What's Wrong with the Wealth Inequality Conversation

This is a power-law distribution graph. I first became familiar with the phenomenon of power-law distribution graphs from Clay Shirky's TED talk comparing institutional models of organization and collaborative models of organization.

Now, suppose you're a photo-blogger. You invest several hundred dollars and a few months on photography lessons, another couple hundred on decent quality photography equipment, and spend a few hours a week, every week taking photos and posting them to your page. As an amateur, you do quite well; your photos are of good, nearly professional quality, and you make calendars out of them over Christmas for your relatives. Your photo-blog receives, on average, around 50,000 hits per month.

Your father, on the other hand, lives in retirement and has opted, of all possible hobbies out there, to devote the majority of his free money, time, and energy into the same one you chose. After thousands of dollars on courses, seminars, workshops, equipment, and trips to exotic places, and after thousands of hours of practice time taking meticulous photos, he's finally started his own photo-blog, and his superior photos bring him in close to 1,000,000 page-views per month, with thousands of them shares.

And just as one final counter-point, let's look at your teenage daughter, a social-media tycoon and queen bee, a selfie-taking, smart-phone-wielding Facebook junkie with more tech skills than she probably deserves or knows how to productively apply. As it happens, she takes a tremendous number of photos, which she uploads to facebook via instagram. Her photos get a fare number of views, but only from close friends and family members. At your request, she reluctantly put some of her better photos into an online photo-blog. The blog gets less traffic than the Gravina Island Bridge.

I want you to keep two things in mind. First, that even the possibility of a teenager taking photographs as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world--which, in many ways, it is--would not have been thinkable a mere hundred years ago, and is now possible thanks primarily to a non-redistributive market. Secondly, in a world where websites are profitable only with the aid of people actually going to them, I want you to allegorically think of page-views as a kind of currency, to be distributed and redistributed.

Notice too that, in the greater population, photographers like your daughter are ubiquitous; like yourself are uncommon; like your father are exceptional and rare. As if by some celestial law, the page views associated with each blog correlate to quality of content, not as a matter of moral obligation or of making the internet run better, but as a function of human nature, incentive structures, and simple cause-and effect.

It is from this allegorical angle that I look at the arguments for redistributing wealth. Power-law distributions are not just about contribution of content and effort, but also describe the expected distribution of rewards, be they page-views or dollars.

In my macro-economics class, the only non-textbook article we were told to read was Joseph Stiglitz's now famous "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%," which lambasted the growing wealth inequality in the United States, and in some way spurred on and gave credence to the Occupy movement (the parts that weren't a political carry-over from Code Pink and the rest of the Anti-War movement, as Bernadine Dohrn mentioned to conservative writer and journalist Andrew Breitbart). Stiglitz actually preempted my own argument, saying:

"Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year--an economy like America's--is not likely to do well in the long haul. There are several reasons for this."

His given reasons are the following: first, wealth inequality is a result of decreasing opportunity, which is bad; second, distortions and manipulations that lead to inequality undermine the economy; third, America needs infrastructure, which is the result of 'collective action,' which inequality threatens by dividing people based on needs, desires and incentives.

As I recently wrote in a post about unemployment, there are no shortages of opportunities for work, even for lucrative work. If there is a problem of unemployment, the problem appears to be more cultural and social than it is economic in nature. Stiglitz's second point is largely correct, but is a function caused by government intervention and meddling, not solved by it.

As for the third point, the argument that "[t]he United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on..." is misleading on two fronts. First, it ignores all of the bad things government has done with the money we give it (most recently, denying the privacy-rights and presumption of innocence of its' taxpayers). As Christopher Hitchens once observed, it is true that Hezbollah gives money to charity, and that HAMAS helps feed the poor. Not to compare our own government's actions to those of theocratic-fascist organizations, but it would be equally unjust to equivocate the threat to society posed by large corporations, which often fund philanthropic infrastructure projects, with the threat posed by the government presumed to be the sole provider of such infrastructure.

Secondly, Stiglitz's point ignores the opportunity cost when money is put into "collective" goals through government. There are various reasons why the private market is a more efficient and more effective innovator, builder, and business-conductor than the government, which I won't go into here for the sake of brevity.

Stiglitz also references a common fallacy in social theorizing: the idea that those at the top stay in the top, and that money doesn't move around. We're stagnating, and money won't redistribute, so the wealthy, while outwardly complaining, are really quite happy with the status quo. Thomas Sowell thoroughly destroys this myth in his more careful study of the issue:

For the more progressively-inclined, loath to trust a conservative (a black conservative!!1!) like Thomas Sowell, Malcolm Gladwell also attacked this fundamental misunderstanding of social and economic mobility in his most recent book "David and Goliath."

Ultimately, however, none of these address the most important issues, which is not intellectual or economic or anything so high as that. The real concern at work here is a more gut-level, emotional argument: they have something I don't have. How did they get it? They're no better than me...

Well, actually, if you want to use money as your measure, yes, the 1% are better than you, and they care more about money than you do. For the same reason that your dad has more page-views on his photo-blog, because he put in time and effort to get those page views, the way Bruce Lee put in time and effort to achieve his martial arts expertise (though I'd totally get behind a "redistribution of martial arts expertise" movement), the wealthiest in America have, by and large, achieved it through a combination of luck and really, really hard work. My 8th grade math teacher was one of the founding members of Amazon, retiring in his mid-30's. How did he do it? By putting in consecutive 18-hour days, for months, on top of a finely honed expertise with computers and logistics. I will never be a member of the 1%, because I spend my time writing about stuff like this instead. As a consequence, I may one-day aspire to be among the top 1% of writers in the world though. Imagine the injustice: 1% of all writers owning 40% of all the writing talent! How terrible! When we look at money the way we look at any other kind of currency, be it respect, page-views, books, knowledge, sleep, or whatever, the lunacy of class warfare rhetoric becomes transparent.

We shouldn't be shocked or upset when we see power-law distributions at work in society. We shouldn't feel upset when your basement-dwelling cousin has a better World of Warcraft character than we do, despite his putting in roughly 1,000% more time into the game than you. We shouldn't feel upset when, after our reclusive sibling spends hours reading and studying in their room while we were out partying, they end up smarter than us. Nor should we feel we've been cheated or wronged when someone makes more money than we do. The increasing wealth-inequality is not a function of some kind of systemic injustice, but is in fact the natural product of justice--giving to each their due--and a growing population. In many ways, it is in fact a sign of freedom and equality of treatment, in that only in a free economy can real differences between individuals in goals, aspirations, drives, and the sweat of honest effort be allowed to shine openly.

Are Schools Enclaves of Totalitarianism?

One of my favorite of all Supreme Court opinions was delivered by Justice Robert Jackson in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, in which he claims that under the fourteenth amendment, all citizens are protected from the state itself "and all its creatures," including schools, and that while the needs of education necessitate special considerations, none are so demanding as to deny students their Constitutional freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. "That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." In Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), arguably the most famous and often-cited case related to American schools, Justice Abe Fortas famously wrote that "schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism."

