The Primacy of the Individual: The Intent Versus the Result in Statism and the Dangers of Leftism

Even as individualists, many of us want to group ourselves according to some larger identification or affiliation. Since my gradual transition to minarchism began as the outgrowth of my move into libertarianism some ten years ago when I supported Harry Browne, I have been perpetually amused by the insistence of many anarchists and minarchists alike that they want nothing (or at most, as little as possible) higher than the individual as a mode of organization. One has only to look at the wide spectrum of denominational affiliations within anarchism, minarchism, and agorism to see that there are higher modes of affiliation and even organization within our spectrum.

How this would result in something other than statism or at least a construct which resembles statism in at least some respects has never been explained to me. People group and cluster together naturally, being social animals. They recognize collective interests, agendas, and beliefs and they group and organize around those commonly held ideals and causes. In this natural process, what inevitably emerges resembles in every way statism on certain levels. We have the declarations and statements of belief, assertions of various rights, organizational hierarchies and the processes thereof up to and including democratic votes, and all of this resembles on a certain level statism.

The ideological purity insisted upon by some within anarchism and its affiliated movements does not ring true with me. One of the reasons I’ve been turned off by statism and political ideologies in general is the obsession with doctrinal purity despite the overwhelming evidence that the doctrine in question does not work as claimed when applied in a real world environment. Let’s take the Drug War, the War on Poverty, the War for Morality, and any other crusades and movements of the past 50 years. Drugs, Poverty, and Immorality continue their unabated advance. If anything, the efforts to combat these ills have arguably led to the perpetuation and expansion of the problem.

On the same level, I’ve increasingly become disillusioned with government. I just don’t see that it has ever worked in the way it was ostensibly supposed to work. I don’t see that it ever even came close. Government is a sort of beast created in a laboratory, where under laboratory settings, the beast would function in a controlled environment according to its design and purpose. Unfortunately, the beast escapes the laboratory and makes it into the real world, where it wreaks unholy havoc.

I am no longer an idealist. I love animals and children, though I entertain no illusions about either. The key to managing an animal or a child is to establish dominance in the relationship, to make both understand who is in charge. Time and time again as a teacher, I had to learn and re-learn this lesson. I also witnessed the natural result which inevitably occurred when parents had not established dominance or control in their relationships with their children early on.

I feel the same way towards government. It’s an unruly beast, and in order to make it conform to your purposes and desires for it, you have to beat the living hell out of it. You may even have to kill it and get yourself a new one.

I distinguish between my government and my country. I love my country, and my love is rooted in the land and the common principles which I do honestly feel bind us. There’s a decency among most of us. We’ll help others in need. I like what we are when our fellow man is in need. I regret that we aren’t the same way when there isn’t an ongoing catastrophe.

I love our Constitution, I love our Declaration of Independence, our various charters, and our flags. I like the idea of being a part of something larger than myself. Maybe it is the traditionalist within me, but being American gives me purpose, direction, and a sense of relevance in much the same way that being a Theist does. There’s a spiritual impact I feel when I’m out and about in our country. I love the land, and I love feeling that on some level, it’s mine as an American to have and to hold, to cherish and to defend.

I love the history of our nation, good and bad. There’s as much to be gleaned from the mistakes and errors of our past as there is to be celebrated from our shining moments. For me, America is the land and the people, and the sum of their beliefs, philosophies, and the shared and individual experiences which make up our history. These are very often at odds with government, which for me, is the state. Government is the conduit for the very worst within us to be magnified and exposed in all of its ugliness. The political component brings out the absolute worst within our country.

I draw a distinction between Republicans and Democrats and what I consider to be the insidious evil within our society: the Left. I firmly believe most Republicans and Democrats aren’t that far apart on values. Your average Democrat comes from a manufacturing background, and was perhaps a member of a union. Your average Republican likely comes from a similar background, but may or may not be a member of a union. The working class tends to inherit their class and their political affiliation from the generation which came before them.

They share similar values, even as you go up the social and economic scale. I have yet to meet a Democrat in Alabama who does not abhor partial birth abortion. In fact, I have to meet a Democrat anywhere that I’ve gone who does not regard it as more suited to the laboratory of Dr. Mengele than an American physician’s office. We tend to acknowledge that teenagers will make mistakes with drugs, alcohol, and sexuality, but we don’t necessarily agree that the government ought to intervene to educate them on either of the three subjects. We tend to regard such instruction as falling with the purview of parents and elders within a child’s immediate social circle, be it their family, their church, or their neighborhood.

