Very sadly, I have to report that The Charles Goyette Show, at least on KFNX AM 1100 in Phoenix, is at an end. My very best wishes and prayers to Mr. Goyette and his new wife. Hands down he is the best talk radio show host in the nation.
Visit his website: CharlesGoyette.com.
The great Lew Rockwell is interviewed on AntiWar Radio. Listen here [mp3].
The Revolution Hasn't Ended: CampaignForLiberty.com.
Beltway Libertarians vs. Rothbardians:
- "Libertarianism’s Divergent Roads" by Justin Raimondo.
- "The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard" by David Gordon.
- "The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard, Part II" by Gordon.
Another Review of The Revolution: A Manifesto.
For those who have not read the book yet, go out and get it. It's an excellent and succinct book. Despite its short size, I believe Ron Paul covers the issues brought up in the book very well. It will bring a new generation in the Liberty movement. Among other things, he covers the foreign policy views of the founding fathers and of the traditional conservatives. He points to the work of Michael Scheuer, Philip Giraldi, and Robert Pape to document the underlying root causes of terrorism. For instance, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini tried for years to create a Jihad against the West because, as the neoconservatives say, of the "freedom" we have. That didn't work out all that well. And if we compare this to Osama bin Laden, we find that he gets recruits by different rhetoric which rallies people against the foreign policy of the U.S. government. Or if we just look at all individual suicide attacks, these individuals who became terrorists for reasons of religion is statistically low. Well, there is much more---but you will have to get the book.
Butler Shaffer is a brave soul. He attended a Republican Convention. Here he writes about it.
Some Politically Incorrect Taboos about the U.S. Government:
- "The United States has become a rogue state, a pariah nation, an evil empire.
- "The United States' military is the greatest force for evil in the world.
- "The United States is the arms dealer to the world.
- "The United States is not the world's policeman.
- "The United States cannot redeem the world through violence.
- "The United States is not the God-anointed protector of Israel that enjoys a special relationship with God.
- "The United States government is the greatest threat to American life, liberty, and property – not the leaders or the military or the people of Iraq, Iran, Syria, China, Russia, or Venezuela."
From "Christianity and War" by Laurence M. Vance.
The Empire has murdered a greater amount of persons than the terrorist organizations that originate from the Middle East. Or am I not allowed to say that? Maybe neoconservatives will follow the lead of their ideological left-liberal cousins in Canada and try to pass "Hate Speech" laws!
"War and the Common Good" by Anthony Gregory.
See "Legislating Tyranny," excerpted from The Tyranny of Good Intentions, by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton.
Now I do not relish seeing yet another administration in the White House. It is nothing but replacing one criminal gang with another. However, it will at least be nice to see the Bush nightmare administration gone. Why if only the modern version of "red state fascist" conservatism (and the whole Republican Party) would leave with him.
"The Spy Who Loves Us" by Philip Giraldi.
"You Want Change?" asks Justin Raimondo, "Me too – but don't hold your breath…"
Thomas J. DiLorenzo on Dictator Lincoln.
Dr. Wilson writes at Chronicles:
Thought experiment. According to widely accepted folklore, the Northern States fought the Southern States in 1861-1865 in order to free the slaves. If the South had freed the slaves after seceding, would the North have attacked them? (The answer is yes. The North attacked not to free the slaves but to “preserve the Union,” i.e., in order to keep the South captive for economic exploitation. The slaves being freed would have increased the incentive to attack and control the South because the Northern ruling class believed, mistakenly, that free blacks would provide cheaper and more profitable labour than slaves.)
"The ‘Good War’ and the Terrible Peace" by Patrick J. Buchanan.
Ludwig von Mises: “The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.”
"War and Inflation" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"What Are Just Prices?" by Jeffrey A. Tucker.
"Starving the World's Poorest" by Bogdan C. Enache.
Upcoming Book to Buy: Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Russell Kirk. It will be out sometime in July. Here is it at ISI Books. Besides The Essential Russell Kirk, this book stands out the most in their Kirk collection. It should be a good read.
Most "discount" book clubs are not worth it. The ISI Books Readers Club seems to be an exception to the rule. It is $15 and there are no obligations. I am a member and I'm happy with it.
Speaking of Books: If you do not have Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, then you must. The Mises Institute has a new edition out. Buy it.
