Objectivism – Page 4

One Day Objectivism Conference In Dallas, February 29, 2020

I was surprised to see that Texas would have a couple of Ayn Rand Institute sponsored conferences this year.

The first will be this coming Saturday in Dallas. It’s a one-day event, with about half a dozen speakers.

The second event will be later this Summer, in Austin, and appears to be the “main” ARI conference this year. (It looks like they are trying to have mini-conferences around the nation, rather than just the one big, yearly conference.)

I was unable to attend the 2019 OCON due to conflicts with my work schedule, but I attended the 2017 (my first) and the 2018.

I’ve been reading and thinking about Ayn Rand’s ideas since I was about 15. I didn’t expect to learn anything particularly “earthshaking” or novel at the prior two conferences I attended. I looked at them more as social events, in which I’d have an opportunity to be around a large number of people who are sufficiently sympathetic to Rand’s ideas to pay out a good-sized chunk of money for the admittance fee, plus pay for a hotel and airfare.

I was curious to see what that would be like. In my everyday social interactions, I sometimes get a feeling of being a permanent “outsider”, but I also suspect that may just be my personality. The OCON’s gave me a chance to see how I reacted when everyone around me is, at least ostensibly, holding the same worldview.

But, I was pleasantly surprised to find that listening to some of the lectures at the 2017 and 2018 conferences was a real stimulus to my thinking on several subjects.

There were also additional “intangible benefits” from the previous two conferences that I have trouble fully articulating with words. It was like a “mental afterglow” or just general “good feelings” from attending the conferences, that lasted for a while. (I’m guessing this is something like what religious people feel after coming back from church camp or some other such event.) I wasn’t necessarily impressed with every single person I encountered at the OCON’s, but being in that social environment sort of helped me to see myself a little bit better.

Book Review of “Explaining Postmodernism”, by Stephen R.C. Hicks

This is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in a decade. I highly recommend it. The over-all value of the book lies in tracing the origins of what I find to be a common tactic when debating a leftist. You present them with arguments, facts, and logic, and, at the end, they will say something like:

“Well this is all just your white male prejudice,”; “that’s only logic, come down to reality,”; “those are just your definitions, and all definitions are ultimately arbitrary”; or, even, “I don’t feel that you’re right, and why is your logic better than my feelings?”

Hicks has provided an explanation, lying in the history of philosophy, for why so many people seem to consider such responses to a logical argument to be persuasive. That explanation lies, mostly, in the ideas of dead, white, male philosophers who lived two-hundred years ago. Those notions have slowly “trickled down” to the masses, and infect the majority of people’s minds today -especially any college student with a “gender studies” or “black studies” degree.

The author expressly states his theme in his table of contents:

“Thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” (Table of Contents, Pg. i.)

Did I find this, in fact, to be his theme based on my reading of the book? Overall, I’d say, yes. I’ll start with Hicks’ definition of “postmodernism”:

“Postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project. It holds that the modernist premises of the Enlightenment were untenable from the beginning…” (Pg 14)

“Postmodernism reject the Enlightenment project in the most fundamental way possible -by attacking its essential philosophical themes. Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment would depend upon.” (Pg. 14)

His definition of “postmodern” is basically a “negative definition”. He defines it as an attack on the Enlightenment. What does he think the Enlightenment stood for?

“In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon…Rene Descartes…, for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke…for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.” (Pg. 7)

“Bacon, Descartes ,and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and especially in the case of Locke, their individualism. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature -in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s character -in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual…“ (Pg. 7)

To sum up, Hicks sees three “types” of philosophical attitudes in the Western World:

The “Pre-modern”, as exemplified by the Christian Medieval, and, probably, the Ancient Greek worlds;

the “modern” attitude, which started around the time of Francis Bacon; and

the “postmodern”, whose origins he goes on to explain later in the book.

What was the “failure of epistemology” he says “made postmodernism possible”? He doesn’t spend too much time explaining what “epistemology” is. He clearly is familiar with, and sympathetic to, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. I assume he generally agrees with what she said in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”. I also think he is assuming people reading his book will already have some general understanding of the subject of philosophy and its basic questions. But, early on, he defines what he views as the “Enlightenment epistemology”, which is:

“If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then that epistemology systematically applied yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science. In mathematics, Isaac Newton….developed the calculus….Linnaeus…a comprehensive biological taxonomy…Lavoisier…the foundations of chemistry.” (Pg. 9)

Hicks says there were:

“…philosophical weaknesses…” that had “….emerged clearly by the middle of the eighteenth century, in the skepticism of David Hume’s empiricism and the dead-end reached by traditional rationalism.” (Pg. 24)

But, he says that the real “counter-Enlightenment” started from 1780 to 1815 with a split between Anglo-American culture on the one hand and German culture on the other. (Pg. 24) In Germany:

“Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment.” (Pg. 27)

Kant’s priority was to defend religion from the Enlightenment:

“I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (See Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.)

How did Kant “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”, according to Hicks?

“The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality -or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality…or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti- reason camps…the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.” (Pg. 28)

“Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality -real, noumenal reality- is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products….Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.” (Pg. 29)

In this way, reason was, according to Kant, limited to the “phenomenal realm”, while the “noumenal realm”, the realm of religion, was off limits to reason. (Pg. 29)

Since Kant posited his epistemic system to save religion, how did it come to be used by a bunch of largely, “irreligious”, if not atheistic, post-modern intellectuals? The rest of Chapter Two of Hick’s book lays out the “evolution” of Kant’s way of thinking by subsequent German philosophers, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. He sums these subsequent, pre-twentieth-century philosophers at the end of Chapter 2 in this way:

“The legacy of the irrationalists for the twentieth century included four key themes:

1. An agreement with Kant that reason is impotent to know reality;

2. an agreement with Hegel that reality is deeply conflictual and/or absurd;

3. a conclusion that reason is therefore trumped by claims based on feeling, instinct, or leaps of faith; and

4. that the non-rational and the irrational yield deep truths about reality.” (Pg. 57)

In the Twentieth Century, Hicks sees this tradition as having been continued by most major philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who “…agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings -especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt- he could approach Being.” (Pg. 59)

According to Hicks:

“Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:

1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of realty;

2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;

3. Reason’s elements -words and concepts- are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;

4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;

5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;

6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy -whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian- based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to overcome.” (Pg. 65-66)

Note that little has been said about the political views of post-modern intellectuals yet. Hicks observes that, in fact, most post-modern intellectuals are on the political left. (Pg. 84) Starting at Chapter 4, he addresses the connection between the epistemology and metaphysics advanced by German philosophers since Kant, and its political implications. The reason for the modern socialist’s rejection of reason lies in the failure of socialism in theory and in practice:

“As modernists, the [early] socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear to anyone with an open mind.” (Pg. 86)

Free market economists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Milton Freedman, and Friedrich Hayek, have largely won the debate when it comes to the theoretical case for capitalism over socialism. (Pg. 87) The moral/political debate is more “up for grabs”, but, even here:

“…the leading thesis is that some form of [classical] liberalism in the broadest sense is essential to protecting civil rights and civil society…” (Pg. 87)

By the 21st Century the:

“…empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism. Economically, in practice the capitalist nations are increasingly productive and prosperous…every socialist experiment has ended in dismal economic failure…Morally and politically…every liberal capitalist country has a solid record of being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century.” (Pg. 87-88)

The success of the capitalist world and the failure of the socialist nations created a “crisis of faith” for those on the left. As Hicks notes:

“This is a moment of truth for anyone who has experienced the agony of a deeply cherished hypothesis run aground on the rocks of reality. What do you do? Do you abandon your theory and go with the facts -or do you try to find a way to maintain your belief in your theory?” (Pg. 89)

Hicks believes the modern left’s abandonment of reality and reason in favor of “post-modern thinking” is their effort to “have their cake and eat it too”:

“Here then, is my second hypothesis about post-modernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” (Pg. 89)

Hicks notes that just as religious thinkers faced a “crisis of faith” during the Enlightenment, in which it was widely recognized that there was no way to prove the existence of god on “naturalistic” and rational grounds, so to, by the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was no way for socialists to use naturalistic and rational grounds to justify socialism. It had failed in theory and in practice, and, with revelations about the brutality of the Soviet Union, it had very little moral standing left. (Pg. 89-90) If they wanted to hold onto socialism, they had to reject reason and reality:

“Postmodernism is born of the marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology….Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic, the far left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective, you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.” (Pg. 90)

The rest of Chapter Four describes the evolution of modern anti-individualist thought, starting with Rousseau and moving on to Hegel and Marx.

