Gainfield Avenue

From Blue to Blue

2006-03-31T20:39:00.000-08:00

There's something strange about air travel, and what it does to a mind. I've never had a more surreal moment than flying to Beijing from Los Angeles one year ago. Twelve hours in a flying bus; crammed like a sardine into a goddamn tin can with jet engines bolted to it, hurtling nearly over the pole at 80% the speed of sound, filled with a whole lot of people who don't look like me, with semi-bi-lingual instructions hectoring over the scratchy intercom. I've never had jet lag like that time; we'd left past midnight, flew 12 hours through incomplete, tortured, and uncomfortable fits of pill-induced sleep, and arrived at 6AM in Beijing. How strange it was; the mind's chronometer so utterly abused, the unwelcome sun peering through the haze and smog of a distant and so very foreign land. The mind fog of that time phased out with some sleep, long, sickly sleep, like the forced rest of flu season--the kind of rest that doesn't rejuvenate, but drains.

So tonight a bit of lag seems bearable, as I adjust to three hours of my day disappearing somewhere over the great and beautiful midwest. I'm going to be here in New York for a few months. Temporarily escaping grad school in LA and being quite the red-stater, somehow the phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fire" plays throughout my subconscious. There's no doubt that NY and LA are aligned on some sort of invisible axis of insane leftism; maybe forced into ridicidulously overpriced housing and dense cities hilights the disparities between people, exacerbates the gulf between those with inherited privilege and those with inherited despondence; between those who can and those who want to harness those who can. Those who see such gulf, from its two promontories, long to bridge it--in their juvenile fancy, without regards to what the gulf means or how it came to be. Somehow they form a fantasy land of hands holding hands, creating a human bridge across the sea of disparaties, until all the tribal instincts of collectivism are fulfilled and the inescapable guilt of conscience is sated by their altruism. By such a gulf is not bridgeable; not unless all the good in the best is destroyed, and all the bad in the worst is overlooked. Alas, this gulf widens as the strong and swift trade as free beings for mutual benefit.

New York is old money, hard-earned in its day, passed to pampered fashionistas and bumbling Trump-style executants. There is some profound danger about wealth that it has taken me years to unravel. It is not the chiding of mothers or fairy tales or movies of self destruction where seeking wealth corrupts souls with boundless selfishness and greed, and it is not the juvenile obsession that leftists of all stripes have with class warfare between the rich and the poor--it is something deeper, more profound, and deeply insidious. It is the danger that inherited wealth poses to those who come to possess it by birthright. For that wealth, which can represent the honest sum of one person's brilliant career or tremendously valuable ideas, becomes a surrogate for the character that a person develops while working hard for oneself. Inheriting wealth frees a man from his obligation to provide for himself; it distorts his perception of its value and the effort required to create it. A man who inherits millions never knew the time before those millions existed, and thus cannot appreciate how the efforts of others have come to be concentrated in his own fortune. He begins to regard that wealth as if it were a natural resource, a fixture of the world, as permanent as a river or a mountain. It is lifeforce seeded to him by the universe--not by the many years of work of others. Such a man's mind is forever deceived about the nature of wealth and its origin, since its creation never concerns him; only its maintanence and its enjoyment. Despite his playing, frolocking, and even work at maintaining and expanding his own wealth, somehow this tremendous good luck bothers him; the disparities he sees in the world seem to him mere chance; after all, he did not earn his own wealth, but benefitted by good birth and lines of inheritance. It nags on his mind; the wealth concentrated in his hands seems stolen, unearned. Perhaps it really belong to everyone, and those who came before gamed and cheated and stole it from the good peoples of the earth. The danger cascades as he begins to regard all concentrations of wealth as suspect. Other wealthy men and women, and large, amorphous entities such as corporations and nations become nefarious, power-hungry, and even murderously devoted to stealing the riches of the world.
Dr Sanity could tell you that soon his own guilt is transferred to these other concentrations of wealth corporations or individuals, regardless of their merits or their morality--they become evil, and they become the source of his rage, and the rotting masses of starving children become heroes, become blameless, become victims....and release....the guilt passes, for he has found the key to his psychic pain and absolving his conscience....and another limosine liberal buds....

Los Angeles is sparkling new money, collected a few dollars at a time from passers by like a glorified side show of street performing monkeys. They grew up sometimes from small midwestern towns. Musical talent, dumb luck, ambition, and training conspire to make some into mega-stars. In TV, radio, music, motion pictures....fortunes of millions--billions--are amassed in the greatest noise machine ever assembled that caters and cajoles hapless young minds into buying billions of CDs and concert tickets. An entire industry has evolved to allow the great bored masses to get some entertainment. And what happens to the performers and producers and agents and brokers and directors and the whole industry as they discover that simply producing noise in the right forms to fill empty heads is remarkable popular and profitable? Hollywood is the greatest money collection system ever devised; better even, than taxes (at least its mostly voluntary). Some profound shift must have happened in the mindsets of these people; what do they produce that is of lasting value? Deep reflections on the nature of philosophy, science, mathematics, mankind, human nature, the universe? Few at best. Does Hollywood enrich peoples lives? What actual productive value does it have? I think its proportionately little for the revenues. These people are in the money collection business, not the money making business. What does that mean? Instead of contributing to the net output of wealth, they mostly just move it around and reconcentrate it in their own hands. A reflective hollywood insider finally understands this on some level, and they begin to understand, either by deliberate avoidance of pondering the question or by direct epiphany, that they really aren't making money; they might be making music, but the money comes from some large fanbase--out there. Where do they get the money? To carry their logic forward, again, either by deliberate avoidance of the question or by applying their perverse logic, the money is just there. It's finite but big enough not to worry; like water in the ocean. Wealth just moves around from place to place--like energy--neither created nor destroyed. Then the reflective hollywood elitist who thinks she's brilliant extends this idea to the rest of the world; perhaps all the rich people are just like them; they amassed their fortunes illegitimately by exploting their workers. And thus another Hollywood leftist follows the cycle to psychic release through leftist insanity....

The two mentalities have different origins but lead to much the same belief system. They both support a Marxist view of the world where classes of people are at war--a zero-sum game where the rich become richer by stealing more wealth from the poor. Every transaction between private individuals has a victim and an oppressor. Identifying the victim, correcting the injustice, and punishing the oppressor is the role of society.

But here is the real problem with all of that:

Free people will always trade for mutual benefit.

Note the qualification: free people. Denying this important fact is necessary in accepting the conclusions of Marxism; for it is only logical, however irrational and insane, to search for exploitation in order to nullify this simple fact; thus the obsession with oppressors and victims. Establishing one party as a victim nullifies the premise; the result is that the trade is not for mutual benefit--and somehow society must intrude to correct the imbalance. Establishing this archetype is absolutely essential in supporting this irrational view of the world, for the simple logic of that statement undoes all the reasoning of Marx. And the irrationality begs for profound changes to reality to support itself; Marxists must somehow know this principle--which makes it so important that under any Marxist system people must be made unfree--slaves to the collective--in order to prevent them from seeking mutual benefit (of which personal benefit is one half) in their relationships.

When Reagan used his rhetoric of freedom in his speeches combatting the evil of communism; it wasn't just rhetoric, it stripped the discussion down to the basest of all truths and exposed how utterly insane the left's logic was.

We need a leader that can pierce the fog of liberalism as Reagan did; and finally perhaps the left will fall by the wayside.

Notes On The Martian Chronicles

2006-01-22T19:54:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a month since I've posted anything new. I've been working pretty hard on research and getting to the point that I can realistically envision graduation in summer or fall of 2007. It will be a struggle to work in the necessary development and experiments before I can submit a publication to OOPSLA before the deadline, after which I am going to IBM TJ Watson for an internship. There's a lot of hard work that has to happen to meet the deadline, so I'll probably just be recycling book reviews from time to time here. Like the previous one, this review rolls two books into one, hilighting their remarkable similarities, though this time they are not from the same author, or genre.

I have to admit that I haven't read much Science Fiction literature, as I've been primarily occupied with expanding the borders of my English Literature knowledge, something that despite my high school's feeble efforts and the few arts requirements for Science, I appreciably lacked. I started reading seriously around mid-2003, building an expanding catalog of things that I should read and things I want to read. By and large, there is a substantial overlap. The first sci-fi book I read was Fahrenheit 451 by Rad Bradbury around September 2003. I liked it, but so many other more important works of literature waited before I would continue with sci-fi. (By the way, Michael Moore should be ejected from our planet, if for no other reason than shamelessly hijacking and polluting the title of this important work of Science Fiction for his maniacal conspiracy theories masquerading as grown-up political documentary.)

