by Caleb Nelson
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Such advances were not happenstance or mandated by government edict. Such advances happen quickly and naturally when allowed to flourish in an environment of economic and political freedoms where rights are protected. Such principles are what today’s third-world countries must have in order to join the freer countries in a leap of prosperity.
THREE ASSAULTS ON THE CONCEPT OF RIGHTS
Now that we have discussed the only social system which recognizes the principle of rights—capitalism—it would be helpful to recognize and counter the common attacks on this principle, since any victory over the concept of rights constitutes a victory over capitalism by implication.
Nobel-prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, identified three main “critiques,” from “critically demanding circles” that directly or indirectly undermine and distort the concept of rights.
[316] All three of these attacks are based on a faulty understanding of rights and thus seek to undermine the principle via a straw-man argument; they set up a false idea and proceed to attack it.
Sen calls the first attack the legitimacy critique. This attack questions the legitimacy of rights as a pre-legal principle. It views government as the ultimate legal authority and provider of rights and that no such principles exist outside of a legal context. In this view, humans are no more born with rights than they are with clothes—rights have to be provided through the tailoring of the legislative process. As Karl Marx insisted in his pamphlet, “On the Jewish Question,” rights cannot precede (but rather follow) the institution of the state.
A proper understanding of rights will quickly show the illegitimacy of this attack. Rights, you will recall, are moral principles guiding human action in a social context. To confuse these with entitlements granted by the state (which are unfortunately often termed “rights” as well) is to misunderstand the meaning and purpose of such ethical principles. When this attack is successful, individualism is destroyed and statism advances.
The second attack is the coherence critique which claims that rights are null and void unless listed coherently with a corresponding agency-specific duty to provide those rights. This attack claims that if A has a right to some x, then an agency such as B must also be recognized as having to provide A with x.
This is the stance taken by those who say that rights can only be sensibly formulated in combination with correlated duties. Someone has a right to something; and someone else has a duty to provide it. They ask, “How can we be sure a right is realized unless it is matched by someone’s duty to provide it?” Immanuel Kant called this a perfect obligation, one which it is moral to coerce from the agent responsible for the realization of the right. If no such agency exists for this purpose, the claim is then directed at anyone who can help. If health care is a right, there must be an agency created to provide that right, and the taxpayers, doctors, and insurance companies must all be coerced into it.
The problem here is that this attack holds a contradiction as a principle: that a right has to be provided by someone else. Rights, as we discussed, cannot be identified as such if someone else’s rights must be violated in order to provide them. It is a contradiction to have a right to any man-made goods or services. Rights, to be a valid concept, must be universal and equal and unalienable. If the rights of some must be violated to provide education or housing or food to others, then those things are not, by definition, rights. This attack calls for a mixed economy and coercive State to provide for the supposed rights of every pressure group.
The third attack is the cultural critique. This view questions if rights can really be universal if they are not regarded by some cultures as particularly valuable. The moral authority of rights, in this view, is dependent on how they are accepted by a given society. This view violates the principle that collective action has no unique moral authority, and assumes that consensus determines reality. The proper conditions of man’s existence are not decided by a culture or nation; they are objective requirements of the nature of man. Individual rights are the principles that recognize this and provide a proper framework for man’s prosperity in all cultures, all places, and for all individuals.
In this book, we are concerned less with the concept that capitalism is practical (even though it is) and more concerned with the concept that capitalism is good, and why it is good. It is true that capitalism is practical; it is effective and efficient. Capitalism is moral; it is just and its end is happiness. Capitalism is true; it agrees with man’s nature and it agrees with reality. Yet, there are many who wish to see it destroyed, both in reality and as an idea. In the next chapter, we will look deeper into the tactics of the enemies of freedom
Review
Q1: What causes and cures an economic depression?
Q2: What caused and cured child labor and slavery?
Q3: When government and business are corrupted, who is at fault?
Q4: Why would a free-market monopoly be a good thing?
Q5: Why are governmental/coercive monopolies bad?
Q6: What is the traditional view of greed? What is a better definition?
Q7: Which social system has eradicated famine to the extent that it has been implemented?
Q8: Why do statist social systems cause famine?
Q9: What is the history of associating capitalism with militant imperialism?
Q10: Is capitalism too advanced or too simplistic for the modern world? Or something else entirely?
Q11: What is the “invisible hand”?
Q12: Describe and debunk the three basic assaults on the concept of rights.