But totalitarianism's face has changed, from the vicious and open brutality of George Orwell to a confused, bureaucratic labyrinth out of a Kafka novel. William Dobson has variously explained this phenomenon on the international scale in his book, "The Dictator's Learning Curve:"

To summarize, the old methods don't work anymore. They're too transparent. The new, more slippery and more effective way to maintain power is to use more subtle tactics: the allowance of free speech, but only in places and manners in which it is certain to have no effect; no blatantly oppressive laws, but vague laws that, when taken literally, are breathtakingly broad in scope but can be applied like a scalpel against political opponents. In short, the new totalitarians do their best to play the part of defenders of freedom, while still quietly suppressing its effects.

I used to think it was an overstatement and exaggeration to refer to school policies as "totalitarian" in nature, but I'm increasingly believing that it was Fortas, not myself, who was correct in naming the problem.

Consider, as just one example of this, the phenomenon that is FERPA law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Two years ago, Issaquah High School expelled Cameron Gardener (name changed to protect privacy). It appears that two other students who had been caught with illegal drugs had opted to turn in Cameron as a kind of plea bargain, though the details are a bit sketchy there. Cameron was brought into the principle's office from class and told that they already knew what he had done and that there was no use lying. The administration forced him to sign a confession that he had violated the school's drug policy, and then proceeded to search his person and backpack and administered a drug test. Cameron was not allowed to call a lawyer or even his parents.

Now, what's interesting in this case is that Issaquah High School didn't find any drugs on Cameron, and his drug test came out negative. Oh well, says the school. It makes no difference. He signed the confession, therefore he broke the school's drug policy. In the school's findings on the case, they audaciously congratulated themselves on respecting all of the student in question's rights during the investigation. Apparently they forgot the IV, V, VI, and VII Amendment rights; I'm no lawyer, but if those words have any communicative value, the school's actions clearly violate them. Issaquah High School turned the emergency expulsion into a 10-day suspension and never apologized to Cameron or the Gardener family.

Here's where FERPA law plays it's part. When I called to confirm these facts with the school, after the ordinary passing off from secretary to administrator to secretary, the school claimed that they could not release the information to protect the student's privacy. It wasn't particularly important, apparently, that it was the student himself who had told me about this information and given me the paperwork that had been given to him. Whose privacy is this law defending?

A much milder but similar incident occurred at Bellevue College where, in attempting to confirm facts, English professor Elizabeth Harazim (no name change, in this case), refused to provide information about a student who she had permanently removed from her class for "question[ing] a student's contributions based on ethnicity," not because she didn't want to--so she said--but because FERPA didn't allow it. The student in question's comment was actually that everyone with American citizenship is an American, no matter what their ethnicity, or at least so they said. Instead of having to overtly deny the claim, Bellevue College could simply fall back on "the student's privacy" in order to protect their own decisions, proceedings, rulings and treatment of the student.

Oops...

In mirroring the secret courts of classical authoritarian governments, schools now run on de facto secret courts, where a preponderance of evidence--rather than the "beyond reasonable doubt," or even the more lowly civil court standard of "clear and convincing evidence--as their standard burden of proof.

FERPA law is just one example of these kinds of infringements on public law that Fortas, Jackson and others warned against in attempting to teach students how to live in a free society. Free expression, free assembly, free exchange, and various other freedoms are being attacked in other, similarly sly ways, all the while paying lip service to the same rights and freedoms that our education system is systematically eroding. It's true that the schools aren't directly responsible for these laws, legal dangers and monetary incentives, but they openly and enthusiasticaly embrace of them without even a hint of a challenge or fight to retain the values they proclaim with their other face--free inquiry, freedom of speech, innocent until proven guilty, and fair, public trials. We're beyond the point where we should accept as legitimate our government school's tired old excuse that "this wasn't our fault." If they weren't taking advantage of these laws for their own sake, or at the very least being cowardly and two-faced, they would be actively working to oppose FERPA, free speech zones, oppressive speech codes and the like. But they're not, so we shouldn't be afraid of calling them by their proper descriptor: totalitarian.

On Unemployment

I recently finished Garret Garret's novel "The Driver," which opens with a surreal procession of various people, from lawyers to farmers to beggars, marching behind two men who, jointly, constitute the modern reincarnation of Christ on earth. Their mission: to solve the problem of joblessness by marching their army to Washington and demanding that congress pass a law granting unlimited prosperity to everyone. Surprisingly, the novel wasn't published in 2008, but in 1922, and set in 1893. Oh the times, they are a changin'.

"There aren't enough jobs" was the crux of the argument made by sympathizers with Coxey's army, as the odd procession came to be called. It is strikingly similar to the complaints made today, particularly of college students who emerge from their academic institutions armed with a fiercesome intellectual resume and the force of will to take on the world... only to find that no one seems to need their job-skills, or at least far fewer than expected. Economists, politicians, and lay people lazily pontificating about the world's problems will say "well, the job-market's tough out there."

But is it really? I don't think so. Nor, as it happens, does Mike Rowe, whose recent interview with Reason.TV is an insightful view into the untapped job-market that the people complaining about the lack of jobs are inexplicably ignoring.

Ignoring these jobs isn't exactly inexplicable though. In fact, it has a perfectly legitimate explanation: as we've gotten more successful as a nation, we've been told over and over again that "college is a path to success." For a while, this was true; as we got more things we needed, like food, housing, and clothes, at affordable prices, we could afford to do research, and come up with theories about society and pay people to do that. Pay them very well, in fact. It was all very new and very interesting, and such people were intellectual giants of their time. Many still are.

But we overcompensated, and the corollary of aspiring to be great doctors, lawyers, professors or politicians, by no means bad or irrational careers (except maybe that last one), was to begin looking down on the more traditional kinds of work as "beneath us." On a more personal note, as a professional truck-driver who left academia for the blue-collar world--I was previously set on becoming a teacher, then a journalist--people from various different walks of life ask when I'm going to wake up and get a "real job." Never mind that the average driving salary is $48,000 a year, ignoring benefits. My second company trainer was an owner-operator, and grossed over $150,000 last year. What do people mean by "real job?"

There is no shortage of jobs. Welders, plumbers, drivers, various tech-industry jobs (it's this easy to learn to code), are all relatively easy to get into, and provide a reasonably good income to people claiming to have no employment. In education, a field that requires upwards of 5 years of school, depending on your state, tens of thousands of dollars, thousands of hours of time that could have been spent doing something else productive, all of that will give you the opportunity to fight tooth and nail against your erstwhile classmates for a job as an intern. Maybe. I'm only slightly exaggerating. My driving-training, which with any effort will easily out-pay teachers in the long run, took one month. Not six months, not three, but one. One month. That's thirty days, to clarify, and four thousand dollars instead of eighty thousand, or more. Before I had even graduated, I had been pre-hired with three separate companies.

