A Review of “Altruism as Appeasement” by Ayn Rand

In 1962, Ayn Rand asked a student at MIT why so many of “…today’s young intellectuals were becoming ‘liberals’…” (pg. 32) A few weeks later, the MIT student wrote Miss Rand a letter, outlining his thinking on the subject. Miss Rand wrote “Altruism as Appeasement”, which expands on the response she got from this MIT student. This essay can be found in The Voice of Reason. (My page citations below are to the 1989 Meridian version, ISBN number: 0-452-01046-2)

In his letter, the student told Miss Rand that “The majority of college students…do not choose to think; they accept the status quo, conform to the prescribed code of values, and evade the responsibility of independent thought…’In adopting this attitude, they are encouraged by teachers who inspire imitation, rather than creation.’” (Pg. 32)

However, there is another group who are “…not willing to renounce their rational faculty.” Miss Rand then quotes at length from the MIT student’s letter: “‘They are the intellectuals -and they are the outsiders….They are teased and rejected by their schoolmates. An immense amount of faith in oneself and a rational philosophical basis are required to set oneself against all that society has ever taught…The man who preaches individual integrity, pride, and self-esteem is today virtually nonexistent. Far more common is the man who, driven by the young adult’s driving need for acceptance, has compromised. And here is the key -[the result of] the compromise is the liberal.’”

What is the psychological result? Most “liberal intellectuals” are driven by a strong guilt complex, because a person who sets himself against society in favor of rationality will feel guilt due to his rejection by the mediocrities around him. The “liberal” “…’loudly proclaims the brotherhood of all men. He seeks to serve his escapist brothers by guaranteeing them their desire for social security…’” (Pg. 33) “Liberals” are driven to atone for their false guilt, and they do so by working for “…’their welfare…’” (Pg. 33)

Miss Rand agreed with the MIT student regarding the psychological process he had identified, however: “…the situation he [the MIT student] describes is not new; it is as old as altruism; nor is it confined to ‘liberals’.” She says that this is the “…story of men who spend their lives apologizing for their own intelligence.” (Pg. 33)

Miss Rand then describes how this psychological process works out in the mind of the average college student. In an effort to avoid a massive quantity of quotations, I will summarize Miss Rand’s description of this process as best I can, as well as discuss some of my own observations that have led me to believe that Miss Rand is describing a psychological process that occurs very often in the mind of persons that usually self-identify as “liberals” or, more often today, as “progressives”.

When I originally read this essay in the mid-nineties, I was 19 or 20 years old. I hadn’t had enough experience to know if Miss Rand was right, so I just mentally “shelved” the issue. 20 years later, I’ve dealt with and seen enough people, and I’ve spent enough time thinking about their behavior, that I consider Miss Rand’s theory in “Altruism as Appeasement” to be a highly probable explanation for many people that are college educated, and self-describe as “liberals”, “progressives” or “social democrats”.

Miss Rand observes that bright children have a sense of being trapped in a “nightmare universe” when they are growing up. Growing up mostly in the Bible Belt and going to public school, I can relate to this description of childhood. In the South, large numbers of people will tell you that you are going to hell for some inherent moral vice called “original sin”, unless you repent your non-existent guilt to god. This could certainly be a frightening prospect for a child. In my own case, I started questioning the existence of god around age 13, and my mother must have sensed that because I was made to go to church despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly interested. Fortunately, the church that I was sent to was fairly “liberal”, and didn’t take the bible literally, so it could have been worse, I suppose.

Public schools, especially high school, were filled with their share of bullies -by which I mean children that would engage in low-level initiations of physical force, especially against anyone who didn’t seem to fit in, or that their emotions told them deserved such treatment. (By low-level initiations of physical force, I mean things like handing out quadriceps contusions —a “deadleg”- or being spit on, or having your books knocked out of your hands in the hall, etc.) Although in my case, by the 11th grade, most of the kids that were initiating physical force against others had either been removed from the school to a special “alternative school”, or were already in jail. Additionally, Plano Independent Schools contain a large number of children with parents that actually care about academic achievement and personal success, so my overall public school experience wasn’t what I’d call a “nightmare”. I suspect that an inner-city public school would be four years of complete hell all the way through, and make my experience look like I was living in Galt’s Gulch (a utopia).

I discovered Ayn Rand’s philosophy when I was about 15, and I did note that most people were hostile to Miss Rand’s ideas, if they knew about them at all. I did have a couple of teachers that seemed sympathetic towards her ideas, but that was rare. So, I can relate when Miss Rand says that the intelligent teenager wants to “…understand things and issues, big issues, about which no one else seems to care.” (Pg. 33)

Miss Rand goes on to say that most intelligent teenagers start college with the hope that it will be better, but their first year is too often a “psychological killer”(Pg. 33). He went to college hoping to find answers and meaning, and some companions to share his interest in ideas. She notes that he may find a handful of teachers that live up to his hopes, but “…as to intellectual companionship, he finds the same gang he had met in kindergarten, in playgrounds, and in vacant lots: a leering, screeching, aggressively mindless gang playing the same games, with latinized jargon replacing the mud pies and the baseball bats.” (Pg. 34)

I found Rand’s description of college to be fairly accurate at the University of Texas at Austin, which is easily the most left-wing school in Texas. One English professor was particularly terrible. He interpreted everything we read through the lens of “multiculturalism” and “feminism”. He told the class that Thomas Jefferson was a racist and a hypocrite when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. I raised my hand and disagreed with him. I told him that the Declaration of Independence may not have been consistently applied at the founding, but it formed the intellectual basis on which the nation eventually moved towards abolishing slavery. His response was that the civil war was the reason the slaves were freed. I disagreed, and said that slavery would have been abolished eventually anyway. In that professor’s mind, ideas had nothing to do with it. The use of physical force was all that mattered. It makes me wonder why he bothered to be a professor at all, if he thought ideas were so futile.

Going back to Miss Rand’s essay, how do too many intelligent college students deal with the intellectual wasteland that is college? “There are many wrong directions he can make at this crossroads, but the deadliest -psychologically, intellectually, and morally- is the attempt to join the gang at the price of selling his soul to uninterested buyers. It is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns…by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal.” (Pg. 34) She notes that this is rarely a conscious decision on his or her part. It is done gradually and subconsciously and by semiconscious rationalization. She also notes that altruism “…offers an arsenal of such rationalizations: if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his…subservience is unselfishness…he is hooked. By the time he is old enough to know better, the erosion of his self-esteem is such that he dares not face or reexamine the issue.” (pg. 34)

What is the psychology of an intelligent person who goes to college and professes that he is using his mind to serve others? Such a man or woman has some “…degree of social metaphysics [secondhandedness]…” (Pg. 34) The concept of “social metaphysics” requires some explanation, which Rand does supply: “Basically, a social metaphysician is motivated by the desire to escape the responsibility of independent thought, and he surrenders the mind he is afraid to use, preferring to follow the judgments of others.” (Pg. 34)

If you’ve read Miss Rand’s book The Fountainhead, the character Peter Keating is the ultimate “second-hander” or “social metaphysician”. If you haven’t read that novel, it could be thought of as the “go along to get along” type of personality. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/go_along_to_get_along) It does not mean never compromising on non-fundamental or trivial matters. So, for instance if you are going to dinner with a friend, and they prefer Italian food and you want Chinese, and you compromise by going to an Italian restaurant, with the understanding that next time you will pick the restaurant, that isn’t social metaphysics. That is simply recognizing that there are a range of food preferences that vary by person, you can only go to one place at a time, and that friendship is about shared values, which means showing an interest in what your friends are interested in.

The social metaphysician regards society -others- as the standard of reality. The social order as it happens to exist is accepted by him, or her, and then he or she operates within it. A social metaphysician can be quite successful at operating within that social order, but she never questions it. This is why Rand called them social metaphysicians.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the most fundamental aspects of the nature of reality. Metaphysics are the principles that must be understood before one can study particular sciences like physics or biology. For instance, in Miss Rand’s philosophy, she accepts the existence of an external universe as the given. The entities that make up the universe have a particular nature and those entities act in accordance with that nature. According to Miss Rand’s system of metaphysics, an entity is what it is regardless of anyone’s desires or wishes to the contrary. If one is a social metaphysician, then the metaphysical, i.e., reality, is less important than the “man-made”. The man-made includes all of our social institutions and customs. Unlike reality, the man-made depends on human choice, and could be other than it is. For instance, America is a Republic and not a Monarchy because people chose to make it that way. It’s continued existence as a Republic depends on human choice. The social metaphysician simply accepts these man-made customs as the given, and rarely questions them. In fact, a social metaphysician has so internalized this way of thinking, that anyone who questions generally accepted social institutions will make her feel uneasy.

