Collapse: The Blog

America Deserves Collapse

Linked to by Karl Denninger and courtesy of this fellow; submitted with comment:

The Great Depression: Then and Now

The tipping point for economic collapse is coming up quickly, perhaps as early as next year. We've been through this sort of mess once before, but the America of 2012 is a vastly different nation than was the America of 1929. Let's take a few moments to examine these differences.

First, while we're heading for depression, the coming one will be markedly more severe. GDP contracted a total of 30% in four years; the necessary correction to bring GDP in line with our present levels of economic output will be more on the order of 50%.

This time, public distrust, suspicion, and contempt of the American government is at an all-time high.

This time, our ethnic minorities are considerably more numerous, more radicalized, and more violent, to the point that they are constantly shooting people over sneakers, getting arrested for losing their minds in fast-food restaurants, and stabbing their coworkers with screwdrivers.

This time, virtually no one is a farmer or even knows how to farm (back then, virtually everyone was capable of at least subsistence farming).

This time, society is in thrall to an ideology that regards pain and suffering as the worst possible evil and suicide as a perfectly valid means of avoiding such.

This time, dependence on the government is already at a record high and there will be no money left to help out the poor.

This time, there are clear villains -- the financial-political complex.

This time, the American identity as such is considerably weakened after decades of propositional-nation nonsense, mass immigration, and political correctness.

This time, we share our porous southern border with a violent narco-state (in fairness, this isn't much worse than the violent atheistic despotism we shared it with back in the 20's).

All of this is reason to suspect, to quote Newsweek's Mark Thomas, that this time, "there will be violence."

Voegelin on the Muddling of Language

"The attempt to come to grips with the problems of personal and social order when it is disrupted by gnosticisms, however, has not been very successful, because the philosophical knbowledge that would be required for the purpose has itself been destroyed by the prevailing intellectual climate. The struggle against the consequences of gnosticism is being conducted in the very language of gnosticism."

--Eric Voegelin, "Foreward to the American Edition," Science, Politics, and Gnosticism

Whence Rights? II: Libertarianism

I mentioned previously that the modern conception of rights is bankrupt and dishonest -- that those who profess a belief in "individual" or "human" or "natural" "rights" while denying metaphysics are either ignorant and confused or evil liars. I pointed out that the modern, antimetaphysical conception of rights are really not rights at all but merely conventions which are subject to change, hence why leftism is constantly inventing new rights and discarding old ones.

Libertarianism, unfortunately, is an inadequate antidote to this, because its metaphysical basis for asserting rights is only marginally more coherent (and still false). When I speak of libertarianism here, I am not speaking of pragmatic or utilitarian libertarianism, the sort most frequently asserted by conservatives in the romantic tradition of Burke, which holds that small and unintrusive government is preferable because it maximizes value and because the alternatives are unworkable and therefore undesirable. Rather, I am speaking of what could be called deontological libertarianism, which asserts a framework of rights and imposes on individuals, organizations, and states a duty to respect them; it is this belief that characterizes most of the people who identify today as some form of libertarian, especially those of the big-L variety.

As I'm given to understand it, modern deontological libertarianism relies on two principles that are held to be axiomatic. The first is commonly called the self-ownership principle, the second the nonaggression principle. The former holds (obviously) that man has ownership of himself, and that by virtue of this self-ownership he may assert sovereignty over property because he endows it with some aspect of himself. The latter simply holds that aggression (i.e., initiated, unprovoked use of force) is illegitimate.

These two principles (usually in combination to some extent) are held to yield up an system of rights. For instance, a (self-owning) man may chop down a tree and use the wood to build a boat; because he endowed the wood with his labor, the boat belongs to him because no others have a right to it. To say others had a right to it would imply that they have a right to his labor, which he would have an obligation to provide; but he, being self-owning, has no such right. (This assumes that he owned the tree in the first place, or at least that the tree was unowned, but more on that in a minute). The nonaggression principle (which is not, strictly speaking, axiomatic, but is usually regarded as if it were) suggests that aggression which seeks to deprive individuals of these rights is illegitimate, typically because it violates the self-ownership principle.

Now, of course, an individual may to some extent yield his rights to others. He may consensually contract out his labor to another. Thus, a man may agree to chop down his neighbor's tree and use the wood to build a boat for him in exchange for handsome payment does not have a right to the boat; the boat is his neighbor's. A kind of mutually-beneficial exchange of rights has occurred here: the neighbor has (temporarily) given up his tree and the man his labor so that the former might get a boat and the latter might get paid.

Consent therefore works out to be the glue that holds deontological libertarian rights theory together. The man cannot build a boat and then assert ownership over it because he consented not to have any stake of ownership in it in the first place.

So consent winds up being an unarticulated axiom here: that you have a duty to do that to which you consent to do (within reason).

But where does this duty come from? I did not consent that my consent should be binding. To say that it is binding on me is therefore to impose upon me an external constraint to which I never consented -- which should be considered a violation of my self-ownership. You can reconcile the two only by acknowledging that there are limits on self-ownership, or by acknowledging that there are higher duties than those which are imposed upon you by choice. Either acknowledgment is fatal to the theory. If self-ownership is limited, it cannot be universal, much less axiomatic. If there are higher duties than those imposed merely by choice, than the entire theory is contingent on assumptions furnished only by natural law, which cannot approve of libertarian rights theory.

A second problem presents itself with the self-ownership axiom. Asserting that one owns oneself assumes that there is a right to own things in the first place, which is a right which self-0wnership is used to assert. Self-0wnership, then, becomes circular reasoning: my right to own property derives from my ownership of my self; but my self-ownership derives from my right to own things in general. Here, the libertarian ethicist might be inclined to say that the principle is axiomatic, then one does not need to know where the right to self-ownership comes from to assert it, and that he is simply saying that a libertarian conception of rights follow logically from its assertion. The lattermost point may well be true, but this gives the game away: an axiom is an axiom because it is obviously true; and whether or not there is anything such thing as a right to own anything is precisely what's at issue here. The principle therefore gives us no basis for deciding whether or not the libertarian conception of rights is true or accurate at all.