There is a town in North Dakota called Williston, where an oil-boom has left the city struggling to catch its infrastructure up to the incredible wealth pouring out of that region, and the subsequent flow of people pouring in. An inexperienced worker can move there and make $16 an hour as a McDonalds employee, with guaranteed overtime, or upwards of $80,000 a year as an oil-field worker. Due to the lack of housing and hotels, construction in that region is in demand, and it doesn't take much to get paid very well to pound nails.

Of course, the reason the pay is so good is that there's a cost. There's a cost--in time, energy, stress, and even danger--in every job, but in Williston, the cost is very high. Temperatures in the winter can drop into the -60F range (even excluding this year's polar vortex), the hours are long, and the whole city is essentially a sausage-fest; romantic prospects are slim even if you aren't wrapped in oil and mud-soaked Carhartts. But people who are willing to work and are resourceful enough to find housing, even just a trailer, can get it there.

I mention Williston to make a point about people's choices. In a recent episode of Joe Rogan's podcast, Stefan Molyneux pointed out that Americans under the poverty line worked an average of 16 hours a week... as a family. That's husband and wife combined, and these numbers precede the 2008 housing crisis. To be fair, there are certainly people out there who work very hard and still live in poverty, but the fact that the average sits at 16 hours a week per family, even if we grant that many people in poverty don't work at all, gives us good reason to guess that number to be much smaller than many particularly leftist politicians would have you believe. These people are, to a great extent, unemployed by choice.

This is not to say that they don't want to be employed; far from it. All I'm saying is that people who are unemployed are, by and large not willing to make the sacrifices or put in the creativity to find or make work for themselves. There is this mindset of externalization at work, which has been fostered in large part by polarized political finger-pointing and the mainstream media, that it is someone else's responsibility to make work for me. Nothing could be more damaging to employment numbers though. The jobs are out there, and it's not anybody else's responsibility to give you one. You cannot parade your way to Washington and legislate a job for yourself (though many people today do seem to be under that impression), and even if you could, you don't need to, because it's far more efficient and effective to go out, figure out what people need, and help provide that for them, and right now, like South Korea, we don't need more college educated graduates; we need linemen, and fishermen, and drivers. The problem of unemployment is social and cultural, not economic.

This article by David Wong gives eloquent (albeit vulgar) advice on how to think about this on a more personal level.

Bellevue College Revisited: Five Reasons to Despair in as Many Minutes

Political objectivity and free inquiry are not just important, but are necessary ingredients in the scientific pursuit of truth, and by extension, are necessary ingredients of an academic institution's law and culture. Without the ability to challenge conventional ideas openly, there is a danger of creating a kind of feedback loop that will support a separation from reality by repelling the protestations of the latter with ideological re-framing or by simply ignoring conflicting evidence. This classical-liberal view is shared across the right and the left verbally, which is a good sign of sorts, but it's become increasingly clear that most people don't know why it is important to separate church and state, so to speak, in the world of learning. Students, faculty and administrators have, in other words, learned to accept the core values of science and philosophy as mere platitudes and pay lip service to them while demonstrating their abject dismissal, or at the very least gross misunderstanding, of these principles. It's the classic "I believe in free speech, but..." sentiment.

I had the opportunity to revisit Bellevue College yesterday morning, and during the period after I had left academia, primarily for the above reasons, I had harbored fantasies of slow and subtle improvements in the state of academic freedom and free expression on campus. Especially freedom from the clutches of one particularly Marxist social ideology that has been pumped through the minds and coursework of students in the forms of multiculturalism, feminism, anti-racism, and moralistic rhetoric about economic disparity. I wasn't surprised by what I saw, but I was rather depressed. In about five minutes wandering around campus, I observed these five minor but subtly telling indications:

1. An article in The Watchdog heralding the election to Seattle City Council of socialist Kshama Sawant as bringing a "new, sexier age in Seattle politics, where idealism doesn't always take a backseat to bureaucracy, political paradigms, and corporate agendas."
2. Another article in The Watchdog detailing Bellevue College's paying for 17 students (at around $100 a piece) to attend this year's Budget Matters conference, an explicitly progressive-liberal conference that I attended myself last year, primarily focused on disseminating and enacting their variety of economic policies,
3. A flyer for an upcoming informational lecture on Obamacare, to be given by two public health government employees
4. Another flyer for a lecture series on such things as "dealing with difficult people," "influence and negotiation," and "communication techniques for leaders."
5. The continued existence of Bellevue College's infamous bias incident policy, a policy that FIRE representative Azhar Majeed called a "pretty terrible policy and rather restrictive of free speech rights."

The first four points are not particularly worrisome by themselves, but when viewed together under the stark light of the diversity and equality-oriented political rhetoric of everything the school does, it paints a very troubling picture of the schools' administrative priorities, and of the effect on student perspectives these priorities are having. It would appear that in higher education, ideological conformity and social mobilization are being put in the driver's seat while free inquiry, skepticism and learning generally are relegated to the passenger seat, or the trunk. In some cases, the side of the road is the most apt metaphor.

It should be clarified that the correctness or incorrectness of this Marxist social ideology is not the important question; for full disclosure, I think it is a stupid, petty, and actually rather dangerous ideology, but those opinions are irrelevant to the larger question of whether it is the schools' place to actively support and promote particular political ideologies over their stated goals and legal obligations as publicly funded institutes of learning. It is all excellent that students learn the Marxist perspective, but it is something else for the school to actively utilize students in pursuit of its own political aims, at the price of the student's own education.

Anarchism v. the State: The Debate

As this was the second take on this debate subject, I've added the opening argument from our first video in text form below:

"I was trying to think of a light-hearted observation to make about government to open this up, which is harder than it sounds, given the scale of destruction we'd ordinarily be talking about. There is one fun little story that comes to mind however; Douglas Murray, a young English Journalist, was telling a story about a Canadian politician who was under pressure to solve some minor problem or other, but she didn't have time to deal with it herself, so she delegated the task of solving this problem to her assistant before a trip overseas. Upon her return, she asked her assistant how her task was going. "Well," said the assistant, "I put together a committee to solve the problem," to which the infuriated politician replied "I told you to solve the problem, not to make it worse!"

We all kind of know our government doesn't really work for us; it's corrupt, it produces the opposite effect of what it tries to do, and hinders the work of people who are really doing great things for society. Yet when this hobbled and limping society produces some signs of progress, statists point to this as evidence that government is not merely working, but is in fact necessary for the continuation of such things. How could we have roads, or protection, or equality, or security, or freedom without the state? they ask. The real wonder, of course, isn't how we would manage it without government, but rather how we've accomplished everything that we have with this beuracratic anvil weighing us down, holding us back and poisoning with its groping, grubby fingers everything that it touches.

