Statism and Myth as a Tool of Survival and Perpetuation Part V: Towards Perfectability and Utopia or, Aiming for the Stars and Winding Up in Ghettos and Gulags

“…and it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.”

-Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity pg. 62.

“Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death.”

-Psalm 94:20-21, English Standard Version

The great difference between freedom as a positivist understands it and freedom as a naturalist understands is quite substantial. Positivists view freedom as “…a lack of resistance or restraint (56 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity),” and they try accordingly to erect great and substantial barriers to such a concept in the form of laws to guide behavior and punishments for a failure to conform to such laws. For a positivist, freedom from freedom is the end to which he works. In short, a man must enter into a sort of voluntary bondage, what B.F. Skinner referred to as “automatic goodness,” and what T.H. Huxley did see as objectionable: “If some great power would agree to make me always think of what is true and do what is right, on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should close instantly with the offer.”

For the naturalist, freedom is defined more as the power to determine for oneself which action or course to undertake, with the understanding that actions and courses have consequences which must be borne as a result of their implementation. Rights and morals do not stem from codes, but codes arise as man attempts to organize into statute or screed what he has come to observe in the course of his undertakings, that which works and that which does not work being the inspiration for his prohibitions and encouragements. It is important to the naturalist that men should find their own way through personal experience, though many naturalists often surrender to the impulse of the positivist by insisting upon codified or written means of behavioral guidance and sanction.

The law is impotent depending on one’s expectation. For the naturalist, the law is quite potent in that it does two things: it identifies a particular behavior as a tort or crime and it prescribes a process to occur in such an eventuality. For the positivist, the law must produce some ideal state, some utopia. Not surprisingly, positivists are often disappointed. In the name of greater freedom from the chaos and disorder that positivists see as freedom, a positivist will establish ever more strident restraints upon human behavior until he at last arrives at totalitarianism; that theory or approach which regulates every moment of a man’s life and tells him what his course will be at every turn, much like T.H. Huxley’s above-quoted example in which he desires to be wound up by some great power like a clock every morning in order that he may be automatically and totally good.

For the positivist, the great debate is over whether or not such robotic goodness is in fact goodness at all, or whether it is some mindless behavior which, due to the removal of free will and self-determination, cannot qualify as moral behavior at all. For the naturalist, the issue is whether or not such a destination is even possible. It isn’t. The most totalitarian societies have had crime. Societies which strive to produce automatons inevitably produce deviants by provoking their sons and daughters to wrath with heavy-handedness. The positivist believes that we are always one innovation or discovery away from a breakthrough which will enable the end of man’s problems in a particular area. He speaks of Theories of Everything, Laws of Everything, and the End of History.

He is a dreamer who dreams of the end of dreams, or at least the elimination of their usefulness to man. He has but one dream: the achievement of everything in one broadstroke. The positivist is that broken man who, in his constant optimism for a better tomorrow, looks sorrowfully upon the day as being somehow worse than the days already passed, no matter how ahistorical his position might be. We have all encountered the acolytes of apocalypse who insist that the world is growing worse by the day, that immorality and disease, wars and rumors of war, the birth-pangs of a groaning Earth, are all multiplying at an alarming rate which threatens the extinction of mankind and the world as we know it. These acolytes are both religious and secular.

The truth of our history is this: it is getting better all the time. We are able to feed more people with less input, but the apocalyptic positivist notes ruefully how better “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” or how “war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution (Skinner 1).” He is a man who find the thread of discontent in any happy news, a fatalist who believes that man must be controlled or managed according to the way that he and his peers see as optimum for human life, and he and his peers are arrogantly precocious enough to believe that they can know what that optimum standard is in its completeness and its entirety.