Chapter 6 discusses Marxism in historical context. Hicks notes that classical Marxism believes socialism would arise in the more advanced capitalist countries, like England and the United States, first. In actual practice, it arose in semi-feudalistic countries like Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. As such, Twentieth Century Marxists, like Lenin, had to modify their thinking to rationalize the need for a violent and brutal aristocracy to bring about socialism. (Pg. 138 to 141)

By the 1950’s and 1960’s the failure of socialism to arise “spontaneously”, as predicted by Marx, resulted in several different strategies to be tried by socialists. Some subtly changed their ethical standards from “need to equality”, which could include the inequalities experienced by small businesses versus big businesses (pg. 151), or the inequality supposedly present between the races. (Pg. 152)

Other mid-twentieth-century Marxists said wealth was bad anyway, giving rise to the environmentalist movement. (Pg. 153).

A third group of Marxists turned to violence in an effort to move the proletarian revolution along in the First World. (Pg. 165-170) As Hicks notes, several international terrorist groups with ties to Marxist thought, including the Weathermen in the US, and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East, arose in the early 1960’s.

What does Hicks consider to be the motives of the 21^st Century postmodern left? He notes that postmodernist thinking contains a whole host of contradictions:

“On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.” (Pg. 184)

“On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” (Pg. 184)

“Values are subjective -but sexism and racism are really evil.” (Pg. 184)

“Tolerance is good and dominance is bad -but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.” (Pg. 184)

There is a “…contradiction between the relativism and the absolutist politics…” of postmodernism. (Pg. 185)

Hicks sees three possible explanations for this seeming contradiction:

1. Postmodernists are “relativists” primarily and their absolutist leftwing politics are “secondary”. He rules out this possibility because, otherwise, there would be more “conservative” postmodernists, but they are all uniformly left-wing. (Pg. 185-186)

2. The use of postmodernism is a “Machiavellian” strategy to undermine their political enemies. (Pg. 186) When they loose an argument, they will respond with: “Of course you, a white, male, heterosexual, would say that. But we cannot know anything about ‘things in themselves’, so reason is limited.”

3. Postmodernism is ultimately a nihilistic world-view, so the contradiction doesn’t matter to a postmodernist:

“The final option is not to resolve the tension. Contradiction is a psychological form of destruction, but contradictions sometimes do not matter psychologically to those who live them, because for them ultimately nothing matters. Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.” (Pg. 191-192)

The biggest flaw of the book I see may lie in the author’s treatment and evaluation of Marxism, which I think he gives more credit than it deserves. At several points, he seems to suggest that Marxism is more “pro-reason” than I think it ever was, even in its original “classical” format, as propounded by Karl Marx himself. Hicks makes an assertion about Marxist socialism that probably isn’t correct at page 86:

“As modernists, the socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear…” (Pg. 86, emphasis added.)

He implies that he is including Marxists in the above description of “socialists”, and not just the non-Marxist socialists of the 19th Century, since he goes on to discuss the claims of “Classical Marxist socialism” on the same page. Also, later, he says:

“Beginning in the 1920’s and 1930’s there had been some early suggestions that Marxism was too rationalistic, too logical and deterministic…And early Frankfurt School theorizing had suggested that Marxism was too wedded to reason…” (Pg. 156 to 157, emphasis added.)

Hicks seems to say that Marxism, as originally conceived, is “pro-reason”, when I think it never was. Non-Marxists socialists, the so-called “utopian socialists”, would have been pro-reason, like Hicks said on page 86. The ideas of Marx probably won out over the “utopian socialists” precisely because Marx embraced the Hegelian dialectic, and didn’t depend on classical Aristotelian logic. Marxism is too “arbitrary”, or disconnected from reality, to really be disproved or proved. Any time someone tries to disprove it, a Marxist could just say that person was a “tool of the capitalist exploiters”, and, “of course”, the critic would say that:

“Aware of the fact that communism cannot be defended by reason, the Marxists proceeded to turn the fallacy of ad hominem into a formal philosophic doctrine, claiming that logic varies with men’s economic class, and that objections to communist doctrine may be dismissed as expressions of ‘bourgeois logic.’ “ (Leonard Peikoff, “Nazi Politics,” The Objectivist, Feb. 1971, 12, found at: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html)

Overall, I consider this to be a minor flaw of the book, which deftly traces the “philosophic genealogy” of today’s “postmodern” left. It really helped me to understand the mind of the average leftist, and how she will dismiss reason and say, I’m engaging in a logic: “…created by dead white men”. Now I see another reason why the average leftist, like some mindless automaton, will point out how I’m a white, male, “bourgeois”, heterosexual -its easier to say this than do any hard thinking about the merits of their political ideology.

(All page number references below are to the 2018, expanded hardcover edition of “Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault”, by Stephen R.C. Hicks, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)

The “Hot Button Issue” of Abortion

I wanted to write a little about this because I rarely do. I am also hoping that I can bring a somewhat “nuanced” viewpoint to a discussion that tends to be driven by pure emotion. Right off the bat, I will state that I do think there should generally be some legal right to terminate a pregnancy, with a recognition that there may be some legal “line drawing”, which I think reasonable parties can disagree on. If you disagree with me, please at least hear me out.

Biological evidence seems to show that a fetus does not have a rational capacity. In fact, it may be that even a newborn infant does not have a rational capacity, which develops some time after birth. This is because the cerebral cortex appears to be underdeveloped, even at birth. This feature of the human brain is responsible for most of what we think makes us human. It also appears to be the physical structure involved in what philosophers would call “the rational faculty”. The reason for this late development of the cerebral cortex has to do with how the fetal body and brain develops, which follows the path of evolution. For instance, human fetuses have gills and a tail at a very early stage. Since the cerebral cortex developed last in the our pre-human ancestors, it makes since this feature comes about last. It’s also necessary to keep brain size fairly small so thet the baby can pass through the mother’s birth canal. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100712154422.htm

The fact that a cerebral cortex is not fully developed even at birth is significant to me because rights are based in the fact that human beings can deal with each other on the basis of reason and persuasion, making the use of physical force against each other unnecessary:

However, the point at which a baby develops a rational faculty in biology is probably not fully understood, and I will move forward with the rest of my argument on this issue without reference to whether a baby or a fetus has a sufficiently developed cerebral cortex or not. My argument for some legal right to abortion for some period of time during pregnancy doesn’t stand or fall on the issue of when the cerebral cortex is sufficiently developed.

How are rights violated? Rights are violated by other’s use of force to deprive you of a value against your will.

“Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, “The Nature of Government”, Ayn Rand)

This does not mean that force can never be used. It just means the times that force can be used are limited to those in which you are not trying to deprive another person of a value. For instance, force can be used in retaliation or self-defense.

Of special note in this context, is that there are times a person can use force against others, and it isn’t just when they are defending themselves or using retaliatory force.

There are at least two types force you can use to protect yourself:

1. Self-defense from intentional murder or other crime.
2. Use of force to prevent an unintentional collision with another person. For instance, if you use force to stop someone who has tripped from falling into you and knocking you over.

My position is that terminating a pregnancy is like this second type of use of force. It’s not force used in self defense. It is force used to stop the purely reflexive act of a fetus in attaching itself to a mother’s body during pregnancy, or the act of removing it once it has reflexively attached itself to the mother’s body.

Why would a woman need to terminate a pregnancy? All pregnancies are inherently risky for a woman. Women still die in child birth in the first world.

If she becomes pregnant and decides that she doesn’t want to take that risk, then she cannot reason with the fetus to explain why she wants it to detach itself from her body. It’s a purely reflexive act, regardless of how developed a fetus’ brain is.

Abortion is analogous to self-defense. The minimum of force is being used to detach the fetus, similar to how the minimum of force is used to prevent someone from killing you.

Does it matter that the mother chose to have sex, while In the above scenario of someone tripping and falling into you, you didn’t choose to have someone fall on you?

I would note that this would still justify abortion in the cases of rape. Since a woman who is raped didn’t choose to have sex in that scenario, my analogy is “spot on”.

At this point we are dancing around whether the fetus has any rights. What are rights? Why do we need them? This is where I and a religious advocate of rights part ways. We have fundamentally different definitions of “rights” and their basis.

Rights imply an autonomous actor who needs to take action to gain the values necessary for living. A fetus, by its very nature is physically attached to the mother. Choice doesn’t play a role in its existence.

If the mother could somehow transfer the fetus to an artificial womb, with no health danger to the mother, that would be something to consider, but we don’t have that technology yet. That means, for now, abortion is the only option for a woman who doesn’t want to risk her health with a pregnancy.