In this 1998 essay Sobran asks: "Are you a Marxist?"
Did Someone Say "Blackmail in Politics"?
(Off-Topic) "'Some of us are owed an apology': Traditionalists and the Latin Mass" - An Interview with Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Speaking of Robert Nisbet, here are a few excerpted passages from Twilight of Authority you might find somewhat interesting...
The concept of a public order, like the concept of a public law, was almost completely foreign to the medieval legal mind. Order, like liberty, rights, and membership in society generally, was conceived of as a tissue or network of "private" relationships in the Middle Ages. Law, to be sure, was held to transcend everything, including the king and his claimed powers; in medieval political theory everyone, the prince included, was "under the law," in the common phrasing at that moment. So far as security and protecting were involved in individual lives, associations like the kindred, guild, church, and monastery accounted for more than did anything properly called the political state.
"From the beginning the state was nothing more, basically, than an institutionalization of war-making power." This is because, he said, the modern, political state came into being with the "strains imposed by warfare" on kinship and other associations. A "Romanist idea of power" took over and the concept of sovereignty prevailed.
This is why "It is entirely plausible to argue," says Thomas Woods in The Church and the Market, "that the authentically conservative position is not to embrace but rather to reject the modern idea of sovereignty altogether.
Sovereignty is a thoroughly modern notion, and thus if anyone has made concession to "modernity" it is those who ardently embrace a political philosophy that is not only at variance with, but which also helped to undermine and subvert, that of medieval Europe. It is they, rather than those of us skeptical of the state, who have the explaining to do.
"In a very real sense," wrote Nisbet,
the modern notion of public order is an evolution of the medieval idea of the King's Peace: a claim that the normal state of things shall be peaceful, with the military power of the king available if need be in enforcement of this peace. Not until the nineteenth century would the idea of a standing, visible police force with the primary function of protection rather than harassment of individuals become an increasingly common one in the West.
Nisbet continued:
Not very old, the idea of public order has already become the object of derision. We observe on a constantly rising scale the use of techniques of "private order" which range from bodyguards and complex electronic systems down to twenty-four-hour security personnel and triple locks in apartment houses that as recently as a quarter of a century ago were immune to such necessity. One reads too of increasingly recourse to neighborhood associations . . . Police forces rise incessantly in size, but crime rates rise faster. . .
"Vatican City as a Free Society" [pdf] by Carlo Lottieri argues that "Despite its official self-description, the State of Vatican City is not a State."
[I]t is possible to put Vatican City in the set of legal and economic entities marked by a voluntary collaboration of individuals (as the families, the companies, the associations, and so on). Vatican City is the outcome of free and spontaneous relationships, in absence of any kind of violence, and there is a big difference between this type of interactions and the bounds imposed by a State with the violence and the threat.
Even though he was not an "anarchist" or a philosophical libertarian, the great Robert Nisbet's central insight is that Civil Society, made up of the so-called intermediate institutions which persons are naturally born into and are a part of (viz., family, locality, church, etc.), and the State are inversely related to each other in terms of strength and the role they play in society.
It is consequently when the state is small and weak that social authority is vibrant. The more functions and roles the state takes on, the less civil society has to take on. A powerful managerial state always results in imposing a top-down, monolithic-coercive control, breaking down pluralistic authorities, autonomies, communities, institutions, traditional norms, and ultimately thereby isolating and detaching the individual from civil society. All that is left after this process is Leviathan and atomistic, detached, and "loose" individuals. Once this has happened the state has what it wants, i.e., control over isolated and weak individuals.
Extending and furthering this analysis, we can understand how increased democratization and centralization of state power directs man's activities increasingly at using this apparatus. This not only must be done at the expense of civil society, since the state's relationship with civil society is parasitic, but also cause conflict between those trying to use power, which is monopolistic, for their own purposes. These men will be constantly fighting to control this coercive power for their own ends and at the expense of other men. Politicalization in increased areas of life will only result in a greater amount of people joining in this infighting (with the upshot of man investing and producing less in civil society). It actually becomes a necessity, if only as a means of (pseudo) "self-defense." All of this further feeds the growth of politics. And the distinction between civil society and state will fade away. In addition, they will blend together as many former civil society institutions attach themselves or ally themselves with statism. States ultimately consume civil society.