As 2006 set in, I let a couple of days pass before starting up a new book. Having received a hardback edition of early Steinbeck works for Christmas from my brother, I had read The Pastures of Heaven right away, making it my last book for 2005. The last couple of days of 2005 dribbled away, and I was planning on starting To A God Unknown or Tortilla Flat, two more novels in that Steinbeck edition, but I found myself longing for a short and imaginative science fiction story instead. One afternoon at school Jess and I went to the bookstore and I picked the Martian Chronicles, the next logical book by Bradbury for me to read, having read Fahrenheit 451 in 2003. It turns out that The Pastures of Heaven and The Martian Chronicles, upon reflection, share more theme and style than one would guess. Both are loose collections of stories centering around a place on the frontier of human settlement, wandering upon a number of loosely-related characters and spanning several decades. Steinbeck was a profoundly more skilled writer than Bradbury, touching on irony and deep character reflections, though not yet having refined his art to its pinnacle, but Bradbury's imagination reaches beyond this world, into the future, onto another planet, rather than back into the past and, at least for Steinbeck, the homeland.

In The Pastures of Heaven, a number of characters at the turn of the century come to settle the central valley of California and begin life anew, escaping from misfortune and cursed lives or dreaming of starting large and prosperous families. In each story the dreams melt away like sand escaping between their fingers; happiness is elusive, lives tragic. In one story, the patriarch who dreams of his many children and grand children inhabiting his redwood homestead for generations finds disappointment when his wife nearly dies while birthing their first child, and a second is stillborn, crippling his wife. His son tries to carry on the dream, though he does not share the passion. The dream fades when the only grandson leaves and seeks a better life in Monterey. The house that was supposed to serve as the symbol, the homestead of the dynasty, burns to the ground, and the dream disappears in vapor. Other characters seek their redemption in this new land, or find solace here, only to have it ruined by the intrusion of others. Steinbeck's condemnation for the "theft" of aggressive settlers pervades the stories, as each of them suffers some anti-climactic fate, hope and faith unfulfilled in each. Steinbeck loathed those first white men who came to claim the land of California; his works drip with malice and contempt for them, who he considered to be thieves, robbers, and bandits. All of his works set in California contain a least a little of his over-arching pronouncement of guilt on all those who came to spoil the idyllic beauty of that place and upset the natural order, carving the land up and raping it, and then gradually, over generations, transforming from greedy pilgrims to fat capitalists and haughty aristocrats, the archetype he would impugn without apology in The Grapes of Wrath, to such wide acclaim. The Pastures of Heaven contains the seeds of his writing, being his earliest stories. They betray a holistic love of that natural beauty, which in itself is natural and good-hearted, but the dark side of that love is the anger that it compels him to feel for those who have come to live in it and build upon it. In The Pastures of Heaven, those who come to this land cannot live their dreams, at least not for long. Some unseen power always topples them or steals them away quietly in the night.

So, too, it is with Bradbury, only that his setting lay beyond the blue shell of our sky. The Martians he portrays as jumble of things; serene, calm, yet superbly advanced, capable of telepathy; sophisticated, yet capable of the lowest trickery to defeat those who come to settle Mars. They are a shifting mirage that disappears when approached; in touch with their deepest feelings, and capable to live, coexist in the world, yet insane and projecting their fantasies on the world. When the first men come expecting a celebration of a momentous accomplishment, the Martians are uninterested, selfish, and dismissive, so absorbed in their daily lives that they seem not to care much.

The first few chapters are mixed up; originally the stories were quite separate from each other and only later collected into the book. As a result there are a number of different sides hanging in space without cohesion. But the confusion of the first few chapters subside to a tone harshly damning on those settlers from Earth coming to Mars as the Martians disappear gradually, killed off by chicken pox. Here we find a clue as to where Ray Bradbury is coming from; the Martians are symbolic of the Native Americans, the majority of whom were killed by diseases, principally small pox. One reflective character laments that the great sophistication of the Martians is not fitting with their end, festering and dying of a non-fatal childhood disease on Earth, drying up and blowing away like black leaves. The frivolity of their deaths is showcased as Earth children sneak into the deserted cities and play with the bones before the adults come to sweep it all away.

And along this theme, here comes the deluge of all accumulated class guilt that white men should feel. Earth men are condemned as greedy, profit-seeking, throwing up shabby and cheap towns while Martian cities ten thousand years old, which we are continually led to revere and rue the decay of, stoically sit in silence, empty. Each man worthy of individual description, distinguished from the masses whom Bradbury wastes no opportunities to smear with every over-generalization possible--savage, stupid, and despicable profit-chasers who will gobble the planet and eat hot dogs--is given some quaint dream or past injury that is savaged by circumstances and does not come to fruition. Bradbury leaves it to the reader to assume they deserved everything they got. Miracle of all miracles, he even manages to squeeze in, where it only barely fits, a quick trip through the southern states at the height of racism, their black people rising up into the sky in the rockets to escape to Mars where they can be free. It nicely completes the whistle-stop tour of all the past things white people out to feel bad about.

To mount guilt upon fear upon hubris upon immaturity, of course an atomic war has to destroy the entire Earth, but not before man managed to come to Mars and desecrate it, too. The desolation left on Mars after men scramble home to the war on Earth is looked upon almost smilingly by Bradbury. Such smug self-righteousness is odious, especially from a writer whose Martian chronicles wouldn't have amounted to much more than a lamb's mad bleat had they been set on Earth.

The doom that Bradbury so satisfyingly bestows on his characters, given no space for the gravity of their imports, belies a certain type of frivolity towards those men, as if justice was ever a frivolity. For that's what both Steinbeck and Bradbury were really saying, that these frivolous ends to little dreams are justice to those who defy the natural order. A gloomy and unwelcome sentence--a sentence that punishes and destroys hope, faith, spirit, and survival of humanity. Our culture needs fewer sowers of guilt and more sowers of ambition. Give it a rest, Ray.

How Bad (and Good) Ideas Nest Together

2005-12-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

Something that has always fascinated me about people and political philosophies is how a number of seemingly disparate beliefs or stances on particular issues tend to arrange themselves in particular patterns. For example, beliefs on such issues as property rights, progressive taxation, welfare, and social security tend to align themselves in two large camps of thought rather than enumerating the possible stances on each of the individual issues. This may not be altogether surprising for this example, given that all of the four issues are relatively closely related (i.e. the individual's relation to the state in terms of property, ownership, and wealth). The more intriguing thing to me has always been how more distantly related (or seemingly unrelated) political issues such as abortion, gun control, national defense, education, affirmative action, and civil rights tend to exhibit similar statistically unlikely distributions of thought. For example, there are far fewer people who believe that government should not be involved in education (-education), but should be involved in affirmative action (+affirmative action) than either of the of the (+education, +affirmative action) or (-education, -affirmative action) possibilities. When we wander wholly out of political issues into scientific and philosophical (and by extension, moral) issues, what is more surprising is that even in these far flung areas of thought, striking patterns emerge.

This strange phenomenon sends the scientist in me searching for the cause of this unlikelyhood. Contemplating the issue, I finally posed the question as follows:

What makes a particular set of opinions on a large number of issues significantly more common than most of the other possible sets of opinions?

There are a number of possible answers to this question that deserve some exploration. In the end, I believe the complexities of human nature will force us to concede that there probably is not a single answer to this question that is best; rather, a mix of a number of factors are probably at work that have various impacts upon different individuals and different cultures. Let's explore a few of these.

1. Religion.

First, religion has a tremendous effect on a person's psychological development. The starting point for religion, in my opinion, isn't an open question to be considered throughout one's life--but a flat statement about the universe, usually starting with "God exists" and proceeding to "God is like this" and therefore "The world is like this" and proceeding to "God wants you to behave like this or do this" and offering a number of sticks and carrots in development of a large code of ethics. It is often illustrated through themes woven into a historical record and the doings and failings of historical figures. Often a religion contains a number of hypothetical situations--parables--intended to illustrate principles for living.

In a way, religion, among other things, is a ready-made set of beliefs about the world and oneself that are to be accepted. Though the starting point is a statement about the universe, man, and God(s) if any, religions are not averse to giving rise to many questions both internally and in their application to the world we live in and an individual's path through life. The answers to these questions therefore give rise to the various factions of religions, and as these questions are discovered, religions become more and more fractured in a type of divergent evolution.