Parenthetically, I think a woman shouldn’t be able to force a man who isn’t her husband to pay child support. If a woman wants the father of her child to pay for her child, she should enter into a contract with him. I also think a man should have no right to see a child or be a part of its life without a contract with the mother. This “contract” is basically what marriage is about -or should be under an ideal political system. (That, and the sharing of one’s finances and property with the other person.)

At this point the more wild-eyed will go with the ‘reductio ad absurdum ‘ argument: “If abortion is okay, then you must think killing newborn babies is okay, since they cannot take care of themselves and there is a health-cost imposed on the mother by that too. Furthermore, maybe science will show that the rational faculty doesn’t fully develop until age 2.”

My response is: 1) the baby is detached, biologically, from the mother after birth. 2) Given that fact of biological detachment, it makes sense to “draw the line”, legally, there and presume a baby is capable of rational thought, even if such capacity may not still arise for some time. These are the minimum criteria I hold for an organism being accorded individual rights: 1, A biologically distinct organism, that, 2, has a rational faculty or capacity of some sort, necessitating that you can deal with it on the basis of reason and persuasion, unlike the lower animals that you can only deal with by means of force.

Should the “line” for when abortion is legal be drawn somewhere before birth? Say, at seven months, or even six? Should some regulation of the types of abortions, or when abortions are allowed prior to 9 months, be in place? I am willing to entertain those sorts of arguments. (Assuming no unusually high level of health threat to the mother, or some massive birth defect is discovered, after the general prohibition date, in which case there should be a judicial exception of some sort.)

Would I personally want my wife or girlfriend to have an abortion? Assuming that: One, she hadn’t been raped, two, she had no unusually high level of health risk, and, three, the fetus had no birth defects, then I wouldn’t want her to do it. I’d ask her not to, and try to talk her out of it. But, at the end of the day, I recognize it’s not my body, it’s not my health risk, and it’s not my decision.

The Objectivist Concepts of “Individual Rights” and “Initiation of Physical Force”

“A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” (“Man’s Rights”, _The Virtue of Selfishness_, Ayn Rand)

Important concepts in this definition include:

“Moral principle”
“Defining and sanctioning”
“Freedom of action”
“Social Context”

(1) What is “a moral principle”? – For Rand it is a system of principles to guide your choices in the furtherance and pursuit of your ultimate value -which is your own life. The purpose of morality is to maintain your life. For instance, you need to cultivate patterns and methods of thinking that will correspond the contents of your mind to the nature of reality. This is necessary because reality is what it is, which means you must learn how things work in order to control them, if you want to live. This is “rationality”. You learn what makes plants grow, and then you rearrange the material in the world to more effectively make the edible ones grow -which is farming. You learn which animals are dangerous and aggressive, and then you learn ways to avoid or kill them. You learn what types of wood or stone is strong enough to build structures out of to protect yourself from the elements, and then you arrange them into shelter.

(2) What is “freedom of action”? – Freedom of action means the absence of physical impediments. For instance, if you are traveling in a particular direction, and there is a mountain obstructing your forward progress, that mountain is restricting you from moving further in that direction. If you see a panther down a particular trail, that animal is restricting your freedom of action because it is a threat to your continued survival if you come into close proximity with it. In both cases, you are confronted with some sort of “physical force”. The mountain’s mere presence blocks your forward path, and the panther can maul you, causing injury or death -which is also physical force. With respect to other human beings, they can restrict your freedom of action by the same means: They can physically restrain you or they can threaten to use some sort of physical force similar to the panther.

(3) What is “a social context”? – This means interaction with other human beings, as opposed to interacting with an animal or a mountain. Human beings can use force against you to deprive you of the freedom of action that is necessary to maintain your life. A human can physically take away the crops that you’ve grown, or they can threaten to harm or kill you with a gun or a knife if you don’t give them your food. However, interacting with other human beings also provide you with many benefits. You can trade what you have made for what they have made. A farmer can trade some of the crops he has grown for a song that a musician wrote. A doctor can trade his services for the services of an auto mechanic, and so on, and so on. This allows for the division of labor, which increases every person’s overall material well-being. This social context of trade can only go on if each individual knows that he is secure to keep the values he has produced. He must know that when he parts with his values, he is doing so voluntarily and not because someone has used physical force to deprive him of his values. In other words, he has to have his freedom of action respected, in a social context.

(4) What is “defining and sanctioning”? – There are certain broad categories of values that all human beings need in order to live. There can be many variations and individual peculiarities within those categories, but everyone must satisfy these needs somehow and to some extent, by virtue of their nature as living organisms and as human beings. Everyone needs some sort of protection from the elements. Everyone needs a certain amount of food. Everyone needs to maintain their body within certain metabolic requirements. (We all need a certain amount of oxygen, warmth, atmospheric pressure, etc.) Others have to recognize and respect our desire to live. Others have to recognize and respect the actions necessary to create the material values we need in order to maintain our lives. This is what it means to “sanction” something. The dictionary defines “sanction” in the following ways:

(1) “a formal decree”

(2) “a solemn agreement”

(3) “something that makes an oath binding”

(4) “the detriment, loss of reward, or coercive intervention annexed to a violation of a law as a means of enforcing the law”

(5) “a consideration, principle, or influence (as of conscience) that impels to moral action or determines moral judgment”

(6) “a mechanism of social control for enforcing a society’s standards”

(7) “explicit or official approval, permission, or ratification”

(8) “an economic or military coercive measure adopted usually by several nations in concert for forcing a nation violating international law to desist or yield to adjudication”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanction

Most of these definitions involve other’s recognition and agreement that something is “right” or “appropriate”. This is why Ayn Rand said:

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.” (_Atlas Shrugged_, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

A question in my mind at this point is: Where does Ayn Rand’s concept of “the initiation of physical force” come in? Do you need a concept of “initiation of physical force” in order to come up with the concept of “individual rights”?

This question came up in my mind because someone once said to me that Ayn Rand’s concept of “individual rights” and “initiation of physical force” were somewhat “circular”. They implied that Rand was saying “individual rights” were the “absence of the initiation of physical force”, and that “initiation of physical force” was “whatever violates individual rights” -which would seem like circular reasoning.

My best thinking on this topic at this point is this: you logically derive a concept of “individual rights”, which includes a concept of “physical force used to deprive someone of a value”, but NOT necessarily an “initiation of physical force”. I think one more concept is needed to logically derive the idea of “initiation of physical force”. You must mentally subdivide the concept of “use of physical force” into at least two categories of “use of physical force”. On the one hand, there is the “use of physical force” to deprive another person of their life, to rob them, or to enslave them. This can be already understood as part of understanding the concept of individual rights. Another type of “use of physical force” is to stop someone who is using physical force to deprive another person of their life, or to rob them, or to enslave them. The distinction between these two types of physical force is that one must occur before the other can occur. There would be no need to stop someone from depriving another person of their life unless someone is already using physical force to deprive another person of their life. So, the distinction is one of “time” or “causation”. This is why Ayn Rand describes one type of force as an “initiation of physical force”, while the other is “retaliatory force”:

“The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (“The Objectivist Ethics”, _The Virtue of Selfishness_, Ayn Rand)

Furthermore, since people must stop the use of force by others that would deprive them of values by retaliating against anyone who is using force in that manner, that too becomes a “…a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context…”. In other words, the retaliatory use of force becomes an “individual right”. As most Americans would say: you have a “right to self-defense”. That right is “defined and sanctioned” with things like the English Common Law right of self-defense, and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. (This includes both a right of self-defense from murder, rape and robbery by common criminals, and also a right of self-defense against enslavement by tyrannical government.)

At this point, someone might say: “Okay, I understand why I need to have my right to life respected in order to live, which means I need others to keep from initiating physical force against me, but why should I recognize the rights of others?”

I think, to a large extent, social ostracism would prevent someone from violating individual rights. If other people view you as a rights-violator, they are going to do what they can to avoid you, which means you will have no friends, no lovers, and no business partners. This means you loose the benefits of most trade and social interaction with other human beings. Additionally, others aren’t going to sit by and quietly let you violate their rights. They are going to defend themselves, which means you’re in a state of perpetual armed conflict with the rest of mankind.

Most criminals do not use physical force to this extent, however. They want to live by reason and persuasion with some people, at least some of the time, and they want to keep their rights-violations hidden from the majority of mankind. Essentially, they want the benefits of living in a rights-respecting society most of the time, and they want to be seen by others as rights-respectors. A criminal just wants to “cheat”, sometimes, when they think they can get away with it. This is where I think government comes in. An essential role of government is to prevent the temptation to “cheat” by systematically exposing anyone who does so. (I don’t think this is the only role of government, but it is a role.) We all agree to establish this institution that will help to prevent any temptation to violate rights in any given situation by establishing a known “price” for anyone who gets caught.