(This will even have a major change on the culture regarding the individual character development of men. The character characteristics that man will develop will tend to be those that define a politician rather than a gentleman.)
Indeed, today every nook and cranny Leviathan has its hand in. No wonder, as Robert Nisbet says, we have moved "from a highly traditionalist, hierarchical, decentralized, and inegalitarian society to one that in our time approaches the diametrical opposite of these qualities." [Quote from The Present Age.]
Now the objective of this Paleo Blog entry is to attempt to show, using insights from Nisbet, Murray Rothbard, Russell Kirk and Robert Murphy and also going through some economic analysis (which has been greatly influenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe), how power destroys civil society. The topics covered may be loosely organized and assumes the reader has some knowledge about the possibility and logic of a private law society, but it is my hope that it provides some insights into this important subject.
Authority versus Power
"[L]ibertarians," writes Murray N. Rothbard in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature (p 152, n 1),
accept the authority of sound values, civilization, and especially reason; it is those who refuse to accept such authority who turn instead to outside coercion and violence. On the confusion between authority and power, see the brilliant article by Robert A. Nisbet, "The Nemesis of Authority," The Intercollegiate Review (Winter-Spring, 1972): 3-13.
Happily the 1972 article is available online here [pdf].
In the article Robert Nisbet removes, as Rothbard explained, the common misperception between authority and power. Power, not authority, amounts to the usage (or threat) of physical force or coercion. It is civil society, he goes on to say, that you find a multiplicity of authorities:
Civil society, in whatever degree it may be said to exist at all, is a tissue of authorities, however loosely knit these may be in times of stress. Authority, unlike power or coercion, is not rooted in force, or threat of force. It is built into the very fabric of human association. Authority exists in the very roles and statuses of the social order. It is no more than an aspect, though a vital aspect, of the social order. . . . Freedom, in any positive, creative sense, is inseparable from a structure of authority ---- of rules, norms, roles, and statues ---- which can alone give the stamp of character to the free mind. No mistake could be greater than that of counterpoising freedom and authority. Freedom and power, freedom and coercion, yes. But not freedom and authority.
(There will be more on this specific article later.)
Children and the Family
Out of all the intermediate institutions, obviously the most essential and basic building block in society is the family institution. Individuals do not exist apart from family, which, by the way, includes even Robinson Crusoe. The atomistic individual is just a myth. And, incidentally, the reason for Rothbard's footnote was to defend parental authority, as long as it does not contravene the foundation of self-ownership and private property rights, over those who say it is (somehow) "un-libertarian." After all, a child is under the private household rules of the father, who is the owner of the household and accordingly has patriarchal authority and control over it. Private property (which is inegalitarian, hierarchical, exclusive, undemocratic, etc.), outside of our physical body, is not a "given" to us as we are born into the world. We must earn it and therefore must work within the framework of families and authorities in civil society.
This framework is essential to society as a whole. The family, that is. As Robert Nisbet says:
[A] well-attested fact [is] that whenever there is private property there will be a strong family system. After all, the origins of private property lie in clan and kindred; and even after the conjugal family, the household, became the chief element of kinship, its relationship to property remained very close. As Joseph Schumpeter noted in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy*, it was not the isolated individual . . . but the household that was the main engine of modern capitalist development. Not economic man but, quite literally, the head of the household working for the present and future of the members of his family, and hence saving and investment. [Twilight of Authority.]
Traditional family households hence promote a low time preference. Their success and longevity depends on this fact. It brings stability to society and capital growth, which advances the capitalistic process. This is what makes genuine capitalism and family mutually reinforcing. It was what, in the past, allowed only the father to enter the job market.
However, it becomes almost unavoidable, in modern society, that both father and mother have to enter the workforce due to the taxation, regulations, and inflation that eats away at persons' wealth. Procurement of wealth has been made comparatively more costly because income used in production has been made less, as it is expropriated by way of taxation, and the opportunity cost for non-production has been lowered. The destruction and blockage of contractual relationships between parties, due to thousands of pages of regulations, lowers market transactions, and thus investments and wealth. And inflation, in particular, is a direct assault against the family institution because, by continually lowering the value of the dollar, savings and long-term planning is discouraged. Consumption, leisure, short-term thinking and planning are encouraged. All of which are to the damage of capitalism and family.