Chapter 13: Knowing the Enemy
“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not fear the result of a hundred battles; if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
[317] - Sun Tzu
To defeat tyranny, we have to know how it operates. We have to know explicitly why our own principles are true, and how they counter every tenant of tyranny. Some would say that tyranny is too strong a word. Let’s define it for our purposes as the initiation of, or advocacy of, force.
Those who espouse tyranny fall under many labels: conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, even family and friend. But no matter the ideological affiliation, they all fall under a wider umbrella which has one thing in common: the denial of individual rights by advocating the initiation of force—whether directly or indirectly. Their ethical philosophy is altruism and their political philosophy is statism. (The exception to this is anarchists who advocate for what they call individual liberty, but deny the need for the protection of that liberty via government.)
Many collectivists believe very deeply that they are doing the right thing. The collectivist ethic holds that sacrifice for other people is the standard of moral action, and that any means to that end is right. Preventing and alleviating perceived human suffering is to be done at any cost, they believe, even the destruction of liberty, prosperity, and other requirements for human life.
Collectivism is the spirit of our times. It is the ideological ocean that society is swimming in. There is hardly one area of truth that has not been tainted and mixed with error. It is taught in schools, churches, homes, and from the halls of government. It shapes personal ethics, alters religious dogma, misinforms legislation, and directs warfare. Collectivism is ingrained into almost every child’s psyche from the first stirrings of self-awareness, and reinforced in almost every step of their education. This is done through many channels and influences, and as early as children begin to understand anything at all. (This is the same process of socialization we discussed in the section on racism.) Sharing is a virtue, but where collectivism taints the concept is when parents mingle it with force—they take the property from the children and make them share whether they want to or not. This teaches the child that property is not a right, that it is okay to use force, and that anyone who makes a cla
im on your property is entitled to it.
Notice that these concepts are not taught explicitly, in clear words, but implicitly, with actions and behaviors. Remember, ideas that are implicit are unconscious, automatic, and unquestioned. When we learn things implicitly, they seem like basic and undeniable facts of existence. We accept the things we learn implicitly as “the way the world works,” that the way things are is how they should be. “My parents did it this way, so it must be right.” Thus children are primed with bad philosophy from before the time they can talk. We should not wonder why the world is plagued with violence and war when we teach our children that force is moral. Unfortunately, collectivism is the unquestioned ethos of the age.
In this war of ideas, reason is a small minority and fights an uphill battle against the inertia and tradition of the world. If collectivism and its political manifestation of statism continue unchecked, their terrible momentum will destroy the unprecedented prosperity achieved on the foundations laid during the Age of Reason.
This section will discuss what we need to know to combat the enemy—the tactics and common misconceptions which are the doctrinal pillars of statism. It is vital to know how truth will be challenged and confronted so that we can be prepared to defend it.
STRATEGIES AND LANGUAGE OF THE STATISTS
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
[318] - George Orwell
“Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.”
[319] - Ayn Rand
CONCEPTUAL AMBIGUITY
Capitalism is the only political system inferred from objective truths of reality. Because it is true, it is correct. How do you form an argument or attack against something that is true? Logically, you can’t, there are no errors in it which you could attack. Therefore, any attack against capitalism has to be based on a misconception of it, or a flat out denial of reality. When something is logically sound, there can be no rational attack against it; all such “arguments” brought in opposition to it will rely on misdirection, evasion, and context-dropping. The only effective weapon against truth is the distortion of thought through language, which is the tool of thought. A major area of assault on the principles of freedom has targeted the realm of ideas specifically.
“As language is the faculty which distinguishes man from the lower animals,” Isabel Paterson explained,
“. . . the confusion and vagueness of terms always found in collectivist theories is not accidental; it is a reversion to the mental and verbal limitations of the primitive society it advocates, the inability to think in abstract terms . . . . The verbal language of a high civilization is also a precision instrument. When words are used without exact definition, there can be no communication above the primitive level. If those who are supposed to express or influence ‘public opinion,’ the writers, economists, social theorists, and pedagogues, think in the concepts of savagery, what can be the outcome?”
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Ayn Rand explained how definitions do not merely state the meaning of words, but that a word is a symbol used to represent a concept. “It is not words, but concepts that man defines,” she said. He does this by specifying what, in reality, concepts refer to.