Before I go any further, I'll give you the definitions of "government" and "anarchy" that I'm working from, as well as three premises that I hope Chris will share with me. The first premise is that freedom is inherently good. It's not valuable because it allows us to do everything else more efficiently, though there's good reason to believe that's true, but is valuable because it is good in itself. The second premise is that coercion is evil. You could rephrase this premise as a restatement of the non-aggression principle if you'd like. The third premise is that any viable ethical standard must be consistent and universalizable, which is to say that we don't hold one standard of behavior for one person, and a different one for another. Freedom is good, coercion is bad, and double-standards are bad--those are my premises. Now, government is an organization that maintains the right to and monopoly on the initiation of force. It is authoritarian by nature, and participation in the government is not voluntary (if it was, it would merely be a kind of club with obnoxious rules). Now, since I won't expect Chris to defend some of the more extreme forms of government like Fascism, but a relatively milder kind of pseudo-democratic republic, I hope he will extend the same courtesy to me by allowing me to defend one formulation of anarchism, which is the following: an anarchist society is a society built upon the non-aggression principle, freedom, and voluntarism.  This is more like medieval Iceland, which lasted completely free of government in the above formulation for over 300 years, and not at all like the anarchy of Somalia, which is not suffering from too little aggression or too much freedom but is in fact a failed state.

By comparison, it would take 238 years to describe everything wrong with the government of the United States. I don't have that kind of time here, however, so I'll see what I can do with five minutes.

For starters, Government necessarily relies on central planning in order to accomplish its goals. This extends to every realm the government has been tragically entrusted to: economics, security, information-gathering, justice, education, infrastructure, and even social values. Central planning is less efficient in allocating resources by limiting input to a small group of people. Even your consent to be governed, the consent upon which all of American government's supposed right to power is built, is condensed into a ritualistic bureaucracy that only nine percent of Americans think actually works to their expectations. Comparing the top-down approach of the state to the bottom-up approach of a free society is to compare Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia. For those of you listening who've read Hayek's "Road to Serfdom," you know the greater dangers of central planning and the quite slippery slope to totalitarianism it presents, a slope that every day our own government gives more evidence for us to believe that we may already be over the edge of.

It's also worth pointing out that central planning usually manages to accomplish the opposite of its stated goal. I opened with Mr. Murray's joke about the Canadian politician and the committee, which demonstrates how the incentives of beuracracies built in such a way so that the beuracracy would vanish if the problem is solved, lead to the problem never actually being solved. Magic. veryone knows where it goes from there; if the problem doesn't go away, then it just proves how important the task-force's mission is and shows that we need to give them more money. This is never how people spend their money in the free market; you don't give more money to the guy who sells you rotten fruit so that he can buy better fruit. It's ridiculous until the state does it.

There's another kind of failure that comes with central planning too, one that comes from giving people peace of mind in the form of complacency with the belief that with government's help, all their problems of organization and security will be ok. In another public appearance, Mr. Murray made a humorous point of differentiating himself from the crazy kinds of libertarians who don't believe in stop signs and traffic lights. That's just silly. Except that earlier this month, reports from the German town of Bohmte, a small city that completely abolished its traffic laws, have shown that when people don't rely on central planning and take responsibility for themselves, crashes become virtually non-existent. The joke's on Douglas.

On a less humorous note, top-down planning has caused incalculable harm by increasing crime and drug problems in its war on drugs, by impoverishing us in its war on poverty, by creepily spying on us and spawning more reactionary terror in its War on Terror, by holding back children's education through the No Child Left Behind Act, by causing more teen pregnancy and spreading STDs through abstinence-only sex education programs, and by catalyzing the biggest economic crash in nearly 100 years, leaving millions of homes foreclosed, in a concerted effort to make sure every American owned their own home. If you sit down for several minutes, you can probably think of another dozen or so examples yourself. That's number one--central planning.

Number two, government fights fire with fire. In its moral inconsistency, it does precisely the crimes that it tells everyone else are wrong, and ultimately, we end up as the victims. The state punishes violent crime, but uses the threat of force to accomplish its goals via the military and the cops, and subjects hundreds of thousands of people a year to kidnap, brutality, imprisonment, rape, and even death. It punishes counterfeiting, but prints money at will, currency that doesn't correlate to any value created in the market. Why does it have value? Because we say it has value, and we'll jail you if you refuse to accept it. It punishes and destroys monopolies, while simultaneously attempting to establish itself as a monopoly in various fields. It punishes fraud, but lies, insists on secrecy, and misleads the public. It punishes theft but takes money from us by force through taxation. More elaboration might be needed for listeners who don't believe taxation is essentially armed robbery, but for the sake of time I'll save it for the rebuttal or open discussion portion.

Thirdly, the authoritarian nature of government predisposes its population to the twin evils of apathy and ignorance. One of my favorite quotes from the Supreme Court is from Justice Robert Jackson's opinion in the Barnette decision, an overruling of a decision from three years prior that compelled students to pledge allegiance to the flag--idolatry to the young Jehova's Witnesses and accompanied with the uncannily Nazi-like gesture of the time, arm outstretched in the classical Bellamy salute. In response to the notion that students could not be trusted with the liberty extended to adults, Jackson said the very fact that children are being educated for citizenship "is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." It is an unfortunate irony that it is precisely "our government" Justice Jackson referenced that was doing what he feared, in the form of the school board as well as the Supreme Court in its previous decision, and all of modern social psychology supports the notion that not money, but authority and obedience to authority, is the root of all evil. Philip Zimbardo's work supports this based on his observations in the Stanford Prison experiment and in Abu Ghraib, Stanley Milgram noticed this in his infamous shock-therapy research, and countless other writers, politicians and intellectuals have pointed this out in various ways. "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." The very existence of government, and the acceptance of its claims to power, underscores this point and undermines its subsequent moral imperative to individual autonomy and free thought.

Finally, while people aren't wholly good or evil, they definitely aren't all the same either. Psychopathy, pseudologia fantastica (what we normally call compulsive lying), sadism and egomania are real things, as are their clinically milder forms in generic character traits, and the coercive power offered by government position attracts precisely the kinds of people we shouldn't want to give power too. Alternately put, if people are good enough to trust with authority over others, than they wouldn't need to be governed in the first place; if they're bad enough to need governing, than you couldn't trust them with the power vested in the State for fear of making a bad situation even worse. This is the foundation of what we now call "Crony capitalism," domination by monopolies led by equally psychopathic executives that can only rise to their positions of extraordinary power and influence with the assistance of corruption in the State. Wall Street, Blackwater, Monsanto, Haliburton, and various other pet companies of powerful politicians demonstrate this point with crystalline clarity.

A side effect of this that we should notice is that the assistance and subsidies provided to these companies also works to stifle legitimate competition. Thorium, for instance, the most efficient and incredible energy source known to man, is currently being actively suppressed as a viable energy source in favor of oil and various green energy projects. It's impossible to guess how much scientific progress we've lost to the interests of big brother's best friends.

In the vein of state power's attraction to evil, our government's adventures in foreign policy is tragic, bordering on grotesque. Thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children have been killed every decade by the American government, even before its metastasis in the last century. The Native American tribes are but a shadow of their former selves, even today, as a result of government action in that era. Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Iran, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, could be added to the list of countries left decimated by the United States' uninvited arrival. We should recognize here that whether such actions were spiritually supported by the country's initial founders and documents is irrelevant; it grants legitimacy to the initiation of force, and the descent into something much more sinister and much more ugly is only a matter of time.