Soon a major social and cultural transformation took place with the increased socialization in society. The belief and value in the father working towards a family wage to provide for the family vanished. Home mothers became stigmatized by ideological feminism, the sexual revolution, and Cultural Marxism. The ideas in the minds of men changed and the course of history assimilated those new values. Entering the workforce became more important than becoming a wife and mother. Womens' investment in the latter areas declined. Job advertisements took on a shift as this transformation took place, and was given additional thrust by today's sacrosanctity of civil "rights"** laws. Old advertisements, with an ethos of strong family values, labeled "Men Wanted" and "Women Wanted" was deemed illegal because it was discriminatory.
Statism has alleviated, to a high degree, father and mother their function and role to raise, care for, and teach their own children. In replace of these functions and roles, that naturally reside in the family institution, has come the state. Put in another way, these functions and roles have become socialized. Children are thrown into the statist education system, where they are fed anti-family, anti-market ideas. Parents can no longer raise their children in a manner they want to and instead must accept school teachers and social workers as the ultimate judge and authority. There is thus less parental investment in children, the family structure, and the next generation and their development. Under statist conditions the internally weak family is promoted and encouraged vis-à-vis the strong family for the reason that investment is made more costly. Natural authority is zapped-away and parental irresponsibility, neglect, and abuse is encouraged because it is made less costly. The natural bond and attachment between parents and children falls. A decline and degeneration must follow.
The externalized value and cost of children also decreases the attachment and bond between mother and father. This encourages an increase in divorce rates. At the same time, divorce courts have become one-size-fits-all and "no-fault." Marriage contract and covenant has been taken away and placed into the control of the state. Mothers, moreover, have a court that is biased to them and, by default, negative to fathers. Added with numerous interventionisms into civil society, there is subsidization of single mothers at the expense of non-single mothers. This is nothing but the collective reinforcement of such lifestyles, illegitimacy, irresponsibility, divorce, and so on.
By socializing the costs of children, the incentive to act with sexual restraint declines. Continuing this socialization will push man to an animal looking to fulfill his appetite through his next "free love" conquest. The animal side and sensationalist side of man replaces the rational side.
Children, in the governmental schools, lose attachment to family, their heritage, and family values. These schools elevate and promote collectivism, uniformity, egalitarianism, "political correctness," and anti-moral values. Schools, in their raised position relative to the family, create dependency between children and the state. Permissiveness is promoted from the diminishment of parental authority. Children, who are under a collectivistic rule, are set "free" and an increase in crime, drug use, and all-around juvenility occurs. They become a lone grown-up drone in the masses attached and dependent on the government, in view of the fact that their early development was deformed (to some degree) to the state's image and its wants.
In addition, as children are forced into the educational system, child labor laws further decrease children's attachment to civil society. Their value to the family household is lowered, as they cannot contribute to it financially. Because their prospects of entering the workforce at a young age has decreased, they will be less likely to develop good work ethics, the skills of being independent or responsible, or have a respect for (non-statist) authority.
Far from being any kind of supporter and up-lifting institution, the State is the enemy of the family. A weaker family is one less bulwark the state has to confront in its desire to enlarge its power vis-à-vis the individual. It is those who want to give the state more power, for whatever reason (even in the name of "saving" or "protecting" the family), that are ultimately empowering an institution that is the enemy of the family.
Sub-Notes:
*Schumpeter believes that, paradoxically, while the family is a backbone to capitalism, capitalism will ultimately hurt this backbone leading to an anti-capitalist mentality. With the analysis in this blog entry, this seems to be un-true. As Jeffrey Tucker says: "Where Schumpeter went wrong was in believing that advanced capitalism itself contributed to undermining the family (thus his pessimism regarding the future of free economies). In fact, if we look at the case of the United States, it is easy to see that it is not the market, but government policy that penalizes marriages by directly and indirectly discouraging their formation."
**Statist and managerial elite, by programs such as affirmative action, have managed to push this process via social engineering. Collective women rights were deemed to exist in which the central state has to enforce and impose on all, contra to private persons and their properties. And those critical of this are labeled as mentally ill and persons of "hate," needing therapeutic help from the establishment. Helping along feminism, of course, has been the neoconservative right; claming that it is only the new "radical" feminism that has corrupted this ideology. (This is no different than their view on civil rights. Paul Gottfried has thus said that "On almost all social issues, starting with Third World immigration, feminism, and civil rights, neoconservatives are far closer to the Left than they are to the Old Right.")