Social metaphysicians who are less intelligent, and didn’t go to college, are the “good old boys” and “rednecks” that one might see in a small, rural town. The social metaphysician is also quite common in inner cities, but I don’t know what the polite word to describe them would be. For lack of a polite term, I will call them “black rednecks”. A “black redneck” from a large inner city like Chicago or New York will be highly critical of anyone from his neighborhood who studies hard and tries to better his economic standing. He will accuse high-achievers in his race of “acting white”. This is a perfect example of the social metaphysician attitude. The “black redneck” believes there are certain social customs and institutions that are not to be questioned -unfortunately those social customs and institutions in minority communities include the belief that gaining knowledge and education is not in accordance with being of African descent. Anyone from his racial group who defies those customs is therefore a traitor in the social metaphysician’s eyes. There was once a great episode of a show that I didn’t typically watch that covered this topic, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” where the “nerdy” character “Carlton” is accused of being a race-traitor.

Another great essay by Rand describing basically the same mentality as this type of social metaphysician, the “anti-conceptual tribalist”, can be found in Philosophy: Who Needs It called: The Missing Link.

The intelligent teenager who goes to college and has the “social metaphysician” mindset will not become a redneck, though. He (or she) will become a “liberal” -which is the “educated” equivalent. To a social metaphysician college student, it seems like all of his professors and peers accept the idea that the individual must sacrifice himself to the “common good”. This means that in the social metaphysician’s eyes, the idea of self-sacrifice is one of the social institutions and custom of college. It is the social order that is not to be questioned.

The psychology of social metaphysics doesn’t entirely explain the “liberal mindset”, however. The college “liberal” is also engaged in “intellectual appeasement”: “…an intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind. The degree of self-abasement is greater [than the social metaphysician]; the implicit view of the mind -as functioning by permission of the mindless -is unspeakable. (Nor does the appeaser often care to speak of it.)” (Pg. 34)

“There are as many variants of the consequences [of being an intellectual appeaser] as there are men who commit this particular type of moral treason. But certain scars of psychological deformity can be observed in most of them as their common symptoms.” (Pg. 35) Rand then describes some common consequences of being an intellectual appeaser.

First, the intellectual appeaser tends to hate mankind in general, and to regard them as “…evil by nature, he complains about their congenital stupidity…” (pg. 35) I regard the “people are stupid” attitude as the hallmark of the “liberal” or “progressive”. “Liberal” politicians like Michael Bloomberg pass laws to restrict the size of sugary drinks because he thinks people are too stupid to regulate their own caloric intake. The “liberal”, intellectual appeaser view of “…the people at large is a nightmare image -the image of a mindless brute endowed with some inexplicably omnipotent power -and he lives in terror of that image…emotionally, he keeps feeling the brute’s presence behind every corner…The brute is the frozen embodiment of mankind as projected by the emotions of an adolescent appeaser.” (Pg. 35)

In my own experience, the belief that the majority of people are brutish is why most “liberals” are for gun control. They believe that most human beings are seething cauldrons of rage who will snap at the slightest provocation -that they are brutes. I saw this when Texas legalized concealed carry with a license in the mid-1990’s. “Liberals” claimed that it would lead to the “wild west” -with people shooting each other over trivial matters like parking spots. This is not to say that murder never happens, but the world today is arguably less violent than it has ever been. (“Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk )

Second, a “…corollary symptom, in most intellectual appeasers, is the ‘elite’ premise -the dogmatic, unshakable belief that ‘the masses don’t think,’ that men are impervious to reason, that thinking is the exclusive prerogative of a small, ‘chosen’ minority.” (Pg. 36) In politics, this “elitism” manifests itself in the form of two types of “intellectual appeasers”. There are the more aggressive “liberals”, who believe in rule by physical force because “…people are unfit for freedom and should be ruled -‘for their own good’- by a dictatorship of the ‘elite’.”(Pg. 36) These are the Michael Bloomberg’s and Hillary Clinton’s of the world, who want to force people to buy smaller soft drinks or to buy health insurance because they are supposedly too stupid to take care of themselves.

Unfortunately, the other type of intellectual appeaser is predominately found in the Republican Party: “The more timorous type of appeasers, the ‘conservatives,’ take a different line: they share the notion of an intellectual ‘elite’ and, therefore, they discard intellectuality as numerically unimportant, and they concentrate on cajoling the brute (‘the masses’) with baby talk -with vapid slogans, flattering bromides, folksy speeches in two-syllable words, on the explicit premise that reason does not work, that the brute must be won through appeals to his emotions and must, somehow, be fooled or cheated into taking the right road.”(Pg. 36)

This analysis of conservatism provides a possible explanation for the popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican party. One thing I’ve noticed about Trump’s campaign is that it tends to be short on many specifics, but it contains a lot of emotional appeals, bromides, and verbal “put downs” of the other Republican candidates. This is not something new within the Republican party, though. Ronald Reagan was the master of “flattering bromides”, “folksy speeches”, and one-liners at debates. Trump is just a little bit more blunt in his delivery than Reagan was.

A third consequence of being an intellectual appeaser is moral cowardice, which is “…the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential.”(Pg. 36) For the “progressive” intellectual appeaser, the image of the brute is “…the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil…when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.” (Pg. 36)

This can be understood in terms of what the intellectual appeaser has accepted as “good” or “moral”. The intellectual appeaser is a proponent of self-sacrifice in the service of others, which is generally known as “altruism”. This means that “good” action for the altruist consists in destroying one’s own happiness and sacrificing one’s life in order to serve others. As a result, “good” and “right action” is self-weakening, and self-destructive. To the altruist, those who do not engage in self-sacrifice will be regarded as morally bad. However, the altruist can see that people who do not sacrifice themselves to others are more successful at living. For instance, someone who rejects altruism will have more wealth because they refuse to drain off their financial resources to help complete strangers. The person who rejects altruism has an easier life. In the altruist’s subconscious mind, the good has become associated with self-destruction, while the evil has become associated with the efficacious. The mistake lies in the intellectual appeaser’s belief that self-sacrifice is “the good”, when it is, in fact, the opposite of the good -if one wants to live.

The result of the intellectual appeaser’s inverted moral system is his belief that “…the self-assertive confidence of the good [the good by the standard of those who actually want to live] is a reproach, a threat to his precarious pseudo-self-esteem, a disturbing phenomenon from a universe whose existence he cannot permit himself to acknowledge -and his emotional response is a nameless resentment. The self-assertive confidence of the evil [those who violate individual rights] is a metaphysical confirmation, the sign of a universe in which he feels at home -and his emotional response is bitterness, but obedience. Some dictators -who boastfully stress their reign of terror, such as Hitler and Stalin -count on this kind of psychology. There are people on whom it works.” (Pg. 37)

The final result of this sort of moral cowardice of the “liberal” intellectual appeaser is to oppose those who want to live, the actual good, in order to appease those who want to violate individual rights, and eventually “…to pounce upon every possible or impossible chance to blacken the nature of the good and to whitewash the nature of the evil.” (Pg. 37) This is why so-called “liberals” were always quick to apologize for atrocities and human rights violations committed by the Soviet Union. It’s also why “liberals” engage in ad hominem criticisms of Ayn Rand because she collected social security -like we’re all supposed to be forced to pay into that system and then “fall on our own swords” and not try to collect out of it. (This is altruist thinking.)

A fourth consequence of being an intellectual appeaser can be seen in art. “Progressives” are always fascinated by movies and art that is a “…projection of cosmic terror, guilt, impotence, misery, doom…” (Pg. 37) “Liberals” and “progressives” are fascinated with movies that study “homicidal maniacs” (Pg. 37), like “Natural Born Killers” or “Dexter” because of their subconscious belief that such people are the norm. They believe destruction is the norm, while creation is an aberration, because they hate mankind.

A fifth consequence of being a “liberal” intellectual appeaser is “…the dry rot of cynicism…”(Pg. 38) that eventually sets in. As the “liberal” appeaser grows older, any “…pretense at any belief in altruism vanishes from his [or her] mind in a very few years, and there is nothing left to replace it: his independent capacity to value has been repressed -and his fear of the brute makes the pursuit of values seem hopelessly impractical.” (Pg. 38) I suspect that this is the point that has been reached by a politician like Hillary Clinton. At this stage in her life, she is probably running on fumes. Her denial of any responsibility in the attacks on the American embasy in Benghazi, and her attempt to shift blame onto a YouTube video shows this sort of cynicism. In response to Congressional criticism about Benghazi, Hillary Clinton said: “What difference at this point does it make?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM) It doesn’t make any difference in Clinton’s mind, because the truth doesn’t matter. All that matters to her is whether she can con the American people into making her President.