This, unfortunately, is what Chris is forced to defend.

Now, a society based on the non-aggression principle, universal standards and freedom is not an unstructured Wild West, contrary to popular belief. An anarchist state is one that would benefit from unfettered free markets, free and open trade being the ongoing 300-year experiment that has proven to be one of the greatest advances in human civilization.

An anarchist state is one without coercion or forced relationships. Isn't it an old story, about the North Wind and the Sun betting on which could get the man to take his coat off? The harder the wind blew, the tighter the man bundled himself up, but when the sun simply gave a bit of warmth, he took it off of his own free will. Persuasion is more conducive to truth, economic efficiency, and healthy human relationships than force, and a society built around this principle will benefit accordingly. In short, an anarchist society would be one that is more peaceful, more wealthy, and more happy than in any similar community forced to deal with a force that can take away your property, your freedoms, or even your life, whenever and wherever it so chooses. With that, I hope you will overwhelmingly support the motion."

The Disturbing Aesthetic Draw of Inner Demons

"The writer is the engineer of the human soul."
--Joseph Stalin

When I was in High School, I was among a fairly large crowd of students for whom Lord of the Flies was the crown of literature. "Ralph wept for the end of innocence, for the darkness of man's heart..." For the emotionally smoldering adolescent with the embers of a newly kindling intellect, Golding simultaneously captured the evil we saw in the world, the dark side of the supposedly good people in our lives--often the ones we had just discovered weren't as saintly as we had been taught to believe--and, most importantly, our own inner demons. There was good, as we'd been shown in childhood, but our own darker desires, a new mix of sexual and violent instincts, had seemed like a tabboo subject, not to be broached with parents, teachers, or any other adult. Or friend, for that matter. Here was everyone pretending to be good and perfect, but they weren't. I wasn't. "No one understands me," is so universal a sentiment it's become an cliche. In my own teenage years, the irony of such generic uniqueness was lost on me.

Of course, teenage hormone-induced angst is not the same as the good and evil duality of human nature, but for many of us who grew up in good neighborhoods, it was our first glimpse at this idea, and it coincides (perhaps for reasons beyond chance?) with a genre of art that made us feel that someone really did see the world through the same lens as we did.

As I grew older, more literature spoke out in the same way. Macbeth: "Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires." From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: "I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both." And, getting older still, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being..." This artistic expression isn't limited to literature either: it creeps into painting, to tattoos, graffiti, even fashion. Movies like the infamous, black-humored "Full Metal Jacket" illustrate the point in a more major form of media.

Possibly even more powerfully for young people, it comes through in music: "In the land of the killers, a sinner's mind is a sanctum" (Eminem).

Indeed, what we know of human psychology, primarily through the eerie experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, support this intuition. People are good... but good people can and do turn evil in strange and terrifyingly predictable ways. Perhaps we aren't even really good, just a convoluted mix of good and evil, or just good and bad instincts that lead to outcomes we divide into good an evil. In any case, the voice of science has spoken, and there are no angels. Or demons.

But there is an aesthetic question that is unanswered by psychology: why the fascination? What draws us to art that dwells upon this fact about ourselves and holds us there, in ways our tendencies to love, to hate, and to err don't quite manage? This very fascination has a kind of meta-draw in itself, as brilliantly illustrated by Tool in a song I can't help but feel incredibly attached to: (lyrics)

In saying all of this, I am breaking one of my own cardinal rules of discussion by singing along with the lyrics: you all feel the same, don't lie.

As is fitting to the tone of the art itself, there is a danger of opportunistic thinking in our dwelling on these dark expressions of human nature so tenaciously, with results that can be very consequential in the world outside of mere aesthetic appreciation. I think that part of the grip of these dark works is their taboo nature, like the dirty secret of everyone you ever knew, and yourself, all in one statement. But that simply begs the follow-up question of why that is so incredibly interesting, and the answer, I think, belies the larger attraction of art like Tool's "Vicarious," and also its hidden danger: it says that not only are those previously idolized role models for proper living not so great, but also that such aspirations may be impossible. The most gripping works almost seem to sneak the thought into your mind for you that perhaps... well, maybe it's a good thing? Well, no of course not, that's horrible. Oh wow, look at the news, there's a body...

It cannot be helped--the entertaining fascination with death feeds on the inaction of the forces of good.

Not terribly long ago, people used to look at idealistic, noble heroes as their role models. If one was religiously or mythically inclined, the selection was obvious and straightforward; Jesus, perhaps, or king Arthur and the knights of Camelot. If not, or perhaps in addition, there were a variety of others to choose from, depending on one's values: Kant, Mill, Socrates, Trotsky, Currie, Darwin, and countless others. The stories of chivalry, honor, of living by a code and striving to do right were the stuff of children's stories and bred principled and moral individuals with enough regularity to shape the culture of the generation. When the cutting and cynical perception of not just human weakness, but the corruptibility of even the greatest among us became de rigueur, the bar was set quite a bit lower for personal standards than it was for previous generation. And it's so easy; it's a get-out-of-moral-responsibility-free card that can be waived in the face of even the most righteous and humble agitator for public virtue. Our hypocrite-alarms are like spinning radars, ready to swivel round and level our gorgon gaze at anyone who appears to make us look ethically lazy by comparison. They drive us not only to be critics by incentive, but also by extension to be conformists by threat.

The best, the worst, part: it's all true. We really are fallen angels with the capacity buried within us to do great acts of compassion as well as horrific evil and violence.

Does this immediately turn us into self-conceited sociopaths? Obviously not, but in my observation, this mindset makes little things like littering a bit easier, and stills our uneasy conscious about not donating money to things we might actually care about. The ratcheting of this pattern, as data inevitably brings these trends to light, could become a self-feeding cycle of cynicism and moral apathy. Universalizing works in both ways after all; just as the old "what if everybody did that?" question can be used to convince people not to throw that empty pop can out the window, it would hardly seem worth the effort to not litter if everyone actually was doing that. If solving the problems of the world rely on people's voluntary efforts, there's a danger of failure, however slight and mild, built into these paintings and novels and songs. It's so evil, and it feels so good!

Can this all come about by art? Yes, of course it can. An end of the world scenario of nihilistic zombies caused by an exceptional haiku is, indeed "unlikely," but it's worth remembering that a novel created the FDA, and a movie launched the KKK into a position of enormous political power and influence for decades. Think about the effect that the Bible, what amounts to a collection of mythological stories, has had on human history. As Robin Williams said in his nearly anachronistic role as poetry teacher, "no matter what people tell you, word and ideas can change the world."

