. So therefore, by your own statement, everything you believe that I do not is your “fantasy”. Or were you meaning to reserve the right of judgment to yourself? Is everybody who disagrees with you fantasizing? How is non-fantasy determined without resorting to some form of collective authority?
You have stipulated that “Somebody who cannot change a particular ideological belief despite a proof of its’ falsity is irrational.” Okay, leaving aside the entire philosophy of knowledge, how are you going to prove to me that there is no flying spaghetti monster? Some of us here are rather found of Him. How are you going to give me proof of His non-existence? Since you cannot prove His non-existence, does it necessarily mean I must be “rational”?
There are beliefs people hold that cannot be proven wrong. These beliefs may suggest to them that a particular act that I consider an “atrocity” is their obligation. Alisa, (and me and a few others) hold the view that an individual cannot be “compelled” to believe what they do not. They may compelled to obedience or deceit, but not belief. They either already hold or are receptive to being convinced of that belief, or their character is one of abandoning their reason process to a collective authority. A collectivist may accept a mandated belief to be a matter of fact (literally). An individualist may lie or mislead for survival sake, but will not surrender their rational process to another. If they did, they would not be an individualist.
Voltaire’s presumption of the possibility that one can be “compelled” to believe suggest either a translation error or a collectivist meta-context. One must either be a collectivist in their opinion acquiring nature or inclined to the atrocity already and needing only some persuasion.
OK Mike, it may well be that both of us are simultaneously missing each other’s points, so let me go first: the way I understand Voltaire’s quote is that, for example, a person (let’s call him the preacher* can cause another person (I’ll call him the converted*) to believe in God*/Arian supremacy/AGW. If and when the preacher wants to cause the converted to commit atrocities, he will use these beliefs that he earlier imparted to the converted as justification.
Now my point is that no one can cause another person truly believe things that cannot be proved as being based in reality (either because they are false, or because they are unprovable, at least for the time being). What I mean by this is that, for example, no one can turn a non-religious person into a religious one: it has to come from within. “The preacher” can encourage this tendency by creating emotional and other conditions conducive to conversion, but no more than that.
*Note that I use religious examples only because I think that religion is what Voltaire originally had in mind. I could be wrong about that, and I am not making a personal value judgment about religion here. I happen to be an agnostic.
I grew up in Soviet Russia and in Israel.
What has compulsion got to do with it? You do not have to compel people to support absurdities like communism, socialism, national socialism, [insert gozo religion of the day here] or whatever, to cause people to act like monsters… you just have to convince them to think within the appropriate meta-context, and the subsequent horrors follow just as night follows day or a lawyer follows an ambulance.
In the quote, I interpreted “make you” to mean “compel you”. If “make you believe” means “persuade you to believe”, then Voltaire’s statement is correct and says nothing about his meta-context.
The horrors can only follow in a meta-context that denies the personhood of the targeted individuals. There will never be these horrors committed by people who believe in each individual’s right to existence. The horrors can only follow from some mutation of collectivism.
I do not believe, however, that collectivism is necessarily absurd. I do believe it is evil. But it can be terrifyingly rational once one understands its ideal goal state.
Mid:
Voltaire’s metacontext aside, I go further than that and contest the ‘persuasion’ part, as ‘persuasion’ implies rational argument: one cannot make a case for absurdity (remember, that is the actual term in the quote) using nothing but rational argument. People, even perfectly rational ones in most other matters, believe in absurdities based on various emotional needs. The quote thus implies that people can create emotional needs in other people. I disagree, unless we are talking about children or unusually immature adults.
As to atrocities: it takes a ‘true believer’ to commit them willingly. As I have (hopefully) shown above ‘true believers’ cannot be created post-childhood. This is one of the reasons why ‘true believers’ in absurdities tend to be a relatively small minority. Most of the rest are usually useful idiots or passive observers (not making a moral judgment on those here, but not for lack of opinion).
Semantics are (is?) driving me nuts (a short distance) in this discussion.
I agree with Alisa about persuasion being a rational process, but in Perry’s comment he said “convince” which can include lying. Nobody can be fully informed about every thing, all of the time. We get our information about the state of affairs from news aggregators, traditionally the MSM. For an example, to watch MSM one would know that GW Bush was a profligate spender, wanton violator of civil liberties and vindictive terminator of gov officials who wouldn’t give him what he wanted. However, we can conclude from that same MSM that Obama is none of these. If the manipulation and censorship of information is successfully built into a false picture of reality, people who accept that false picture will build a flawed meta-context from it.
