by Caleb Nelson
[152] “Moral principles are not based on properties of human nature, but must subsist a priori [independent of experience] of themselves . . .” and “. . . it is this purity of their origin that makes them worthy to serve . . .”
[153] The fact that altruism has no good reason “in heaven or earth” is what makes it sublime.[154] Virtue, he says, is morality that has been stripped of “sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love.”[155] This is the anti-self-interest ethic, and what is anti-self is also anti-life.
The link between altruism and collectivism can be seen when we ask the question, “Which other should I serve?” Altruism gives no answer to you, because it doesn’t matter who is served as long as it is not you. The good is not found in the action or in the receiver; the good is found intrinsically in the fact that you sacrificed.
Collectivism, however, provides the answer: it is society, or the collective, that must be served. Collectivism also provides the means to such service: the State. Since sacrifice for others is held a moral imperative, the altruist-collectivist ethic holds that it is therefore moral to force others to do the proper sacrificing.
John Stuart Mills wrote that the foundation of morality is “the greatest happiness principle” which holds that “the standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent’s own happiness but that of all concerned.”
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But, there is one question which the ethics of collectivism has never answered and never will: “Why?”
Why must I live for others?
Why is that the good?
Why is my own life the standard of evil?
Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others but never my own?
There has never been a rational reason for it, though there have been many ugly distortions of philosophy and religious doctrine to try and cover for that failure. While this is not a book designed to treat religious issues, we can address two of the most common Christian altruistic fallacies based on the following:
1. The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
2. Love thy neighbor as thyself.
The altruistic distortions of these mantras are self-contradictory at best, and blatantly evil at worst. The standard of value found in both of these proverbs is individual life and happiness. Whose life and happiness is the standard used for the measurement? Yours.
How are we told to love others? As ourselves. Our self-love is the standard. We can’t love them until we love ourselves. What is the standard given to judge how to treat another person in both of these phrases? Our rational self-interest.
In order to love another, whom must you first love and know the best way to love? Yourself.
The only rational interpretation of these proverbs is that one must have a moral code using individual rights to guide your own actions and the actions of others towards you. The alternative is a whim-based subjective code where each person treats another according to their feelings or demands. Self-interest, or self-love, is the true standard behind these maxims, yet altruism would have you believe that these must be interpreted as “Do unto others as they would have done unto them, regardless of the cost to you,” and “Love Thy Neighbor More Than Thyself.”
THE CRUSADE AGAINST SELF-INTEREST
The collectivist ethical crusade to destroy the concept of self-interest is widespread and active, both consciously and unconsciously, among today’s “intellectuals.” Professor Zygmunt Bauman passively states that, “It is true that objectively good—helpful and useful—deeds have been time and again performed out of the actor’s calculation of gain . . . these deeds, however, cannot be classified as genuinely moral acts precisely because of having been so motivated.”
[157] He makes no attempt to explain this view, to explain why personal gain is anathema to the concept of morality. He takes, as a given, that altruism is morality, that helping people out of a desire for personal gain is immoral, and that morality consists in serving others self-sacrificially.
Despite clear descriptions of the altruist code, coming from St. Augustine, Kant, Comte, Hitler or modern presidents and legislators, this code is consistently mistaken by many as meaning kindness, charity, and helping others. Gary Morsch and Dean Nelson, in their touching book, The Power of Serving Others, characterize altruism as “acting for the welfare of others as well as oneself.”
[158] As we have seen, altruism is not meant to be helping others “as well as oneself,” but at a self-sacrificial cost.
Self-interest is the principle that is violated by the creed of the altruists for no other reason than that it does not sacrifice. It was one of Hitler’s common insults to hurl at the Jews, that “The Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual.”
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The philosophical attack against individualism and self-interest is relentless. Your bread is not moral in your own belly, you are told, but only in the bellies of others. It is immoral to earn money, but not to give it to others who did not earn it. The basic altruist principle here is that man does not have the right to exist for himself, but only to exist as a means to the ends of others, whether those others are the proletariat, the State, society, or the world. The code of altruism does not care which “others” are referred to, but only that the self is denied as a matter of moral duty. This is the cause of the bloodshed and tyranny wreaked by history’s tyrant-altruists.
John Stuart Mill wrote in Utilitarianism that, “It is a part of the notion of duty in every one of its forms that a person may rightfully be compelled to fulfill it. Duty is a thing which may be exacted from a person, as one exacts a debt.”