The interesting aspect to religion in our exploration of the origins of commonly held belief systems is that religion therefore serves as a blueprint for belief, and its implications in the development of belief systems to address such issues as politics and philosophy therefore lead to wide uniformities. Thus, one possible explanation for the remarkable uniformity of different camps of belief is the common blueprints of different religions.

Point one can be summarized as "some belief combinations arise from a common belief blueprint".

2. Compatibility of Ideas.

A statistical approach to investigating belief systems that assumes that all beliefs are interchangeable is absurd. This is because we must admit that certain combinations of beliefs are more compatible (for example the education/affirmative action dichotomy mentioned in the introduction) than others. In the same way that the nature of atoms lends them to bonding in certain compatible configurations (e.g. H20) and the incompatible configurations simply do not exist, the "compatible" combinations of beliefs then appear more frequently, leading to the phenomenon that some combinations of belief are extremely popular. Also, since people are not entirely logical, the "incompatible" combinations still do exist in various places, but with far less appeal.

What makes the beliefs "incompatible"? Perhaps their very nature, like atoms; they might simply not fit. Thus, point two can be summarized as "some belief combinations are more compatible by their nature".

3. Hierarchy of Implication and Influence.

In the previous point, we explored whether beliefs can be simply incompatible by their nature. Perhaps also, there is another mechanism by which beliefs can be incompatible, In this point, we can explore that though political issues and philosophical questions of seemingly disparate subject matter appear to us to be unrelated (such as "Is Man Good or Evil?" versus "Do we need government healthcare?") they may nevertheless be related through a chain of implication from a more abstract principle. For example, a deep philosophical question about the nature of man can influence, directly and indirectly, a person's conception of what the role of government is. A question of man's nature and capabilities can influence how a person conceives of their own personal responsibility and others. A position on the value of the individual versus the importance of society impacts the development of which individual rights are important (and what is their origin).

Using this principle allows us to analyze how certain belief systems are constructed from a hierarchy started with the abstract and proceding down by implication to the concrete. The consistency between the beliefs at the "leaves" of the tree then is related to the quality of logic applied at each chain of reasoning from the abstract to the concrete. Therefore it should not be surprising certain sets of beliefs are common; they have grown and develop from the same abstract roots. The "almost discrete nature" of sets of belief systems can then be explained that perhaps the large groups of people in particular schools of thought descend from the implications of different answers to the same abstract questions. The nature of the question and the number of possible answers determines the number of "schools of thought" that descend from the answers. Just which abstract questions might depend on the domain; in a scientific field, they may be an as-yet unsettled question or an aesthetic judgment (and yes! there are aesthetic judgments in science); in the philosophical field, it might be the nature of man, and whether god exists, and god's nature; in politics, it might be the role of government, or the origin of rights. Groups and subgroups of belief systems can then also be related to each other hierarchially through another, higher, abstraction. Could it be that all beliefs (even those specific ones within a sub-sub-group of science or philosophy) are ultimately related in a small number of essential abstraction questions?

This was an essential tenet of the axiomatization of mathematics that was undertaken in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. The logic is formal, and rigid--but Goedel showed the fundemental limitations of that logic. But the question now can could be, is it possible to axiomatize belief--not to establish a single belief system that should win, but rather to map out the topology of how belief systems derive from answers to fundamental questions? That is an interesting proposition; but for now I will leave it an open question.

Point three can be summarized then as: "some belief combinations are just the implications of answers to important questions".

4. Tradition, Mimicry and Popular Fads.

What is funny about people is how much they can be like monkeys, birds, and all life on earth in extraordinarily deep ways. Studies of biology have shown in species after species, a tremendous capacity and natural tendency to mimic others. Mimicry is a primary component in learning language and culture--without the built-in capacity to mimic the movements and sounds of our parents in our first months of life, we would not be able to learn language in order to communicate or walk. This mimicry in human nature is a force that drives adolescent conformity and adoption of culture. It also drives the adoption of ideas, too. Thus, in our search to find what makes belief systems for large groups of people remarkably similar, the built-in capacity for mimicry has to be examined. Put simply, people believe many things because it is popular--fashionable--to do so. They may also believe things because they are traditional; an inter-generational belief that is self-perpetuating. The subtle pressure from the collective upon individuals has been demonstrated in numerous psychological experiments to be considerable. The pressure to conform to popular belief and culture, despite the contradictions that can arise from the extreme pressure toward acceptance, has been a source from political satire and amusement for centuries. Clearly the pressure can lead to remarkably uniform belief systems with nevertheless glaring inconsistencies.

This is not to denigrate mimicry, tradition, or popular fads; they are a transmission mechanism that can transmit good ideas and bad ideas. The important point is that mimicry plays an important role in how belief systems become less diverse and more uniform.

Point four can be summarized as: "some beliefs combinations perpetuate their own popularity through conformance".

5. The Political Battleground.

In the political sphere, especially in the American two-party system, it is often the case that political parties vie with each other over specific issues, particularly new issues that emerge in the progression of history such as social security in the depression of the 1930s, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the abortion movement in the 1970s, and today, gay rights, government healthcare, Iraq, and the larger global War on Terror. In such situations the parties vie on particular issues in order to win voters to their side and effectively deny the other party intellectual "territory" in the same way a battle between two land armies would be fought fifty or one hundred years ago. In such a military conflight, control of tactical territories, such as the next hill, would occupy the primary short-term objectives and battles in the overall war between two powers.

Considering the political struggle of two parties vying for power in this light, we can see that it might occasionally be the case that parties will take one side of an issue first in order to deny the other party that ground, and therefore increase their political power. The side taken by the party may nevertheless be contradictory or instill internal friction with the other issues under their tent and of course will lead to internal disagreements and new factions within the party; since parties are large and amorphous, some individuals in the party may agree with the party position or absorb elite opinion; others might ignore the issue or reject the position.

In this way, the political battleground is not entirely separable from the point on tradition and mimicry, since all individuals are subject to the forces to conform or copy; however, the political battleground provides an important mechanism to analyze how large groups of people come to beliefs or opinions on a new issue that are contradictory to their previous beliefs--it may be simply politically advantageous to do so.

Point five can be summarized as "some belief combinations are the assets of political parties at war".

6. Perspective on Reality.

Nearly everyone except the most sophisticated intellectuals realizes that objective reality exists. Of course there is always the possibility that it doesn't really exist but that we are just incapable of directly dispelling its existence through our senses (i.e. all our senses deceive us). Nevertheless, all people share interaction with the same objective reality, and therefore come to certain beliefs as a result. Using this measure simply, we would expect that all people would come to the same conclusion and beliefs about the world and its workings, which is clearly not the case. However, people can experience different aspects of the same reality, even the same event, and therefore come to different conclusions. The different "sides of the same coin" can therefore inspire different belief systems, even complex ones. Thus the common experience of people leads them to accept beliefs similar to other people with the same experience, which may differ from other people with a different perspective on the same reality.

Point six can be summarized as: "some belief combinations are the result of perspective on reality".

These six reasons, Religion, Compatibility, Hierarchy, Mimicry, and Battle, and Perspective provide the basis for how large groups of people come to ideological conformance. My personal interest is in the Hierarchy point; I will try to explore this one in more detail some time in the future.

Notes on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged

2005-12-16T17:53:00.000-08:00

I started reading Ayn Rand this year, starting with "Anthem", then "We the Living", and then "The Fountainhead", and finally "Atlas Shrugged". Here are some of my thoughts about the latter two.

These are daring books. The Fountainhead deftly and expertly puts its finger directly on the issue; it focuses the lens of debate so that we can see clearly now the stark line that has been distorted and blurred by so many confusing voices. Rand was not the first to identify the primary source of political friction, but through her fiction she has given us one of the most clear illustrations of the matter: the individual versus the collective.

The Fountainhead, as nearly all of Rand's writing, condemns the collective--that feeling of altruism that some use to impel others to self-sacrifice and instill them with guilt. That guilt is just a tool to power and the satisfaction of a parasitic greed and envy, the real dark psychological force underlying communism which masquerades as selflessness. Both books extol the primacy of the individual; the source of creativity, inspiration. Rand holds that the majesty of a reasoning mind belongs solely to an individual and that there is no such thing as a group mind. She dares to let man out from under the punishment of hatred and condemnation espoused by every religion and societal construction of man since the beginning of time, without the temptation to supply a god.