Drop the positivist in the Middle Ages, and she will find that wandering through the countryside unescorted as a stranger in a strange land is the first step towards an increased risk of sexual assault. To some degree this is true today, but we have our high risk areas and neighborhoods, and most of us can exercise good sense and take precautions to reduce the risk of harm to ourselves. The positivist male who is dropped into the Middle Ages will find that while better medicine and sanitation do not lead to any threat of overpopulation, the lesser medicine and sanitation of that time do threaten to lead to human extinction in the form of the plague. Either way, the positivist will be happy to note that there are crises to be noted there in much the same way as such crises can be noted here.

The greatest cause of peace in human history has been the development of nuclear weapons. The problem is not the excess of such weapons; it is the fact that all countries do not possess such weapons in abundance. Invasion and foreign aggression would be things of the past if such weapons were proliferated through every nation in the world community. Nuclear weapons are the greatest deterrent to statist aggression ever developed by man. Are they dangerous? Most certainly. Can they destroy our world? Absolutely. Their awesome destructive power for both the state that initiates their use in conflict and the state that responds in kind renders it virtually certain that neither side will use the weapons or initiate lesser forms of direct conflict.

Instead, that portion of the world which does not retain such weapons becomes a great chessboard, as the countries which possess nuclear arsenals carve up spheres of influence in indirect conflict with each other. The side effect of nuclear weapons which has been less than positive has been the denial of nuclear weapons to those states who have traditionally suffered subordinate status in the world, and such states have had to endure their territory and prerogatives being trampled in order that nuclear states might conduct their conflicts in a proxy manner. Nuclear weapons enable and even proliferate a kind of power projection by those states who possess nuclear arsenals over those states that do not possess such arsenals. The positivist is incapable of understanding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would virtually guarantee diplomacy rather than warfare as the means of settling statist disagreements. In point of fact, universal nuclear armament would likely negate the practical need for standing armies.

In all truth, the positivist likely does realize this, but he refuses to acknowledge it. His existence depends on inequality as the basis of coercion. Those who have nuclear arsenals can dictate to those who do not. This inequality as the foundation of statist coercion is what the positivist covets. It is what he requires as a practical means of constructing the world which he desires. So long as his side has the bomb, he has no real objection to make. But the moment his lessers develop such a capacity, the positivist decries nuclear proliferation as a destabilizing force in the world, and it is no wonder: the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that formerly subordinate states gain the power to reply in the negative to positivists. The positivist can no longer dictate or decree to such states as to how matters will be. They gain their say so about such matters the moment they enter the nuclear club.

Without nuclear weapons in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would likely have undergone a third world war with great implications for all people. As it stands, the war that emerged was largely fought through proxy states and theaters, and casualties were greatly minimized as a result. Eventually, the excess of militarized command economics brought down the Soviet Union. Empires are difficult to maintain in perpetuity.

It never once occurs to the positivist that men must learn in the free market of behavior what works and what does not, nor does it occur to the positivist that men can or should die as a result of their wrong choices. The positivist seeks at every turn to interrupt or delay natural consequence. He is the individual who in times of economic crisis does everything to salvage the unsalvageable by pumping vast liquidity into a failed company, never once considering that the expense of intercession may outweigh the benefit of the company’s continued survival. He also fails to consider the negative precedent that such continued survival establishes: you may act in a way that is fatal repeatedly and wantonly, but someone will always interrupt on your behalf to save you from the fate of your own making.

Ironically, the positivist who has this attitude towards a large corporation lacks such an attitude towards his fellow man: if that man is suffering a mortal or terminal illness, the positivist tends to weigh the cost versus the benefit and can very often decree that is it cost negative to offer a treatment. This is of course in times of illness, but in terms of human action, the positivist seeks to rehabilitate the man who wantonly harms others and their property. He wrings his hands in agony as he considers punitive action versus rehabilitative action in penal codes. He seeks to interrupt and check consequence. A criminal can still be saved; a law abiding citizen afflicted with a terminal illness cannot be saved. The efficient allocation of resources and intervention efforts must be directed towards the salvageable: the company or individual who deserves to perish or suffer as the natural consequence of their actions is saved from the full measure of that consequence; while the individual who through no fault of their own develops some chronic medical condition or likely terminal illness has a low possibility of survival and thus can be rightly denied treatment and therefore condemned to certain death. Such is the moral calculus of the positivist and such is his idea of progress and efficiency.