[321] Every word we use (except proper nouns) is a symbol for a concept. Such a concept, to be valid, must have reference to reality. For example, take the concept of a chair. The concrete reality that the concept chair refers to is every type of separate seat for a person that has ever existed or will ever exist, usually with four legs and a back rest, but not always. One cannot accurately use the symbol (word) chair as a designation of the concept of a table, even if the table has four legs and has someone sitting on it! One cannot accurately use the word equality to designate the concrete reality of a system that actually grants special privileges. When words are used in such a way as to remove any specific reference to reality, any meaningful communication is removed.
The collectivist attack against true principles consists of an attack against man’s mind and his ability to understand the words he uses, completely, down to their core. Ideas have consequences and if we can be made to have sloppy, vague ideas, the battle is already won for the collectivists. If we talk of American principles, or equality, or freedom, but have no idea what we actually mean in concrete reality, then we cannot advocate effectively for those ideas because we won’t know what they look like when we see them.
The strategy of the collectivists is to substitute anti-concepts for actual concepts. An anti-concept is an unusable term designed to “replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding.”
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The key to using anti-concepts as an attack consists in substituting words that only give an approximate meaning in place of important concepts. Here are only a few common examples of today’s anti-concepts and the vague ideas they are meant to convey:
· democracy, which is used to mean freedom or equality;
· rights, which is used to mean claims, entitlements, or demands;
· working families, which is used to mean low- and middle-class families who earn their money rather than exploit others;
· capitalism, which is used to mean exploitation, fascism, imperialism, a corrupt mixed economy, and greedy monopolization;
· altruism, which is used to mean concern for the welfare of others;
· extremism, which means any dangerous or uncommon ideas.
As Rand points out, the aim is to convey vague feelings without any actual meaning. Then the hearer substitutes their feelings for any actual understanding of the concept being addressed.
With this assault, the collectivists hope we will eventually accept any contradiction as necessary and natural, and the Orwellian slogans of WAR IS PEACE, SLAVERY IS FREEDOM, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, will no longer seem alien and sinister, but familiar and comforting.
Paterson explained in The God of the Machine that this attack is characterized by “the persistent discrediting of reason, and the deliberate corruption of language, to prevent communication.” Through the misuse of language the Marxists have done the “most serious injury to intelligence . . .” They express a false concept or theory in terms which embody the error so that “thinking is blocked until the misleading words are discarded from the given context.” She claims this is more serious a handicap than statements which are simply false.
[323] For example, take the slogan coined by anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that “Property is theft.” The concept of theft presupposes the concept of property. The statement is logically absurd.
In 2009, Barack H. Obama went on George Stephanopoulos’ show, to defend his Affordable Care Act. Stephanopoulos asked how the fine imposed on those who did not comply with the individual mandate was not a tax. The President responded, “No, but George, you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.” Stephanopoulos replied, “I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax—‘a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.’” To which the President said, “George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.”
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Note what happened carefully. The President claimed Stephanopoulos was making up language; Stephanopoulos gave the dictionary definition to prove that he was not; and then, being shown to be wrong, the President claimed that Stephanopoulos was “stretching.” Look at what the President did here. He was using the symbol for a concept, “tax,” but he was destroying the concept by denying the meaning that is tied to the word. Because he was caught in a lie, and couldn’t make a rational argument against the truth, he had to shift tactics. He had to attack reason itself! S
tephanopoulos was seeking for clarity, for an unambiguous definition so no equivocation or evasion could be used. But in Obama’s eyes, clarity was found in making things up. The President’s deception relied on keeping the concepts fuzzy and vague. Often the fastest way to end an argument is to ask the other person to define their terms. (The health care bill passed muster in the Supreme Court by being defended as a tax, regardless of what the President said.)
The enemies of freedom know the power of words and have shaped them as tools to manipulate and control. Saul Alinsky, Progressive activist and author, devoted an entire chapter to “words” in one of his books with the heading, “A Word about Words.” The Progressives have monopolized and twisted a great many words to “seize power . . . to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment . . .”
[325] They don’t actually mean a single one of those buzzwords. What do they actually mean?
· “Democratic” means rule by majority, but they actually mean rule by them.
· “Equality” means equal rights before the law, but they actually mean equal stuff provided by redistributionist policies, resulting in equal misery.
· “Justice” means everyone gets what they deserve, but they actually mean the entitled get what they haven’t earned while it’s stolen from those who earned it.
· “Peace” means the absence of physical force, but they mean to institute these Progressive measures using the force of government.