[160] If altruism is our moral duty, then we may be rightfully compelled to self-sacrifice.
The belief that we must serve others self-sacrificially is the root cause of many misguided government policies, from financial and mortgage policies mandating that the taxpayer pay for defaulted loans of those who otherwise would not have qualified, to military policy which demands that American soldiers hold the lives of enemy civilians above their own safety, to financial bailouts of foreign nations at the altruistic expense of American citizens.
Ayn Rand put it most strongly when she said, “Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil—that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that. Yet that is the meaning of altruism.”
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(For an excellent explanation of how altruism doesn’t just ruin nations but individual romantic relationships as well, see The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, by Edwin A. Locke and Ellen Kenner.)
PART 2: PRAGMATISM
“There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense.”
[162] - Adolf Hitler
As a philosophy, “pragmatism” does not simply mean doing what works best. Pragmatism (with a capital “P”) is an American-based philosophy that surfaced in the late 19th century and flourished among intellectuals, professors, Progressives, and liberals. It is responsible for much of the collapse of any possible philosophical, intellectual, principled, or moral approach to modern political discussions. Early pragmatists included C. S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey.
It is difficult to define concretely because it is not so much a set of doctrines as a way of thinking. It is a “big tent” theory that seeks to include a host of conflicting beliefs and ideologies. It is a method of thinking that consists of determining the meaning of truth based on “practical consequences.” It gives no method for answering, “Which consequences? How are we to measure consequences? What is the standard of practicality? Which ends are desirable to advance?”
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Pragmatism holds that there is no permanent truth, no absolute principles, no objective reality, and that collective subjectiv
ism identifies truth. It is the doctrine that philosophy must be “practical” and the truth is whatever “works.”
This doctrine quickly leads to relativism, if it is not already underpinned by it, which holds that an idea is only judged as true or false according to its utility in a particular situation, that what works today may not work tomorrow, and thus there are no principles in any field, no absolutes.
For the Pragmatists there is no ready-made reality. We create reality, they say. Thus there are no absolutes, no facts, no laws of logic, and no certainty. What must be done away with, James said, is “truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need.” The “true,” he said, “is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”
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Tara Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, masterfully distilled the Pragmatist style of thinking into four succinct features:
A short-range perspective. Pragmatism involves range-of-the-moment thinking. The measurement of truth is what works, and that “since reality has no definite, enduring nature, what works today may be quite different from what works tomorrow.” The here and now is what is most important.
The inability (or refusal) to think in principle. “Pragmatism rejects principles and erodes its practitioners’ ability to grasp principles, let alone apply and be governed by them.”
The denial of definite identity. “The pragmatist characteristically resists identifying things by their essential nature. Whatever the subject of inquiry, each thing is regarded as sort of this and sort of that.” “To name things—to clearly identify or define an entity, an event, a policy, or any phenomenon—would be unrealistically constraining.”
The refusal to rule out possibilities. “When it comes to decision-making, the pragmatist’s inclination is to keep all options open—indefinitely. Whether he is negotiating differences with others or making a solitary, primarily self-regarding decision, nothing is ever off the table. After all, there is nothing that might not be ‘expedient’ someday.”
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Author Leonard Peikoff identified Pragmatism as being one of the two core doctrines of the Nazis (the other being dogmatism).
[166] Hitler latched onto Pragmatism very soundly, stating in Mein Kampf that the standard for ideas is not logic or fact, but the idea’s usefulness (i.e. practicality) to the Volk. “The needs of the state . . . are the sole determining factor. What may be necessary today need not be necessary tomorrow,” Hitler said. “That is not a question of theoretical suppositions, but of practical decisions dictated by existing circumstances. Therefore, I may—nay, must—change or repudiate under changed conditions tomorrow what I consider correct today.” And as his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, said, “Important is not what is right but what wins.”
[167]
Another of Pragmatism’s earliest advocates was John Dewey, an American philosopher and education reformer. He said, “If we start from reason alone, we shall never reach fact.”
[168] Using Pragmatism as the moral impetus for statism and Progressivism proved very effective. Dewey advocated the “use of unchecked state power to control the future through shaping the thought, action, and character of its citizens.” Pragmatism “provided the moral dexterity” necessary to Marxist politicians, offering a philosophy that translated questions of moral value into “problems of strategy” and defined principles as “the expedient within a given set of social circumstances.”[169] Metaphorically, Pragmatism is the railroad track that takes the train of Statism on its journey.