Sixth, the intellectual appeaser ultimately spends so much time pandering to her own image of the “the masses” as a stupid, irrational mob, that she eventually “…assumes the standards of those he [or she] professes to despise…Any man who is willing to speak or write ’down,’, i.e., to think down- who distorts his own ideas in order to accommodate the mindless, who subordinates truth to fear -becomes eventually indistinguishable from the hacks who cater to an alleged ‘public taste.’ He joins the hordes who believe that the mind is impotent, that reason is futile, that ideas are only means of fooling the masses (i.e., that ideas are important to the unthinking, but the thinkers know better…” (Pg. 38) In my own experience with self-described “liberals” and “progressives”, this has been true. They will imply to me that reason is just a means of tricking or fooling people, and that objective truth is not even possible.

Ayn Rand had a more realistic picture of the majority of mankind than the “liberal” appeaser: “No, men are not brutes; neither are they all independent thinkers. The majority of men are not intellectual initiators or orginiators; they accept what the culture offers them….their abstract range is limited…The truly deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over…When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.” (Pg. 39)

Ayn Rand was not pessimistic about the future, so long as the more intelligent people refused to become altruistic intellectual appeasers: “No, the average man is not morally inocent. But the best proof of his non-brutality, of his helpless, confused, inarticulate longing for truth, for an intelligible, rational world -and of his response to it, when given a chance he cannot create on his own -is the fact that no dictatorship has ever lasted without establishing censorship.” (Pg. 39)

How does one avoid becoming an intellectual appeaser? By being “…proud of his intelligence -regardless of their [the average person’s] approval or disapproval. No matter how hard this might be in a corrupt age like ours, he has, in fact, no alternative. It is his only chance at a world where intelligence can function, which means: a world where he -and, incidentally, they -can survive.”  (Pg. 39)

Regrettably, I suspect that by the time most people are about 30, it would be very difficult for them to change. They have too many habituated behaviors and thought patterns. But, Ayn Rand remains popular with the young, so I think that there is still a chance.

Bernie Sanders: The Pied Piper of Self-Sacrifice

Bernie Sanders will likely loose the Democratic Party Primary. Despite this, I want to take a moment to discuss his ideology and his philosophy, which must be resisted -if you regard your own life and the pursuit of your own happiness as important. This is true whether you are “rich” or “poor”. I will discuss Mr. Sander’s philosophy in the context of an interview I found online. The interviewer’s name was Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB CEO Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation. Mr. Rosica is a Catholic Priest. The interview with Bernie Sanders was posted on the Washington Post web site, and can be found in its entirety at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/bernie-sanders-calls-pope-francis-a-socialist/2016/02/22/9fefd340-d9b4-11e5-8210-f0bd8de915f6_video.html

I transcribed the portions of the interview that I considered to be relevant to what I want to write about here:

Bernie Sanders: [1:00 minutes] “What the Pope has done in a very bold way is not only talk about the dispossessed…people who just don’t have enough income to survive…but what he has also done is raise the issue of the worship of money, the idolatry of money, and to say maybe that’s not what human life should be about…”

Fr. Rosica: [1:40 minutes]“They call you a socialist…do you think he’s a socialist [Pope Francis]?”

Bernie Sanders:[1:54 minutes] “….Well, what it means to be a socialist in the sense of what the Pope is talking about, and what I’m talking about, is to say that we have got to do our best and live our lives in a way that alleviates human suffering, uh, that does not accelerate the disparities of income and wealth. Uh, when he talks about wealth being used to serve people – not as an end in itself- I agree with that. In this country, and obviously the Pope is a worldwide figure, the church is worldwide, we are the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and if you go out in the street and you ask people, “Did you know that we’re the wealthiest country in the world?” They’d say “No, I’m working two or three jobs, I’m making 8 dollars an hour, I don’t know that we’re the wealthiest. I can’t afford childcare for my children.” So, what the Pope is saying is that human life, our existence, should be more than just the accumulation of more and more wealth, and everybody knows that right now we have the wealth, we have the technology, to provide at least a decent standard of living for all of our people, and so few should not have so much, and I think that’s what the Pope is talking about.”

Mr. Sanders isn’t exclusively talking about more welfare for poor people here. This is made clear when he says: “What the Pope has done in a very bold way is not only talk about the dispossessed…people who just don’t have enough income to survive…but what he has also done is raise the issue of the worship of money, the idolatry of money, and to say maybe that’s not what human life should be about…” (emphasis added) Mr. Sanders claims that people “worship” money.

What is money? It is a medium of exchange used instead of the barter system. Money involves trade. It is used when people want to voluntarily exchange goods and services with each other. It presupposes that (1) Each party to the transaction has something that the other regards as valuable, and (2) that each party has a right to use and transfer what he has produced as he sees fit. Why does each person have the right to dispose of what he has produced? It can only be the case if one regards his own life as important to him -if he wants to live. Money is a tool -it is a means of satisfying your material wants and needs by voluntary trade with other people who are also interested in satisfying their material needs. We all have these material needs -we all need a certain number of material goods in order to live. We all need food, clothing, and shelter, and it isn’t provided by nature. It must be produced by someone. If some produce while other appropriate by force what they have produced, then those producers are not free to live their lives. They are slaves to those who don’t produce.

I would hasten to add that it is possible to be irrational about the pursuit of money. It’s possible to pursue it over and above other things that would be more important to a rational human being. In the novel “A Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge chooses to pursue more money over a marriage to the woman he loved (Belle):

[Belle:] “Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”… [Scrooge:]“Have I ever sought release?” [Belle:] “In words. No. Never.” [Scrooge:]“In what, then?” [Belle:] “In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,” said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; [Belle:] “tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!” He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, [Scrooge:] “You think not.” [Belle:] “I would gladly think otherwise if I could,” she answered, [Belle:] “Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl—you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.” He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed. [Belle:] “You may—the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will—have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!” (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm)

Scrooge was not truly acting in a manner that promoted his own life. He chose a little more money over love of a “dowerless girl”. (A “dowry” was money or property that a wife or wife’s family gives to her husband when the wife and husband marry.) The problem here is Scrooge had already satisfied a certain level of material well-being, but he choose a few more dollars over the love of his life (Belle). Even in this case, who did Ebenezer Scrooge hurt -in the most fundamental sense? He hurt himself. (Belle went on to find a man that valued her in a more rational manner -as shown by a later scene in “A Christmas Carroll”.) Scrooge’s own life was (presumably) of utmost importance to him, but he damaged that life by pursuing more money over Belle.

Rational egoism means making your own life your ultimate value, and recognizing that reality demands that you must take certain actions in order to further it, such as working to produce the material values you need to survive. But, rational egoism means more than just acquiring material wealth. If you want to fall in love, you actually have to go out, and try to meet people, and you have to go out on dates. If you want friends, you have to find people that you have things in common with, and make an effort to make them a part of your life. If you want knowledge, you must read books, go to school, and study new ideas. If you want to be rational, you must study logic, and learn the method of objectivity. If you want happiness, you must discover what will make you happy, and then pursue it relentlessly. The level of wealth that each of us chooses to acquire in relation to other important values is a personal matter, and will often depend on your personal context and situation. One of the values of Capitalism is that it leaves each individual free to decide what level of wealth he will pursue. If he chooses to irrationally pursue additional wealth over love or friendship like Ebenezer Scrooge, that is his choice to make, and he will live with the consequences.

But, Bernie Sanders is not talking about the irrational pursuit of money like the case of Ebenezer Scrooge, because he does not accept the morality of rational egoism. He does not want you to live your life for your own sake. He reveals this when he discusses what it means to be a “socialist”. As a preliminary matter, it must be noted that the actual, accepted, definition of “socialism” is along the lines of: “…a way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and controlled by the government rather than by individual people and companies…” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism Whether governmental ownership of the means of production is actually in anybody’s rational self interest is more of a question for Economics and History. (I refer you to the old Soviet Union for an example of how socialism just makes everyone poor.) Governmental ownership of the means of production is not what Bernie Sanders is primarily talking about:

Bernie Sanders:[1:54 minutes] “….Well, what it means to be a socialist in the sense of what the Pope is talking about, and what I’m talking about, is to say that we have got to do our best and live our lives in a way that alleviates human suffering, uh, that does not accelerate the disparities of income and wealth.”

Whose suffering is Mr. Sanders talking about here? Are we talking about you taking action to better your own life and maximize your own happiness? It’s doubtful, given the rest of what Mr. Sanders said, that this is what he means. Bernie Sanders is not advocating “socialism” per se here. He is advocating “altruism”. He does not believe that your own life is important for its own sake, or that you should pursue your own happiness -and leave others free to pursue their own as well. Mr. Sanders says we should all: “…do our best and live our lives in a way that alleviates human suffering…” Service to others and self-sacrifice, i.e., altruism, is what Bernie Sanders advocates. To Mr. Sanders, your own life is secondary to the purpose of alleviating the suffering of others.