The Fountainhead primarily concentrates on the creativity of Howard Roark and his anti-pole, the power-seeking second-hander Toohey who lacks (or disavows) his own ability and seeks to gain power through subjugating that which he could never be--namely, the creator. Atlas Shrugged focuses more on the broader effect of the Prime Movers, individuals of tremendous inventive and motive power: Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D'Anconia, Ellis Wyatt, Ken Dannager, and at the pinnacle, the stratospheric John Galt. While Roark experiences ridicule and scorn, even to the point of ruin, but escapes, these giants of Atlas Shrugged are persecuted to the point of destruction, having been impelled to guilt and forced to supply their genius to the world for the benefit of the masses. Ultimately Galt discovers the game and refuses to supply his genius and energy to the world of the looters, pulling the Prime Movers one by one in protest from the looters' grasp, stopping the motor of the world.

The Fountainhead, being written first, is missing the crucial relation of the creator to the rest of the world. The follow-on which overshadows it, Atlas Shrugged, supplies much of the missing material, but there are fundemental assumptions about human nature that I take issue with.

In Atlas Shrugged, the struggle for survival is addressed, though it primarily ignores the violence of human nature until the descent into chaos at the end. These things are not present in the Fountainhead; Rand dismisses them with a flick of the wrist. These are absolutely essential parts of existence in nature, from the smallest and weakest passive plant to the fiercest predator, all along the food chain. The struggle for life--and survival--is the pain and destruction and torture of violence, competition, predation. This an absolutely essential part of humanity's existence and cannot lightly be dismissed as does Rand. The characters in the Fountainhead are not violent; there isn't physical abuse, murder, and destruction, but mostly intellectual and psychological deceit on the part of the collectivists. This ignores an important impulse inherent in human nature. Rand's view of man as heroic and rational I regard not as its natural state, but a state to strive after. She assumes, wrongly, that this pinnacle is the natural state and that the creep of evil, collectivism, is primarily responsible for our inability to reach that height of rationalism and pride. Alas, but human nature is flawed.

The Fountainhead is remarkable but incomplete. Though Atlas Shrugged is needed to complete the story, in the Fountainhead, she does not fully address the question: what can be done against collectivists? Retreat from them, shun them. Be self-sufficient and refuse to let them take what they can. Howard Roark does this in the Fountainhead. But it is not enough when the collectivists are prepared to use force to take from you what they demand. Aggression is not something that can be reasoned with or escaped. It demands growing concessions that cannot be satisfied. It is a force of nature of ever-growing hunger and power; living your own life in a self-sufficient manner (as is done in Atlas Shrugged in the mystical land of Atlantis) is not enough. There is evil beyond that of the passive-aggressiveness of the collective; there is aggression and murder in man's very spirit; it is freely chosen, and it cannot be denied as the Fountainhead does. It must be fought; on the individual level and on a larger scale. Sometimes this struggle becomes a hot war.

We must recognized that it is not possible to shield yourself with an impenetrable barrier; an island, a fortress that can withstand the siege of aggression, nor escape like those in Atlas Shrugged. Every fortress has a weak point or can be overrun and crushed. No shield and no armor can protect against all arrows and swords. A man has a hard skull to protect his soft brain, to protect his fragile logic and reason from the scorching wind, searing heat, and eroding sands of open exposure, but it cannot withstand a direct blow from an aggressor armed with steel. No helmet and no protection is enough. Survival depends not on being armored, or being quick enough to escape and abandon one's possessions and life's work; but by being able to wield weapons in defense, even preemption. To strike an enemy before he can strike you. Kill or be killed. The fundamental struggle of existence. We can see those pacifist forms of life are vegetables, pasture animals--sitting on their hands waiting for slaughter for fear to tarnish their souls with guilt. But those highly developed, those strong, swift, powerful, and even beautiful creatures, be they insect, bird, snake, or mammal, cannot wait to be slaughtered by some greater predator, but fight for survival. Those animals can strike first--kill first--when presented a with a threat. In Rand's philosophical work, she regards it immoral for any man to initiate to the use of force. Is preemption ever moral? For survival we must recognize it may at times be essential, but is it ever moral? Rand must answer in the negative. But how can survival be immoral? Ah, a conundrum is born. But more on that some other time.

We have been taught, and we believe after thousands of years of civilization, that man is placed atop the food chain because man has been given intellect, or alternatively, conscience; because man has evolved a large brain and a large heart--emotions, the ability to communicate and cooperate. But this is only partially so. It also is because we can wield weapons and can plan to avert impending doom, though it not be immediate; we can subvert, deflect, weaken, and destroy the forces of man and nature that would destroy us before they become imminent. From the first wooden club to today's antibiotics; we live on to develop higher because of our willingness to kill first.

This is an inescapable part of our existence as humans. It is not a question of morality, but of reality, and our guilt over our existence--our survival in the face of aggression--is our own making; it is a psychological consequence of our neurological ability to see ourselves in other's places, to imagine suffering how they suffer, and to feel remorse.

All of these forces are mixed in humanity's complex nature. It is not an external force, forbidden knowledge, or a perversion. The nature of life is to kill, consume, and compete without apology in order to survive. It is not solely human nature, it is nature. No creator need put sin in our hearts, nor evil be chosen by Eve, no fall from grace; it is bred into our genes, from the first bacteria. Kill or be killed. No societal norms or conventions or social constructions or imposed morality will ever correct the inherent will to survive that is a part of humanity, arising out of our evolution, and continued existence, as sophisticated predators. This predatory nature insures there will never be a utopia, no matter how far technology develops or our thinking progresses. The utopia that Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged, while theoretically pure and self-consistent, is impossible with the unalterable nature of life.

In Rand's Atlantis there is no government, only individuals trading towards their own self interest, with each trade bringing mutual benefit to the involved parties. This is the purity of capitalism that is unassailable, but it is the ideal that can only be approached asymptotically. Theft and murder are also ways of playing the game, and nevertheless authorities must be constructed in order to deter and punish them.

As Federalist #51 put it,

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to government men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Rand admits that she is a romantic. It is great to be an idealist, but reality is busy existing all around the illusion in our fiery minds. There is far more to be said about humans that "self is good; altruism is bad".

But back to the concrete world of The Fountainhead. There were a couple of things that I found dissatisfying about the plot in The Fountainhead. There is the issue of Roark raping Dominique in the beginning of the second book that is disturbing and inconsistent with Roark's principles; he has subjected another person to his will violently. As Rand holds Roark to be the ideal man, I hope that she did not really believe ideal men should go around raping whoever strikes their fancy. Did Dominique want and enjoy it? She seems to have, but she did not give her consent. We must recognize that even ideal people will not always share a sexual attraction for each other, thus leading to the friction of unrequited love and lust. This is inescapable friction in the conflicting interests of humans. I just don't buy this rape as consistent with Roark as the ideal man, and it really bothers me. Rand attempts to escape this in the Atlas Shrugged, asserting "there are no conflicts of interests between rational men." This is absurd; the world possesses nevertheless limited resources (sexual mates in particular) and the human propensity for envy is inescapable. Are we to believe that a rational man must rise to be a Pygmalion?

Secondly, Roark does not bother to defend himself at the first (Stoddard) trial. He doesn't ask any questions of the witnesses, challenge their statements, or even offer any rational arguments in his own defense. He didn't even offer the terms of the contract or the facts. He didn't even make an effort, but instead was completely indifferent. As high as Rand holds reason, Roark doesn't much honor the truth if he is unwilling to even bother countering his accuser's claims with it. This is nevertheless holding Roark's disposition higher than the objective reality in which he exists; his right to indifference therefore occupies a more exalted place than the actuality of the world in which he lives. This amounts to man worship--but whither reason in the face of any type of worship? Rand claimed she absolutely believes in an objective reality, but Roark is so indifferent to other people that he doesn't even bother defending himself with it. He is more important than reality. And his indifference has costs: his financial liability. Roark therefore allows other people to take from him, but he chooses not to defend himself; not even with the truth. This is a bit of an inconsistency that is perhaps corrected in Atlas Shrugged, as John Galt is true to his principles, choosing never to surrender the secret of the motor to those who take by force.