Barack Obama: Tribalist-In-Chief

In my previous blog entry, I described the “tribalistic mindset” and showed that it is the “anti-conceptual mindset”. I also opined that the possible reason for this uptick in discussion of the concept of “tribalism” was due to the election of Donald Trump. Commentators on the left seem to have seized on the idea to explain his rise, and also seem to be blaming Trump for what they see as more “tribalism” in our society and political system.

However, if we are going point fingers at politicians, then we need to take a look at Trump’s predecessor. The Obama administration fanned the forces of tribalism like no other President, and he severely damaged race-relations in the United States.

The intellectual groundwork of the Obama administration’s facilitation of tribalism lies in key aspects of the leftist ideology.

First, most leftists admire or tend to follow the ideas of Karl Marx. So, his ideas on the nature of the human mind, logic, and reason are important in understanding how leftist thinking tends to encourage the anti-conceptual, tribal mindset.

The Marxist epistemology is “polylogist”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html). He thought your class determines your consciousness. For Marx, what class you are born into determines your logic, which is unique and distinct from other classes. The proletarians have their method of thinking, the bourgeoisie have theirs, the aristocracy theirs, etc. For Marx, there could be no reasoning with those who control the factors of production, because they fundamentally don’t think like proletarians. Only violence could bring about socialism. You couldn’t reason with members of the bourgeoisie any more than you could reason with a species of lower animal. (See my previous blog post for more on this: https://deancook.net/2018/08/16/karl-marx-polylogism-and-utopian-socialism-how-fundamental-philosophy-drives-history/ )

Marxist polylogism is not very different from those who believe that your race determines your method of thinking, and that other races fundamentally cannot understand you. An example of racial polylogism can be seen in an article discussing how the author believes a policy of “colorblindness”, i.e. *not* treating people differently because of their race is morally bad:

“Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism)

Note how the author of this article focuses on “cultural heritage” (i.e., tribalism), and how black people have “unique perspectives…”, thereby giving the article a distinct whiff of racial polylogism. (But, that’s apparently okay when the author is black.)

Marxism appears to have either “set the seeds” for racial polylogism, or it has the same philosophic basis as racial polylogism.

According to Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, the ideas of Marx were an outgrowth of the ideas of the philosophy of Hegel, who was in turn the intellectual progeny of Immanuel Kant. I haven’t studied Marx, Hegel, or Kant enough to know if this assertion is correct. (I take nothing on faith, even when Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff said it.) I note it here as a possible “lead” on the “philosophic roots” of the ideas of Marx and how those same ideas also led to racial polylogism:

“There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.” (_The Ominous Parallels_ Leonard Peikoff, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html)

The second aspect of the leftist mindset that tends to foster tribalistic thinking is modern philosophy’s rejection of reason. This modern rejection is summed up in an Encyclopedia Britannica article:

“As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute, moral values. Reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by discourses; hence they can vary with them. This means that the discourse of modern science, when considered apart from the evidential standards internal to it, has no greater purchase on the truth than do alternative perspectives, including (for example) astrology and witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes characterize the evidential standards of science, including the use of reason and logic, as ‘Enlightenment rationality.‘” https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy (Accessed on 12-15-2018)

As a result, post-modern intellectuals tend to believe that reason is nothing more than a “tool of oppression” over the non-white races:

“A philosophy and religion professor at Syracuse University gave an interview to The New York Times Thursday in which he critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a ‘white male Euro-Christian construction.’” (https://dailycaller.com/2015/07/03/professor-reason-itself-is-a-white-male-construct/)

I’d note that this attitude about reason serves as great “psychological cover” for a leftist because any time they loose a debate, they can just say your logic, evidence, and reason is nothing more than a “tool of oppression” by the “white, male, heterosexual patriarchy”, and disregard it.

The third intellectual basis of leftism that tends to promote tribalism is its promotion of collectivism. It is a core tenant of leftism that groups are more important than individuals. Quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica Article on “Collectivism”:

“The earliest modern, influential expression of collectivist ideas in the West is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social, of 1762 (see social contract), in which it is argued that the individual finds his true being and freedom only in submission to the “general will” of the community. In the early 19th century the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued that the individual realizes his true being and freedom only in unqualified submission to the laws and institutions of the nation-state, which to Hegel was the highest embodiment of social morality. Karl Marx later provided the most succinct statement of the collectivist view of the primacy of social interaction in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘It is not men’s consciousness,’ he wrote, ‘which determines their being, but their social being which determines their consciousness.’

Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in such movements as socialism, communism, and fascism.”(https://www.britannica.com/topic/collectivism , last accessed on 12-16-2018, emphasis added.)

For Marx, the father of modern collectivism, it was not (individual) men’s consciousness which determines their “being”, but their “social being”, which determines their consciousness. In other words, the individual is nothing, and the group, the collective, is all.

These systems of thought held by the Obama administration, the modern rejection of reason and the promotion of collectivism, create the proper “psychological attitude” for tribalistic thinking to flourish. This is because if reason is impotent, and if service to the group is considered as all-important, then an individual will consider his mind incapable of choosing what group he should serve. He’ll simply seek to join a group based on concretes like the fact that they look like him and talk like him:

“Now what are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group -any group- which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group -they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices -so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

This is, of course, racism. But, if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called ’ethnicity’” (“Global Balkanization”, Ayn Rand, _The Voice of Reason_, https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Objectivist-Thought-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXD7I/)

As we have seen, the philosophic roots of the Obama administration’s facilitation of tribalism lie in the ideas of mostly dead, white male philosophers, like Karl Marx. However, many previous leftist presidents have ascribed to similar philosophies. The Obama administration went further and actively promoted tribalism.

This promotion of tribalism started even before Barack Obama was President, although it has only become common knowledge in recent months, because the news media actively suppressed the information. In January of 2018, a photo surfaced showing a then-Senator Obama smiling and posing with Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. (http://www.tampabay.com/news/nation/Decade-old-photo-of-Obama-with-Louis-Farrakhan-surfaces_164857663) (Farrakhan is a tribal mentality through and through. I recommend doing an Internet search and reading some of the things he has written and said if you are unfamiliar.)

This photo was taken during a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus meeting with Farrakhan on Capitol Hill, which demonstrates where the loyalties of the entire Congressional “Black Caucus” lie.

If this photo had come out prior to the Presidential election of 2008, it is opined that Obama would not have been elected. The photo is the moral equivalent to a white Presidential candidate posing and smiling with the leader of Aryan Nations. (http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/01/27/obama-farrakhan-photo-dershowitz-says-he-would-not-support-him-if-he-knew-about-picture)

Obama managed to hide his promotion of tribalism pretty well until a later event in 2012. This was the shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman, a homeowner living in Florida. (Zimmerman was subsequently acquitted at trial.)

Obama chose to inject himself into a purely local matter of criminal law. (http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/23/president-obama-statement-on-trayvon-martin-case/) He aided and abetted the news media in doing its best to ensure that George Zimmerman wouldn’t get a fair trial.

But, more than that, Obama made a statement that I think did more damage to race relations than possibly anything else he said before or since. When commenting on the shooting, Obama noted:

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” (https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-had-son-hed-look-trayvon-171805699.html)

This was like saying: “I am with black people because you look like me. I’m not the President of the United States, who serves abstract, and important, concepts like justice, rights, and the rule of law. I am the mouthpiece of a racial pressure group, and I will do everything I can to promote that racial group’s ‘collective good’, at the expense of the individual rights of people who don’t belong to that racial group.”

Why did Obama do this? Probably because:

“The case resonates with many black Americans, a key voting group during Obama’s 2008 election, who see it as an example of bias toward blacks.” (https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-had-son-hed-look-trayvon-171805699.html)

I suspect so many black Americans were convinced George Zimmerman was guilty because many of them hold the tribal premise to some greater or lesser degree, although I obviously don’t have statistics to back that up. I’m not sure how one would even measure “tribalistic impulse” of a particular group of people, but I would like to see such a study. I suspect the results on the level of “tribalistic impulse” of American blacks, compared to American whites or Asians, would be stunningly high.

I believe Obama thought he had to say “If I have a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” to appease black Americans, but it was more than appeasement. It was active endorsement and promotion of the tribalistic impulse. It was encouragement to unleash some of the worst tendencies amongst some black Americans.