Furthermore, for Bernie Sanders, the more successful you are -the more productive you are- the more you should sacrifice yourself to others: “…right now we have the wealth, we have the technology, to provide at least a decent standard of living for all of our people…” However, “wealth” is nothing but the material means by which you maintain your life and pursue your own happiness. Imagine that you want to spend more time furthering your writing career (or painting, or sculpture, or dance). If you want to buy a washing machine so that you don’t have to spend enormous amounts of time washing your clothes by hand, so that you can pursue your career in art, according to Bernie Sanders, you can’t -unless you first buy a washing machine for all the people in inner cities, Appalachia, and the Third World. Imagine that you want to get married to the love of your life. If you want to buy your girlfriend an engagement ring as a symbol of your love when you ask her to marry you, you cannot -unless you ensure that every unmarried bachelor in the world can afford to buy one for his fiance. Imagine that you want to have children. You can’t buy that toy for your child -until you buy a toy for every child, everywhere. Furthermore, would Mr. Sanders even limit this self-sacrifice to the material realm? Once this notion is accepted, shouldn’t you go out and marry a girl you don’t love out of charity? Hell, maybe you have to find a spouse for everyone else first? Shouldn’t you spend time with your worst enemy, who does nothing but denigrate you, rather than seeking out people who would value you and your friendship? What about the “suffering” of someone who chooses to be obnoxious and boorish in any social situation, such that no one wants to be his or her friend? Shouldn’t you put up with his or her undesirable behavior and be friends, even though you gain nothing from the relationship and feel totally “drained” by their toxic friendship?

What motivates support for Bernie Sanders? For some it may be genuine envy -a hatred of those who want to live and are successful at doing so. However, I have too much faith in the good will of my fellow man, so I refuse to believe that this is anything more than a small number of people. I think most people support Bernie Sanders out of fear. They fear loosing their job, they fear getting sick and having no way to pay for it, they fear their child will get sick or starve, and they won’t be able to pay for it. There are no guarantees in life, and that is a scary thought. I understand this fear, and I feel it, too, sometimes. But, the desire to use armed force to obtain from others the goods you need for survival must be resisted -and that is what we are talking about when we talk about the welfare state and socialism. If you refuse to pay taxes for the support of others, the police will come for you and arrest you. If you resist, they will use clubs and handcuffs. If you resist with a weapon, they will shoot you. If they put you in prison for not paying taxes, and you try to escape, you will be shot by the guards. Right now, you may regard someone else as “the wealthy”. You may think that you can “get away with” expropriating the goods produced by “the wealthy”, and make your own material circumstances better. Be aware that you’re playing a risky game. Someone, someday, may decide that you are “the wealthy”. They may also decide they have a big enough voting block and the necessary government force, i.e. a big enough gang, to take it from you. Then you will be the one to have his wealth expropriated.

Today I Will Vote For Marco Rubio In The Republican Party Primary

Today I am going to early vote. I’ve decided to vote in the Republican Party primary. (Texas is an open primary state.) I have decided to vote in that party’s primary because I do not want to see a continuation of the Obama Presidency, which is what I see with both of the major Democratic candidates. (I’ve outlined my critique of Obama here: http://deancook.net/2016/02/20/the-obama-presidency-a-postmortem/)

I have looked at the three most likely Republican candidates at this point, and tried to seriously weigh the pros and cons of each one. These three candidates are: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.

I have decided to vote for Marco Rubio because I think his views are the “least bad”. I don’t consider any of the Presidential candidates of either major party to be ideal, but if I am going to vote at all, I have to operate within the realm of these choices and not some other candidate who doesn’t exist at this time.

I generally consider my political views to be so far outside the mainstream of American thought that voting is always a “lesser of two evils” approach for me. I also think there could be good reasons to vote Democratic, depending on your particular personal context. I think this is particularly true for women. If I were a woman, I’d probably vote Democratic on the abortion issue alone. I am very “pro-choice”, but since I am not female, that issue is just not as “visceral” or “personal” for me. I think it could be a very important issue for a woman who thinks that she has a right to live her own life and make her own choices free from governmental interference.

I’ve also seen a lot of infighting between different Republicans over their particular preference for the Republican Party nominee, and I hope that this will not step on too many toes. Just like I could see good reasons for voting Democratic for certain people in certain contexts, I think it is possible that one could have a knowledge context or background that would make Trump or Cruz appealing for very personal, and not necessarily irrational, reasons. At the end of the day, I am not prepared to say that my voting choice is the best choice for everyone because I am not omniscient, and there may be facts that I am unaware of. I’ve just tried to make the best choice I could make given my knowledge and context. This is my best attempt to reason it all out.

Donald Trump:

Pros:

(1) A certain “emotional appeal” with statements like “Make America Great Again”.

(2) He is willing to discuss “uncomfortable issues” like race relations and Islamic Terrorism and refuses to be “politically correct” about it. (By “politically correct” I mean speaking in euphemistic terms on those issues, to pretend like the problem isn’t there, or to fear offending people when addressing the facts associated with the problem.)

Cons:

(1) He seems to lack any clear, express, guiding political principles. Trump seems to operate on an emotional level, and I worry that his emotions could change for the worse later down the road -without any rhyme or reason for why they have changed.

(2) Trump seems to support some of the same things that Bernie Sanders wants. For instance, Trump seems to support single-payer socialized medicine.

Ted Cruz:

Pros:

(1) Strong knowledge of the Constitution. Although I don’t agree with all aspects of his “originalist jurisprudence”, he would bring forth thought-provoking and challenging ideas when it comes to nominating judges for the Federal courts.

(2) His foreign policy seems to strike the right “balance”, in my mind, between being assertive in the use of military force to defend American interests while not becoming “the world’s policeman” or attempting to “right every wrong” out there. (This article seemed to set out the different Republican approaches on foreign policy in this election: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2015/05/rubio-vs-paul-vs-cruz-on-foreign-policy )

Cons:

(1) He is everything I hate about the Republican party -and I think he really believes it. He wants to erode the separation of church and state. In fact, I am fairly certain he thinks the very idea of “separation of church and state” is offensive. He is anti-abortion rights for women. Although they all claim to be “pro-life”, I suspect that of the three listed here, Cruz is the most opposed to respecting a woman’s right to make her own decisions when it comes to ending a pregnancy.

Marco Rubio:

Pros:

(1) He seems to be very thoughtful on many issues. I watched a Republican Party debate between Rubio and Cruz on foreign policy, and, although I tended to side with Cruz, I thought Rubio had well-thought-out positions on these issues.

(2) Immigration reform. Although I’ve heard compelling arguments from people that I respect on why immigration should be greatly restricted, at the end of the day, I think there probably is some sort of right to immigrate into the country consistent with the government ensuring that those coming in are not here to commit acts of war against the United States or its citizens. I too am concerned that people immigrating into the United States will want to make this nation less capitalistic and less free than it already is -and I don’t just mean property rights. Have any of you Democrats thought about what happens when mostly Catholic immigrants start voting to restrict abortion and birth control rights? Also, last time I checked, the Pope is opposed to gay marriage. However, I think there are ways to mitigate this “cultural dilution”. For instance we can allow automatic legal permanent residency, but not automatic citizenship. (This seems to be Rubio’s plan. https://marcorubio.com/issues-2/marco-rubio-immigration-plan-border-security-legal/) This will restrict the vote to native-born Americans, and hopefully, the children of immigrants will be more culturally assimilated than their parents. I also think that Hispanic immigrants can be reached and convinced that free markets and a government reduced to the protection of life, liberty, and property is best. All human beings have the capacity to think -so they can be reached. My, admittedly anecdotal, experience is that immigrants are very interested in working hard and making money -not on imposing international socialism on the United States.

(3) Rubio seems less strident on issues like abortion. He says he is “pro-life”, and I take him at his word, but I also don’t get the impression that it is going to be a major issue for him, whereas I think Ted Cruz would push that issue as President.

Cons:

(1) He seems like more of a conventional politician. I think he is more interested in getting elected than he is in pushing any particular ideology. However, given the fact that I think much of Ted Cruz’s ideology is wrong, I guess I’d rather have someone who is more “middle of the road” or “pragmatic” like Rubio.

The Obama Presidency: A Postmortem

I consider the two serious candidates in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary to be unpalatable. I think that both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would be a continuation of Barack Obama’s Presidency, and I have become disgusted by Mr. Obama. I voted for Obama in 2008 because I considered him to be the “lesser of two evils” at the time.

Obama’s claim that he would be a “post-racial” President also made me hopeful. At the time, I thought Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech struck just the right balance, and frankly discussed the complications associated with race. In the speech, Obama defended his decision to continue attendance at a church where the pastor had made racist and narrow-minded comments. The basic theme of Obama’s speech on that occasion was that there may be people we care about who hold racist views, but you don’t necessarily have to disown those people because a person’s views on race is not the end-all-be-all when it comes to judging a person’s character:

“ I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_More_Perfect_Union_%28speech%29

Despite Obama’s optimistic tone in 2008, by 2013, I think Obama had abandoned any pretense of being a “post-racial” President. The event that solidified this in my mind was the George Zimmerman criminal case. I’m not going to go over the specifics of that case, or try to “re-litigate” that issue. I think the jury reached the right verdict in that trial. I studied the facts, and it was clear to me that there was reasonable doubt as to George Zimmerman’s guilt. However, for most of 2012 and 2013, I had to listen to the news media do it’s best to convict Mr. Zimmerman in the court of public opinion.