When someone is asked to do something that evil, if it suits their nature they will do it. If it violates their moral character, they will try much harder to validate their premises. I think there is a movable threshold of how neglectful a person can be in confirming information before allowing themselves to be convinced to do monstrous things. There is a story, perhaps true, that during the Tiananmen protests, the Chinese government moved troops from one part of the country to another part and told them that the troops drawn from the part of the country they were now assigned were committing atrocities to their relatives back home. By building their meta-context on this false foundation, many not-bad if not necessarily good people could be convinced to do abhorrent things.
I think I’ll shut up now. 🙂
Absolutely, Mid. But, this is not what the quote is talking about. Troops committing atrocities to families of other troops, while possibly a lie, is not an absurdity, in the way a flying spaghetti monster is (with due apologies to any Pastafarians who may be present).
Does it really matter a meta-monkey’s…the mark of Cain is indelibly inscribed on the human race.
Come to think of it, the French Revolution really isn’t the most obvious place to find shining examples of this principle. The revolutionaries, however evil their path was, were fueled primarily by legitimate grievances with the thieving government. Voltaire’s axiom played out in a lesser-known fact about the revolution: the revolutionaries scapegoated all Catholic clerics and even nuns for the tyrannies of the relative few. For an apples-to-pears comparison (closer than oranges, not quite apples), imagine if an American uprising, spurred by FDR’s coziness with Stalin, had spurred mass lynching of low-level Interior Department clerks.
Scapegoating is a common example of absurdity that fuels atrocities. Ask Reginald Denny and whoever owns (owned?) that McDonald’s in downtown Seattle that got trashed by WTO protesters. Or the late Yankel Rosenbaum’s dad.
“My ideological beliefs are based entirely within my beliefs of the nature of the physical world. Prior to your comment I would have thought that same connectivity applied to almost everybody here. Perhaps you meant to say that some people believe there is a spiritual world also?”
No, Mid I wasn’t saying anything of the sort. I was accused of making a category error for conflating ideological beliefs with scientific beliefs and merely meant to admit there is a difference between them (i.e. one involves people and has direct implications for human action and the other does not). Notice that I then went on to say that both aim at descriptions of reality, which point I had originally thought was obvious.
“Who gets to judge whether my beliefs “refer to reality”?”
Hey, you hold your horses! I was making an epistemological point, not a political one and you entirely ignored the notion of error. Beliefs may be in error and though that error may not yet be apparent, that doesn’t mean such beliefs are fantasies. They ‘aim’ at reality and account for the known facts. A fantasy is not ‘aimed’ at reality in the first place, except perhaps in the most skewered and obscure sense.
And as for the political point of who gets to judge – I didn’t so much as hint at that, it is entirely your superimposition on my second comment. Look, you get to judge me because I am making my thoughts available to you, and likewise I get to judge you. That an individual makes a judgment on the beliefs of some other people does not imply authority to act on behalf of anyone other than himself.
“…how are you going to prove to me that there is no flying spaghetti monster?”
You can keep your Flying Spaghetti Monster for all I care and much good may it do you – not all beliefs are falsifiable and I never claimed as much. But to clarify my point however, take communism – it is a system of ideological beliefs that purports to describe a society in which all people flourish, yet it is false. It is false not only because of our historical examples (which will always be defended as Stalinism or socialism or some such rather than communism) but because of the content of its’ ideological beliefs which deny individual freedom.
“Alisa, (and me and a few others) hold the view that an individual cannot be “compelled” to believe what they do not. They either already hold or are receptive to being convinced of that belief, or their character is one of abandoning their reason process to a collective authority.”
You misread me as a result of semantic confusion – your own semantic confusion, and I have no idea where it came from. ‘Compelled’ was your word, not mine. What I meant by “how did Young make the Newtonians believe that light moved like a wave?” was clearly meant to conjure the image of the double slit experiment and thus the concept of rational persuasion that light really did behave with wave-like properties via empirical demonstration. I made not even the slightest connection between the use of physical force and the acceptance of some belief as true – that was you superimposing onto my comment and unjustifiably so.
And further, I agree with Perry’s point about the consequences of thinking in a particular meta-context. Ideologies and ideological beliefs have direct consequences for human action, even if (and especially so) when they err in their reference to reality and this fact has nothing to do with someone shouting at you to believe statements X,Y and Z whilst pointing a rifle at you.