Rand's skill as a novelist is not phenomenal, though we must recognize that her wooden and frankly flat characters are vehicles to a philosophical discourse. There are numerous events that do not advance the story nearly as much as their length would justify in both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and this nevertheless retards the principal messages in each. On the other hand, this psychological ballast gives enough static inertia to the novel so as it make it hard to dismiss with a flick of the wrist, or as the mad ravings of some fascist. Weighing in at some 600,000 words (nearly twice that of the Fountainhead), Atlas Shrugged is truly a behemoth of literature. This weight of course denies reductionism and summarization; it also opens the door to discussing things in far greater depth than a mere pamphlet or novella, allowing a theme to be explored in many situations and illustrate its spreading influence. The scope is surprising, and after reading this book I have been amazed at how deep and in how many areas her ideas apply to the world we live in now--how naked is the collectivist bent to certain political philosophies that hides only under obscurity.

At some point I will explore the collectivism underlying the Open Source movement, but that is an essay for another time.

The Democrat's Demon

2005-12-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

You will know a man's enemy by whom he spends his energies fighting--whom he denounces and decries, whose hands he binds, who he chooses to disarm, whose name he despises and who drives him to anger, to madness in fevered dreams, whom he fears and shrinks from, whom he whispers about and plots against, whose failings for him are the most sweet, whose weakness and oversight infuses them with energy, and whose visage becomes a mask of evil, inspiring rage, bending all the world to a crown of contempt to be deposed at all costs.

We are at a time in our nation's history of immense polarization, discontent, distrust, disillusionment, and tremendous peril. We are besieged from without by a murderous, barbaric enemy, who has brought a war to our shores, and landed a terrible blow. In the evolution of this conflict, our nation is tearing itself apart. While our military forces fight a war abroad, a political war of unprecedented ill will has consumed us, set family member against family member, brother against brother--and our civil debate has descended into chaos. Alas, a House Divided cannot stand--we cannot both fight amongst ourselves and defeat our enemies--they grow bolder upon our division and salivate at the rising prospect of our loss of will.

It has come time to analyze how this fight has come to be--how has a populace so united after that initial attack upon our soil, both behind our leader and our policies, torn itself apart into such madness?

Some will see a leader whose polarizing decisions have alienated the good faith of the opposition party, and some know that such good faith was freely and consciously abandoned by that opposition party in the desperate search for political power. While our military fights abroad--while our enemies kill our soldiers on the battlefield and threaten to tear Iraq apart, our opposition party has become ever bolder in embracing defeatism, alleging high crimes on the part of the administration, and rapidly delegitimizing not only the moral foundations for our actions, but asassinating the very character of our country's collective willpower.

Our nation is facing an immense task. We are fighting a war that will demand patience, perserverance, and confidence, fought in places far-flung on the globe--primarily in secret against enemies who claim no nationality and who can remain unknown until they finally strike. Our enemies are the most barbaric our country has encountered in its history--without a qualm they slaughter innocents, blowing apart the bodies of women and children whose only crime is being considered an infidel by the attackers. They will not stop at beheading hostages or flying planes into buildings; their crimes are limited only by their access to weapons and the opportunities to deploy them. They have no restraint; killing muslim and non-muslim, and their suicide missions are undeterrable. Through ideology they have chosen to destroy America, Israel, and all of the West that dare exist on terms contrary to theirs; they would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against civilians--they know no restraint.

We have a massive task of fighting a global war based on intelligence that cannot ever be certain in inhospitable places abandoned by allies festering in ennui--our nation is dogged by a radical and wild opposition party that is overwhelmingly sympathized with in the press--we fight on a shoe-string budget and with troop levels at one tenth of those in World War II against an enemy infused with holy righteousness that does not hesitate to use any brutality, any atrocity or restraint and lives not for victory but for destruction. We've fought wars where whole continents were at stake and lost three times as many troops as are live and well in Iraq today, in the trenches of France, on the beaches of Normandy, and on the shores of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In such total wars there were for sure blunders that cost thousands of lives and victory was by no means assured. And in those times of life or death our press and our people back home knew the stakes, and knew that their only hope was to grit their teeth and fight harder. Those who stepped back to throw fire bombs were roundly and justly shunned.

And now we come to how we shall know that the Democratic party has jettisoned good faith and American interests; while our soldiers die at the hands of the enemies; we hear nothing but attacks on the administration. They do nothing but throw stones at generals and presidents. In bad faith they attempt to smear the president with the blood of our soldiers; they oppose at all directions and in every way each step of the administration; they will spare no lie nor slander no distortion nor misrepresentation nor selection bias to offrail the war and its leaders. And they choose not to forgive those small things they know to be wrong, as supporters too, know are wrong. But instead they are throwing the rocks at the White House, at the pentagon, and the military. It is because they choose to fight so visciously the president and the military and the administration, and NOT our enemies, that we know who their real enemies are, and what their real motives are. It is time that we come to admitting this to ourselves--it is not their criticisms, but their bad faith--it is not their fighting, but their deafening silence on fighting our true enemies, on finding our soldier's killers--it is that they choose so soon to submit us to defeat and humiliation, when the war is not yet won--it is that they argue from perpetual weakness to perpetual weakness, to our basest neurological responses to pain--they confuse and demoralize--they nitpick tactics and use our virtue and restraint against our own inclination to morality, restraint, and mercy.

They are not patriots. They are a self-serving, self-righteous, maniacal, confused, stand-ins for traitors that cannot even see how dangerous these times are, and just how petty and moronic are their gripes against the balance of a brutal enemy that will stop at nothing--at nothing, to destroy, kill, and maim American soldiers and innocents alike. In hard times demanding intenstinal fortitude, courage, steadfastness--our president, our soldiers, and our moral standings are under viscious siege by Democrats and war opponents across the board. They demand accountability from an administration, they seethe and rave in mad rants in the halls of Congress--but are they not elected officials that we should also hold to account?

We must ask of them: where is your rage against America's enemies? The killers, the suicide bombers, the murdering barbarians who slaughter women, children, innocents, and our soldiers? Those who, trying to disrupt the advance of democracy in the January elections, strapped a suicide vest on a mentally challenged child and detonated him remotely with the sole intention of killing more innocents? While you blame George Bush for the death of 2,000 troops, their killers are at large, vanishing into the fog of war. And you turn a blind eye to them, and call for us to withdraw, to leave those murderers behind, never to face justice? What justice is there if virtue shrinks in the face of evil, where our military leaders and our commander in chief are hated more than those irredeemable souls that murder our troops and blow apart children in the streets of Baghdad?

From your outrage at Bush and your silence over the true guilty ones, you have betrayed yourselves not as patriots, not as pursuers of true justice, but as viscious and irresponsible, and, by implication, enemies of justice. You would abandon a battlefield to the enemy to chastise a leader and make yourselves appear more powerful in comparison. You have denigrated America's most brave men and women, who have chosen to wear the uniform and fight for this country, who perform with unequalled dedication to achieve the advance of freedom and eradicate its enemies--at best considering them misguided and duped children, and at worst, equating them to stormtroopers, to Nazis.
Our American virtue, our restraint, detaining and pampering the scum of the Earth who were picked up on a battlefield fighting to kill our soldiers rather than slaughtering them by the thousands, is ridiculed--you call our ultra-modern prison facilities complete with culturally sensitive cuisine GULAGS, equating them to torture camps where Soviets imprisoned millions for daring to speak out, or daring to defy real totalitarians. You cede our moral sanction, our moral imperative, to those who commit mass murder--without perspective and without apology. You subject our leaders and our nation to ridicule for your gain, and tie our leaders' hands, deny them the support of their own people, for what?

You have broken every moral code with your words, overstepped every line of rhetoric, and desecrated every symbol of nobility that the United States has ever earned in your reckless pursuit to destroy our commander in chief. In the short span of 30 months, you have reversed your very positions and stand now in total opposition to your former selves. And you expect us to believe that you were duped? You expect us to believe that you were misled? You expect us to believe the sheer unanimity of the world's intelligence communities was a Bush lie? How can you be so irresponsible to force us to believe that you're either too gullible to resist one man's fabricated reality, that you're chronically hypocritical, or worse, that you voted for a war, in full knowledge that ultimate repercussions could grant you a windfall destruction of your political adversaries, and humiliate our entire nation? Do you expect us to forget what Clinton, Kerry, and Cohen said in 1998, during Operation Desert Fox, and what prominent democrats said in 2002, following on the uncertainty of 9/11--when you actively chose of your own volition to seek out the media and offer your unqualified support of removing Saddam Hussein through military action?