War, Culture, and Community
Centralization is always the stamping out of community and locality. Returning to Nisbet, he saw that the reason modern man has become preoccupied with community is for the very fact that community has waned. Unfortunately, this desire to restore community has not resulted in man endeavoring to reestablish genuine community, which has nothing to do with political power, but the seeking of community by the use of the central state. Yet all this has done is further the erosion of community. According to Nisbet, there is nothing more fraudulent or dangerous than a "phrase as 'national community.'"
This "quest for community" can be seen in times of war. There is probably nothing greater than war that brings out the mass mobs in modern democracy, especially today's Limbaugh-type conservatives or kiddy-con conservatives, with their nationalistic and patriotic spirit banging on the drums and labeling war skeptics as "unpatriotic" (or worse).
Ironically, this patriotic or nationalistic spirit, having everything to do with glorifying Leviathan than anything else, is in all probability the result from the loss of any genuine conservative community. This is why states like a community void. Man has become increasingly detached and atomized from others. This makes, at least at first, the masses gung-ho about war. Just remember back to the first days of the Iraq War. War for a moment brings a sense of community and connection. Certainly those in actual combat feel a sense of community with their fellow soldiers. Those at home feel a bit of that as well. A little later, nonetheless, it dries up because it is a shallow and false collectivist and statist community.
In response to those that judge military life as beneficial to the development of a young man, conservative Russell Kirk said that "there is no tyranny more onerous than that of military life." Military life does not build character, strength, or independence of mind. It does not make a man "a real one." That kind of life, due to its socialistic nature, is antagonistic towards these characters. It is "military discipline," says Kirk, that is "crushing to self-reliance."
"In military life, distant from home and most of the forces of social opinion, there is every inducement for an average young man to sink into indolence and indulgence and every reason for him to rely increasingly upon the state for very existence."
So life in the military does not resemble community at all. Not only does it distort the development of young men, life in war and military tears families apart. It discourages old taboos on morality, including sexual relationships. War encourages promiscuity. And this has been multiplied many times over by unnaturally allowing women in combat.
"War and the military are," writes Robert Nisbet,
without question, among the very worst of the earth's afflictions, responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible---not only cut off when they threaten to appear but, worse, extinguished more or less at root. ... Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. [Twilight of Authority.]
And it is in times of war, Nisbet says, that the welfare state proliferates. Around "75 percent of all national programs which have been instituted in Western countries during the past two centuries to equalize income, property, education, working conditions, and other aspects of life have been in the first instance adjuncts of the war state and of the war economy." [Twilight of Authority.] War, socialism, and "progressive" movements are bound at the hip.
The Natural Community
Natural authority is not only found in the family and its extended outgrowths. It is found in businesses, churches, firms, associations, schools, and other places. In communities you generally find natural leaders (or, if you will, aristocrats). These are families who are good at organizing community functions and resolving quarrels. The majority of the town respects their position and abilities. In community you find differentiation and distinction between individual persons who possess different levels of authority and who play different roles (occupations) in the community.
One aspect in the development of community or neighborhood is the stabilizing effect that businessmen (working within the community) have on it. For instance, Robert Murphy's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism points to how
public safety is best ensured when people voluntarily look after their own streets, and where stores, bars, and restaurants (open night and day) and public spaces are all jostled together, because it gives residents, business owners, and customers a mutual interest in ensuring safety, a complex interaction of unexpected "neighborhood watch" mutual support.
What takes this away, Dr. Murphy says, is forced and top-down planning by the government. It "breaks up this mutual support." All of this has led to is increased crime rates and the annihilation of natural community development. It cuts off the bonds between men in community.
Again, this is exactly what the state wants. Any private functions and roles communities takes on, power in the state is less. Any kind of private authority is a threat to the state. Thus to gain power, the state must crush community development. Community functions and roles the state must take over. And when this happens man increasingly turns to the state for the answers to all problems. (The more centralized this state, the worse.) It becomes the center of society and existence. Instead of seeking private solutions, state solutions are almost always sought. This unties the structure of civil society. The atomization of individuals from all cultural and social restraints takes place. Hierarchical outgrowths of pressures and competing authorities atrophy. There has been hence the development of the ferine and democratically "equal" mass of individuals with "equal" authority in relation to each other. And hence the increase in immoral, "alternative," and destructive lifestyles.