Alisa…
“Now my point is that no one can cause another person truly believe things that cannot be proved as being based in reality (either because they are false, or because they are unprovable, at least for the time being). What I mean by this is that, for example, no one can turn a non-religious person into a religious one: it has to come from within.
‘Come from within’ in the sense of my point 4 above: “(4) where rational criticism is being purposefully avoided – in which case ‘beliefs’ may actually be fantasies and therefore quite arbitrary (e.g. Nazi ideology).”
“Voltaire’s metacontext aside, I go further than that and contest the ‘persuasion’ part, as ‘persuasion’ implies rational argument: one cannot make a case for absurdity (remember, that is the actual term in the quote) using nothing but rational argument.”
Voltaire’s metacontext aside then, is communism an absurdity? I say it is. Were people (of any nationality throughout the 20th Century) presented with a rational case for it? I say they were and a great many people swallowed it (indeed are still swallowing it).
“People, even perfectly rational ones in most other matters, believe in absurdities based on various emotional needs. The quote thus implies that people can create emotional needs in other people. I disagree, unless we are talking about children or unusually immature adults.”
Based on emotional needs OR false premises, though the latter may typically be presented with some manipulation of the former. People often believe in absurdities not purely as a consequence of emotional manipulation, but as a consequence of them holding false premises too. If the premises are irrational, then the rest of the argument can be as rational as a quadratic equation but it will still be false.
I distinctly remember a teacher at school when I was about nine years old (so 1989) showing us videos about the Soviet Union and news footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the videos I remember him asking us questions as to why communism – under which he said something to the effect that all people would live in equal conditions and there would be no more poor and homeless people – was wrong. The false premise (that justice requires equality of outcomes) had been presented to us with full emotional slant, and none of us could answer. What nine year old would dare to challenge such a mighty question of Justice in front of his mates, armed only with an interest in arithmetic, pirate stories, dinosaur names and the like? I cannot recall well enough to ascertain whether the teacher was merely playing devils advocate or whether he really was a commie, but I do remember asking him to check my work one day only to have him wheel around like lightning and scream in my face to wait because he was busy. I nearly jumped out of my skin in fright. Those videos and that talk are my earliest memories of ‘communism’ and, along with that screaming incident, my only memories of that teacher. It wasn’t until I reached my early 20s (getting out of the education system and into real books) that I got around to looking at that premise again and rejecting it. I regard the fact that it took me so many years to do that with a sense of revulsion and sorrow.
Perry’s point about meta-context is profound – once false premises are shown to be socially accepted and supported with all kinds of emotional manipulation and rational argument, then the social costs of exposing the premises themselves to rational examination can become rather steep.
I am so deeply fucking indebted to the Wright brothers, honestly.
“What is an absurdity” – something that is not just “unproved” (something may be true but as yet unproved – or even “unprovable”), but rather something that has clearly been proved to be false and yet is trotted out anyway.
For example, the policy of “expanding credit” by credit money expansion.
Logically the policy of lending out more than actually exists in real savings can be shown to be harmful (see Austrian School economists such as Ludwig Von Mises on this).
And empirically vast number of examples can be shown of how such credit money expansion “booms” lead to “busts” – i.e. how they harm (not help) long term employment and living standards.
Yet the policy is still followed (is being followed as we speak) with even a bust just leading to yet more credit money expansion (like someone with a hangover going to the booze bottle for a “hair of the dog” that bit him).
It is almost Marxist in the way that logic is ignored (in favour of the empty games of dialectics) and empirical evidence is ignored also (especially by “economists” who claim to be empirical).
And whilst Karl Marx and his early followers did not support credit money expansion (at least seems to follow Ricardo on these matters) – some modern Marxists, following the Italian P. Straffa, have managed to combine the (seemingly incompatible) ideas of Karl Marx and J.M. Keynes.
Not a theoretical point – this unholy alliance of ideas (this alliance of absurdities) is at the root of the Administration of President Barack Obama.
The Western World is seeing the absurdities (has seem them more and more for years) – the atrocities will come.
My ideological beliefs are based entirely within my beliefs of the nature of the physical world.
The nature of the physical world tells me that killing a guy for his wallet with no witnesses around is profitable. That some transcendent law endows the guy with the wallet and everyone else with rights to life, liberty and property is not discernible in nature.