Do you expect us to believe that Iraq now has nothing to do with terrorism, and that it is not related to the global war on terrorism, when IEDs, car bombs, and suicide murderers slaughter innocents and diplomats? Do you expect us to forget Saddam's support of terrorism against Israel, or that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was masterminded and perpetrated by Iraqis? Do you expect us to believe that Iraq's admission of possession of chemical and biological weapons in 1991 never happened, or that Saddam never used them against Iran, and to forget that Chemical Ali killed 5,000 Kurds? Do you expect us to forget his numerous evasions of UN weapons inspectors, repeatedly expelling them from his country? Do you expect us to forget 17 UN resolutions, including number 1441 holding Iraq in material breach of its obligations to reveal and destroy WMDs? Do you expect us to forget the Scud missiles fired at our troops during the opening days of Operation Iraqi freedom--missiles he was not permitted to possess by UN treaty? Do you expect us to forget that Saddam Hussein initiated wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, brutally repressed his own people, and ended hundreds of thousands of lives, torturing unknown thousands, and attempted to asassinate a U.S. President? Do you expect us not to connect the debacle that was the Oil for Food program with its corrupting influence on key members of the United Nations who conveniently attempted to block the U.S. invasion? Do you expect us not to understand that though no large stockpiles of weapons were found, nevertheless facilities and raw materials were maintained and even the Duelfer report expected Saddam would restart them after sanctions were lifted?

Do you refuse to understand the concept of preemptive war, and how the dynamics of risk calculations forever changed after the stark reality of 9/11 and the subsequent, rational concern over the widespread delusion of militant Islam? Do you expect us to believe that terrorists kill because they can't get jobs when they cry "Allahu Ackbar" before exploding themselves? Do you expect us to believe that poverity creates terrorism when the 9/11 hijackers were almost all from middle or upper class families and were highly educated in western institutions, or the London bombers were third generation immigrants who knew not poverty?

How dumb do you think we are?

Your elitism stinks of faux outrage--at the Bush administration, and not at Iraqi terrorists--at Guantanamo Bay, and not at Kim Jong Il's million-prisoner gulags--at the debunked lies of abused Korans, but not government-funded "art" that defiles Christ--about not being allowed to show soldier's coffins, but not at video-taped beheadings emanating from the enemy--at tribunals for military combatants caught trying to kill our soldiers, and not at stonings for adulterers in Iran, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Jordan--at oil companies, and not the Saudis' mammoth Aramco.

You have long screamed for the administration to be held accountable for its mistakes in the war. Yet the more shrill your tone, the more vacuous your accusations, the harsher their criticism becomes, the more imperative that it is that YOU are held accountable for your words and deeds. Are you prepared to face the repercussions of your actions?

Where are your suggestions for how to improve our handling of Iraq? Nowhere. Your offer us only one choice, to get out--as fast as possible. You ask us to tuck our tail between our legs and retreat as if from a bee sting and abandon our support of Iraq, and abandon the pursuit of justice, to find and stop those who have killed and are still killing our troops. You ask us to accept retreat under the name "withdrawal", and your strategy relies on amplifying the damage we have suffered in this war until it is large enough to convince popular opinion to support you and bring you electoral victory. How has the world allowed you, who stand to gain so much by our soldiers' deaths and a defeat in this war, sow the seeds of distrust against our leaders, who are busy fighting the enemy? The debate has raged about the justification for war, about the motivations of the administration and the military--why none about you who would choose to submit us to defeat and humiliation? And as it has become ever safer to allege the president has lied--a high crime--the more you appear to rise in comparison. And when someone asks that you who fight the president should rather fight our enemies is roundly shouted down as "questioning your patriotism". How is it that your criticism is beyond reproach, and from your low place you can spend all your energies fighting the president with impunity? Have you ever thought that even if you believe yourselves patriots, maybe you are fighting all the wrong people?

You, the Democratic party, have flung yourselves headlong at destroying this administration, delegitimizing the war, demonizing the military, and even, in the halls of the Senate, airing the wildest charges of all, equating the American military to totalitarian regimes who have slaughtered millions and practiced every form of brutality. You have refused to suppress and censure voices that elevate insurgents who murder innocents, who attack school children openly with suicide bombs and video tape beheadings. You've crossed every line of rhetoric, distorted every statistic, trumpeted every negative, and bent recent history into a pretzel pursuing the destruction of the president and the rise of your own power.

Our debate has lost all the dimensions of a meaningful discourse on how to move the world forward. Where are the demands in the media, in Congress, among the people for those who have made the most serious charges, who have skated on the lines of rhetoric and brought nothing but demoralization and destruction to answer for their irresponsibility? Where is the demand for accountability of those who have changed the nature of our debate? The debate we have now is not about bearing costs, overcoming losses, defeating the enemy, advancing democracy, achieving victory, or even changing tactics--but only of the pain and alleged deception--and how to end that pain as soon as possible and punish those who "deceived" us. We hear only arguments from a position of perpetual weakness, an argument to our basest neurological reaction to pain--a instanteous response that hinders our duty to finish our task. Pain is all that a baby understands; as adults we learn that we can endure pain, that we must force ourselves to work through it, if the task demands it and the end requires it. And this end does require it, this task does demand it--our dedication to altering the destitute situation of the Middle East and bringing freedom to oppressed peoples is the only real chance to end the pathology that leads to terrorism.

You say you support the troops, but you devote all your energies to the wild-eyed pursuit of both trivial and non-existent errors that the administration and the military may have committed either knowingly or unknowingly from 9/11 until now, knowing full well that such pursuits inestimably reduce our standing abroad and embolden our enemies. You've levelled every possible attack against the administration and military--that Bush knew about 9/11, that Bush escorted Saudis out, he lied in the twelve words, intentionally allowed looting of the Baghdad museum and missing TNT stockpiles, intentionally sent troops into Iraq with inadequate body armor, you bemoaned his celebration of that Carrier's mission accomplished, you believe that he authorized Abu Ghraib and the (now debunked) case of flushed Korans, that he wants all the oil for his buddies, our soldiers targetted Guiliana Sgrena and other journalists, that Bush lied and linked Saddam to 9/11 or that Saddam had no ties to terrorism, that no WMD or related materials were found, Saddam had no scud missiles, that our soldiers burned Talibanis out of sheer contempt, we alienated our allies, and many others. Most had little substance and ultimately vanished, leaving nothing but a distrust befouling your judgment, and many had a grain of truth wrapped in a tremendous amount of contempt. But in this it is not the truth or falsehood of your charges that demands scrutiny (though many were largely false), it is the psychological distrust that you project into every dark alley searching desperately for weapons against the president and the administration--they betray contempt.

How can you advocate a zero, a vacuum? That is all that your party has contributed to the debate? Has there been a single serious analysis of what will happen if we accept the only--the ONLY--plan for Iraq advanced as an alternative to winning? Nothing. Blank-out. Empty space. How will the Iraqi people perceive our irresponsible betrayal? Blank-out. How can the premiere military in the world be defeated by a low-scale insurgency? Blank-out. Does demoralizing first the Democratic party and then the American people cause them to abandon even winnable wars? Blank-out. Has terrorism actually worked on Democrats? Blank-out. How is it possible that Bush is more responsible for the soldiers' deaths than those blowing themselves up on the ground? Blank-out. Has anything good happened in Iraq in three years? Blank-out. The freest elections ever in the middle east amount to what? Blank-out. Two hundred thousand Iraqi security forces trained? Blank-out. Should we leave the killers of our soldiers behind and never seek justice? Blank-out.

Blank-blank-blank-blank. And the more the President does, the more they can only try to black it out preemptively. Thus-- 45 page strategy for victory? Don't look there. Iraq economy rebounding soundly? Don't look there. Iraqi security forces taking over and leading the fight? Don't look there. Pull out now. Restating the facts about the world's opinion of Iraq's WMD? Bush is lying again.

How can people be swayed by such vitriolic tripe? These aren't rational arguments or apparent realities, but opposition-inspired bludgeons to bruise the president. But now he is fighting back--and Americans must awake and hold the Democrats responsible for what they have said.

Perhaps, one day, the American people will wake up and realize that if the Democratic party weren't spendin 95% of its energy fighting Bush, that the United States might actually make some progress in the War on Terror.

How I Came to Be an Atheist

2005-12-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

My religious background is rocky, though probably not uncommon for someone born and raised in the midwest. My father's family were Catholics, my mother's also, though their roots were in neighboring states. I am convinced now in retrospect that my father must have been an atheist of some sort, having excised religion from himself somewhere around college age. My mother broke with the Catholic church sometime around 1990 and became a born-again Christian--pentacost and all.