Socializing personal morality and conduct to the state can only result in a decrease in the importance of civil society's role to "regulate" these matters. It is then that the family loses authority. Churches, in the realm of personal or individual morality and conduct, get hurt as a source of authority in society. Social pressures lose their value. So it is the socialization that lowers investment of civil society's institutional and associational presence in these matters. As a consequence, statism will actually tend to increase destructive behavior all-around on net. What is defined as "good" and "bad" will be state defined. Man will increasingly depend on the state for the guide to what morality means. Morality will enter in a state of flux, ever changing, and ever relative.
Under a free society, on the other hand, and implied in the above analysis, social and cultural restraints would be restored. Families, in both the nuclear and extended sense, would regain their natural authority. Churches can gain functions and roles in communities. Without a central power, communities can be restored in vigor. A person's membership in various intermediate institutions would be reestablished (or created anew) to his natural position in its hierarchical structure. A pluralistic society would develop. There would not be any collective, systematic subsidization of harmful lifestyles or activities with the welfare state gone. Property owners would regain the right to discriminate, and implied in that would produce an increase in civil behavior by the joining increase of the ability to discriminate against uncivil behavior. And so on.
Moreover, instead of public laws there would be private laws. Laws that would arrive out of civil society; not the state.
Murray Rothbard writes that "Under total privatization, many local conflicts and 'externality' problems ... would be neatly settled.
With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortion, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person's or community's land area. ["Nations By Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State"]
"In a country, or a world, or totally private property,
including streets, and private contractual neighborhoods consisting of property-owners, these owners can make any sort of neighborhood-contracts they wish. In practice, then, the country would be a truly "gorgeous mosaic," ... ranging from rowdy Greenwich Village-type contractual neighborhoods, to socially conservative homogeneous WASP neighborhoods. Remember that all deeds and covenants would once again be totally legal and enforceable, with no meddling government restrictions upon them. So that considering the drug question, if a proprietary neighborhood contracted that no one would use drugs, and Jones violated the contract and used them, he fellow community-contractors could simply enforce the contract and kick him out. Or, since no advance contract can allow for all conceivable circumstances, suppose that Smith became so personally obnoxious that his fellow neighborhood-owners wanted him ejected. They would then have to buy him out----probably on terms set contractually in advance in accordance with some "obnoxious" clause. ["The 'New Fusionism': A Movement For Our Time"]
Sub-Notes:
1. A free libertarian society would
therefore not only consist of a horizontal "convivial order" made up of
natural law. Vertically on top of this would be the development of the
"social order's" voluntary positive law. For more on the difference
between the "convivial order" and the "social order," see these notes from the PFS.
2. The communities that would develop would be diverse and this would allow people to live by those of like-values. Interventionists, as Rothbard said, would have no place in a libertarian society however. This would remove a major source of conflict in society. If communists want to a have voluntary communist community, then it does no harm to me (but only them).
3. Nonetheless, communities would tend to develop homogeneously. Today, even in a statist world, neighborhoods and towns that are wealthier and that have a stronger level of trust between neighbors are homogeneous versus heterogeneous. A free society would amplify that tendency. In particular, argues the great libertarian Hans-Hermann Hoppe, insurance companies would encourage this development:
"Heterogeneous" risks either cannot be insured or must be insured separately (in different pools, jointly with other homogeneous risks, and at different prices). Ethno-cultural homogeneity of neighborhoods, then, is simply a device for making insurance against external threats and interferences possible and thus lowering the cost of residential property protection. Homogeneity facilitates mutual property insurance. Capital-based insurers will charge lower premiums for clusters of homogeneous territories (while at the same time revealing the different ranks in cultural development of various ethno-cultures, as reflected in the price-spread of the premium charged at different locations.)
The process to a free society via secession, says Hoppe, "Rather than promoting a downward leveling of culture as under forced integration, ... stimulates a cooperative process of cultural selection and advancement."