Mike, unfortunately I don’t have time right now for a well thought-out response.
There is a general assumption here (not really surprising) that skepticism is the default for the human mind, and that it must be overcome. But I doubt this is true. There is a rather startling diversity in the first principles people are given. I’m not sure this is strictly environmental, ie., that it is something we absorb from the people and ideas we grow up in. I’m beginning to think that some people’s brains are wired differently.
That includes Voltaire, who someone quoted as saying, “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.” Which to me seems itself as absurd and untrue as the first quote from him was true. Beyond that, I suspect this belief of Voltaire’s was not subject to falsifiability: that is, no one could have ever convinced him through reason that he was wrong.
I guess my point is that all human beings are subject to irrationality of one form or another, because that is part of who we are. Our various irrationalities may be different from those of others, but they are still there. Those who crow so loudly about being free from the irrationalities of religion should thus remain humble. They are little more free from extremism as the religious nuts they scold. I’m not convinced that hyper-rationality is any more free of extremism than hyper-religiosity.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” Charles Baudelaire
Ideas, good (tending toward properly identifying reality) or bad ideas (contradicting reality – absurdities), drive your actions, good or bad. Multiply it out by millions of people holding to ideas, and you get The Enlightenment or you get Nazi Germany.
You are all wrong about the belief being only those things that are not physical. Take for example, abortion.
According to the SUPREME Court of the USA, life doesn’t exist (or count) until after the first trimester of pregnancy. Ergo, a womans right to the privacy of her own body is primary, but only for those 3 months.
There are those that say this is a lie because, left alone, birth will ensure naturally.
There are those who claim that life doesn’t occur until the entire “fetus” leaves the birth canal and is born, hence terminating the womans right to her own body/privacy and the “babies” rights as a natural born citizen of the USA.
I do not have dog in this fight. It is just an example that all things natural or physical are not absolute. But there are those who can make you believe the absurd and lead you to commit atrocities. If you believe A, then B is a natural outcome. Unless, of course, you think sucking the life out of foetuses while labor is active is not an atrocity. Or you believe that cold calculated murder is necessary for anyone who would commit such an atrocity so that murder is also not an atrocity or an abomination.
We try to keep our enlightenments less gory and more ideologically pure but in fact, some MEN picked a point in time where one thing is legal (abortion) and then the next week, is illegal, although nothing changes re: privacy rights. But everything changes, if you believe that.
So Alisa, yes, not matter which side you fall on with this issue, you are being made to “believe” something absurd. However, you might not be made to commit an atrocity, again, depending on whether or not you really believe it. I imagine that you would have to be made to believe it AND have it personal.
See?
Man is the measure of alll things.
Another absurdity.
This is a wonderful quote, but I have been unable to find the reference. Did Voltaire really write this? I’d like to read it in context.
‘ “Man is the measure of alll things.”
Another absurdity.’
And yet… Man is the only creature who measures things. You may now snatch the meta-context from my hand, Grasshopper.
At the end of 1984, Winston Smith loved Big Brother.
TO: Alias
RE: What Does It All Mean?!??!?!?!
What it means is that if someone sets up a propaganda machine, e.g., Goebbels or currently the so-called MSM, that gets useful fools to accept whatever they say as the truth, e..g, ‘True Believers’, then they can get those True Believers to commit murder for them.
Sooooo….
…..how much of what you hear in the MSM do you accept as ‘gospel’?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. I’m waiting to see Obama try to implement the Ayers Solution to the Constitution problem.
Another absurdity:
what has been variously referred to as man made global freezing,global warming and now’climate change’WPaladin2
Alan K. Henderson —
“The nature of the physical world tells me that killing a guy for his wallet with no witnesses around is profitable.”
No it doesn’t. The nature of the world tells you that there is always some trace evidence you may overlook. Happens all the time.
People are already predisposed to commit atrocity if they think it serves their self-interest.
If convenient, they will try to blame their actions on “those who made me believe absurdities!”
“The nature of the physical world tells me that killing a guy for his wallet with no witnesses around is profitable. That some transcendent law endows the guy with the wallet and everyone else with rights to life, liberty and property is not discernible in nature.”
Oh f*cking hell. That’s just wrong and stupid. I’ll get straight to the point:
Let’s say you kill a guy in order to steal his wallet and there are no witnesses and we’ll even assume nobody ever finds out. So what? In the absence of any further context, all that shows is that you’re a right f*cking c*nt.
