You don’t say.
The Morality Of The Means
“There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. Robbery! Forcible appropriation! These words convey to us ideas of crime and the penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a developed civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property. And this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery is the primitive relation of life, just as the warrior’s trade — which also for a long time is only organized mass robbery constitutes the most respected of occupations. Both because of this, and also on account of the need of having, in the further development of this study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms for these very important contrasts, I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the ‘political means.’
“The idea is not altogether new; philosophers of history have at all times found this contradiction and have tried to formulate it. But no one of these formulae has carried the premise to its complete logical end. At no place is it clearly shown that the contradiction consists only in the means by which the identical purpose, the acquisition of economic objects of consumption, is to be obtained. Yet this is the critical point of the reasoning. In the case of a thinker of the rank of Karl Marx, one may observe what confusion is brought about when economic purpose and economic means are not strictly differentiated. All those errors, which in the end led Marx’s splendid theory so far away from truth, were grounded in the lack of clear differentiation between the means of economic satisfaction of needs and its end. This led him to designate slavery as an ‘economic category,’ and force as an ‘economic force’ — half truths which are far more dangerous than total untruths, since their discovery is more difficult, and false conclusions from them are inevitable.
. . .
“The state is an organization of the political means. No state, therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a definite number of objects for the satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery. For that reason, primitive huntsmen are without a state; and even the more highly developed huntsmen become parts of a state structure only when they find in their neighborhood an evolved economic organization which they can subjugate. But primitive huntsmen live in practical anarchy.”
— Franz Oppenheimer, from The State (1908)
Those who say that they “pay for civilization” with their taxes have it ass-backward. The state doesn’t create a civilized society; it’s civilization that is a prerequisite of the state. Without permanent settlements, specialization of labor, surplus of goods and other such trappings of civilization, there would be nothing for the state to tax and therefore has no power or reason to exist. It is more accurately described as a consequence of civilization that we have to bear. At its best it defends a society from its rivals.
Greater Love
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.
Your voice sings not so soft, —
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, —
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.
Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.
— Wilfed Owen (1918)
The Monkey’s Paw
A little ditty for election day:
Considering I’m a tyro at creating A.I.-generated music, and the first cut of the lyrics were whipped up in about 45 minutes while swilling Mai Tai’s at the pyool a couple of nights ago, it didn’t come out too bad.
I originally was a little disappointed that it lacked a more lyrical progression to arrive at the point of the song, but decided that having it drip sarcasm throughout has a quality of its own. There are some words here and there that don’t really work and I’d like to change, but I seem to have reached a point where any further editing of the song alters its musical character too much. Suno doesn’t seem to cope well with six-line verses.
Even Easier To Be Hard
“Most appeals in the name of social justice rely on an underlying assumption of universal altruism. They assume that you care if something bad happens to anyone, anywhere, and advise you to take some sort of action to ease or prevent their suffering.
“People react by questioning whether or not that stranger, somewhere, is really suffering, or if they are suffering any more than anyone else. They examine the circumstances of the alleged suffering and the motives of the people bringing the alleged suffering to light.
“They argue about the details and the proportion of the suffering and point out their own allegedly comparable suffering or the suffering of some person or people who are allegedly suffering more.
“Once you’re arguing, they’ve already got you.
“Once you’re arguing, you’ve agreed that you could care, or would care — that you should theoretically care — given satisfactory evidence and argumentation.
“But what would they say if you stopped pretending to care at all?”
— Jack Donovan, from the essay I. Don’t. Care. (2014)
Read the entire thing.
Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “social justice,” but that’s a topic for another day.
Protected: Fortune and Grory
Orwell In A Nutshell
“Orwell… was an almost classic case of the Old Intellectual in the sense that for him a political commitment to a utopian, socialist future was plainly a substitute for a religious idealism in which he could not believe. God could not exist for him. He put his faith in man but, looking at the object of his devotion too closely, lost it.”
— Paul Johnson, from Intellectuals (1988)
Our Democracy
“Those who want to avoid confusion, and insist on clarity in political thinking, by carefully trying to distinguish between liberalism and democracy and between democracy and republicanism, are probably fighting a losing battle. Most people are not usually aware of the fact that one of the most important differences between the Continental and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of representative government has to be found in the important alloy which has been, so far, the almost inseparable concomitant of the latter: whiggery, or liberalism in the classic sense. The names and works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have carefully distinguished between democracy and liberalism will be found in the next chapter (Note 58). But the vast majority of Americans and Englishmen talking about ‘democracy’ always include the liberal element in their concept of democracy — and this in spite of the fact that democracy and liberalism are concerned with two entirely different problems. The former is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while the latter deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government. A democracy can be highly illiberal: the Volstead Act, quite democratically voted for, interfered with the dinner menus of millions of citizens. Fascism, National and international Socialism repeatedly insisted that they were in essence democratic — a claim which must be viewed in a strict philosophical and historical setting, and in this view becomes less hypocritical than observers in the Western hemisphere are wont to admit. The Soviet use of the ‘democratic’ label is by no means a shrewd political manoeuvre of recent years, but a terminology already adopted by Lenin and continued by Stalin throughout the nineteen-twenties. If we accept St. Thomas’ definition of democracy (De regimine principum, i. 1) we will find that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (provided the proletariat forms a majority) is more democratic than the American Constitution — in which, in contrast to the sacred books of communism, the word ‘democracy’ never figures.”
— Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, from Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times (1952)
“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe, from the essay Reflections on State and War (2006)
Man’s Place Under Materialism
“Pedantic louts, hangmen, scribblers, legislators, tonsured scum, what are you going to do once we are here? What will happen to your laws, your morality, your religion, your powers, your paradise, your Gods, your hell, when it is demonstrated that such and such a flow of humours, a certain type of fibres, a specific degree of acidity in the blood…are sufficient to make of a man the object of your punishments or your rewards?”
— Marquis De Sade, as quoted by Paul Éluard in La revolution surréaliste (1925)