Fortunately it is possible to appreciate the works of Golding and Shakespeare, and even the research of Zimbardo and Milgram, without letting it lower our bar for higher moral aspirations. We can sing along with Tool without letting the uncomfortable knowledge of our fascination with death and suffering prevent us from actively working to fight against it, even if it sometimes feels like we're the only ones. The fallibility, or fall-ability in the catholic-myth tradition, of human nature need not be a justification to stay on the ground when we fall. But this way of thinking, upon which the rate of our civilization's advancement rests, takes awareness and conscious effort. The art of inner demons sells well because it speaks to an inner truth about us that we aren't really used to hearing and tempts us with an offer of evening out the social ladder by morally tearing down everybody else, instead of doing the hard work of actually climbing it by living a life of principle and honor (there's a word you don't hear very often).

Ultimately, the failures of other people and the corruptibility of the soul are not a valid reason for apathy in important matters, and a wonderfully paradoxical justification is that we're imperfect. The impossibility of sainthood, to anyone or anything, is a kind of freedom to live the life we want to live. Close examination of this question, when we really look at what makes us feel happy, and not just secure, points to the idealist life in pursuit of truth, beauty, justice, and virtue that the music of the angsty and adolescent split human spirit draws us away from. One could say the aesthetic of outward-looking but self-focused idealism is the opposite of the inward-looking and projecting art of cynicism. It is proactive self-reliance instead of reactive denigration. Conscious decision in the dualism of art, in other words, is the answer to our internalized disquiet on the dualism of man.

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude ."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Endlessly Changing Horizon

Within the first few months of my departure, a friend of mine asked if I was going "into the wilds" on her and everybody else back home in Washington. I didn't know the specific reference at the time, but my proclivity towards good literature, even while driving, eventually paired me with an audio version of Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild, about the young Christopher McCandless' tragic but nonetheless inspiring adventure of self discovery and pursuit of true beauty and the good life. Yes S, I may be slow, but I get the reference now.

It would be fraudulent of me to say, post hoc, that the eloquent reasons McCandless gave for his expedition into the wilderness are my own. The reasons I gave for my abandonment of academia were more banal in their (ironically, I see now) academic tone: student loan depredations, academic inconsistency with my values and with liberty generally, the cult of diversity and multiculturalism--a critic's phrase, not my own--the raw price of the whole ordeal, its ultimate irrelevance and separation from pure learning generally, etc. But it would be wrong to say that the Joycian drive to forge off on one's own played no part, and the benefits sought by the likes of Steven Daedalus and his creator have become the bi-products of my more shallow motives.

It isn't just Irish writers and young athletes with family problems that feel impelled to hit the road. Some of the same impulses McCandless put words to were true for various young idealists throughout history, many of whom are detailed in Krakauer's book. Krakauer himself is among these dreamers. I feel that my love of authors like Jack London, Gary Paulson and Richard Bach, in conjunction with my love of traveling, my idealistic tendencies that drove me towards becoming a SEAL and then towards writing, and the testimony of my friends and of strangers, all allow me to claim some degree of membership in this ancient and demanding club of misfits.

My own brief reference back in August to finding the open road and solitude attractive is nothing in depth and passion compared to McCandless' own thoughts, nor to Thoreau's in Walden, nor the various other prophets, thinkers, and characters in history who wrote about their time alone in the woods. But what I was thinking about and conceptualizing in that concise sentence, had I devoted a day to elaboration, meditation and exhortation, might have come close in feeling to one of Christopher's letters:

"I'd like to repeat the advice I that I gave you before, in that I really think you should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence, there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty."

It's a point two of my other intellectual heroes, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, primed me for in their own views about how to live the good life in the short time we have, but one that very few people seem to pursue, and perhaps for good reason. Different people do have different preferences (I'll avoid delving into the political implications of such an obvious but ignored fact for the sake of keeping a cohesive post), and the nomadic, adventurous life may not be for everyone, even for a brief time. It has always had a draw on me however, and while it wasn't the original reason of my departure from civilization to the strangely Borderlands-esque world of professional truck-driving, this kind of freedom and variety has already fast become my favorite part of my new life. Make no mistake, it is a new life, no matter how long or temporary it ends up being, but if things continue as they are, it may be longer than I originally anticipated. I am doing exactly what I envisioned doing: listening to intelligent people on audio books, listening to... people, of all kinds of backgrounds and with different ideas outside of the truck, writing consistently and seeing the country. It may be a bit early to judge, but if first impressions mean anything, ditching college and its trappings for the road has been the most radical and best decision of my life.

Vicarious Redemption: The Masochistic Religion of the Left

A repetitive routine of racial, ethnic, national and even ideological self-flagellation has somehow become one of the defining characteristics of the modern progressive-liberal movement. I first noticed this when our economic history (economics, mind you; this wasn't a social or ethnic studies class) read Howard Zinn's infamous tract, "A People's History of the United States." This majority hating and/or self-hating, masquerading as "empowerment" for minorities, is worked into government school curricula with the explicit purpose of infiltrating this philosophy into the mainstream public through the next few generations.

What's the attraction of this self-evisceration?

In 1951, the social psychologist Eric Hoffer wrote a book entitled "The True Believer." It was heavily utilized in a recent critique of the American far-right, an excellent and informative book called "Republican Gommorah" by Max Blumenthall. I think however, that the prophetic concerns and arguments raised in Hoffer's little book go far in explaining the bizarre loathing of the left in its modern form. The best analogy, fittingly, is in the Right's own pet problem: religion.

What are the core beliefs of Christianity? We can summarize its essential elements in the following way. Long ago, a man named Adam disobeyed God's commands, and so God punished him by condemning him, his wife, and all of his children to the remotest generation as sinful. We are not sinful because we have sinned, per se, but were in fact sinful by birth: we were born disobedient, rebellious, and short of the glory of god. This crime is punishable by death. Not death in the ordinary sense, but infinite death in the fires of Hell. But God did something that we today might call "counter-intuitive:" he had his son born into human form so that he could be killed off, thus freeing human-kind of their sinful nature by the magic of this human-sacrifice, so long as they accept this offer and throw themselves on the mercy of the Lord. In the words of the immortal Hitchens, "we are created sick, and commanded upon pain of death to be well again."

"Here, as elsewhere," writes Eric Hoffer, "the technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as the cure."

The artificial disease, in the case of modern-day radical-egalitarian culture, is responsibility for the infinite crimes of our ancestors. The cure is penitence and public disavowal of these crimes. By repudiating our ancestors, our history, our heritage, and our culture, while simultaneously embracing the moral, and perhaps even pragmatic, superiority of other cultures, we can achieve moral purity and self-transcendence. We can speak vicariously for the oppressed, against ourselves, and find redemption.