Now let’s say you do the same thing except this time there are witnesses. Now what? Well now they know what you are, and if they have their wits about them they’ll know what to do to you too. Wanna know why? Because by being such a c*nt as to murder for a few quid, you’ve forfeited your natural right to not have other people kill you. Capiche?
Right now for the appalling rest of it:
First, the physical nature of the world ‘tells’ you nothing, it is you who selectively attends to it. Physical reality cannot ‘tell’ you that stealing a wallet is profitable, for the additional reason that the concepts of ‘wallet’ and ‘profit’ refer to a social aspect of reality.
Second, any ‘transcendent’ law would of course not be discernible in nature – by definition for christ’s sake.
Third, natural rights do not ‘transcend’ anything in nature because they are derived from the nature of human beings (I mean you would think the name gives it away really like wouldn’t ya?).
For various reasons having to do with self preservation, predators tend to go after the weak, the sick, and the crippled. Accordingly, I attempt to never appear weak, sick, or crippled.
When the US was in the throes of the FDR induced extension of the Depression, the US looked weak, sick, and crippled. That was the time that Hitler hoped that Japan would attack the US, so he would have time to loot Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The US is adapting to the reduction in the money supply, itself a reaction to the expectation that a Socialist Organizer would become president. The rapid printing of money will cause inflation, and regulation and taxes will extend economic weakness, giving the appearance of weakness, the appearance of sickness, and the appearance of a crippled country. Last time we paid 300,000 lives in the US and the world paid more than 50 million lives. With proliferating nuclear weapons, this time will be much worse.
Alisa, if you truly believe that you cannot be manipulated in a multitude of subtle and insidious ways, then they’ve really done a number on you.
No. Don’t listen to him Alisa. He has no idea what he’s talking about.
Cheers
Wormwood
To Mike if you’re still in the thread.
So was I. There are only two places something can be assigned the status of “reality”. Internally or externally. In the individual or in the collective. That was my point. You use the label of “fantasy” without definition. Whether “reality” is is identified by oneself or agreed upon collectiviely changes the entire definition of fantasy and reality. Is reality what other people tell us it is? Is it what each individual thinks it is? Or is it an immutable constant that we are perceiving? And if it is an immutable constant, who assigns the status of “reality”, each of us personally or is it granted by society collectively? Are individuals allowed to believe the majority is wrong in your framework? If so, then where does the authoritative label of “fantasy” come from? (I think you and I agree that it is an individual determination.)
Mike, you are making so many assertions without explaining their framework. I agree with most or all of your assertions but absent a philosophy with epistemological legs, they are only assertions. Imply to whom? Authority from whom? In a democratic collective a majority of ‘individuals’ does indeed have the (collectively granted) authority to act on the minority (even of ‘one’). And that majority can also assign to one ‘individual’ the right to command other ‘individuals’. Your assumptions only work if individualism itself is the articulated foundation of the moral framework, not an indicator of the framework’s success. If individual rights are to survive, we have to stop the pretense that we are arguing about what works best for this or for that and argue about whether a human being shall be a cell in the body of society or an independent being in its own right.
And I don’t see any connection between between scientific debate of perceptions and people committing the atrocities Voltaire was speaking of. I don’t think the stakes of a ‘wrong’ answer between the scientists involved burning alive, (or Nick M’s beloved ‘pear’
although Galileo?). If it did, then of course your example would apply. The quote was a statement about what people will do based on what they believe. What standard of certainty do they require before they will do something you or I consider an atrocity.
You are attaching the title of “false” to collectivism because it denies individual freedom. That is akin to saying ‘cold’ is “false” because it isn’t ‘hot’. It may be wrong by your and my values, but collectivism is not a falsifiable statement. You and I are diametrically opposed to it, but it is dangerous to assume that collectivists share our values and goals and are failing to achieve them. They do not share our goals and they are successfully achieving their own quite well over the last century. What we must do is not convince people that collectivism is “false” reasoning. We must show them what collectivism’s goals and values really are. Show them the naked emperor, if you will. I believe most (at least in the US) will choose individualism once they truly understand what collectivism will be. What it MUST be.
Presuming you think collectivism is unnatural that is, not derived from the nature of human beings, how come throughout recorded history life, liberty and property have been in almost all cases under collective authority with minimal if any individual authority? Anglo style individualism is extremely rare throughout recorded history across cultures. There is nothing ‘natural’ about natural rights. We must wrest them away from the much more ‘natural’ collectivists and defend them.