The postivist is full of vim and vigor for such Devil’s calculus; indeed, he is often the individual in any room or conversation who prides himself on the ability to suspend empathy in order to maintain what he perceives as objectivity. The suspension of empathy, and the subsequent dissociation from rational relativity which such a suspension of empathy yields, often gives rise to the nonsensical realities of our world. We spend $28,000 a year on average to incarcerate career criminals and violent sociopaths in climate controlled comfort with access to healthcare and legal representation, but a law abiding individual whose doctor prescribes an expensive treatment will often run into a review board at his insurer that denies the treatment on the grounds that is experimental and unproven, when that same treatment would readily be given to inmates by a state loathe to run afoul of litigious prisoner rights advocates.

This is not freedom at all. Freedom is self determination, free of coercion or aggression, coupled with the responsibility to accept the consequences of exercising freedom. Such an understanding contains within it the natural prohibitions on excess that positivism seeks through statutes and greater regulation: individuals are subject to the implications of their own actions without exception or limitation, and thus are more likely to censor their own behavior accordingly. By removing such limitations and establishing exceptions from the consequences of one’s own actions and excesses, positivists do not prove themselves to be practitioners of some progressive notion of mercy: they are in fact advocates of allowing men to think that failing behavior is working behavior, and as such, the positivist, or as he likes to be known, the progressive, is a blind sadist whose unintentional skill at cruelty is unrivaled.

By further condemning men in no-fault situations such as the development of some chronic disease that is potentially terminal, progressives show themselves to be anything but progressive: they are in fact advocates of regression. The same man who would bristle at the denial of care to an inmate will not hesitate to conceive that medical resources are finite and therefore must be rationed to a regular individual who works hard and enjoins himself to moral or legal behavior. In this way, the good among us are culled while those who wantonly pursue lives of harm to others and their property flourish and survive under the tender mercies of positivist progressives. What a world this is, that we should be reduced to the olden days of casting the infirm, the sick, and the unwanted unfortunates outside the city gates and the protections of the laws within, so that they might perish away from us and be the problem of the savage world outside of our supposedly civilized one. In the meantime, our piteous criminals are held in climate controlled cells, afforded access to comprehensive medical care, legal representation, and three squares a day. Who says crime doesn’t pay more than law abiding indigence?

Those of us who are not misers do not hesitate to recognize that with incarceration comes the assuming of certain responsibilities like food and board, as well as clothing and medical care. We also insist that when an individual enters into a contractual agreement with an insurer, the insurer should not be able to wriggle out of honoring his end of the agreement on technicalities. We insist on something novel that positivist progressives claim as their own but rarely deliver in practice: equality before the law. Our world is the better world when we are allowed to implement it, where the lives of the lawbreaker and the law abider are both equally valuable and equally worthy of preservation. We do not ration the sanctity of life, nor do we impose conditions and exceptions upon said sanctity.

We may not aim for the unattainable world in which crime vanishes and everyone wears white with identification numbers tattooed or subcutaneously implanted on chips, but we do value human life and recognize the basic obligation we have as our brother’s keeper. We aim for what is possible; acknowledge that which is likely even when it is perhaps undesirable, and we plan for such contingencies as the likely and the possible with laws, understanding that the law doesn’t deter or prevent crime, but merely serves to identify crime and outline a process by which crimes can be tried and punished, so that each of us are equal before the law. We don’t aim for Utopia, but we do manage to avoid Dystopias.

In those bastions of progressivism and positivism and leftism, where individuals are so much more enlightened than those of us who cleave to quaint notions like the sanctity of human life as an absolute, things like voluntary euthanasia morph from self-determination over when one’s life ends into a medical professional determining your end without your consent or input. We know that this has happened.