It's worth noting that libertarianism itself necessarily imposes unconsented-to restrictions on individual action, anyway, so that my being the biggest and strongest man on the block may grant me the capacity but not the right to pummel, pillage, and rape others (hence, nonaggression). But why so? I never consented that my rights should be restricted in this way (I certainly didn't and don't consent to this self-ownership principle), yet consent must be supreme if we are to be able to reconcile self-ownership with the functionality of the society we see around us. The libertarian ethicist may reply, "Yes, but you must agree to this restriction so that a liberty-promoting framework may be maximized." But this also gives the deontological game away, since it acknowledges that its conception of "rights" is really just a consequentialist convention and that "rights" themselves are, at least some of the time, subordinate to the good of social value-maximization.

The libertarian conception of "rights" isn't really much more tenable than the modern leftist one. It must necessarily degenerate into either leftist consequentialism (by abandoning the universality and absolutism of rights in order to enable itself to function) or sin (by acknowledging the supremacy of natural law but refusing to live in accordance with it). In either event, it is certainly not reasonable, much less a valid or desirable alternative. Which stands to reason, since libertarianism itself an earlier innovation of modernity.

The Muddling of Language

One of the peculiarities of the modern condition is its corruption of language. Concepts that were once readily intellectually accessible are now cloudy and muddled to the vast majority of people because the language we use to discuss them has been warped. Although the general effect has been to draw a veil of uncertainty over knowledge of pretty much everything premodern, the exact nature of this muddling varies depending on the word.

In some cases, words have acquired contrary meanings. "Faith" was once understood to be something more akin to "trust": trust in what one's reason has revealed to be true, no matter how much one's senses may scream out against it. You have faith, for instance, that a rope and hook tested on 10,000 pounds weights will hold your comparatively meager frame when you go mountain climbing: you know it's irrational to believe there's much more than a vanishingly small chance you'll die, but still you must force yourself to let go and swing. But today, faith is understood to mean something quite different: a kind of blind, irrational, groping hope against hope, utterly unmoored from any basis in reality. I'm assuming this probably comes from the triumph of fideism in the larger body of religious thought, although it's certainly wound up a convenient means of denigrating a perfectly rational dogma.

In other cases, words or phrases that once would have been understood to be nonsensical have acquired meaning, carrying along them with particular ideas. For instance, the phrases "good person" and "bad person" are ontologically meaningless: the former a tautology, the latter a non sequitur. Yet they're widely bandied about today, especially in service to liberal causes, e.g., "homosexuality can't be immoral, I know plenty of gays that are GOOD PEOPLE." At best, the phrases are heuristics: "good people" really means "people who do good things." But that hardly means those same people don't also do bad things, or even principally do bad things. The problem with even talking that way is that, since everyone does some mix of good and evil, the judgment that one is a "good person" is necessarily subjective and informed entirely by what you've witnessed of them. Thus we're always surprised when some seemingly nice, quite fellow snaps and kills people, and the common refrain is heard (but never listened to) that he seemed like such a good guy. Our understanding of good and evil itself is made hazy with such talk.

There are also curious cases in which two perfectly innocuous words acquire some other (usually sinister) meaning when juxtaposed. I'm reminded of some vaguely right-wing columnist (I think a National Review type) remarking that "social" was a word which, in modern parlance, had the remarkable ability to completely destroy the meaning of any word joined with it, so that "social justice" is typically grossly unjust, "social engineering" lacks the methodological rigor of traditional engineering fields, and "social studies" usually involves the unstudious distortion of history to fit the official modern narrative of slavery/genocide/bigotry/oppression/intolerance rememberance.

Even "modernity" itself is a bizarre word. When I first started to develop an inkling that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world (back in my last year of college), I started looking up what I could about the concept. Unfortunately, much of it had been written by art historians, who seized on the concept of modernity and developed from it the grotesque visual abortion that is modern art. Much of the rest was unintelligible gobbledygook written by pondscum sociologists. Nowhere was I able to find a clear and succinct explanation of what modernity actually was, what it meant, when it started, who was responsible for it, and so on; that realization came gradually as I read more history and philosophy. I almost wonder if that obfuscation isn't intentional, at least in the sense that the whole modern project has been intentional, as if the moderns are deliberately hiding the fact that there is an antiquity against which modernity can be contrasted.

Some words have had additional and previously unheard of meanings attached to them, so that, for instance, "duty" is honored as a virtue rather than simply acknowledged as a fact of human life arising from nature.

Other words have been severed from their traditional connotations, so that "illegitimacy" is seldom thought of as a problem (and the fact that previous generations saw far lower rates of illegitimacy than we have today as a source of concern is simply baffling to most people). No one talks or cares about "divorce" as a problem anymore. On the topic of sex and marriage, that which is "natural" has ceased to mean "that which accords with human nature" (a definition that logically excludes, for instance, homosexuality) and come to mean "that which occurs in nature" (a definition that excludes nothing). Relatedly, "disorder" has come to mean merely "dysfunction," to the exclusion of its more traditional connotation relating to the use of a healthy and functional faculty in a manner that does nto accord with human nature.

The fact that words themselves have fallen victim to modernity's ever-spreading poison just goes to show how deeply the modernist/leftist project has triumphed. I don't even have to make the obligatory 1984 reference. The rot has, at last, reached the heart of the world, and salvation for many people is impossible simply because the language needed to communicate the core concept of it is rapidly disappearing.