This pandering by Obama gave aid and comfort to the group known as “Black Lives Matter”, a group that always assumes if a white cop shoots a black man, then the shooting was unjust. For instance, when Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson in Missouri, it was determined by the United States Department of Justice that Officer Wilson did nothing wrong:

“Based on this investigation, the Department has concluded that Darren Wilson’s actions do not constitute prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, which prohibits uses of deadly force that are “objectively unreasonable,” as defined by the United States Supreme Court. The evidence, when viewed as a whole, does not support the conclusion that Wilson’s uses of deadly force were “objectively unreasonable” under the Supreme Court’s definition. Accordingly, under the governing federal law and relevant standards set forth in the USAM, it is not appropriate to present this matter to a federal grand jury for indictment, and it should therefore be closed without prosecution.” (https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf)

Despite that, there was a rush to judgment by what the media portrays as the “black leadership”. Jessie Jackson called it a “Crime of Injustice”. Al Sharpton, another tribalist, also shilled for Michael Brown in the face of the facts. (https://www.businessinsider.com/al-sharpton-denounces-darren-wilsons-excuse-michael-brown)

Always taking the side of a black person over a white person, without knowing any of the facts, demonstrates that the slogan “Black Lives Matters” is nothing but a statement of tribalism by the “black leadership”. (The notion of a “black leadership” is tribalism too, but the news media seems to believe Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton speak for black people, so that is how I refer to them.)

Despite the tendency of “Black Lives Matter” to always take the side of a black man, even when the facts didn’t support it, Obama expressed solidarity with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, and even went so far as to accuse police of widespread racial discrimination himself:

“’As a young man, there were times when I was driving and I got stopped and I didn’t know why,’ he [Obama] said.” (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/257811-obama-defends-black-lives-matter)

I don’t think Barack Obama is, himself a tribalist, but I think his philosophy, ideology, and method of thinking drives him to pander to those who *are* tribalists. Another example of that pandering could be seen when it came to Obama’s policies on immigration.

When it comes to issues of immigration policy, Obama supported open borders, which I, more or less, also support. I believe that policy is consistent with freedom and free markets. (https://ari.aynrand.org/blog/2017/02/07/ayn-rand-on-immigration) But, Obama didn’t support the policy because he’s committed to Capitalism. He supported it because of the need to appeal to Hispanic voters, who, to the extent they are concerned about open borders, are likely concerned out of feelings of tribalism, rather than concepts of justice, freedom of movement, and the free market. This tribalism is why you will see people flying Mexican flags at pro-immigration rallies in the United States:

“‘Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt’ to social changes caused by migration, he [Obama] said….’When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment…’ (https://dailycaller.com/2014/11/16/shock-flashback-obama-says-illegal-immigration-hurts-blue-collar-americans-strains-welfare-video/

Flying Mexican flags at pro-immigration rallies shows that, rather than being primarily about the abstract concepts of freedom and free markets, most of the “pro-immigration” sentiment of the Democratic Party is an expression of “Latin-American nationalism”, i.e., tribalism. They care less about the abstract concept of freedom of immigration than they do about ensuring that members of their racial and ethnic group can come and go as they please, into and out of, the United States. Would the “Hispanic leadership” in the Democratic Party care so much about immigration if most of the immigrants were German, or Chinese? (I doubt it.) Obama’s policies on immigration were another appeal to a tribalistic pressure group, just like his support of “Black Lives Matter”.

The tribal mentality discards reason because he is, fundamentally, the anti-conceptual mentality. (https://deancook.net/2018/12/15/what-is-tribalism-it-is-the-anti-conceptual-mentality/) This means tribalists will be strongly tempted to use force and violence when dealing with others outside their own ethnic group because they have no other recourse:

“Warfare -permanent warfare- is the hallmark of tribal existence. A tribe -with its rules, dogmas, traditions, and arrested mental development- is not a productive organization. Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals. War amongst other, momentarily luckier tribes, in the hope of looting some meager hoard, is their chronic emergency means of survival. The inculcation of hatred for other tribes is a necessary tool of tribal rulers, who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects.

There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule -since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind.” (“Global Balkanization, Ayn Rand, _The Voice of Reason_ https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Objectivist-Thought-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXD7I/)

So, the consequences of Barack Obama’s pandering to the tribal mentalities in our country was predictable. Here are a few examples:

(1) Riots in Ferguson Missouri and elsewhere. (“Ferguson riots: Ruling sparks night of violence” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30190224)

(2) “Occupations” of College Campuses by leftist thugs.

A couple of these “occupations” have been memorable for their totalitarian tendencies. A journalism professor at the University of Missouri was so enamored with the little totalitarian “no go zone” she and other campus minority groups had created on campus, that she, and the brutes following her, sought to exclude journalists from the area. When one journalist defied her, she famously yelled out: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!”( https://www.yahoo.com/news/mizzou-professor-some-muscle-protests-resigns-143632236.html)

Deep down in this professor’s soul, and in the soul of every leftist academic, “muscle”, i.e., naked force, is what matters. This is because reason is an illusion to them, thanks to “post-modern thinking” and Marxism.

At Evergreen College in the Pacific Northwest, a college professor was forced to resign after he questioned the wisdom of asking white students to “voluntarily” leave the college campus for a day. ( https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/evergreen-professor-plans-to-sue-college-for-385-million/ )

Given the violent nature of the “anti-conceptual, tribalist mindset”, it won’t be long before the “voluntary” aspect of Evergreen’s “ethnic cleansing dry-run” is dropped in favor of the use of force.

But, the riots and the “college occupations” at least had the virtue of not leading to the loss of human life. The bloody climax of the Obama administration’s race policy was seen in my hometown of Dallas, Texas. In July of 2016, a sniper shot twelve white police officers, specifically because they were white, in what was described as the deadliest day for law enforcement officers since the September 11 attacks in 2001. (https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/07/07/shots-fired-during-downtown-dallas-protests/ )

Ultimately, I believe that much of our recent history has been driven by mostly dead, white, male philosophers, like Karl Marx. However, if we are going to start looking at political and social “conduits” for the philosophy driving tribalism, then our 44^th President was one such conduit. If we’re going to point fingers at politicians for the uptick in tribalism in America, then we need to start with the villainous Presidency of Barack H. Obama.

What Is Tribalism? (It Is The Anti-Conceptual Mentality)

Use of the term “tribalism” seems to have gained currency over the past couple of years. Several books describing a descent into tribalism have been written, such as “Suicide of the West” by Jonah Goldberg and “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations” by Amy Chua. (I have not read these books, and express no opinion here about their merit.) However, the first place I ever heard the term “tribalism” was in Ayn Rand’s 1973 article “The Missing Link”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/philosophy-who-needs-it.html)

I think what is largely fueling this interest in the phenomena of “tribalism” is the suggestion that it might explain the Donald Trump Presidency. (I will express no opinion on that, although I will show, in a later blog entry, that if we’re going to point fingers at Presidents, then the “tribalistic mindset” was encouraged and enabled *prior* to the Trump Presidency.)

What, exactly, is “tribalism”?

The definition of “tribe” is something like: “a local division of an aboriginal people.” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tribe

A “define” search on Google returns the following definition: “a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.”

I’d say it’s something like: a political-social group from a stone-age culture that operates as a group for purposes of survival.

When commentators like Jonah Goldberg use the term “tribalism”, I think it is meant in a “metaphorical sense”. I doubt that he literally means that a “tribalist” is someone associated with a stone-age political-social group known as a “tribe”. Instead commentators are saying the “mind-set” of a “tribalist” is *similar* to someone from this type of stone-age group.

The fact that the term “tribalism” is being used somewhat “metaphorically” rather than literally means that the term can be easily misused by people who don’t clearly understand the concept. For instance, a “Psychology Today” article cited to a “USA Today” article in which a valedictorian made the following quote and initially attributed it to Donald Trump: “Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.” Then he said “Just kidding, that was Barrack Obama”, and the crowd allegedly then stopped clapping. The “Psychology Today” author said this was a clear example of tribalism.

Assuming this story actually happened the way it is reported, which I question, this is not *necessarily* an example of tribalism. The quote about “fighting for your place at the table” is extremely metaphorical. There is no literal “table”, and you don’t literally “fight” for it. So, *who* says “fight for your seat at the table” actually *does* matter. If Ayn Rand said it, I know enough about her philosophy of egoism and individual rights that I would know she meant you should develop the virtues of rationality, independence and courage, and earn your wealth on a free market. If Barack Obama says it, I know that someone with socialistic and anti-individualist tendencies like Obama means something like: “Get together with other looters and use the force of government to expropriate the wealth of the producers for yourself.”

My point is, when making a metaphorical statement like this quote, *context* matters. So, the crowd in the story may have stopped cheering because they took into consideration what Barack Obama likely *meant* by that statement as: “We need more government force to take wealth from the producers,” while they didn’t think, rightly or wrongly, that Donald Trump would mean that. That’s not “tribalism”, that’s just taking into account context.