The Left does not regard sex education as the purview of parents for precisely the same reason it does not regard traditional family structures in high regard: it seeks to deracinate the traditional values and beliefs of any society in which Leftists exist. It seeks to challenge and overturn convention, and not to erect anything better in its place, but rather to arrive at a sort of nihilistic destination where individuals are no better than subjects in some grand scheme or experiment conducted by ideologues and academics who want to tinker with the lives and beliefs of others and their cultures.

The Left constructs some noble goal or some laudable end like the reduction of teen pregnancy or the reduction of sexuality transmitted diseases; and it proposes a program or agenda to accomplish its end. The reality of the matter is this: the stated or ostensible goal of a Leftist is never the genuine goal. Teen pregnancy goes up, not down, and the rate of transmission where venereal diseases is concerned skyrockets as well. The idea is to change normative standards, to introduce alternative modes of sexual conduct in the name of limitless individual expression.

It never once crosses the Leftist’s mind that limitless individual expression is not freedom at all, but rather an invitation to voluntary enslavement. People can die as a result of their bad habits. In point of fact, we refer to behaviors as bad for the very reason that they are a danger to human life. We construct rules within a society or point to certain behaviors as virtuous because they lead to the perpetuation and the prolonging of life. We don’t condone overconsumption or promiscuous sexual behavior because neither works to perpetuate or prolong life; rather, both are likely to shorten lives.

We can’t force individuals to choose virtue, but we can erect societies where failure isn’t incentivized in the form of endless safeguards, bailouts, and nanny state regulations. Protecting people from consequence does not result in greater survivability or happiness; it results in indolence and enslavement to whatever entity rescues individuals from themselves. The point of salvation is freedom, not bondage.

Leftists have a fatalist view or outlook on nearly everything. Their idea is never that individuals left to learn on their own in the marketplace of behaviors can over time learn for themselves what works and what doesn’t; it is instead that individuals of a certain caliber or class are incapable of learning anything. The Leftist regards the poor or the mentally disabled in the same way that they would regard a stray animal: they seek to spay, neuter, and yes, even subject them to euthanasia. History is a testament to this. Look at the so-called progressives and the various movements they have spawned, eugenics and population control especially.

Human beings are not animals, and anyone who would propose to treat them with the same management techniques and husbandry methods employed by farmers seeking to build or cull their livestock is unfit to hold power over the life of another human being. If we regard the Leftist with cold contempt and even hot hatred; it is because he is contemptible by virtue of his low esteem for the life, autonomy, and right to self-determination of his fellow man.

The reply of the Leftist is that someone must, absolutely must, provide some redress for the suffering of these poor dullards. They are overrunning the Earth, consuming beyond the capacity of the planet to replenish itself, and they must be stopped to ensure the greater good of the human race. Implicit within such logic is the fact that the Leftist does not regard whoever falls into the category of “they” as part of the human race, or at least as a part of the human race worth preserving on the same level as the class occupied by Leftists and their peers. In truth, the Leftist regards such individuals as altogether separate from himself. He may even, as history has shown, construct a classification system to relegate these others as being somehow akin to animals.

The great danger of Leftism is this: it wears virtually every mask available. Leftists have been Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and every other sort of partisan, religious, or ideological denomination under the sun. The measure of Leftism is its obsession with pragmatism as the basis for action against or over others.

It is from this pragmatism that many of the coercive abuses of the state spring. Leftism is the soil from which the great heresies of statism spring: security as a justification for surrender of liberties rather than the means to the end of liberty; eugenics and forced sterilization; slavery and segregation; the reduction of women to a lesser status before the law with lesser privileges where suffrage and other matters were concerned; and the reduction of embryos from human status to mere protoplasm in the event of an abortion while simultaneously preserving laws which classify the murder of a pregnant woman as the murder of a child as well. If you would have a government function within the limits prescribed by its citizens, you must keep Leftism out of elected office and out of bureaucracy. In point of fact, if you would have any sort of a society whatsoever, you must expel Leftists from your ranks the minute they reveal themselves.