I was educated in a Catholic grade school and indoctrinated--more than just indoctrinated, positively brainwashed--in an Assemblies of God church. I remember thinking that not only did I actually believe it, but it was as real as the birdshit on your car. I believed the Holy Spirit was real, that people really did speak in tongues, and that the evil Scientists and liberals were the unknowing agents of Satan and were out to destroy God. It's rather embarassing in hindsight, but come on--I was thirteen.

A formative moment in my life, a love unrequited, was forged in part from assurances from God that he was speaking directly to me and willed it for my life. What I chose, I felt he had not only sanctioned but positively goaded me into. It played out horribly and brought me to such anger at God that it fomented a tremendous internal struggle that culminated in swearing vengeance on God. Ahab, thy heart hath in mine a brother.

Distant and isolated from family during college, I devoted myself to the pursuit of technology and science. It instigated a profound maturation that forced me to confront my anger. At some point I was able to admit to myself that I could neither blame God for my actions or for the pain that I felt--that, empirically, the only person I could truly prove had acted was myself, and rejecting the tantalizing belief that reality is simply a figment of my all-powerful imagination and that I could shape it as I like, I came to the humble acceptance that I could no longer claim victimhood in the matter, and that I must be able to accept my mistakes and the actions of others in that time, as real and unchangeable facts of history, and that the only reflectance that I should pay should be to learn.

In essence what I came to regard as the only acceptable explanation of the world is the pure statement of atheism--I exist, the universe exists, and the path that reality takes is governed by natural, unchangeable laws, influenced, but not controlled, by actors such as myself of finite will that exist in this universe. It is a tantalizingly simple statement that my upbringing, and I believe, the psychological needs of my human brain, required significant intellectual development to entertain. I found tremendous pressure, internal and external, not to believe it. It was a dark, cold, masochistic thing to consider--and I feared in my heart, irrationally, and automatically, that God frowned on me. As this pressure weighed on me, I felt a sinking, deepening dread, as if the stars would lose their brilliant twinkle and wink out one by one, leaving the night to darkness, and that orange glow of street lamps would drench the world in a monochrome blandness, and the wonder would melt away from life.

I felt such uncertainty to my core that I wondered whether God would damn my very soul for inviting that dangerous answer into consideration and entertaining it as seriously as I knew must inevitably follow. And fear--fear of the unknown, as primitive man huddled in the dark hearing the gutteral roars of voracious predators in the vast blackness, grown to monster proportions in the imagination of his expanding, but barbaric brain. I knew that same fear that gripped primal minds before there was fire. I was in the wilderness, I was without comfort, without light, and the world was mysterious, unknowable, and destructive.

From that journey I now know that I traversed a black abyss, a deep canyon separating the safe shores of faith in God, the creator, the originator, and the ultimate will, from the rocky and dangerous path of the universe as it exists, undistorted and untempered by love, impersonally stoic, and infinite in its crude justice. I knew that path would take courage, that it would offer me no solace to my soul, and would not reveal in me a religious or spirtual truth that was transcendent. It was an adolescent mind--I concluded--that demanded the universe make sense, that demanded simple but profound insight into the very mysterious nature of it all. It was some brand of narcissistic hubris to believe such things, to have that faith. For as I was coming to see that God is not the creator of man, but God the creation of man--I recognized the origin of God as the core forces of all that primitive man could not grasp about the natural world--wind, water, fire, life and death. Layered and barnacled with all the crusty plaque of millenia of philosophical discourse, our discourse and our conception of god has evolved as our society evolved. Billed as constantly unchanging, all-knowing and all powerful, His evolution throughout history bears the marks of constant redefinition, expansion, and continuing abstraction, exposing Him rather as man's fleeting fancy than the unchangeable and universal. Scholars no longer muse about miracles, nor do we much accept that they take place in our times, as they have eroded like all mysticism from human consciousness, as rightly they should. And the creator who was once the bastion of all that humanity could not understand, has been desperately fleeing from the development of science and the maturation of human consciousness. As theologians have retreated to more abstract ponderings on God's nature, their discourse on free will and God's justness is more and more divorced from the mythological history of the events of the Bible--God, once a bearded Santa Claus in the sky and the personal god of the Israelites, the bringer of rains, the mover of planets and the stars, has abdicated each of these roles as mankind has accepted more and more responsibility for knowing.

Responsibility--that's important to consider when musing about God, and the more I pondered my own role in this universe I could not claim myself an adult yet still defer responsibility for my own actions, and for my own ignorance upon some other person or entity. What else is faith but evasion of responsibility? How can a mature and self-aware consciousness intentionally cripple itself by immediately abdicating responsibility for its own knowledge, growth, and survival? Yet nevertheless that is in essence what faith is.

The contradictions of theology then come to the forefront. We are created with intelligence, but must cripple ourselves intentionally. We are created with a consciousness that under every circumstance appears to be free will, yet we must deny free will. We are created with original sin, yet we can neither achieve redemption through our own actions or our faith--but through God's grace alone. The will is bonded, and God becomes absolute--determinism rules all. But we are to conclude, through our own reasoning minds given us by God, that God's grace has been given unjustly, and that His choice to create billions of human souls which are doomed to suffering is sickly sadistic. The worst deceit of theology is therefore doublethink; we must cripple our minds to accept without judgment a jumble of contradictory things--we must hobble our intellect, restrict our reasoning powers, and dare not look critically at the message or the contradiction that is God's existence. In order to worship the creator, or to know the creator, we must destroy His gifts of intelligence--we must accept as morality original sin that is inescapable, and must destroy our very nature, insulting its creator, in order to praise Him? Worse, we are expected to transform our objections to such contradictions into an admission of idiocy, proof that we cannot know God. The vast well is thus swimming with God's poison. Alas, God is a charlatan.

This doublethink is totally absurd. It smacks of the strange pretzel of contradictory logic--and those theological masters, who humbly prostrate themselves before God, or immodestly slap you with their superior God-knowledge have bent themselves into odd contortions and convinced themselves that its comfortable. It shows how strange and demented the human mind is, how susceptible it is to accepting odd and quite twisted nonsense when it divorces itself from reality.

Nevertheless, the Christian theology, though its exorcism from my own mind being of primary importance, I began to see just how ideologically restrictive and psychologically twisted other belief systems are, too. There are both spiritual and non-spiritual religions, and it strikes me how similar the modern left's progressive belief system is utterly mystical; it substitutes a different model of justice, projects upon the world a code of ethics that emanates from that model, and tries to force reality into the mold. Reality is a stubborn thing, and 100 million corpses in the twentieth century has been a high price to pay to discredit such an ideology.

Yet it lives, and a post on that topic will have to wait.

Are You Obsessed with Computers or Something?

2005-11-13T18:32:00.000-08:00

I have been working towards a PhD in Computer Science for the last several years, focusing mostly on programming languages and compilers although there have been distractions. These two areas of complementary technology influence each other in very deep ways and are the underpinnings of much of the field; languages influence how we think about problems, how we write solutions to problems, and how we architect and engineer software tools and systems. Compilers allow our abstractions to outpace hardware architectures; providing an environment for reasoning. And for 30 years they have been quite solidly the primary means of extracting the requisite computational efficiency necessary to make tasks complete soon enough and make systems reactive enough to serve their respective purposes. These two, Compilers and Programming Languages, can often resemble a microcosm of Computer Science, itself a microcosm of human knowledge, communication, and reasoning.

My exploration of Computer Science, from the breadth reached in an undergraduate education, though never as broad as I would have hoped, to the depth that I have chosen to develop from focusing on these fields, have given me an unique perspective on life. Strangely enough, as impersonal and rigid computers and their underpinnings of discrete mathematics, abstract algebra, and logic are, the field has enormous need for imaginative and creative minds to drive it. It is the ultimate expression of man's reasoning mind; a machine. It is neither emotional nor wayward, it is the perfect pupil, and the complete embodiment of an architect's pure genius. It admits no ambiguity, and where ambiguity has cropped up--in computer architecture, languages, communication protocols, electrical specifications--chaos and wasted effort is the inevitable result. No technology ever created has enjoyed the meteoric rise, the vast penetration, and astonishing rate of advancement that computers have. In many ways it is because a computer is more than a overblown calculator (a term once reserved for humans who carried out arithmetic operations on paper with pencils), and it is more than a blank monolith of nebulous existence that is mysterious or unknowable. It is imminently knowable; it is the ultimate tool, and it is man's finest creation to date.