In order to avoid misusing the term “tribalism”, what is needed is a proper definition and understanding of the concept. Who has defined that concept? Ayn Rand did in her article: “The Missing Link”. What I intend to do here is provide my own explanation of the concept of “tribalism”, as Miss Rand used it, and possibly provide some additional explanation and insight into the phenomena.

So, what is the “mind set” of tribalism?

An example of “tribalism” can be seen in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. The Montague’s and the Capulet’s are engaged in a sort of “tribalistic warfare” with each other.

Another probable example of “tribalism” from history would be the Hatfield-McCoy feud in Appalachian America. (https://www.history.com/shows/hatfields-and-mccoys/articles/the-hatfield-mccoy-feud)

In the case of “Romeo and Juliet”, if you’re a Montague, you associate with and fight alongside a fellow Montague. It doesn’t matter if your clansman was in the right or in the wrong -you’re on his side in a fight. Justice has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if your fellow Montague is interesting or boring -you spend your time with him over a Capulet.

Basically, a “tribalist” will prefer and choose *his* group, right or wrong.

Since right or wrong doesn’t matter, it means truth and falsity doesn’t matter, which ultimately means: reality doesn’t matter.

This raises an interesting question, then: How do you choose your group? It cannot be on the basis of which group has the best ideas, because that would require comparing their ideas and behavior in accordance with the facts and some standard of justice. The way you pick your group, therefore, is by *not* picking it.

You are born to a particular group, and you accept the traditions, customs, and behaviors of that group without question. Your people worship a particular god, and you never question it. Your people regard certain lands as sacred, and you never question it. Your people only eat certain foods, and you never question it. Your people say members of a particular “cast” can only associate with members of certain other “casts”, and that’s that. The leaders of your people say that another group of people are your ancient enemies that you must exterminate, and you blindly accept it.

A “tribalist” accepts the contents of his mind, the ideas he happens to hold, as the given, and never questions them. In other words, mentally, a tribalist holds certain *concepts* in his mind, and those concepts have no correspondence to reality, but he holds them, regardless. (It may be that some of the ideas a tribalist holds could be mentally “connected” to the facts, logic, and reality, but he doesn’t bother to “test” any of his ideas in that manner.)

Since we’re talking about the ideas in somebody’s head, what exactly is an idea? (For my purposes here, “idea” and “concept” are synonymous.)

A “concept” is a mental blending of observed concretes that are similar to one another, in contrast to other things from which they are different, when some common characteristic is considered. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html) For instance, two rocks have similar hardness, texture, natural origin, and size when compared to sand, a tree, or a television. On this basis, one can mentally blend together in one’s mind the similarities of the two perceived rocks and create a mental “file folder” designated by the word “rock” and defined as something like: “relatively hard, naturally formed mineral or petrified matter; stone.” (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/rock)

Furthermore, concepts can consist of other, mentally combined concepts that include new observations about additional characteristics of those earlier formed concepts and/or other concepts. So, for instance, with additional observations about different types of rocks, one can discover that some rocks originate from the cooling and solidification of magma or lava, which requires knowledge about volcanoes and the Earth’s core. (“Igneous rocks”) Other types of rocks are formed by the deposition and subsequent cementation of mineral or organic particles. (Sedimentary rocks) While other types of rocks are formed from the transformation of the other two rock types through heat or pressure. (Metamorphic rocks) These new sub-categories of the concept “rock” are called “higher-level concepts” or “abstractions from abstractions”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/hierarchy_of_knowledge.html)

The above example of forming the concept “rock” is an example of a concept that corresponds to reality. Unfortunately, we can also hold ideas that *do not* correspond to reality. One can believe that “ghosts” are real, that there is a “rain god” that makes it rain, or that the Earth is the center of the universe. The ideas that we hold can be true or false, and it is the role of logic and science to distinguish true ideas from false ideas.

Going back to the “tribalist”, now, he is a person who simply accepts certain ideas in his mind without question. He accepts that the way his group dresses is the way to dress. He accepts that the way his group worships a deity is the way to worship. He accepts that certain lands are sacred because his group believes that. He accepts the traditions and customs of his group *because* they are the traditions and customs of his group.

So, a person who chooses to blindly accept the word of the group he is born into, and the ideas it holds, over and above corresponding his ideas to reality, to see if they are right or wrong, is, fundamentally, “anti-conceptual”. A “tribal mindset” is therefore an “anti-conceptual mindset”.

This “tribal mindset” will often show up in issues of justice. By “justice”, I mean judging the character and actions of other people in accordance with a standard and then treating them accordingly.

“Justice” is a concept that depends on a chain of prior concepts to understand. Some of these prior concepts include the fact that one must take certain actions in order to live, which means one has chosen to live. One must also have some concept of rights, in terms of the things that human beings are entitled to and that others may not rightly use force to deprive you of.

A “tribal mindset” doesn’t hold to any standard of justice because that would require him to judge members of his *own* group in accordance with a standard of right and wrong and treat them accordingly. A tribal mentality cannot do that because he has to come to the aid of his fellow “tribesmen”, regardless of whether they are in the right. If a Capulet sees a fellow Capulet being attacked by a Montague, he must come to the Capulet’s aid and fight alongside him. (I will note, as an aside, that this is not the same as seeing a friend or family member being attacked, and assuming they are the victim. You may base that on your *knowledge* that the friend or family member would not initiate physical force. That is acting in accordance with justice. Like I said, context matters.)

As we have seen, the “tribalistic mindset” is, more fundamentally, the “anti-conceptual mindset”. There is one other aspect of the tribalistic mindset that is related to its anti-conceptualism.

If we go back to the “define tribe” search on Google, then we see that a tribe is described as being “…a traditional society…” So, if one is described as “tribal” it means that they tend to follow tradition.

What “tradition” are we talking about in this context? We mean the customs, habits, ideas, and morals of the “tribe”. In other words, the man-made institutions of whatever group one is born into. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaphysical_vs_man-made.html)

This means if there is a better, but non-traditional, way to do something, the “tribal mentality” will tend to choose the less efficient, but traditional way. If his great-grand-parents hunted with a bow and arrow, he’s going to hunt with a bow and arrow, even though a gun would be superior. (Or, the tribal mentality will choose hunting over farming or an industrial culture because it is “traditional”.)

In other words the “tribal mentality” prefers his particular man-made institutions over reality, or his own life. He tends to make no distinction between what Ayn Rand called “the metaphysical” (reality) and “the man made”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaphysical_vs_man-made.html)

What is “the metaphysical”? It is that which exists apart from human choice. The orbit of the planets around the sun is “the metaphysical”. They occupy their current orbits through a process of the laws of physics. The fact that water consists of two hydrogen atoms combined with one oxygen atom is “the metaphysical” – it is that way through the operation of the laws of nature and chemistry, not because of human desires or wishes to the contrary. The institution of marriage, on the other hand, was created by human beings. It would not exist apart from mankind. The rule of law is created by human beings. All technology is created by human beings to serve human ends. All institutions are created by human beings and can be altered or abolished by human beings. Concepts like “rock”, themselves, are human creations. Concepts serve human ends and needs. To serve human ends and needs, they must be consistent with the nature of the human mind, and, more generally, the nature of reality. (Their purpose is to promote human life.)

The “anti-conceptual mentality”, is someone who takes the contents of his mind as the given, and does not care to discover if those contents are true or false, i.e., if those concepts conform to the nature of reality and serve the purpose of promoting human life. To him, there is no distinction between the fact that the sun rises and sets every day (a metaphysical fact) and the fact that his particular ethnic group speaks a particular language or engages in certain customs. (A man-made fact). The anti-conceptual mentality says: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” But, only one of these is *actually* a certainty. Taxes are a man-made institution and can be changed or abolished, if enough people choose to do so.

Since this mentality has no distinction between the “metaphysical” and the “man-made”, the fact that his particular group happens to live in a certain area, wear certain clothing, or engage in certain rituals is the same as the fact that the sun rises and sets every day due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun and it’s rotation -although he probably doesn’t even consider why the sun rises and sets every day. (That would require too much abstract thinking.)

This type of mentality has no ability to examine the origins of the concepts he happens to hold or to determine if they are true or false, so anyone who questions the ideas he holds will tend to feel like a threat to him. He cannot justify what he believes. As Ayn Rand put it:

“This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is -because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind’s whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred.”(“The Missing Link”, Ayn Rand, _Philosophy: Who Needs It_)(https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Who-Needs-Ayn-Rand-ebook/dp/B002JPGQ2A/)

As a consequence of his inability to use reason or abstract concepts, the anti-conceptual, “tribal” mentality will be tempted to resort to force when he encounters those who do not ascribe to his particular tribal world view, because he has jettisoned the use of reason in dealing with other men. (See “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”, Ayn Rand, _Philosophy: Who Needs It_ https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Who-Needs-Ayn-Rand-ebook/dp/B002JPGQ2A/)

Another result of this anti-conceptual mentality, is the tendency to favor members of one’s “tribe”, whether right or wrong, in any given situation. Additionally, since the “tribal mentality” cannot handle abstract ideas, he tends to view his “tribe” as people who look like him, have the same accent as him, or who speak the same language as him. Usually, he will favor members of his own race over others.