The Leftist is a vampire who sucks the lifeblood out of a society, a cancer and a pox upon culture who corrupts everything from public discourse to private conversation; and he encourages the proliferation of racial bigotry and resentment, gender inequity, slavery, and the equivocation of consensual sexual relationships between adults of sound mind to that of a man or woman who molests an animal or a child, neither of whom possesses the requisite mental faculties to form consent to a sexual encounter. The Leftist must be identified, and he must be cast out and purged. He sows only endless abstraction, and all in the service of tearing down the agreed upon conventions and normative standards of the society in which he exists.

The Leftist seizes upon rights not as the end to realize his own Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, but as a means to overturn the Life and Liberty of others with whom he disagrees. He seeks at every turn to utilize his freedom and autonomy to overturn theirs. The end result of the open society which tolerates a Leftist is the extinguishing of individual self-determination, autonomy, and eventually, the extinction of the open society itself, which is replaced with a totalitarian or autocratic regime.

The liberal or the conservative may be a Leftist. As I have said before, Leftism is malleable to any ideology or affiliation, so long as pragmatism is introduced and melded with the the ideology or affiliation in question. When a conservative transitions to a point where agreed upon absolutes like the sanctity of life or the autonomy of individuals up to and including sacrosanct rights become mere means rather than ends unto themselves, he is a Leftist, as is any liberal who takes the same position. When anyone comes to a point where they say to themselves, this is more important than life or the rights of individuals to their lives, their beliefs, and property is concerned, they have effectively removed themselves from whatever society in which they previously existed. They have committed treason. From that point forward, they can only work to overthrow the freedom, self-determination, and autonomy of others who do not align themselves with the Leftist. Everyone who does not believe as a Leftist believes become the Other, or the Enemy. The freedom of the Leftist differs from your freedom and my freedom in that it is mutually exclusive to the freedoms of others who disagree.

When Christian conservatives argue for boycotts against a sitcom on the grounds that it is immoral or promotes indecency, their position is not to make a statement of belief. It is instead to deny others the right to determine for themselves whether or not the program in question is decent or indecent. There is a fail safe method of determining merit in entertainment: ratings, and/or the money which flows from those ratings in the form of advertising dollars or sales. The Christian conservative boycotts not as an exercise of free speech, but as an attempt to intimidate and coerce advertisers and producers of entertainment so that they will not defy the standards advocated by Christian conservatives. It is the same with liberals who object to conservative programming in the same manner. They are not content to let ratings or sales serve as an arbiter of a program’s success or failure. They simply do not want anyone to be able to have the option of watching the program in question at all.

I exercise my freedom by turning the channel or putting in a DVD. The Leftist seeks to deny me the opportunity to choose for myself. His is a war on Ideas, an effort to drive all competing Opinions and Ideas from the marketplace in order to limit the options of consumers to only those which the Leftist deems appropriate or good. Politicians who cater to this tendency, who inculcate within their constituencies an entitled attitude so common to Leftists, are not politicians at all: they are demagogues.

Virtue is the foundation of any free society, and the ends of freedom is to find that behavior which works in the marketplace of conduct. That is why individuals who save their money and live within their means build wealth more quickly than individuals who do not. The Leftist seeks to dominate the marketplace of conduct to pick the winners not according to the merit of their behavior in a marketplace, but according to his own set notions of the way things ought to be. He fails every single time.

The last three of our Presidents have proven that, contrary to the myths and innuendos, drugs will not ruin your life. All three used drugs. They learned on their own that repeated, frequent, and abusive drug use was perhaps not the way to go through life. My own personal experience taught me more or less the same lesson. I see nothing wrong with recreational use; though I don’t see anything right about it either. It’s a choice individuals ought to be able to make on their own time. I firmly believe that if they were able to do so, overall drug use would decline both as a result of their epiphanies and as a result of removing some of the illicit qualities of drug use.

The Leftist believes in the efficacy of the Law above all else. He believes that the Law can prevent or deter crime. We execute more people in this country than any other nation on Earth besides China, and we have the highest homicide rate regardless. We have an abundance of laws and we incarcerate more people than any other nation on Earth besides China. Crime continues to multiply.

The Law does not prevent or deter crime. It merely identifies a behavior as criminal and prescribes a course of action for the eventual occurrence of the behavior. The Law is important in that it provides orderly processes and defined consequences for an action. It discourages vigilantism by providing a legal recourse to address violence against others, whether in their lives, persons, or property; and it provides a means for individuals to stand equally before the Law so that they may be held accountable for their crimes or their torts. At least, that’s the way it ought to work.