Researchers in Belgium interviewed 248 nurses who admitted to assisting a patient in committing suicide. Of course, 120 of the 248 also admitted to the fact that there was no patient consent. That’s important, because it clearly undermines the notion that euthanasia is at the patient’s discretion under Belgium’s assisted suicide programs. The researchers also noted the likelihood that under-reporting occurred, given their desire to avoid criminal charges for overstepping the boundaries of Belgium’s euthanasia laws, which require patient consent. Of course, the medical profession being what it is, the researchers then exculpated the nurses in question with the following: “It added that many [of the nurses] were probably acting according to their patient’s wishes, ‘even if there was no explicit request (http://bit.ly/bclKZ5).’” How high is the probability that someone who didn’t request to die wanted to die in a country where asking to die is perfectly legal? What objective criterion do we have to ascertain what the wishes of the deceased were to know how probable it was that the nurses in question were acting according to the wishes of the patient rather than, say, a hospital administrator looking to clear beds for budgeting purposes?

There are good reasons why we limit government power and take a dim view of those who exercise powers that they do not legitimately possess: it’s called abuse, and we’d like to avoid abuse. We could die as a result of it. But such powers and the exemption from accountability which typically come as the result of statism are designed specifically to increase government power at the expense of self-determination. In short, these laws are specifically designed not to prevent injurious behavior to the public good, but rather to prevent what the sovereign on his own perceives as injurious to the public good.

These sorts of laws, laws against individual choices which by themselves cannot be shown to constitute any form of aggression against others, are key to the positivist goal of perfectability. Our state would gain in its quest for perfection if only we were to criminalize miscegenation and prevent the degradation of the races, or if we were to foist sterilization on the weaker individuals within our stock, or if we were to criminalize the ingestion of drugs and ban the sale or manufacture of alcohol. These conceptions are in keeping with the positivist conception outlined by T.H. Huxley; namely, that individuals can be wound up like clocks every morning with the knowledge of the various prohibitions placed upon choice by the state, and the individual thus informed will proceed to enjoin himself to whatever right behavior is prescribed by the state. This is utter poppycock.

To begin with, it is not criminal to fall in love with someone outside of your own race. It is a matter of free choice and individual preference that is laudable, for it entails individuals looking beyond appearance and race into the inner character of the individual whom they choose. Such an act is not injurious to the public interest; on the contrary, it is quite compatible to the public interest, for it demystifies race and promotes the humanization of individuals despite their racial and cultural differences. When I was a high school student, I was deeply indoctrinated in my household as to the innate evil and insidious desire of homosexuals to convert heterosexual young men such as myself to their proclivities. This homosexual conspiracy was said to be all pervasive. My own father advocated public stonings and executions of homosexuals.

I departed for college steeped in this reinforced belief. And then I encountered a homosexual, albeit a closeted one. He was a recent Army veteran attending college on the GI Bill. He taught me how to play cards, instructed me in shooting whiskey, and he was the friend I went to for counsel upon breaking up with my first girlfriend. I even roomed with him and another friend that summer in a house. Afterwards, we moved into the same apartment complex with different roommates. It became apparent that he was gay after mutual friends stumbled across the proof of it in the form of his computer diary. My friend never acted in a manner consistent with the supposed homosexual agenda. What is more, upon encountering other homosexuals, few if any of them ever had designs on forcing any issue with me or anyone else.

The point is that getting to know actual homosexuals completely changed my mind about homosexuality and gays. They were merely people. Everything that I had previously seen about them, this notion that homosexuals were cross-dressing, style and interior decor obsessed, feather boa adorned, dilettantes who cavorted around on stilts in and out of pride parades was clearly wrong. Most homosexuals I knew were not promiscuous individuals, and those who were were not any more or less promiscuous than a good many heterosexual men I knew and associated with in college.