An actual example of this mindset occurred back in 2014. A white man in Detroit accidentally hit a black child with his car after the child randomly stepped out in the street. (Police determined the driver was not at fault.) (https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/04/04/white-man-beaten-by-mob-in-detroit-after-hitting-boy-with-truck-was-it-a-hate-crime/)

The white driver did the right thing and immediately stopped to render aid to the child. A mob of angry blacks attacked the white driver and brutally beat him and robbed him.

This is the tribal mentality. A mob automatically assumed that the driver of the vehicle was “in the wrong” because he was a different skin color. Abstract concepts like “justice”, or even the traffic laws, were beyond their range of thinking. To them it was just: “white people bad” and “black people good”. (However, I’d also note that the beating was stopped after a black woman, a nurse, intervened, and convinced them to stop beating the white driver. Her actions were extremely admirable, and showed an incredible courage. The group beating the man were an example of the “anti-conceptual mentality”, while the nurse, who convinced them to stop, was an example of a reasoning individualist, committed to justice and the rule of law.)

Fundamentally, the mob that attacked the man in Detroit was a group of people incapable of much abstract thought. They had never learned to think conceptually, and had therefore chosen to cling to their group like a stone-age group of savages. They reacted violently the first chance they got. But, their fundamental problem wasn’t tribalism, which was an effect, not a cause. The cause was the anti-conceptual mentality.

Anti-conceptualism causes tribalism, because all tribalism is the anti-conceptual mentality. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-conceptual_mentality.html)

The Self-Interested Purpose of Concepts

When I give the Objectivist definition of “selfishness” as being “primarily concerned with the maintenance of one’s own life”, the retort I have gotten the most over the years is something along the lines of: “That’s just your’s and Ayn Rand’s highly-unsual definition of ‘selfishness’, and nobody else shares it.”

Unfortunately, anyone saying this doesn’t understand the purpose of concepts and knowledge. Why do we need a concept of “selfishness”, or any other concept for that matter? What is the purpose of knowledge? For Rand, all knowledge serves the purpose of promoting, maintaining, and enhancing “man’s life”. Since reality is what it is, and human beings are what they are, you must form concepts in order to live. So, the concept of “selfishness” must be formed based on the choice to live and your nature as a human being. That means the correct definition of “selfishness” means: “being primarily concerned with the maintenance of one’s own life,” not “violating the rights to life and property of others” or “treating others unjustly” -which tends to be what most good non-Objectivists mean when they speak of “selfishness”.

So, a bank robber should not be described as “selfish” because it doesn’t distinguish him from the people who own the bank and the depositors at the bank, who all presumably want to live and pursue happiness -which is selfish. A bank robber should be described as a “force-initiator”, a “criminal” or a “rights-violator”. Similarly, a man who cheats on his wife shouldn’t be described as “selfish” because it implies that you should go out and marry someone not because you love them but because they have “need” of you. It implies that you should marry someone not because you consider them to be the best spouse you can get, but because they are the *worst* spouse you can get -which is rather insulting to your spouse. A man who cheats on his wife should be described as “unjust” or a “promise-breaker”, not selfish.

The people who have suggested that my definition of “selfishness” isn’t in accordance with the “socially-accepted definition” don’t understand that all concepts serve my self-interest, and reality is what it is. That’s why I learn new things and gather knowledge in the first place -I’m rational because I want to live, not because rationality serves some unspecified purpose, unrelated to my life. If the “socially accepted definition” of any concept isn’t in accordance with the choice to live and the nature of reality, then it is the socially accepted definition that needs to change.

Context-Dropping

Someone posted this article on Facebook about a drink company getting sued because they claim that their product is “all natural”, but it contains what the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say are not natural ingredients. https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/463609871/beaumont-costales-files-class-action-lawsuit-against-lacroix-water

I jokingly responded with: “They meant ‘natural’ in the sense that everything that exists was created by the big bang”. Obviously, this is not what is meant by “natural”, as most of us use that term, in drink or food products, so it was recognized I was making a joke.

I regard what I did there as what Ayn Rand called “context dropping”. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/context-dropping.html

When done seriously, and not in the context of a joke, it indicates a serious thinking problem, especially if it is a “mental habit”.

In Objectivism, context is considered a very important concept. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/context.html
The Objectivist view of concept-formation depends on having a context. So, for instance, when you form the concept “cat”, you do so in a certain context. You see two or more concrete instances of cats, which have distinct identities. They might have different colors and different amounts of fur and size. One cat may be old, while the other cat is young. But, when you look at those two concrete cats in comparison to, say, a parrot, their similarities, are much greater than any of their differences. According to Objectivism, you cannot form the concept “cat” without a “foil” of some other entity that is so different, that these two entities seem similar by comparison. (You’ve then achieved what Objectivism calls the “unit perspective” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/unit.html
on cats, and can then say that you are omitting the differences between the two cats on the premise that they must have some size, color, and amount of fur, but it can be any within certain ranges, which is “measurement-ommission” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/measurement.html
.)

I think if you are a “habitual context dropper”, then your mind would be paralyzed, because you couldn’t form concepts with any great success.

However, in logic, I think what I was jokingly doing would be considered the “fallacy of equivocation”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

The “fallacy of equivocation” is an example of an “informal fallacy”. https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions.html

However, I’ve noticed that most of the informal fallacies in logic seem like instances of what Rand called “context dropping”. For instance, argument ad hominem involves attacking someone’s character or motives for holding a particular viewpoint rather than the truth or falsity of that viewpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Pointing out bad motives can sometimes be a valid form of critique, such as when you are pointing out that a witness in court has a motive to lie about what they are testifying about. That has to do with whether the witness is an accurate reporter of *facts observed*, whether they are “credible”, rather than a *logical argument*, which, assuming the truth of the facts used, is independent of the credibility of the person making the logical argument. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html

So, what I suspect is that all informal fallacies in logic are really just common examples of what Rand called “context dropping”. Unfortunately, Miss Rand didn’t write much on what she considered to be “context dropping”, although I noted early on in my reading of her that she used the term a good bit. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t write more on this, as I believe she coined it. The closest I’ve ever seen to the same meaning is “taking something out of context”. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/take+something+out+of+context

However, that has more to do with just misrepresenting what someone said by quoting just some small portion of what they said. “Context dropping” as Miss Rand used the term is more about something that goes on within the mind of the person, with their own thinking, which becomes incorrect because of their failure to “hold context”.

Evidence

Lets say Albert tells me he saw Victor commit a murder 30 years ago.

Victor categorically denies it.

I say to Albert: Do you have any physical evidence of this murder? (Even a dead body?)

Albert: No

I say to Albert: Do you have any other witnesses that can corroborate what you are saying?

Albert: No, in fact some of the people who I say were there say they don’t remember this.

I say to Albert: Where were you when this happened?

Albert: I was at a party.

Me: Were you drinking?

Albert: Yes.

Me: How long ago did this happen?

Albert: 30 years ago.

I don’t actually think Albert has said anything here. All he has is his statement, and he admits that he was drinking. I know drinking alters perception of reality and memory. https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa63/aa63.htm

Albert has no credibility, and I’m simply going to regard his assertion as “arbitrary”. He has no credible evidence to back up this assertion. Albert’s assertion is neither true nor false. It is simply “arbitrary”. It’s like the claim: “There’s an invisible gremlin on my shoulder, but only I can see it. Now prove that I’m lying.” The onus of proof is on he, or she, who makes the assertion.

“‘Arbitrary’ means a claim put forth in the absence of evidence of any sort, perceptual or conceptual; its basis is neither direct observation nor any kind of theoretical argument. [An arbitrary idea is] a sheer assertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/arbitrary.html

If your response is: “You can’t prove Albert didn’t see this murder,” then you’re essentially asking Victor to “prove a negative”. Victor says it didn’t happen. How is he supposed to present evidence of something that didn’t happen, when the person making the assertion hasn’t really presented any credible evidence for it?