A lot, perhaps a majority of the people in the world see nothing unnatural with survival of the strongest. For them, property is what you take, not make. Warlord cultures are far more natural than ‘natural rights’. “I won”. The only thing “false” about collectivism is the marketing campaign. We need to attack collectivism by exposing its own goal state, not for its failure to achieve our’s.
One important thing to bear in mind in all this is the lessons of evolutionary psychology.
A lot of the trouble is caused by the fact that almost everyone has a hardwired sense of “folk economics”, perfectly apt for the smallm intimate hunting-gathering band of our ancestral environment, but well out of its depth in judging what’s fair and not fair, likely and not likely, in a large, open society of interacting strangers.
Political systems that appeal to our sense of folk economics are generally “populist”, and “populist” arguments are easily detachable and stickable on right or left wing points of view (right/left being rationalist categories, not themselves subject to “folk X” senses).
So what you have is often very intelligent, well meaning people sticking by their intuitions about what’s right and wrong. Their intuitions tell them there’s a “fair price” for everything, their intuitions tell them that someone’s gain must always be someone else’s loss. Etc, etc.
There’s no way out of it except the gradual seepage of economic thinking through the mainstream. Economic education, as the great 19th century liberal economists thought, is the key.
In fact, our current economic situation is itself a reminder of economic basics for many people, and is insofar a good thing.
But even if one is economically literate, the temptations to “populist” economic thinking are still hard to eradicate.
I’m rather surprised nobody has brought up the series of experiments performed by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the ’60s, about how easy it is to persuade average, typical college students to condone torture if a plausible context is prepared. For details, google “Stanley Milgram”, “Obedience to Authority,” etc.
“Now my point is that no one can cause another person truly believe things that cannot be proved as being based in reality”
lol! Let’s hope for Alisa’s sake that she is finding amusement in getting others to believe in the absurdity that not a single soul can be found who has caused another to truly believe things that cannot be proved as being based in reality.
Becky, I do find satisfaction in your amusement from my comment, but, alas, no enlightenment in yours.
Or, as that great philosopher of human nature so neatly put it:
W. C. Fields in the 1939 movie he wrote, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man”
Midwesterner: I might not get back to this thread until sometime tommorow.
George C. Scott, “The Flim-Flam Man” – “…I never cheated anyone who didn’t believe they were cheating me…” People believe what they see as validating themselves, then rationalize their “investment”. The people who “challange” them become guilty until proven innocent, the definition of prejudice. Atrocity inevitably follows prejudice. Thus, communism=purges, eugenics=holocost and Bernie Madoff=bankruptcy.
George C. Scott, “The Flim-Flam Man” – “…I never cheated anyone who didn’t believe they were cheating me…” People believe what they see as validating themselves, then rationalize their “investment”. The people who “challange” them become guilty until proven innocent, the definition of prejudice. Atrocity inevitably follows prejudice. Thus, communism=purges, eugenics=holocost and Bernie Madoff=bankruptcy.
“Mike, you are making so many assertions without explaining their framework.”
I will write it all down in essay (call it ‘On Natural Rights’ or something) and email it to Perry for use as a Samizdata post. His call if it’s good enough to put up here. When? I don’t know, but shoot for next week… I’ll look forward to you burning it up.
For now…
(1) Reality is external to the human mind, but it is only the individual human mind that can perceive it.
(2) Collectivism is not more ‘natural’ than individualism; it’s the result of aberration (not from a norm, but from an ‘ideal’ – one whose basis is itself in nature).
Time does not permit anything more than that.
OK. Just a comment on promising essays. I promised veryretired an essay on civil disobedience probably two or three years ago and I haven’t started it yet.
A comment on your second point. ‘Ideals’ are based on values. Values are a product of the valuer. While they can be based on the valuer’s perception of nature (mine are), they cannot be based within nature. Nature has a much more Einsteinian/Newtonian look to it. The only truly natural laws look like ‘e=mc2’ or perhaps ‘a body in motion . . . ‘
I enjoy what your comments contribute Samizdata. Please don’t take offense if/when I attack one of them vigorously. Changing each others minds is what we try to do here. As it says on Samizdata’s front page: “We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future.”
I understand the time issue. Serious thinking takes undisturbed time and lack of it is why I contribute so little any more.