The Authority of Culture, Language, and Reason
To loop back, in the first article linked-to above, the "authority of language," especially, is shown to be of great concern to Robert Nisbet, for it is language that is the most basic social and cultural bond between men. This is not only limited to verbal language but also the "silent language" of physical expressions. Language as well, as a means of communication, expresses itself in mathematics, music, paintings, et cetera. It is the essential foundation to any civilization, and therefore encompasses "nearly the whole of experience and reality."
With that in mind, there is a direct correlation, Nisbet believes, between the loss of authority in language and the increase of power and the decline of culture. Specifically, he points to George Orwell's work. Orwell said that in politics you locate "phrases tackled together" made up of meaningless abstractions and generic terms. In political discussion, for example, you find interminable phraseology that is vacuous: "human rights," "democracy," "social justice,"* "civil rights," "diversity," and so on. (With pro-empire Sen. Obama we can add the word "change," which is a political word that is as empty and lifeless as them come--------no wonder he is so liked.)
*(On "social justice," Irving Babbitt wrote: "Every form of social justice ... tends toward confiscation, and confiscation, when practiced on a large scale, undermines moral standards, and, in so far, substitutes for real justice the law of cunning and the law of force.")
"A generation," writes Nisbet, "that has formed itself linguistically around the primitivism of 'like,' 'cool,' 'man,' 'feel,' and, above all, 'you know' will not be a difficult generation to enslave politically, socially, and culturally." As a matter of fact, in the article he points to a study that reports the average Englishman and American recycles on a daily basis only "thirty-four basic words."
One author Nisbet finds loathsome is Richard Poirier and his book The Performing Self. Poirier disapproves of the "waste" of language and believes it must be personalized to the "performing self." All constraints and authority must be removed. Nisbet replies that this is not how genuine culture works. It is not how the genius develops or how the genius flourishes.
Creativity in high culture
is never the consequence of nihilistic rejection of the forms and structures which the creative mind finds around him. It is invariably a working from, and generally through, these to new forms and structures: forms and structures that may be so original indeed as to make their relation to past seem highly tenuous. That creative minds do indeed reveal capacity for liberating themselves in some degree from accepted modes of intellectual order, as a means of quickening the search for other modes, in no ways means that passion for disorder for "waste" is overriding. Least of all does it mean passion for "self-watching."
"The basis of any culture," says Nisbet, "is the presence of values which have external force in the individual's life, which reflect a power greater than anything that lies in the [single] individual alone." [Emphasis mine. This, separate quote, from Twilight of Authority. The above one, of course, is from Nisbet's essay on authority.]
Robust culture in literature rides the tides from the point of the Greeks. That is, of their techniques, forms, styles, and structures. Developing culture is the outgrowth from them. Not only is today's language untidiness caused by the denunciation of authority, the authority of reason has been waning.
In the West man finds the "acceptance of objectivity as at least a worthy goal." Our philosophical literature, says Nisbet, has looked for the objective in the order of existence, rather than the subjective or the "cult of individuality" of one's feelings. And it is this objective search that "declare[s] something of superlative nobility."
Without the authority of reason comes irrationality. It has thus been at the university where you find "feeling, through sensitivity and encounter sessions, ... exalted, in those wide spheres of the arts ... where preoccupation with self, with display or exhibition of self, takes the almost invariable form of display of the least rational, the least reason-oriented..."
In regards to the decline of the arts, for example, Murray Rothbard agreed. Rothbard saw nihilism forming in the arts:
The art-for-art's sake scam that permeates the modern liberal world-view, was launched by nineteenth-century aesthetes as a camouflage of their own morbid, nihilistic, pessimistic, and violently anti-traditional outlook: the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the Impressionists, Dadaists, and later the Bloomsbury Set and the literary and art critic Roger Fry. Since they could not get anywhere at the time by openly advocating their nihilistic values and epistemology, or their "alternative life-styles," they pushed – unfortunately with great success – the "art has its own reasons" rationale.
First, the left-liberals preached l' art pour l' art in aesthetics, and as a corollary, in ethics, trumpeted the new view that there is no such thing as revealed or objective ethics, that all ethics are "subjective," that all of life's choices are only personal, emotive "preferences." ["KULTURKAMPF!"]