Mr. Obama, the President of the United States, 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. The fact that Obama did that, regardless of his actual comments on the matter, spoke volumes to me. It said to me that far from wanting a “post-racial society”, where race doesn’t matter, he wanted to play the usual Democratic game of whipping up racial animosity within the black community to garner political support. This game consists of convincing black people that most white Americans are racist in order to get votes.

Race relations under Obama only got worse from the George Zimmerman trial. Next there was the unrest in Ferguson Missouri. In that case, the facts are also fairly clear to me: Officer Darren Wilson acted within the law and generally accepted notions of self-defense when he shot Michael Brown. Despite this, the Obama Justice Department conducted an investigation into the shooting, once again showing me that he was prepared to inject himself into a purely local matter. If a black police officer had shot a white man under similar circumstances, I have no doubt that Obama’s administration would not have concerned itself with it. The message from the Obama administration has been clear: he believes most cops, judges, juries and prosecutors are racist, and the Justice Department must step in to right that “wrong”. Since cops, judges, and juries are all drawn from the general population of America, it means Obama believes most white Americans are racist. Obama believes what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, believes. He was lying when he talked about a “post racial America” where we can finally move beyond this issue.

There are a lot of other reasons that I have become disgusted with Obama. The Affordable Care Act involved another lie. I specifically remember a debate between Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary in which Obama said he was not in favor of an individual mandate for health insurance:

“OBAMA:…So we’ve got a lot of similarities in our plan. We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it.” http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/21/debate.transcript/index.html

What did we get? An individual mandate to buy health insurance.

Obama says the Bush Administration was mistaken to invade Iraq because it created a power vacuum in that area that gave rise to ISIS. Regardless of whether this is true, what has Obama done? He used military force to topple the Gaddafi regime in Lybia, which has now been infiltrated by ISIS. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/fighter-jets-target-libya-s-sabratha-40-killed-official-n521506

By virtue of the fact that Barack Obama was our nation’s first black President, his policies on race relations were probably always going to take center stage. His initial promise was that he would move us beyond racial animosity and strife, but instead he has fanned the flames of racial tension with his actions and words. Instead of saying: “I am the President, and I stand for the rights of all Americans regardless of color,” his actions have been otherwise. Obama has shown us that he is more in the “political camp” of Al Sharpton: someone who wants to use the animosities against white Americans that exist in minority communities to advance his own political power. Even on other major issues that don’t involve race, he has consistently said one thing, and then done another.

“The Martian”

I saw “The Martian” last night. I won’t do any plot spoilers, but it was pretty great, overall. A sufficiently faithful adaptation of the book that I was pleased. The overall theme -that reason is man’s means of survival- was translated to the movie fairly well.

They cut out some sub-plots that I would have liked to see, but I understand that has to be done in the interests of time. They also made a reference to religion -the rocket launch scene- that wasn’t in the original book (as best I can recall), but the book is such a powerful statement about the power of human reason that I’m sure the Hollywood PR people were nervous about how that would go over in middle America.

The other thing that really annoys me is how Hollywood has treated this movie. It got some sort of award for “Best Comedy”, which I think is a total back-handed compliment. The movie and the book definitely do have humor in them. You often laugh with the main character as he uses his reasoning skills to solve problems, but to describe the movie as a comedy is a slight on the part of the Hollywood elite in my opinion. It makes it clear in my mind that people in Hollywood don’t just have a left-wing bias, they have an “anti-man” bias. This translates into an anti-reason bias -because they don’t believe man is efficacious and capable of solving problems through the use of his reason. (This is also why Hollywood is so left wing -they think we need a nanny-state to take care of us.) They hate those who want to live life as men, they hate the faculty that is man’s means of survival -his reason, and they hate success. As a result, the movie is not fully “real” or “dramatic” to the Hollywood elite. In their minds, the idea that anybody could use their reason to promote their own individual survival is not fully real -hence the “comedy” label.

“Natural Born Citizen”

This whole thing about whether Ted Cruz is a “natural born citizen”, from the standpoint of original meaning, is fairly interesting. (I do not know, one way or the other.) I started looking at some stuff on line, and it quickly became apparent it would take a good bit for research, and I just don’t know that I care enough. I did look at Blackstone, who would have been considered authoritative at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, and he offers a definition of “natural born subject”, for purposes of British law at the time:

“Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it. ”

He then later says that some persons born outside the dominions of the crown would still be considered “natural born subjects”:

“When I say, that an alien is one who is born out of the king’s dominions, or allegiance, this also must be understood with some restrictions. The common law indeed stood absolutely so; with only a very few exceptions:…”

He then seems to imply that at common law one such exception were persons born to ambassadors of the King while abroad:

“Yet the children of the king’s embassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England’s allegiance, represented by his father, the embassador.”

Blackstone also seems to say that merchants’ children born abroad were also considered to be “natural born subjects” at common law:

“To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants.”

Additional disabilities against being a “natural born subject” of the King were also removed by statute:

“But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception; unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.”

So, according to original meaning, if Blackstone would have been authoritative, then any person born outside the United States to a parent (specifically a father) who was a natural-born subject, was also a “natural born subject” themselves.

In the case of Ted Cruz, it was his mother that was a US Citizen at the time of his birth. So the question is: Assuming Blackstone is authoritative on original meaning and that my interpretation of Blackstone is correct, then would a person born from a mother, not a father, who was a US Citizen be considered a “natural born citizen”?

What Is Wrong With Prohibiting Persons on the “No Fly” List From Purchasing Guns

The Senate rightly voted down an attempt to allow the Attorney General to prohibit people on the so-called “no fly list” from purchasing a firearm. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that I don’t think this would stop any would-be terrorist from getting a gun (see Paris, France). Let’s also leave aside the fact that the two jihadists in San Bernardino California were not on the “no fly list”, so this law would have made no difference. Regardless of that, this is a terrible violation of Constitutional rights. The Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun. This important liberty cannot be taken away by the government without due process of law, and that due process must be adequate.

An examination of the proposed statute, contained in an Amendment to an unrelated bill, shows that the “due process” included was very weak. This provision starts near the bottom of page Page S8401 of the proposed Amendment:

“(b) In any case in which the Attorney General has denied the transfer of a firearm to a prospective transferee pursuant to section 922A of this title or has made a determination regarding a firearm permit applicant pursuant to section 922B of this title, an action challenging the determination may be brought against the United States. The petition shall be filed not later than 60 days after the petitioner has received actual notice of the Attorney General’s determination under section 922A or 922B of this title. The court shall sustain the Attorney General’s determination upon a showing by the United States by a preponderance of evidence that the Attorney General’s determination satisfied the requirements of section 922A or 922B, as the case may be. To make this showing, the United States may submit, and the court may rely upon, summaries or redacted versions of documents containing information the disclosure of which the Attorney General has determined would likely compromise national security. Upon request of the petitioner or the court’s own motion, the court may review the full, undisclosed documents ex parte and in camera. The court shall determine whether the summaries or redacted versions, as the case may be, are fair and accurate representations of the underlying documents. The court shall not consider the full, undisclosed documents in deciding whether the Attorney General’s determination satisfies the requirements of section 922A or 922B.”. https://www.congress.gov/amendment/114th-congress/senate-amendment/2910/text

This proposed “due process” has no automatic hearing, just the right to file a petition. A person’s right to a hearing is waived after 60 days of “actual notice” -presumably forever. It contains no right to even examine the documents being used against petitioner. Documents are examined by a judge “ex parte” -which means without the defendant/petitioner present. It uses a “preponderance of the evidence” standard instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt”, like in a criminal case. I am not even sure it allows for one to call witnesses in one’s favor or to confront one’s accuser in court, as required under the 6th Amendment. It’s about like the standard the Department of Motor Vehicles would uses to deprive someone of their driver’s license, which is not a Constitutionally protected right.

The “no fly list”, even as applied to its original intended purpose -flying on an airplane- is fraught with problems and possible Constitutional violations. (See https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-files-lawsuit-challenging-unconstitutional-no-fly-list)  The ACLU has argued that even its original intended purpose is unconstitutional. Furthermore, when it is applied to something like owning a gun, which is a specifically enumerated right under the Bill of Rights, then it is just doubling down on what was already probably a bad law to begin with.