The self-negation and moral bankruptcy of this proposition should be self-evident the moment you actually do put yourself in another person's shoes. In the opening of Zinn's chapter on American slavery, he makes excuses and explains away the existence of African slavery as not being "real" slavery compared to the American variety. To be fair, he's right in saying the two are not equivalent, and that there is a scale of right and wrong action, rather than an easy binary, but it is odd how otherwise exceptionally intelligent people with sharp noses for crimes against humanity make excuses for the most horrendous crimes when they are committed by "the other." Sam Harris' encounter with a Whitehouse bioethics advisor who couldn't bring herself to condemn a hypothetical tribe that gouged out the eyeballs of children for religious reasons is another sharp illustration of the effects of such a philosophy. The idea on the left that our identity in the West (the origin of this masochistic movement)--our race, our nations, our ethnicity, our cultures, even our values--that all of that is evil, is an idea that is every bit as dogmatic and taken as an axiom of faith as the claims made by its supernatural counterparts on the right.

There is a more pragmatically sinister aspect of this faith of ideological self-immolation. In the aftermath of 9/11, there were a number of public figures who claimed that we deserved it, that we brought those airplanes upon ourselves. This is, aside from disgusting, immediately and obviously false; the western-educated and upper-class terrorists flew themselves into our skyscrapers because they had been convinced that they would get an "advance-directly-to-go" card for heaven, where they would collect 72 virgins, and if they were lucky, advance the cause of reestablishing the old Islamic empire, the Caliphate, in the process. But it's interesting to notice who it was, specifically, that was saying that it was all our fault. Jerry Fallwell and his compadres on the right claimed we had brought it on ourselves by embracing homosexuality and abortion. This actually contains a probable grain of truth, since the Abrahamic prejudices of Fallwell and his ilk are in many ways shared with the pork-shunning Muslim reactionaries who see violence as a legitimate tool for religious evangelism. But the peace-loving progressive-liberals had their response prepared too: Noam Chomsky, the hero of the most radical elements of the modern-day left, responded by saying it was we, the United States, that were the real terrorists, and that while al Qaeda was still responsible, we had more or less caused these delusional religious zealots to bomb us through decades of political manipulation and oppression in the Middle East and elsewhere. This is how to "love thy enemy" as a godless liberal.

What this does is take away a nation's right to self-defense, so long as that nation is us (when others do it, it's always justified, since it's always self-defense). If we go into Afghanistan to try to root out international criminals protected by a ragged, theocratic-fascist government, that's a war of aggression, because 9/11 was itself an act of retribution against American imperialism. What sort of imperialist crimes were these? Among Bin Laden's list of indictments used as justification for the attack were the crimes of not doing enough to stop the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Serbia, and also for stopping a Muslim genocide against Christians in East Timor. We'd have to allow the genocides desired by Bin Laden or any other thug with violent inclinations towards a Western nation, while suppressing the violence they dislike.

This kind of self-transcendence via self-negation from the left is a one-way street, as foreigners are quick to agree with us and point out our historical moral failings (as if that left us responsible, decades or centuries later), while being extremely slow and equivocating about their own culture's record. Try, for example, to find a modern-day Muslim who will admit plainly and unequivocally that it was an wrong for Mohammed to have married a 7-year-old girl. ("But he waited till she was 9 to make it official!"). Similarly, the crimes of the Turkish empire, or the horrible atrocities of the Japanese empire, are relatively unknown in the American classroom, but everyone is intimately familiar with the Trail of Tears and the Japanese internment camps. No one else is responsible for their history, but we in the civilized West are responsible for everything. In accepting this malady of historical responsibility, we open the door to some genuinely dreadful ideologies that are far less apologetic about far worse crimes.

Fortunately, the remedy is not needed because the disease is imaginary. We are not living in sin because Adam ate the apple, and we are not genocidal racists because Americans 300 or 50 years ago had these very real but often exaggerated tendencies. We are individuals, not members of a collective inheriting liability for the sins of our fathers. This should be a fundamentally attractive way of thinking to liberals, as it is the only way to thoroughly combat bigotry, the broad characterization and judgment of entire groups based on membership rather than on their individual character. If we forget this, it's conceivable that we could end up in a society where it's socially unacceptable to use racial slurs against minorities, like "nigger," but common practice to use racial slurs against the races of our own core-culture, like "redneck" for the Irish. Let us hope we never reach that level of ingrained masochism.

Douglas Murray on the crimes of the west:

Christopher Hitchens on the necessary concessions of liberal masochism

To Germany: "Help us!"

Washington Post

Everyone is familiar with the obsessive, clingy stalker girlfriend, or overprotective and inquisitive boyfriend. The "overly attached girlfriend" videos and memes are a kind of humorous satire of this kind of thing gone extreme.

Okay, maybe not satire or extreme, but still funny in abstract. But no one tolerates this kind of thing from their significant other for very long, and from their friends, not for a second.

Except Americans, for some strange reason. Our government has done precisely this, and now we're past a point of being able to control the tiger. Our overly-attached girlfriend completely controls our lives, and we're trapped. It's only natural for us to assume that other countries are similarly controlled.

It's easy for Americans living in a post-9/11 America to make post-hoc excuses for this kind of espionage, usually cynical ones along the lines of, "well, isn't this kind of normal, even if it isn't good? Didn't everyone know about this already, like, 10 years ago?" The answer is no, and even if everyone around the world did know the American government was spying on them, it wouldn't make it okay.

I hope that Angela Merkel doesn't forgive Obama, and I hope that France, the UK, and other countries jump on the shame train to try to change our governments policies. Here in the United Staes, around 75% of Americans are against the Orwellian NSA's spying operations, but that wasn't enough to stop it from happening. Both Obama and Romney supported these operations, despite Obama's stated opposition, and even if 100% of the American public had voted for Gary Johnson (the candidate I voted for who actively opposed excessive government growth and power, including the War on Terror and its spying operations, and who received just under 1% of the popular vote), not a single member of the electoral college voted for him. There is literally nothing the American people can do to stop this at the moment, short of something as drastic as a violent revolution. Given most gun-regulations, in blatant violation of the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, that isn't really a possibility either.

The American people have been spied on and locked up by their own government for things like whistleblowing or speaking out against the government, not just more than any other time in American history, but more than all of American history up to this point combined. Between the occupy movement, the espionage act of 1917 (now used to defend government espionage, instead of protect against it), and the broad and vague list of laws that leave most citizens guilty of several felonies daily, there's nothing we can do. Most Americans seem to be disillusioned with politics, but lack the willpower, the knowledge, or the conviction to change things, and are certainly not willing to go to prison in the attempt. It might be up to foreign powers like Germany using a big stick in order to change things, if they really do think that American spying is unacceptable.

For our freedom's sake, I hope they do. Help us Germany.

Logocidal Maniacs

In Kors' and Silvergate's book "Shadow University," they discuss a court case in which a young Jewish student, Eden Jacobowitz, had charges of racial hatred, or something to that effect, brought up against him for shouting "shut up, you water buffalo!" to a black sorority group that was drunkenly serenading his dormitory at 11:00 pm. There was an enormous amount of discussion and argument over whether or not "water buffalo" was a racial slur or epithet; a term which, to the Yiddish-speaking Jacobowitz, roughly translated from the Yiddish word behema, or "cow," a mildly insulting synonym for "foolish, unmannered or obnoxious person." The news anchor, John Chancellor, argued that the thought police on campus were threatening communication itself by extension, because if the unspoken premises of the charges were true, words no longer had agreed upon meanings, but could mean whatever the alleged and presumed victim wanted them to mean.