Just as the conservative traditionalist Leftist believes in the deterrent efficacy of the Law, his liberal counterpart believes in the rehabilitative efficacy of the law. One does not rehabilitate or deter through the law. One merely provides a consequence or redress commensurate with the crime or the tort in question.

But the Leftist seeks not correction, but rather some abstract notion of justice. Tell me, what is justice? Is it the reciprocity of consequence? Do we want that? Do we want the state raping rapists so that they may know what they’ve done to their victims? Does the acknowledgement of earlier wrongs which excuse present wrongs somehow constitute justice? Do we want the state taking into account the abuse suffered by a murderer as a child when sentencing him for his crimes? Does this somehow mitigate the free choice he made when he chose to kill his victim?

To invite this sort of nonsense into a society, to entertain it as a basis for governmental action, is to overturn absolutes and institute situation and circumstance in their place. It is to invalidate the real and the actual in order to entertain the hypothetical. It is to rob the meaning and significance from every area of our culture. It is to say that an individual may own himself and his property, and that he may be entitled to pursue his own happiness with both as he sees fit, if and only x does not occur or is not presently occurring. No individual may claim freedom based in individual rights or liberties in such an environment. His rights are dependent not upon his mere possession of humanity, but rather upon the situation or the circumstance in which he finds himself. He is at the mercy of the Fates.

It is to exchange civilization for barbarity. We arrive at a debate where an attorney working in the employ of the United States Federal Government, whose salary is drawn from your tax dollars, can argue that the President has the right to sexually mutilate the child of a suspect in order to compel that suspect to divulge information. The infant has no rights. He is a mere object to be exploited for an end. His humanity is stripped and his claim to autonomy reduced to nothing. He can make no objection to his own mutilation as the interrogator crushes his testicles in order to compel his father or his mother to divulge information that they may not even have to begin with. After all, they’re just suspects. They haven’t been tried or convicted of anything. When you look upon what Leftism has wrought, and the way in which it turns the State away from its intent of upholding, defending, preserving, and even expanding individual liberty and power, you can see where Leftism and the primacy of the individual are incompatible. You can further see how intent and result are separated and rendered awry in statism.

The problem is not statism per se; it is the appropriation of the state by Leftists of various stripes who put pragmatism before principle, results before process, ends before means, hypotheticals before what is presently real and known. They proliferate laws, regulations, and bureaucracies, all in the name of arriving at Utopia and inevitably they arrive at Dystopia instead. The problem of Leftism highlights a greater problem among those individuals who believe in sacrosanct individual rights: a lack of resolve and an obvious discomfiture on our parts to reckon with the obvious danger of allowing those who would exercise their rights in order to overthrow the rights of everyone else. At some point, we cannot continue dealing in theories and endless abstractions ourselves. We have to resolve to fight the Leftists in order to ensure our own survival.

This naturally means surrendering some of our doctrinal purity to work with those whose opinions and outlooks differ from our own, but whose foundational ideals are nearly identical: individual rights are sacrosanct, non-negotiable, and the ends to which everything else from our government to our armies serve as means. We can coexist because of this common foundation and outlook, but we cannot coexist with the Leftist. His success entails our obliteration. He builds the gulags, ghettos, and concentration camps for us. He proposes our sterilization or our lobotomization. He dreams of not only procuring nuclear weapons, but deploying them against his enemies. We are fast approaching the hour when our own abstractions and silly theoretical bifurcations will no longer matter: our survival, and indeed the survival of the world in which we live, will depend on rising to meet the threat of Leftism once and for all.

I leave you with this, the warning of German pastor and activist Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemoller: “When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent: I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent: I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”

Every time you hear the government assert for itself the power to hold individuals indefinitely without trial or legal counsel, or any time you hear of the President’s newfound authority to execute Americans without trial or due process, you think of your silence, and realize that it is your complicity which empowers the Left in its quest. When they do inevitably come for you, there will be no one left to speak out. These are your fellow citizens, convicted of nothing, only accused by a government whose record should give you little comfort or confidence about its motives and purposes.

“And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done.”

-F. Niemoller

Thanks to GONZOTIMES

http://www.gonzotimes.com/1779/the-primacy-of-the-individual-the-intent-versus-the-result-in-statism-and-the-dangers-of-leftism/