If this law had passed, what would have been next? Imagine the following hypothetical scenario: What if the government decided to deny anyone on the no-fly list a computer because terrorists use computers to meet each other and conspire to commit their crimes? This would clearly have First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of association implications, and the level of due process required to restrict that freedom are on a par with what would be required before you can send someone to prison. Similarly, the due process required prior to restrict someone’s Second Amendment rights, must be on an equal level.

“The Purge of the Hunters” by W. Dean Cook

“What do we do now? We’ve pushed through the executive order outlawing the Republican Party, and managed to blame the previous President’s assassination on NRA-extremists.”

“Yes, and the purge of the last of the reactionaries from our own, now-renamed Green-Democratic party is complete. But, we need something really flashy that will show that we intend to make the Earth a garden again, and to destroy this industrial society that has become a cancer on Mother Earth.”

“What about an executive order outlawing all experimentation on animals?”

“No, unfortunately, there are still too many selfish people in our society. They won’t stand for not getting their precious pharmaceuticals. The same goes for all of the people who didn’t become vegetarians until after we banned the killing of domestic animals for food. Their time will eventually come, but we have to ease into it.”

“What about a ban on genetically modified crops?”

“Well, the 200% sales tax we’ve imposed on any food that isn’t organic has already effectively done away with G.M. crops anyway….which reminds me, exactly how bad is the famine in Southern California?”

“You’re actually concerned about the starvation there?”

“Ha! No, of course not, the Earth’s population is going to have to be reduced to under a billion people, so we might as well start with the Southwestern US. I just wanted to know if there is a possibility of revolt in Southern California. We can’t have anyone getting it into their heads that they should try and secede from the Union.”

“Oh, no worries there. We just call anyone who suggests secession a neo-Confederate racist. Besides, the Prefect of California had some of the strictest gun control laws even before our Green Revolution overthrew the corrupt capitalist regime that existed under that document that was a legacy of the white male hetero-patriarchy known as the Constitution.”

“I’m glad to hear it won’t be a problem. Now, back to the issue at hand. We need something ‘splashy’ that will make good headlines in the state-controlled news channel, MSNBC. By the way, have you noticed that MSNBC’s reporting is exactly the same as it was prior to the Green Revolution? We had to purge people from the other news channels, but everyone at MSNBC was already on board with us. Just goes to show you that MSNBC was right -or, should I say ‘left’? HA!- all along. Anyway, what I am thinking is this: We go after the hunters.”

“The hunters? What’s that?”

“Oh, back before they imposed nation-wide gun control under the old regime, and back when that barbaric notion of private property existed, say more than 20 years ago, there were people who used to hunt our brother and sister animals with weapons for sport or for food. It was a horrible crime against mother Earth. Since we are all agreed that there is no difference between a man and an animal, those people are really no different from people who commit crimes against humanity, and they are a small minority group, so no one will complain too much if they are liquidated.”

“How will we find them?”

“We will just go through the old records and round up anyone who ever applied for a hunting license. It’s the same tactic we used to liquidate the gun-owners, just check the government registry. The previous regime’s largely useless attempts to prevent criminals from getting guns did at least make it easy for us to eventually round up that group of undesirables.”

“What will we do with them once we find them?”

“The gas chamber for every last one of them. Like I said, the world has an excess human population, and we might as well get rid of the troublemakers.”

“What about a trial?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. No due process for fascists! We’ll just issue another executive order.”

“Structural” versus “Declaratory” Provisions of the Constitution and Originalism

For purposes of this paper, the provisions of the U.S. Constitution can be broken down into two different major categories. The first category of provisions are “structural”. These include such things as Article I, Section 8, which sets forth the powers of Congress, all of Article II, some of Article III, Article V, and Article VI. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

These structural provisions of the US Constitution set forth things like how a bill becomes a law; that the Congress will be divided into a House and a Senate; how congressmen and the President are elected; how long congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, and the President serve; how treaties are ratified, etc. Most of these “structural provisions” could have been arranged differently. For instance, it is conceivable that the Founders could have decided to have a unicameral legislature (one chamber of Congress instead of two), or that they could have made the President’s term of office 6 years instead of 4.

Most of these “structural provisions” were based in political expediency, or in the historical and social circumstances of the states at the time the US Constitution was ratified. For instance, at the Constitutional Convention, there were two competing “plans”. These two plans represented differing interests of low-population states versus high-population states, as well as other interests of the time.

The first plan, put forth by James Madison and Edmund Randolph, became known as “the Virginia Plan”. It called for a much more unified Republic with state sovereignty significantly reduced by allowing the national legislature to veto all state laws.[1] By way of contrast, the Constitution actually adopted just implicitly says that state laws that are contrary to the Constitution are void under the Supremacy Clause of Article Six, Clause 2, but it does not empower Congress with a cart-blanche veto power over any and all state laws.

Large states like Virginia supported this plan because it would give high-population states more power in the national legislature. Low-population states preferred the New Jersey Plan, which would have created a single unicameral national legislature that kept the one-vote-per-state representation found under the Articles of Confederation. With the New Jersey Plan, small states could more easily prevent large states from enacting legislation that would have trampled on their sovereignty as states. The New Jersey Plan was more of a modification of the existing Articles of Confederation, while the Virginia Plan threw out the Articles altogether.

At the end of the day, neither the Virginia Plan nor the New Jersey Plan was enacted. The document eventually adopted regarding legislative power was reflected in the “Connecticut Compromise”. It retained the bicameral legislative features of the Virginia plan. Also like the Virginia plan, in the lower house, there would be proportional representation based on state population. However, the upper house would have two representatives per state, thereby ensuring that low-population states could not be dominated by high-population states in the new Congress.[2]

The other major category of provisions that can be found in the US Constitution are what I call the “declaratory provisions”[3]. These provisions don’t set forth the powers of government or government officials, or how government is to operate. Instead, they state certain fundamental rights that citizens or residents of the United States possess. Most of these “declaratory provisions” are found in the first Ten Amendments to the US Constitution. For instance, Amendment I says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

These first ten Amendments reflect the Enlightenment tradition of individual rights[4], and were adopted in order to placate the anti-federalist critics of the Constitution. At the time, some state constitutions included a bill of rights[5], and the English legal tradition, as embodied in the Magna Charta, often had a declaration of rights. During the debates leading up to the ratification of the US Constitution, Madison and Hamilton responded to anti-federalist complaints about the lack of a declaration of rights in the proposed document by saying it was unnecessary, and that such a declaration could actually be dangerous to the rights of individuals.

Hamilton’s opposition to a bill of rights can be found in Federalist Number 84:

The most considerable of these remaining objections [of the Anti-Federalists] is, that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights….I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colourable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority, which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it, was intended to be vested in the national government. (Emphasis added, Federalist Number 84, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_rightss7.html )

In essence, Hamilton said that there was no need for a declaration of the right of freedom of the press in the new Constitution because the Constitution did not authorize the Federal government to regulate the press at all. Article I, Section 8 sets forth the scope of Congress’ powers, meaning that unless a power is granted to Congress under this section, then it has no power to act. Since there is no power to regulate the press, Congress does not have the power, and it can make no law regarding press or speech.

Additionally, Hamilton goes on in the above-quoted text to note that a bill of rights provision stating that Congress can make no law regarding the freedom of the press could be construed as meaning that Congress has this power –that it might give a “…plausible pretence for claiming that power…” In other words, a bill of rights for Hamilton and Madison, could actually be dangerous because someone might assume that Congress has the power to regulate speech and press, when, under Article I, Section 8, it has no such power.

At the end of the day, Hamilton, Madison, and other supporters of the new Constitution compromised on the issue of a Bill of Rights. In order to avoid the problem of “constructive powers” being implied to the new Federal government under the Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were probably included:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”[6],[7]

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

In other words, the 9th and 10th Amendments ensure that the people retain all of their rights, not just the ones set forth in the Constitution, and that the Federal government only has the power to act insofar as it has been delegated powers under the Constitution.

In order to properly understand this distinction between “structural” provisions on the one hand and “declaratory” provisions on the other, it is necessary to move into the realm of political philosophy and philosophy of law. Specifically, it must understood what a constitution is, and what purpose it serves.

Human life is not guaranteed. If one wants to live, then one must take certain actions. Such actions are a necessary condition for living. Man posses a rational faculty that allows him to comprehend laws of nature and to adjust his natural environment, in accordance with those laws, to maximize his chances of survival. For instance, someone recognizes that it is human nature to require protection from the snow, the rain, and the cold. A man’s chances of survival are maximized when he is protected from certain weather conditions. He also notices that certain types of plants and trees, when properly harvested and arranged, can provide a barrier against the weather. So, he gathers naturally occurring elements like trees, rocks, and dirt, and combines them to build a house. Another man recognizes that he needs nourishment, and he learns to build weapons to hunt the lesser animals with, or he makes a plow and plants seeds to grow crops.