These barriers that statism puts up to choice and behavior have little if anything to do with protecting the public from injury and everything to do with promoting stereotypes and prejudices, with inculcating an unfounded mystique on the part of the colored person, the homosexual, or the Semites amongst the perceptions of the larger population. The statist needs an enemy to blame at all times for his own failings and shortcomings, and when the economy tanks, it’s the fault of sodomites and Jews rather than a ruinous monetary policy and the fiscal profligacy of elected representatives. God is judging us for tolerating the Asiatic and homosexual; as opposed to our own accounts taking the natural turn which inevitably occurs when states overspend and over-borrow.

The sovereign decrees such states of being and the choice to associate with individuals in these states of being as criminal not because it is truly injurious to the public good, but because it is helpful to the statist ideal of preserving the state from accountability for its own failings by dissociating blame to those individuals who are colored, gay, or Jewish and the individuals who supposedly undermine the strength of the state by their voluntary association with such people. This reasoning is diseased and utterly false, and it is the codification of bigotry and hatred into statute which is truly injurious to the public good.

It inculcates within individuals a capacity to view gays, coloreds, and Jews as somehow lesser before the law and lesser before humanity, and as such, it promotes the idea that whatever we do to them is not the same as what we do to us. Whites in the early 20th century would never have conceived of lynching a white man for sleeping with a white woman out of wedlock, but they would readily mandate such punishment for an interracial couple, or at least the male or colored portion of that couple. It is dangerous, and it promotes and inculcates within a population a dangerous and insidious tendency towards vigilantism.

In the name of promoting perfectability, we arrive at barbarity and open lawlessness, where men lose their sameneness before the law, and the law loses its power to promote order and a uniform standard of decent and civil behavior. What follows are pogroms, genocides, expulsions, and medical experiments upon individuals without their consent. To say that a man is lesser before the law is to invite his mistreatment by others acting on the notion that what they are doing to the man in question is not inhumane, for he is not fully human. You might as well be experimenting or beating a horse or a dog. It is to strip a human being of his humanity, and to strip his peers of their capacity for empathy or a sense of common humanity which might prevent them from acting in barbaric and abhorrent manner towards the colored, the Jew, or the homosexual.

And what is more, this false notion of perfectability inevitably leads to the inverse, for whatever you acknowledge as the state’s power to act where others are concerned is by implication its power to act towards you as well. When the reciprocity of perfectability comes, it comes in the form of affirmative action, which does not affirm anything other than old failed notions that individuals of color cannot achieve on their own without state interference on their behalf. It comes in the notion of gender and sexual politics whereby our entire culture now portrays the women in advertisements as superior to the men, who sit indolently in their plush easy chairs and insolently reply to their wives’ superior logic. Our interests are as follows: breasts, beer, and sports. We are not the same individuals who constructed the Parthenon or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus at Rhodes, or who established a pantheon of literature and art which has stood the test of time to be classified as timeless. In the positivist and leftist construct which is our dominant worldview, one cannot merely acknowledge the accomplishments of both men and women as indications of their common and equal claim to humanity and greatness; one has to denigrate one in order to raise the other.

Humanity and human achievement are not mutually exclusive on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, or any other classification. To hell with anyone who claims that they are. It is one thing to argue over whether Shakespeare or Sappho was the greater poet and author; it is abominable to argue that one was greater than the other on the grounds gender or sexuality. Men are conditioned by the pessimism of such logic to believe that our best days lie behind us, that “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” as Skinner put it, rather than the reality that sanitation and better medicine have enabled more people to realize healthier families and better relationships within those families.

This is not progress; it is false cynicism. It is not unfounded optimism to suggest that our gains in productivity have enabled us to do more with less and to have more with less. It is reality and achievement, and it is cause to celebrate. Perfectability does not entail going backwards towards some optimum standard subjectively selected from the past of human history; it entails going forward to meet the future head on and improving upon the past so that more people can have more of the experiences which are so enriching to human life and human experience. We will never arrive at perfection, for such a destination entails that there is nothing more to achieve or gain. There is always room for improvement, and means to drive the benefits of advancement to people who previously lacked clean water, clean air, basic sanitation, an adequate food supply, and good medical care.