Now lets say two people both make an assertion that on two separate, and unrelated, occasions, Victor committed two separate murders. They both admit they had been drinking at the time, and have no other witnesses to corroborate what they assert, nor do they have any physical evidence to back up what they assert. The fact that two people (or three, or four) make completely unrelated assertions doesn’t somehow make any one of those assertions more or less true. You cannot say “A is true because B is true,” and then turn around and say: “B is true because A is true.” I think this is an example of “Begging the Question”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

If you could show that Victor had, in fact committed one murder with some independent evidence of that murder, then that probably would be some evidence that he had committed the second murder. This is because we know that someone who does an action one time will tend to act in accordance with a pattern or habit when doing the same action on another occasion. But, you’d first have to put forth some independent evidence that he committed the first murder. Simply using the unsupported assertion that Victor committed a first murder to prove that he committed a second, unrelated, murder, and, in turn, using that second, unsupported assertion of an unrelated murder to prove that he committed the first murder, is bad reasoning.

Now lets say you were accusing Victor of some sort of sex crime, like indecent exposure or attempted rape. Victor says it didn’t happen. He denies it. If a person claims that they had been drinking alcohol 30 years ago when they witnessed this incident, does that hurt their credibility as a witness? Yes. The analysis is the same. If they have no physical evidence of this, and no other witnesses to corroborate their story, then the accuser has made what can only be described as an arbitrary assertion with no credible evidence to back it up.

The fact that a second accuser comes forward and makes an accusation of a separate, unrelated sex crime, where the accuser admits she was very intoxicated, doesn’t somehow make it more or less likely that the other accusation is true. If fifty women come forward making fifty different claims of completely unrelated criminal acts on separate occasions, that doesn’t somehow make any one of those accusations any more or less true unless you can show that at least one of those accusations is true with independent evidence. (In which case you could say the one independently established assertion is proof of a habit.)

Most people will accept my reasoning on the murder, but will want to say that attempted rape is different. They will likely say that women are generally embarrassed or ashamed to report rape, and that this is evidence that a woman, on any given occasion, is telling the truth. This is the fallacy of division. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division Even if 99% of the women making rape allegations are telling the truth, that doesn’t mean you can say, in any given instance, that a woman accusing a man of rape is telling the truth. We know that some percentage of women make false rape accusations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case So, you cannot simply assume that any particular woman, in any particular case, is telling the truth.

Applying these principles to the case of Judge Kavanaugh, we have two women who admit that they were drinking when each of these incidents happened. I base my understanding of the situation on two news articles, that I recommend you read:

First alleged incident: http://www.waxahachietx.com/zz/news/20180916/kavanaugh-accuser-speaks-out-on-sexual-assault-claim

Second alleged incident: https://www.businessinsider.com/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-yale-deborah-ramirez-2018-9

As far as I can tell, neither of these women has found any independent witnesses to corroborate what they’ve said. Neither of them has any evidence other than their assertion that they witnessed this, and they have less credibility in my mind than Judge Kavanaugh, because they both admit they had been drinking when these incidents allegedly occurred, while Kavanaugh says it didn’t happen. I say “credibility in my mind” because I don’t know either these women or Judge Kavanaugh personally, so I only have the information contained in news articles on which to assess credibility.

The third accuser has prepared an affidavit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kavanaugh-accuser-michael-avenatti-reveals-julie-swetnick-today-2018-09-26/

She was careful to never say whether or not she had been drinking alcohol at the parties where she allegedly saw Judge Kavanaugh assault and gang rape women. The question of alcohol consumption is highly relevant for determining her credibility as a witness, and the fact that she was at a “party environment” suggests to me that she probably was drinking alcohol. If she had NOT been drinking, then it would make sense to put that in her affidavit, because it would make her much more credible.

If she were subject to cross-examination, the FIRST question I’d ask her is whether she had been drinking alcohol when she witnessed these things, and how much? That goes directly to her credibility given the memory impairing effects of alcohol.

Additionally, she states in line 14 of her affidavit that “I am aware of other witnesses that can attest to the truthfulness of each of the statements above.” But, she doesn’t say WHO those people are. Why not? It would instantly make her story more credible if she gave names of other witnesses who could corroborate what she’s saying. The fact that she doesn’t do so makes her story very suspicious.

The fact that she was willing to sign an affidavit, and it is therefore “sworn”, doesn’t make it more credible. Since the affidavit is not being used for any lawsuit or for any legal proceeding, I doubt she could be prosecuted for perjury, if it were shown she was lying. If anything in the affidavit was shown to be a lie, none of the lies would be considered “material”. For instance, someone could sign an affidavit saying “I swear that the sky is red,” and then post it on the Internet, but I don’t think that would make them guilty of perjury because the statement “the sky is red”, while a lie, isn’t material to anything from a legal standpoint. (There is no lawsuit where the color of the sky is an issue.)

Given the fact that she doesn’t say if she was drinking alcohol when she witnessed these things, and given the fact that she claims there were other witnesses, but didn’t name them, I regard her entire affidavit as suspect. Any reasonable person who wasn’t lying would know that others would want to know these things and would state them in the affidavit.

She has yet to give an interview. This is also very suspicious and makes what she is saying suspect. It appears that she isn’t willing to let reporters ask her any of the basic questions that are raised from reading her affidavit. Although, I’ve heard, she will give an interview on Sunday for a pay cable channel. (This also sounds strange to me.) At any rate, I hope she is asked some of these basic questions.

These are the three accusers that have come out to date. I find none of them to be credible based on the news stories I’ve seen. I am not saying they are lying. I’m saying they have not presented any credible evidence for what they are saying. I therefore regard their statements as “arbitrary” -having no evidence to back them up. Before I’m prepared to treat a man as a criminal in my personal or professional life, and denounce him and avoid him, I need some level of actual evidence to demonstrate that what the speaker is saying is true.

The other issue in my mind is: Does any of this matter?. All of these incidents of alleged rape or attempted rape are well outside the statute of limitations for prosecution. The only way this matters is in Judge Kavanaugh’s advise and consent process by the Senate. Senators can hold hearings on the issue, but where do they draw the line? Do they have to have a hearing on every outlandish accusation made by any person about a nominated Federal Judge before they can perform their advise and consent role? What if someone claimed Judge Kavanaugh was an alien sent here to take over the world? Should an obvious nut be allowed to testify? Senators have to assess credibility of potential witnesses based on news reports like the ones I’ve cited. Then they have to come up with some standard of “probable cause” on who to have as a witness, and I think, based on that, no reasonable Senator could even regard these women as credible enough to testify at a hearing.

Karl Marx, Polylogism, and Utopian Socialism – How Fundamental Philosophy Drives History

I’m currently listening to: “The Long 19th Century:European History From 1789 to 1917” Professor Robert I.Weiner (Disk 4, Lecture 7), from ‘The Great Courses’ series.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/long-19th-century-european-history-from-1789-to-1917.html

It is a pretty ‘middle of the road’ series with no obvious ideological skew other than, maybe, ‘slightly left of center’, since it’s a mainstream college professor.

In it, he says Karl Marx called the other socialists ‘utopians’ because they believed that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means, maybe even with the assistance of other classes. That is where the term ‘utopian socialist’ comes from.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism

Marx, on the other hand, believed that only violent class struggle could achieve socialism.

I realized when listening to this that Marx’s metaphysics and epistemology was driving his politics. He thought that your class determines your consciousness -that what class you are born into determines your logic. He was a ‘polylogist’ who believed in ‘many logics’. The proletarians have their method of thinking, the bourgeoise have theirs, the aristocracy have theirs, etc.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html

Thus, for Marx, there could be no reasoning with those who control the factors of production, because they fundamentally don’t think like proletarians. Only violence could bring about socialism. Any socialist who thought you could reason with the bourgeoise was a ‘utopian’ -not recognizing reality. Marxism was therefore self-described as ‘scientific socialism’.

This explains the inevitable Marxist penchant for mass killing when they took over in a country. Anyone who wanted a peaceful transition to socialism was seen as naive at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Later, what I think happened is others picked up this same idea of polylogism and applied it to things besides class -such as your race or ethnicity. (Specifically, a certain political group in 1930’s Germany.) Once again, without a common frame of thinking and logic, any such proponent of ‘racially unique logic’ would be led to believe that no reason or discourse is possible between the races, and that only violence or separation is the solution.

I vaguely knew about polylogism from reading Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. http://www.peikoff.com/lr/home.htm But, I never really saw how one’s views on logic and the nature of the mind could have political ramifications like they clearly did on Marx when he referred to his fellow, non-violent, socialists as ‘utopians’. Furthermore, any time a Marxist committed murder, he had the perfect rationalization handy: He is serving the forces of historical necessity, and no reasoning is possible with the forces of counter-revolution because they don’t think like him.

Fundamental philosophy really does have political and social consequences for history.