House of Eratosthenes

Revenge, as Lord Bacon tells is, is a kind of wild justice; and the desire for it has had a very poor press over the millennia. We are enjoined not to take it, in fact to turn the other cheek to those who strike us, to return good for evil. This is easier said than done: and the question is whether it should be done. Is total forgiveness, that is to say forgiveness in all circumstances, desirable?

What is certainly true is that it is easier to forgive the evil done to others than to forgive the evil done to oneself, especially if in the first place we don’t really like those others to whom the evil is done. Then conspicuous forgiveness becomes a kind of sadism, an additional burden to bear for those to whom the evil was done: for as I know from clinical experience with my patients, the lack of proper punishment of the perpetrators of evil is itself a punishment of the victims of it, a punishment that is often long-lasting and even rather like a life sentence. This is because it removes from the victims all confidence that there is justice in the world or that anybody cares what happens to them. Their experiences and their feelings are of no account; they (the people who have them) are nothing, no more than insects under the feet of society.

A most eloquent expression of the thoughts I was having as I watched Star Trek Into Darkness. My goodness, the If You Kill Him You’ll Be Just Like Him trope has gotten tired. That’s because it doesn’t work. I go to the movies to be entertained, and Kill Bill is a much better movie, entertainment-wise, when you get right down to it.

But what kind of grown-ups do kids become after watching “don’t kill that bad guy, bring him to justice instead” movies? Non-vengeful, angelic types? Or, are they taught to de-value human life, to see it as not worth avenging, or for that matter, much of anything else. The latter, I think. For that reason, and some others, after watching the recent Star Trek installment I always come away with the same aftertaste as the closing credits roll: I don’t want to see the “don’t kill the bad guy” trope, ever again. Let’s go back to Han shooting first again. It isn’t that I entirely disagree with the point, that the desire for vengeance should be checked. The problem is that it’s bland, boring, reeks of lazy writing and that’s probably what it is. My impression is that the writers never even bothered to contemplate the other problem with vengeance, that those who crusade against it may have as many problems as those who crusade for it. They may pose just as grave a threat against what we think of as “civilization,” which, if it relies on anything at all, must rely on the idea that humans are worth something. Also, that actions have consequences.

Back to Thompson’s post. What’s interesting about it is that it has offered a connection — without meticulously explaining how the connection works — between this “lust” for not-vengeance, and the lazy condescension of the intellectuals by way of a link to Mises.

The intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.

In other words, intellectuals are often out of place in entrepreneurial societies. The growth of the intellectual class is not a response to consumer demand, but to the expansion of higher education. Passing through the higher education system does not necessarily confer valuable skills, but it often does convince graduates that work in the market is beneath them:

The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. His failure to do so may be due either to lack of natural ability—perfectly compatible with passing academic tests—or to inadequate teaching; and both cases will, absolutely and relatively, occur more frequently as ever larger numbers are drafted into higher education and as the required amount of teaching increases irrespective of how many teachers and scholars nature chooses to turn out.

If higher education takes little or no account of the supply and demand for useful skills, it will produce graduates who naturally gravitate to the intellectual class, bringing with them feelings of estrangement and dissatisfaction:

All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator’s typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a rationalist and utilitarian civilization.

A swelling intellectual class then molds public opinion, swaying it in favour of socialism.

Feral Kid Thompson (via Small Dead Animals) then adds:

This “conspicuous forgiveness,” a kind of vicarious tolerance, can be quite striking in its boldness and disregard for facts, with acts of savagery being met with improbable excuses and rhetorical diversions. Generally from a safe distance. In 2011, following the London riots, China Miéville, a middle-class Marxist and member of the International Socialist Organisation, claimed to be “horrified” that members of the press and public had used the word feral when describing the career predators and assorted thugs who, seeking excitement and a sense of power, had beaten passing pensioners unconscious and burned random women out of their homes. And who, on the arrival of firefighters, had dragged them from their vehicles and punched them insensible.

To use the word feral when describing such people was, Mr Miéville said, our “moral degradation far more than [theirs].” You see, by referring to such behaviour as savage and anti-social, we are the degraded ones in Mr Miéville’s eyes, the ones in need of chastisement. Our compassionate Marxist was hardly alone in his rush to invert reality and flatter the brutish, even as it became clear that an overwhelming majority of the looters, muggers and arsonists had previous convictions for similar crimes, an average of 15, and some more than fifty. Despite such bothersome details, flattery and evasion were very much the done thing as fellow leftists Nina Power, Laurie Penny and Priyamvada Gopal were happy to demonstrate. Presumably on grounds that none of the feral behaviour, the random beatings and violent predation, was being directed at them.

Tying this all together is the concept of worth. Say what you like about those who think humans are worth avenging; at least part of their mindset is “humans are worth.” Their philosophy is not, as we’ve been repeatedly told by the pop culture, opposed to justice; it’s more of a close-cousin to it, since you can’t have justice without thinking humans are worth something. The work they do, for each other, is also worth something, inconvenient as that may be to the intellectuals who consider themselves to be above it all.

Captain Capitalism has completed an interesting item of Internet research:

I had to search her name and after finding her newly hyphenated name was able to track her down.

What is she doing today?

Well….this.

I want to highlight this because there’s a couple important lessons to pull from it.

1. Look at the money raised and their pleas for money. Also look where it goes to. It goes into just basically supporting themselves. These aren’t professional activists. They’re panhandlers on the internet pursuing some sad pathetic crusade they’ve been told to by media, leftist professors, and yes, even the government.

2. Precisely what is their crusade? To take selfies on Monsanto’s signs out in the middle of nowhere as they hold up craptastic home made signs? Not only is the crusade itself pointless and ultimately mentally-egotistically self-serving, but they’re not even doing it right.

3. She is obviously with child. If they only have $160, guess who’s going to pay for her birthing expenses! That is the least of our concerns though. Any body want to place odds on the kid growing up right?

I could go on, but the larger point is this is ultimately where crusaderism leads. A dead end wasted life of delusion and no real practical or meaningful achievements.

In the last post I had made reference to nihilism, singling out for special criticism the “don’t discuss politics” types and the “I’m a (phony) moderate” types and the “conservatives and liberals there’s no difference between the two” types:

Nihilism — the belief that life lacks meaning or intrinsic value. It’s really a “Captain Obvious” thing when you think about it: The belief that ideas and actions are pointless, leads to the belief that life itself is pointless.

That is our culture clash. This is why we see all the arguing. “First Black President” has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever, it provides no motivation at all on either side. We’re having a national shouting-match about all the rest of us, and our worth. A certain Secretary of State summed it up very well, as she was being grilled in the Senate about her most glaring failures: “What difference…does it make?” Waitaminnit, did I say “very well”? I meant “perfectly.” That is the epicenter of disagreement.

Ultimately, if you are dedicated to a consumer-economy in which we rely on helping each other, lots of things matter that otherwise wouldn’t. In fact, whether you realize it or not, just about everything matters. But if you’re above-it-all, then none of it does. So then you can join some crusade that doesn’t really have any meaning, or value, material or otherwise. Get yourself knocked up with no means of support, no food in the cupboards, no cupboards, just panhandling on the Internet? Burn randomly-selected women out of their houses? Beat up old people? Get beaten up yourself? What difference does it make?

Let’s concentrate instead on banning words like “feral” and “bossy,” because words mean more than people. Yes, that does start some arguments. I should certainly hope so.

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The Pointlessness CrusadeThursday, July 10th, 2014

The Pointlessness Crusade
Thursday, July 10th, 2014