The fact that improvement is not automatic, that difficulties arise on the path to the solving of a problem, is not in and of itself evidence that we should consider destroying or culling human life in order to solve the problem. The measure of a solution is whether or not it can expand human and animal life, and not the cold efficiency with which it extinguishes one as mutually exclusive to the other. To the extent that we have regressed as a society, it has been the advancement of the positivist or the leftist (to me they are one and the same) with his false dichotomies and choices, his either/or, and his notion that the state must have the ability to restrict human action on the most intimate levels imaginable in order to limit some theoretical catastrophe. I have no problem with prophylactics being available to any individual who wants them, but let the individual choose for themselves whether or not to utilize prophylactics. Do not mandate family sizes at the state level.

If there is one thing that is to be extinguished in order to ensure the perfectability or the progress of humanity, it is the leftist and the positivist worldview which decrees such solutions and such mandated limits upon human action and human choice. We are at war, and the war is ideological. There are two ways to wage this war: with the exchange of ideas and open debate, or with the waging of one final physical and coercive conflict between the two extremes. On the one side, we have an ideal which insists upon the primacy of individuals, the sanctity of their lives, the intrinsic and innate dignity and worth they possess merely as result of their conception and birth; on the other side, we have an ideal which states that such dignity and worth is neither innate or intrinsic, but that it is negotiable according to race, gender, sexual orientation, or the subjective standards placed on the measurement of human intellect and achievement by academics who have more oft than not erred in their worldview as their programs of eugenics, alchemy, and various other pseudoscientific approaches would indicate.

These programs and agendas were given the patina of legitimacy by their origin within scientific circles, circles which have as their antecedent the notion that the Earth was flat and rectangular and the geocentric model of our universe. Science can and has been wrong, not merely in its theories, but also in its laws during given time periods within human history. The urgency with which scientists insist on the implementation of some solution ought to be viewed with skepticism given science’s historical tendency to be captured by its patrons and directed not towards factually based views and solutions, but ideologically minded preconceived notions which are bolstered with shoddy academic work and selective sampling of data sets.

Gulags and ghettoes have been built in the name of theoretical perfectability and necessity masquerading as the law of our existence, and today, we have a gulag of public perceptions constructed to denigrate, marginalize, and discredit through ad hominem anyone who challenges the positivist or leftist worldview which is taken as truth in an almost fanatically fervent and reverent way by the intelligentsia and those who view themselves as being in the know. They are the heirs to the W.E.B. Du Bois school of thought which acclaimed Nazi programs to purify the supposed lessers from the supposed betters, with the pretension that a madman who would not acknowledge an achievement by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics would somehow make an exception for someone of letters like Du Bois. Seriously, how illogical can positivist leftism be?

What perverse logic is this that infects such thought processes, whereby the innocent are condemned to death and their unjust conviction and execution are legitimized through the law itself? I’ll tell you what logic infects such thought processes and the results thereof: leftism, whose perverse moral calculus denies prescribed treatment to a law abiding citizen with a contractual arrangement between himself and an insurer on the grounds that the treatment is experimental. The spirit of the contract is violated by the fine print letter of the thing.

It is one thing to deny treatment to the uninsured, and though that is still barbaric and inhumane, it is nothing compared to the bad faith contractual stipulation which enables one side to occupy an elevated position in a contract that discharges them from the obligation to execute the very purpose under which the disadvantaged party entered into the contract! These are the contracts and statutes which pervade a society given over to positivism, to leftism, and to corporatism, to any of the -isms who spring for the diseased root of such a logic which decrees that ends justify any and every means. And yet, the proponents of such logic are disposed to call their means towards an unattainable end like perfectability progress no matter how many must perish on the way to nowhere.
Contrast that with the naturalist position on the law, as postulated by Cicero: “However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all.” Let us have this debate, and frame it once and for all for the future of humanity, so that human beings may choose between the positivist and the natural camps as to which approach works for them. Let us articulate it once and for all in these stark terms, and see what people choose as the foundation for their communities and societies going forward.