Food, shelter, clothing, and other values are necessary for man’s survival, and are typically not found in nature, or are not sufficiently plentiful to sustain man’s life. As his technology and scientific knowledge grows, man’s capacity to improve his life grows. Men have gone, over several millennia, from living in caves to building rockets to the Moon -all thanks to man’s capacity to recognize reality, formulate general principles of cause and effect, and to act accordingly. Man’s mind allows him to recognize cause and effect relationships amongst entities that exist, to recognize his own nature as a living being and a rational animal, and to take action aimed at his survival.

Just as other inanimate entities have a certain nature, so does man. Man is the “rational animal”. He is a living organism of a certain kind and, in principle, he must therefore act in accordance with that nature if he wants to survive. A man cannot live like a plant, by merely sitting and absorbing nutrients from the sun and the soil. A man must engage in a process of thought, and create the wealth necessary for his survival. Men also have the capacity to engage in collaborative endeavors amongst themselves that benefit all participants. Men can trade with other men, which means that individual human beings gain from certain types of associations with each other. If men are going to benefit from each other, they must recognize that each individual living in society acts to provide the things necessary for his survival, if he wants to live. All men must recognize the moral principles defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action in a social context. These moral principles are known as individual rights. Although the list is not exhaustive, fundamental individual rights include the right to live and the right to private property. The right to live is the ultimate individual right, and forms the basis of all rights.

Although most choose to live as traders and producers, some human beings choose not to think and produce their own values. Some will attempt to take what others have produced by means of force. Such people are known as “criminals”. The criminal attempts to gain values from others not by voluntary trade, but by means of force or the threat of force. A criminal substitutes reason and persuasion for force in an effort to gain values from others, or to destroy the values of others. Criminals are force-initiators. They use their fists or a weapon, or they threaten the use of force, to gain what others have produced without their voluntary consent.

If men are to live together in society, then they must create an institution or collaborative agreement to protect those who want to live by means of reason, persuasion, and trade from those who wish to destroy or take the values of others by means of physical force. Although in an emergency, each individual has a right to use force in retaliation and to defend himself from a force-initiator, a formal institution to stop such force-initiators, with objective rules of procedure and fair notice of what is prohibited, is necessary once a society gets beyond a certain point in size and geographic scope. This organization is known as “government”.

There are various reasons why government is necessary if rights are to be protected, and this paper is not meant to be an exhaustive critique of the political philosophy of anarchism, but some of the major reasons why government is essential for the protection of individual rights will be discussed prior to turning to constitutional law.

Without a central governmental authority, it is difficult for others to know whether a person using force in retaliation against a criminal is truly acting in retaliation. Concretely, imagine that a criminal has stolen a person’s property. The victim then goes to the criminal’s house, and holds him at gunpoint while recovering his stolen property. If others see only the victim holding the criminal at gunpoint, how will they know that this is not a robbery? If the criminal’s family or friends see this, and know nothing about the circumstances, then they might mistakenly believe that the victim is the force-initiator, and use force to stop what they perceive as a robbery. This in turn would lead the victim’s family and friends to counter-retaliate, and society could devolve into gang-warfare.

By instituting formal rules of procedure in this situation, misunderstandings can be minimized. The victim of a burglary goes to a socially recognized authority, the police, and files a complaint. The police then investigate, while ensuring that the rights of the accused are respected. Another branch of the government, the courts, then make a determination, in accordance with pre-established rules of evidence and procedure, as to whether the property was in fact stolen, and issue a ruling.

Another important function that only a government can serve is to provide all members of society with prior notice of exactly what actions are violations of individual rights. Citizens elect representatives who then gather periodically and promulgate rules prohibiting certain actions that would violate individual rights. This representative body is generally called a “legislature”, and it sets forth the elements of crimes. For instance, at English Common Law, murder was defined as: (1) unlawful, (2) killing, (3) of a human, (4) by another human, (5) with malice aforethought. The legislature promulgates a statute which sets forth each of these elements, and they must all be proven by a certain standard of proof in a given circumstance before one can be shown to be guilty of the crime of “murder”.

Governments are instituted among men and derive their powers from the governed, who delegate some of their right to retaliatory force to that institution so that individual rights can be protected, and everyone can be assured that their own rights will be protected if they, or their friends or family, are ever accused of a crime. Government isn’t there just to do justice, but to show justice, and only justice, being done. It is there to assure everyone in society that force is only being used to protect individual rights. But, this raises a new problem. How to ensure that those acting on behalf of government –the police, the military, the courts, and the legislature- do not themselves become force-initiators? If the fundamental powers of government are written down in a document, then it is clear what actions government officials can take, and the exact procedures for taking such actions. Any power not granted by this written document is not a power delegated to the government by “the people”. This is the purpose of a written constitution. In other words, a written constitution can be defined as the fundamental charter delegating the peoples right to the retaliatory use of physical force to a central authority. Only the powers granted to government agents in a written constitution are authorized.

The difference between these two types of provisions found in the US Constitution suggests that they have different origins and should be interpreted in accordance with different methodologies. As was already stated, the “structural” provisions of the Constitution represent decisions at the time the particular document was adopted. They represent the political and social circumstances at the time of ratification, and might be significantly different if circumstances had been otherwise. The “declaratory” provisions tend to be more “abstract”, “timeless”, or “universal”. For instance, a right to freedom of speech and the press is seen as essential to all human beings everywhere, and under all circumstances, while the creation of an upper house of the federal legislature whose members are chosen by individual state legislatures (the Senate) is more a matter of social, economic, and political circumstances at the time of adoption. In some other nation, with some other set of historical circumstances, a unicameral legislature might make more sense. The structural provisions represent the compromises that made the union possible. The structural provisions have a role to play in ensuring rights are protected via such things as separation of powers and checks and balances, but they presuppose the rights that they protect.

Given what has been said about the strong role of historical, political, and social context at the time they were ratified, the structural provisions of the US Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with that historical, political, and social context. In other words, the structural provisions of the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with original meaning, as described by Justice Antonin Scalia and others.[8] The reasoning here is fairly simple: (1) A constitution is the fundamental charter delegating the people’s right to the retaliatory use of physical force to a central authority, and only the powers granted to government agents in the written constitution are authorized; (2) “the people” currently living may not have ratified the constitution, but they are free via its amendment process to alter it at any time; (3) since the currently living have chosen not to amend the enacted constitution, they must still prefer its original terms. When judges interpret these structural provisions of the Constitution, they should therefore look to original meaning on the assumption that it is what the current generation of the body politic prefers. Since most of these provisions have to do with the powers and structure of government, it would undermine the idea of “the consent of the governed” for judges to reinterpret, for instance, how a bill becomes a law. It would abrogate the consent of the governed if the courts suddenly decided that “times had changed”, and only a majority of Senators had to vote for a bill that was signed into “law” by the President, and by-passed the requirement that a majority of the House of Representatives also vote in favor.

Using “original meaning” makes no sense with regard to the “declaratory” provisions of a constitution because these provisions describe universal individual rights, and the protection of rights is the very purpose of government, and a constitution, in the first place. Individual rights are conceptually and logically more fundamental than any written constitution, and form the underlying moral foundation for a written constitution. The source of rights is not divine law, and it is not Congressional law. As discussed, rights are moral principles defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action in a social context. They ensure that the individual is free to live in society. People have freewill so, they can choose not to respect individual rights. However, when the majority of a society fails to respect rights, it will disintegrate. Only a society that respects rights to life, liberty, and property can remain functional long-term, because it is the only society that leaves people free to think and act on their own best judgment in the maintenance of their individual lives.

[1] See The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Gordon S. Wood, Chapter XII, “The Worthy Against the Licentious”, Section 1, “The Federalist Revolution”: “Not only should the national government have a ‘positive and complete authority in all cases where uniform measures are necessary,’ as in finance, commerce, and foreign policy, but it should have ‘a negative, in all cases whatsoever, in the Legislative acts of the States, as the King of Great Britain heretofore had.’”

[2] See The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Gordon S. Wood, Chapter XIII, “The Federalist Persuasion”, Section 7, “The Redefinition of Bicameralism”: ”With the ‘Connecticut compromise,’ which provided for two senators from each state, the Federalists found a justification for the upper house that they had not anticipated. ‘The people will be represented in one house, the state legislatures in the other,’…The Senate now became a means of restraining ‘the large states from having improper advantages over the small ones.’”

[3] Hamilton also appears to make this “structural” versus “declaratory” distinction in the Federalist Papers: “Independent of those, which relate to the structure of the government, we find the following: Article I. section 3. clause 7. “Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honour, trust or profit under the United States; but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.” Section 9.” http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_rightss7.html

[4] The Meaning of the American Revolution, Dan Lacy, Chapter 1, “The Eighteenth-Century World”: “The general body of thought we call Newtonian was most effectively applied to social issues by another Englishman, John Locke (1632-1704)…they dominated political thought for a century to come and provided the philosophical basis for the American Revolution.”