Chancellor's evocation of Orwell by referencing "thought police" is more prescient than it might seem to those who think, "come on, this is an academic institution, not some Big Brother." In his 1946 essay on politics and the English language, a defense of simple English against the creeping in of euphemism and abused metaphors, Orwell argues that if we aren't careful, sloppy language can create sloppy thinking, and that bad metaphors and meaningless phrases can lead us to come to bad, meaningless, or imprecise conclusions. If "water buffalo" can be a racially-charged insult, what other words might the young minority college student interpret through the convoluted lens of deconstructive ideology and critical power-structure analysis?

I've written about the problems of political polarization before, and it's true that much of the problem does have to do with how we solve our problems of cognitive dissonance. Do we assume the people we disagree with are seeing things differently, and one of us is incorrect, or assume we have identical experiences and the other side is simply evil? However, the proper interpretation of language, or the failure to properly define what we mean and agree upon definitions, can exacerbate or perhaps even cause these problems too. When I listen to popular pundits talk about how the Republicans are terrorists, or how Liberals hate freedom, it's not just an exercise in what I like to call "bad psychology," but it's also an attack on the agreed upon meaning of "terrorist," and a confusion of what "hating freedom" looks like. By example, imagine an anarchist debating a socialist about the proper role of government. As soon as the anarchist says that he's an anarchist and that he thinks government shouldn't exist, let alone monopolize healthcare, the socialist is in danger of using different interpretations of "government" and "anarchy" than the anarchist.

How anarchists think of Anarchism:

How socialists think of Anarchism:

There is a grain of truth to both, of course, but they're very, very different and separate ideas, and if an anarchist is implicitly defending the former and condemning the latter, while the socialist is completely ignorant of the former and assuming the latter because of imprecise and completely different understandings of what "anarchy" means, debate becomes impossible and you get more severe segregation of ideas.

Conversely, when the socialist defends the necessity of government and the state to correct for congealed imbalances of power, they might picture statism/socialism like this:

But when the anarchist thinks of state intervention, or even hear the word "statism," they might think of something other than what the socialist is describing:

Again, these are two very different ideas that have been blurred together. Without precisely defining terms and outlining ideas, arguments will be useless at best, divisive and counterproductive at worst.

Here's a very short list* of politically-charged words I think are being abused and mangled beyond recognition--killed, in my mind--by their use in ordinary political conversation:

1.) Terrorism

A terrorist is someone who uses lethal violence to inspire fear in a population in order to coerce that population to do something, or perhaps to not do something. A terrorist is a Mexican drug cartel hit-man leaving severed heads in elementary schools, not politician leveraging their decision-making power to further an agenda, or a hacker from 4chan insulting or mildly disrupting the Church of Scientology. You can call these bad if you'd like; that's an opinion. But to call it terrorism is an assertion of fact, and it's objectively untrue, and diluting to our ability to communicate.

2.) Racist

The connotation when someone is called a racist is usually that they are a racial supremacist, probably violent, of the Hitler variety. If someone asserts that they think the races might be genetically different, that is factually a racist statement, but it isn't an argument about racial supremacy or violence or anything that comes with the connotations we associate with the term "racist." It's a scientific assertion that might or might not be true, and it's truth is irrelevant to someone's opinion about whether it's good or bad. That's only a mild problem though, and is limited mainly to biology disputes. Eden Jacobowitz was called racist, a crime he said he would rather die than be guilty of, because what he said was reinterpreted. This is most common in the art of "deconstructionism," whereby an idea is broken down and taken in the context of who said it, at what time, and under what conditions such an idea might have benefited the speaker, before being ruthlessly shredded to pieces and discarded as selfish and evil. This is where we get strange words like "patriarchy" and "heteronormativity" from, which are, of course, just as vulnerable to deconstructive criticism as any other ideology.

Racism is generalizing skills and traits by race and ascribing them to that race. It is biologically unfounded (racism is false), but not morally evil, compared to, say, racial supremacy. Racism has nothing intrinsically to do with culture or religion. Let me say that again: racism has nothing intrinsically to do with culture or religion. Someone who criticizes Islam is not racist against Arabs. Similarly, someone who holds American culture to be inferior to, say, African culture is not racist against white people.

3.) Fascist

Closely associated to the abuse of labeling people as Nazis. Fascism is a specific and extreme form of authoritarian nationalism. It has nothing to do with gun control or abortion, or religion, though it might have an effect on these things. It isn't uncommon to see someone called a fascist for being too left wing or too right wing, when in reality, either side can be excessively authoritarian. Often times, some of the most outspoken opponents of Fascism and totalitarianism are themselves accused of being fascist (neoconservatives and Trotskyites in particular). One's economic ideas have nothing to do with nationalism or authoritarianism, intrinsically (though admittedly, the latter does tend to be correlated).

4.) Rape

Rape is forcing someone to have sex. It can happen to men, women or children, and it doesn't necessarily require penetration. What makes a word like "rape" complicated is how people define consent nowadays and its relationship to personal responsibility. For example, if a woman has several drinks, many feminists hold that she cannot give consent anymore. Therefore, any sex that happens after a woman drinks is de facto rape (this isn't extended to men, of course). Notice that we don't hold to this kind of reasoning when a drunk driver runs someone over; the driver is not only still held responsible, but is in many ways held to be more responsible.

Some of the more legally aggressive have gone even farther in taking away a woman's responsibility in the matter, saying that excessive power differentials take away a woman's ability to consent (rape), or that a woman who regrets sex might realize post hoc that she might not have been able to give consent, even if it seemed alright at the time (rape), or even that a woman who dressed attractively, flirted, made out with, implicitly consented to, and actively participated in sex, but perhaps forgot to say the magic words "I consent to sex!" repeatedly--because consent can be withdrawn at any moment--might legally and ethically be able to later say that they were raped.

Other misapplied terms like "rape apologist" and "rape culture" have come out of some of these misrepresentations and blurred definitions of rape. Suffice to say, American prisons and fascistic Islamic countries are something like rape cultures. Mainstream American society is not.

5.) Irony

This is a word that isn't being killed, but might actually already be dead. Hopefully, it will be possible to resuscitate the great word, but odds are slim.

Irony is when there is an incongruity between a statement or situation and the truth, particularly when there is a reversal of expectations. The Oatmeal does a much better job explaining exactly what it is than I can, but here's a short list of what irony is not (though some of these can be ironic):

- anything humorous
- poetic justice
- blatant sarcasm (especially if its repetitive and predictable)


--To be continuted--

*Other words commonly abused, in no particular order, include: conservative, liberal, Tea Party, empowerment, tolerance, safe, diversity, equality, communist, democracy, rights, freedom, faith, courage, religion, brainwash, dogmatic, and the various ____phobes (homophobe, Islamophobe, etc)