This, according to Robert Nisbet, makes our age a "critical" one. Saint-Simon said that there are two types of ages: "organic" and "critical." It is in organic ages that the authority of culture, reason, and language is dominant. The age of our time is critical because these intellectual and abstract authorities are weak. We are in a "twilight of authority." And it is no quirk that with this comes the rise of Power.
- Freedom Tour ’08.
- Revolution By Mail.
- Revolution March.
- RonPaulRevolutionBook.com.
- Revolution Broadcasting.
- A "Grand Rally" in St. Paul near Republican Convention.
- Operation St. Paul.
Being a libertarian (or a paleolibertarian) I am a "live and let live" kind of guy. When it comes down to it, while I no doubt believe in moral values outside and above the narrow and strict libertarian philosophy (and often write about them here at this blog), I want to be free from Leviathan. Not only do I want to be free, I want others to have that option. I want others to have their natural and God-given right to own their own life, not detached from civil society (as some ignorant of libertarianism falsely charge), but from the State and the gun.
I want to be free to work in the market place without being robbed by the State; free to associate with who I wish to associate with, without being forced to associate with anyone I do not want to associate with (like the State); free to form private communities with people of like-values and to let others do the same; to allow the spontaneous associations, groups, and institutions of man to be free.
Ernest Hancock is right when he says there are two kinds of people in the world:
“Those who wish to be left alone and those who just won't leave them alone. What type are you?”
I want the choice, like Mr. Hancock, to be left alone. Is there that option? All too often do I hear that I need to "do my duty" and vote and participate in the political arena. But can I, instead, just be left alone?
But as said by those who think they have some kind of "right" to use physical violence against me, for the sin of wanting to be left alone and of leaving others alone (!), they say No.
What they want is to be given the "ring of power" or, short of that, they want to give the crown and the power it contains to someone they like who will control, from high above, society for their own selfish ends and desires. Many in this group of people are voracious for dictatorial power. They think nothing should stand in their way.
It is not only our very lives that this group wants to control, but our families, neighborhoods, communities, churches, businesses, prejudices, traditions, et cetera. Having these things serve the dictates of power and the opulent and omnipotent State is one thing for the sedulous statist who seeks to control people like cattle. It is another thing, contrariwise, if these things defy the King and defy power.
When we look at civil society, we find that it is based on the recognition of private property and the golden rule. It is only the State----the "legal" institution of plunder----and those connected (e.g., many in the big business world) with its power that is not.
Some Things to Read:
- "Down With the Presidency" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
- "Why the State Is Different" by Rockwell
- "The Cultural Contradictions of Statism" by Anthony Gregory
- "Why the Wolves Rule" by Joseph Sobran
- "Utopia and Reality" by Butler Shaffer
At VDare.com, Mr. Brimelow makes a case that “Immigration is the Viagra of the State.” His article is based on a speech he recently gave at the Property and Freedom Society. Click here to read it.
***
A Note on Multicultural Nations and Free-For-All Immigration
"Human beings," wrote Mr. Buchanan in his 2006 book State of Emergency, "are not blank slates. Nor can they be easily separated from the abiding attachments of the tribe, race, nation, culture, community whence they came."
It seems very naïve, if one was to ask me, when certain libertarians deny this or pretend that individual persons in actual fact are "blank slates."
When in 1991 the Soviet Union broke-up, it broke-up divided along these attachments. Thus suggesting, multiethnic and multicultural societies require force for them to be maintained.
This is what made Murray Rothbard re-think the issue. No "open borders" as such, it occurred to him, would be found in a libertarian private property society. Private property owners would, in distinct contrast with today, have full control over who could and could not immigrate or travel into and onto their roads, private neighborhoods and towns.
With that understanding, it seems fairly clear that a free-for-all of immigration would not exist. That can only be the outcome of the central government running public property and controlling private property owners' (and their voluntary associations') right to discriminate as they see fit.
(That is not to say that no immigration would take place. Obviously that would not be the case. Nonetheless, it seems lost on some that what the State brings is a free-for-all in replace of the wants and desires of different private property owners.)
Statistics today, if I remember correctly, show that as California's minority population is growing to a not-so-minority position, whites are leaving and moving to other states. This alone seems conclusive enough for one to say that much of today's mass immigration is not at all invited as they enter various neighborhoods and towns.