[5] See The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Gordon S. Wood, Chapter VII, “Law and Contracts”, Section 2, “The Contract of Rulers and Ruled”.

[6] James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, comprising his Public Papers and his Private Correspondence, including his numerous letters and documents now for the first time printed, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900). Vol. 5. 6/26/2015. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1937#Madison_1356-05_877: “The exceptions here or elsewhere in the Constitution, made in favor of particular rights, shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people, or as to enlarge the powers delegated by the Constitution; but either as actual limitations of such powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution.”

[7] James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, comprising his Public Papers and his Private Correspondence, including his numerous letters and documents now for the first time printed, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900). Vol. 5. 6/26/2015. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1937#Madison_1356-05_898: “It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may [385] be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution. [See above footnote for this clause.]”

[8] Section 70, “The false notion that the Living Constitution is an exception to the rule that legal texts must be given the meaning they bore when adopted”. In: Scalia, A. and Garner, B. (2010) Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, “Preface”. St. Paul: Thompson/West Publishing.

What is Proof?

I was recently asked what I consider to be “proof”. This question came up specifically with respect to my blog post on why I am an atheist and not an agnostic.  So what is “proof”?

I hold that the most essential form of proof is observation -that which you can come into contact with by means of your sensory-perceptual mechanism. In other words, “proof” is generally what you can see, hear or touch. (Taste and smell would also count, but these are pretty weak senses for human beings.) There are other types of proof that are possible, but they are related back to observation.  Some things are not directly perceivable, but we know that they do exist because of how they interact with things that we can observe. We can observe the effects on things that we do observe directly, and thereby come to understand something about the imperceptible thing that was the cause.

In the natural sciences, much of what we would call proof involves observing the effects on things we can perceive by things that we cannot perceive, thereby providing evidence about the existence and nature of those imperceptible things. For instance, bacteria were first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, using a single-lens microscope of his own design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#History_of_bacteriology  With bacteria, human beings have been able to use a device with known properties to observe what was previously unobservable. The device was something that used specially shaped glass to amplify light. We knew that when glass was shaped in certain ways, it would make something appear bigger. We then extrapolated that if we bent and shaped this glass and combined it with other bent and shaped glass -other lenses- then it would amplify even smaller things. With sufficiently powerful enough lenses, such a device would eventually amplify the appearance of things that were too small to see with the naked eye. This device was named a microscope, and when Leeuwenhoek looked through it, he saw tiny organisms that were not visible with the naked eye, which were subsequently called “bacteria”.

The atom was discovered thanks to a number of observations made by scientists:
“In the early 1800s, John Dalton used the concept of atoms to explain why elements always react in ratios of small whole numbers (the law of multiple proportions). For instance, there are two types of tin oxide: one is 88.1% tin and 11.9% oxygen and the other is 78.7% tin and 21.3% oxygen (tin(II) oxide and tin dioxide respectively). This means that 100g of tin will combine either with 13.5g or 27g of oxygen. 13.5 and 27 form a ratio of 1:2, a ratio of small whole numbers. This common pattern in chemistry suggested to Dalton that elements react in whole number multiples of discrete units—in other words, atoms.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory

This knowledge was combined with other knowledge such as the phenomena of “Brownian Motion”:

“In 1827, botanist Robert Brown used a microscope to look at dust grains floating in water and discovered that they moved about erratically, a phenomenon that became known as “Brownian motion”. This was thought to be caused by water molecules knocking the grains about.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory

In the case of atoms, it was observed that a certain amount of tin always combined with a certain amount of oxygen in one of two ways, suggesting that whatever the ultimate constituents of tin and oxygen were, they must be discrete units. In other words, they must consist of units that cannot be divided any further -at least if you still wanted to speak of them as “oxygen” and “tin”. This knowledge, combined with other observations, such as Brownian motion, eventually led to the widespread acceptance of the existence of atoms. We inferred the existence of something, the atom, based on things that we could observe with our inborn sensory-perceptual mechanisms (our eyes).

The Theory of Evolution is another example of how we have come to have, at the very least, a theory, that explains our origins. There is no way to directly confirm this theory by direct observation. If it is happening, evolution happens over millions of years, with parents giving rise to slightly different offspring, who then are either more or less successful at survival because of these characteristics. These offspring have more children than those without those characteristics, and this continues on and on, until the resulting organism is so different from the original ancestor that it can no longer even be considered of the same species. This theory is based on things like:
(1) Geological observations that suggest the Earth is billions of years old.
(2) Observing the fact that different members of the same species of organism have different characteristics from each others. (E.G. some people have red hair while others have brown hair.)
(3) Parents are able to pass some of their unique characteristics on to their children. (E.G. blue-eyed parents have blue-eyed children.)
(4) Some of the unique characteristics an organism has can make it more successful at surviving and reproducing than if it didn’t have that characteristic. (E.G. a bacteria might have partial resistance to penicillin, while other members of its species do not, meaning resistant ones will tend to survive and reproduce.)

All of these observations suggest that, given sufficient time, one organism can be the ancestor of organisms that would be considered a completely different species, and that this occurs because of changing environmental conditions.

Proof of things that we didn’t observe by observing other things, and recognizing that there is a relationship, is not limited to the natural sciences. For instance, in a murder trial, all of the evidence that is presented is something that the judge and jurors can observe directly with their eyes and ears. For instance, the prosecution can present finger prints that were lifted from the murder weapon, and explain the chain of custody of the object such that no one had touched the murder weapon since it was discovered at the scene. Or, the prosecution can explain how each gun barrel leaves unique markings on the bullet when it is fired, and that the markings on the bullet found in the victim matches the markings on a bullet fired through the weapon by a ballistics expert.

Witness testimony can also establish other facts for the jury, such as if someone saw the accused walk into the victims house, and then heard a shot ring out. In that case, the jurors are relying on the eye witness’s observations, which are generally going to be believed, unless it can be show that the witness had some bias to lie or some mental problem that makes them unreliable. Even testimony such as someone seeing the victim and the accused in a heated argument a few days prior to the murder can be evidence, based on what we know about human nature. Human beings tend to do things because they have a motive for doing so, and if the accused hated the victim, then that would suggest he might have killed the victim. This recognition of human behavior is also based on observation.

What is the method of relating the things that we observe and then concluding the existence of something that we didn’t observe? The method of logic provides us with guidance in this area. Logic generally takes two forms: the inductive and the deductive. In deductive logic, we mentally place a specific instance into a general category or principle. It is reasoning from the general to the specific. For instance: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. “All men are mortal” is a general category or principle. Socrates is shown to be a specific instance of a man, and therefore everything that is known to be true about all men is true with respect to Socrates, i.e., that Socrates, just like all men, is mortal.

Deduction is a means of coming to have knowledge that doesn’t depend on direct observation of the conclusion, but the conclusion is based on other direct observations. In the case of the Socrates syllogism, you didn’t observe Socrates being born, growing old, and then eventually dying, but you were able to conclude without such direct observation that he is mortal -that Socrates will eventually die. What is the evidence for this?  One such fact is that every other man who is known to have lived eventually died. You then assume that since Socrates is in this category of “men”, that he has the same characteristics as other men, and is therefore mortal.

The above discussion of deduction leads to the other major form of logic. Where did the “all men are mortal” part of the Socrates syllogism come from? This is a complicated subject, and is not even fully agreed on today, but, in general, such knowledge is gained by observing a sufficient number of concrete examples of a thing and then generalizing that all members of that category possess that characteristic. For instance, it is impossible to actually observe all men and see that they are mortal, but you observe enough examples that you can eventually conclude that “all men are mortal.” The problem is that this can lead to generalizations that are erroneous. An example of this is the generalization: “All swans are white.” You observed numerous examples of white swans, and you conclude that they are all white. But, one day, you discover a bird that is morphologically the same as white swans, but it has black feathers. How do you know when you have a valid generalization versus an invalid one? I would like to know the answer to that one myself. In general terms, I think that if you are clear about the nature of the thing, and your purposes when you generalize, then it is possible to come up with valid generalizations. So, in the case of the invalid statement “all swans are white,” if you were clear about what a swan is and also about why the color of swans matters to you, then you probably wouldn’t make such a generalization in the first place. I cannot even think of a situation where it really matters whether swans are black or white. If you regard swans as a food source, then their color makes no difference. If you simply think swans are beautiful and graceful, then I think that belief applies to both colors. For my purposes here, the minutia of valid induction can be put aside. The point is that you generalize, or induce, by observing a sufficient number of examples to reach the generalization. Induction ultimately depends on your observations -on what you can perceive with your senses.

Someone might claim that they have a means of gaining knowledge other than through observation or logical reasoning, but I am aware of no such means. However, if they can provide me with proof, then I am open to hearing what they have to say. I just don’t know how you provide proof without proof, which seems to be what they are claiming.