The positivist cannot sustain the glare of light upon his position. The leftist cannot withstand the scrutiny of objective measure, and neither can the corporatist. It is only by controlling the framing of the debate, by establishing straw men and employing circular logic and ad hominem that the leftist position which is at the root of all of the positivist approaches to life and law can prevail. Only by dividing us into camps of grievances and promising us redress through a reciprocal and vengeful statute which takes our perceived suffering and foists it onto those who are supposedly responsible for the injustice visited upon us and our forefathers can the leftist win the argument. Only by appealing to the lesser impulses and petty, capricious portions of a man’s soul can the leftist win an argument.

The problem has been that few if any on our side have been able to articulate the naturalist position in a way that delineates it from the positivist approach so starkly. So pronounced has our inability to articulate our position apart from leftism that leftists now masquerade around as naturalists in theory while clearly functioning as leftist positivists in action! Part of the issue has been the construction of ideas and philosophies which clearly hold effectiveness. Left Hegelianism works not by virtue of its merit, but through its identification of that which is inferior within mankind: his pettiness, his ability to be reached through demagoguery, and his overall intemperance. Thesis vs. Antithesis enables leftists to play both sides against their desired middle in order to gain the Synthesis which they covet. This is the manufactured consent which I wrote of in an earlier section, and it contains the germ of every pernicious bit of theory ever envisioned by Machiavelli, Hegel, the Left Hegelians, and the Alinskyites. These individuals do not care about being right, nor do they believe that there are standards by which a result can be judged right or wrong. They care only to win for their ideology, and they have no regard for the misery they inflict upon human beings.

They are meritorious in one way only: the identification of those weak and degraded impulses within man such as spite and hatred which can be exploited to gain his assent to surrender his own sameness before the law for the promise of gaining superiority in the law. As Orwell noted in his classic Animal Farm, some animals are indeed more equal than others in such an environment. What these individuals fail to alert their subjects to is this: reciprocity is the inevitable result. There will be extreme backlashes with grave implications for future generations. To the leftist and the positivist, this is of no concern: they are after their perfect world now, and if they can get it now, now is all that they have. They may talk of a better future, but the reality is that they seek the immediate gratification of their ideological impulses and fanatical desires. The promise of a better future is only made to gain the consent of those in the present.

The time is fast approaching when the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff to ensure that the leftist is revealed; his disguise as the conservative, the classical liberal, the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian, or the neo-this, that, or the other stripped away until he is at last exposed as an individual who believes only in an ideological end and will resort to any means to achieve it. He has not conviction but the end, some purported perfectability which can be achieved and implemented if only we commit to do whatever it takes, right here and now, without being sidetracked by concerns like the sanctity of human life and the legitimacy of the law, which is rooted in the nation that for the law to have meaning to free men, it must regard them as being the same. To the Leftist, these are incidental concerns to the End, and we must do whatever it takes to stifle any objection rooted in this irrelevant concerns. We must erect gulags and ghettoes, camps with ovens to dispose of the mess, and the road to Utopia is strewn with such edifices and the necessary consequences of Leftism. But at the end lies Heaven, a Heaven that is possible only if men surrender their temporal freedoms to arrive at the blessed Freedom conceived of by the Leftist.

The naturalist cannot promise Heaven, but he can promise you that you will be treated like any other man and given the opportunity to make of yourself whatever you will utilizing your own unique gifts. He can assure you that your life will be valued and preserved with the same fervent enthusiasm reserved for the preservation of the lives of others, that a society built around human rights and founded upon the notion that the state acknowledges to acknowledge and defend human liberty will respond to an attack on the life and liberty of one of its members as though it were an attack upon all of its members. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He can promise you progress through human effort and ingenuity, where better sanitation and medicine do not lead to your family being viewed as part of the problem of overpopulation, but as evidence of the achievements of better sanitation and medicine. Life is to be celebrated and not rued. That is the end for which we contend.