John Dewey
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As long as Pragmatism thrives either consciously or unconsciously in America, personal liberties will continue to be trampled as government expands. People will have no political principles to base their decisions on, believing that no such things are possible or desirable. As Dewey said, the chief characteristic of the Pragmatic notion of reality is precisely “that no theory of reality in general . . . is possible or needed.”
[170] This describes the root of the Pragmatic line of thinking—that there is no way to know about reality and no point to knowing anyway. The only thing that matters is whatever seems to work to help you accomplish a certain aim—knowing why it works, or how to interpret a principle for long-range planning is impossible and unnecessary.
SUBJECTIVISM
Implicit in Pragmatism is the doctrine of subjectivism—which holds that feelings create facts and therefore man’s primary tool of knowledge is feelings. If men feel it, that makes it so. Recall that subjectivism may be divided into two kinds: personal and social.
Personal subjectivism is the idea that truth and morality are creations of the mind of the individual—or “matters of personal opinion.” Its slogans are “Who’s to say what’s right?” and “What’s true for you may not be true for me.” The personal subjectivist values whatever he feels like valuing and does whatever he feels like doing. Taken to an extreme, he is seen as a follower of hedonism—which holds that morality is acting in whatever manner gives you pleasure. (See “Rational Self-Interest” in Chapter 3 to review how hedonism is not to be confused with self-interest.)
Social subjectivism is the notion that truth and morality are creations of the mind of a collective—or “matters of social convention.”
[171] The consensus of the majority is the source of all truth for the social subjectivist.
The important key to understand in respect to these ideas is that they hold the belief that truth and morality are created by man, rather than discovered.
The foundational morality of social subjectivism is that you don’t place yourself, your own judgment and values, above those of the group, or “common good.” You must subordinate your interests to the whole, of which you are merely a part.
THE MIXED ECONOMY
The economic system that is the result of subjectivist/Pragmatist philosophy is that of the mixed economy. Today’s economy in America and many other countries cannot be considered capitalist. To distinguish between what we have today and what is actually capitalism, many use the term “laissez-faire” capitalism, but that is merely redundant. Only an economy completely laissez-faire (hands-off) is capitalism; anything less is a mixed economy, meaning a mixture of freedom and controls, choice and coercion, individualism and collectivism.
This type of economy has no principles, rules, or theories to guide it. The introduction of controls into an economy always necessitates further controls. It is an unstable mixture which can only go one of two ways—the controls can be repealed towards freedom, or they can be compounded towards dictatorship. A mixed economy will always slide one way or the other.
No one’s interests are ultimately safe in a mixed economy. It breaks a country into enemy camps fighting, looting, and draining the productive elements of the society. As Ayn Rand described it, “A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e. by force.”
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A mixed economy gives rise to the dominance of lobbying. Lobbying is attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing legislators. This activity is the spawn of government-by-pressure-groups whose methods range from social courtesies and luncheons to threats, bribes, and blackmail. Professional lobbying is an activity which naturally stems from the Pragmatic idea that there are no principled reasons for doing anything, and the only way to get ahead is to squeeze concessions and favors out of those with the guns—i.e. the government. A mixed economy is built on the foundation of Pragmatism and subjectivism.
HOW TO FIGHT PRAGMATISM
Pragmatism denies the concept of unalienable rights. Jeremy Bentham described the idea of natural rights as “nonsense.” He saw rights merely as inst
ruments to be used in the pursuit of certain objectives.[173] We’ve shown that rights are moral principles to guide man’s conduct in a social context. Pragmatists deny this and use rights only insofar as they help to achieve a desired end. If it seems that the end would be best accomplished by abrogating those rights, instead, then so be it. It is this line of thinking that leads governments, such as China, to deny any rights to achieve a desired aim. For example, they deny the liberty-based right to reproduce in favor of the Pragmatic goal of population control.
Combating the destructiveness of Pragmatism can be difficult. To do so, we must know what principles our thinking is founded on and what objective proof we have of their correctness. Still, Pragmatic opponents can be hard to get a grip on because they shift so quickly. It is difficult to argue with a method of arguing—especially one that denies the possibility of a correct method of arguing! Normally, as Professor Smith points out, “when a doctrine is mistaken, a rational argument can demonstrate that its conclusions do not follow from its premises or that its premises are false; one can point out faulty logic. Pragmatism, however, corrupts people’s understanding of what logic is.”