We must never surrender the creation of the computer and all of the marvel it has unlocked to those whose believe that man is irrational and that progress is an accident. It more than anything yet created is a reification of reason, an instillation of creative genius, and a functioning, real, and entirely logical entity that proves its own existence. It defies anti-reason; it dispels it. It debunks the loose irrationalism of relativism, postmodernism, deconstruction. It was neither discovered nor happened upon nor mined from the earth. It is a creation, an establishment of principles that exists as true in this universe.

But let's not make it too holy. It is, after all, just a tool. And "computer" is a bit of a loose, abstract term, in the sense I was writing. I was not, of course, talking about your Macintosh on your desk; but an abstract conception: computation. A mathemtical construction, finally completed after some false starts and incomplete prototypes (and here I am talking about both mechanical adding machines and formal logic systems) in the 1930s by three primary figures of importance: Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and Kurt Goedel. The Universal Turing Machine was a mathematical construction; an imaginary machine that was endowed with an infinite spool of paper tape sectioned into squares on which could be printed a limited set of symbols. Some of those symbols described a program that could operate the machine in any way possible. An automatic typewriter, if you will, that can read its own writing. But Turing proved it could perform any computation by any computer that could ever be built. And the first complete abstraction was born. An almost before the umbilical was cut, it was almost sentenced to death by a blow from Goedel with his Incompleteness Theorem; he showed that that universal computer wasn't so universal after all; it could never answer the most trivial questions about itself or others like it.

Turing was very interested in the human mind, and intelligence. His original dream was to make a machine simulate the human mind. He proposed a test that bears his name, claiming that any machine that could pass it should be legitimately considered intelligent. By all accounts he was optimistic that his dream would come true quite soon. That dream still remains elusive. Turing died young in tragic circumstances that serve as an immortal reminder to computer scientists about the destruction bigotry can wreak on the human mind. He was a homosexual; despite his unparalleled service to British intelligence during WWII, he was caught in a sting operation intended to trap homosexuals engaging in consensual sex. His sentence entailed being forced to take drugs that were intended to correct his "defect"; the drugs shrunk his genitals and threw him into fit of depression that drained him of all energy to work; it ended when he took his own life in 1954. Even to the end he was helping to build England's first physical, completely programmable computer. He was only 42 years old.

Yet since that time computers have progressed from behemoths which occupied the better part of a basketball court with the power of only a few thousand adds per second to microprocessors measuring less than a square centimeter that each can perform billions of adds per second. The first computers cost millions of dollars and were customly constructed by dozens of dedicated engineers over the period of months or years. Today, the computational power of the entire Earth in 1965 can be purchased anywhere for a mere $50. Computers today are a million times more powerful and a million times cheaper than the first models. That is a performance/price increase of one trillion to one.
And there're billions of them. They're in everything; dozens in your car, your cellphone, your TV, your microwave, your refrigerator, both in production and in consumer items. And every single place a computer occupies space it makes that good more efficient, more capable, safer, and often cheaper to produce.

This revolution, more than any other in the history of the planet, has established capitalism and free markets as the premiere socio-economic system. This revolution could not have happened with near the speed or impact if it were not for private enterprise doing the lion's share of development and advancement. Nearly every advancement in integrated circuits has happened in industry, and the bulk of today's software was written for profit. The pioneers profited handsomely for their efforts, and they did it in the most economically sustainable way possible, by offering cheaper products, more powerful hardware, more space, and better integration. And they didn't oppress a single soul--it's quite the opposite. Computers and products made possible by computers have offered an unparalleled bargain to producers and consumers alike; they made possible things that were thought impossible; they streamlined processes that increased profits of producers, paying for the next generation of advances, while still bringing down consumer prices. And they have brought advances in everything from medicine to gaming to boot.

The mental pathology of socialist thinkers who argue that optimal economic output comes from cooperation and public ownership has been discredited--no, worse--soundly and utterly trounced beyond recognition by the dynamism of free markets. All the classical critisms from socialist circles are almost entirely toothless when directed at the computer industry. Oppression of laborers? Jobs in technology, from manufacturing, architecting, and engineering, pay handsomely. Greedy industrialists pursuing power above people's lives? Tens of thousands of people have become multi-millionares, and dozens have become billionaires. And the billionaires' philanthropy is unmatched in history; providing grants, research money, whole university buildings, helping those starving in Africa. Environmental destruction? Computers produce no emissions; and hardware production plants are engineered to the strictest, self-imposed regulations ever, on top of an already low-emission business. Of all the electricity consumed by all computers everywhere, a large portion of the emissions produced in generating that electricity are offset by more fuel efficient cars made possible only by electronic fuel injection that is entirely computer controlled. Power savings in other areas due to automation is considerable, which is economically preferrable for producers because energy is an often unacknowledged, but certainly non-trivial component cost of production. Acceleration and automation of everything from commercial freight to jet liners removes still further costs of waste from the economy.

And the automation that computers are now making possible has not brought about any of the disaster unemployment scenarios that socialists and luddites have used against every advanced in industrialization for three centuries. America, even in the midst of the 2003 recession, never experienced unemployment much higher than 6%--contrast to Europe for example.

And the computer industry, like many break-out industries of the past, is a jewel of American innovation, directed by the best brains from around the world who care for nothing but making the best technology possible, powered by the ambition and drive of the American spirit. This alone should discredit leftists notions that the sun is somehow setting on America; in technology, we are still setting the pace and pushing the world forward.

The world will never be the same.

Welcome

2005-11-13T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've lurked on blogs and newsgroups across the internet for many years. It started as an addiction to hardwarecentral.com, a techno-geek fixation with the vast increases in computational resources available to consumers. In those days (around 1998), people were anticipating Voodoo3 video cards and the Athlon microprocessor. I progressed from hardwarecentral to OSNews to Slashdot, all technical news sites run by young techno-fans with real jobs. Around 2002 I became increasingly frustrated with slashdot as it descended into the worst of group-think; its popularity pushed out informed opinion by professional engineers and it was inundated with brainless, barking, fifteen-year-old goons whose imaginations, fueled by pop sci-fi from Star Wars to Aliens, toppled all careful reasoning, logical deduction, and balance of real-world engineering constraints. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Slashdot deserves its own post. It needs and gets no link from me.

In 2002 I was reading The Agitator, a big-L libertarian whose roots in Indiana I readily identified with. But the big-L'ness of the big-L Libertarians turned me off. It took some months for me to realize just how insane a person can get when the take a simple idea and stretch it over the universe; markets in everything, the government is evil, all politicians must forever and again be beaten over the head for every semblance of impropriety they've ever simulated. I learned an important lesson from one of my best friends during a casual conversation around that time:

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

It's a jingoist phrase that embodies a strangely common theme among intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and engineers.
This quote has been attributed to Neal Knox, but I've never heard of him or read any of his writing (light research reveals he is a pro-gun activist, but let's not get mixed up in that for the time being).

What I saw on The Agitator was Radley Balko beating up on conservatives (especially members of the Republican Party in Congress) viscerally, with an utter contempt that shocked me. Now I realize that all politicians are duplicitous to some extent, and there are certainly many Republicans who could qualify as hypocritical in certain aspects, but hey, aren't they supposed to be conservatives? Why yes, and in many important ways have delivered on that promise, if not recently, but surely between 1994 and 1998 (tax cuts, welfare reform, free trade, spending cuts). Along with that, there have been decidedly non-conservative abuses of power and extensions of the state, but instead of supporting the big picture of advancing conservatism, hypercritical libertarians were hyperventilating because the world was not becoming perfect as it should be, according to their worldview. Nevermind that the "good" has been, and still is, being advanced. People are more distrustful of big government than ever, "liberal" is almost a dirty word now, welfare reform is real, tax rates are low, deregulation is happening in many important industries, government subsidies and protectionist trade practices are finally being negotiated down, China is emerging as a global player intent on achieving status through fair trade rather than hegemony at the UN or other means, strategic economic, cultural, and educational partnerships with India are never stronger, there is real talk of school vouchers, young workers are extraordinarily distrustful of Social Security, free markets in technology have created vast wealth that even the wildest leftist rhetoric cannot camouflage; but hey, there are bad things too; imperfections, and then we arrive at the point of the quote: Perfect is the enemy of good.

I have to thank Balko for being so "dedicated" as to dazzle me with enough immature whining, ideological hubris, and mean-spirited character assasination to the point where I was quite weary of the big-L Libertarians. He wasn't so much partisan as anti-partisan, hating his own side more than the other. Irrational, stupid, and vastly counter-productive! His conduct in regard to 9/11 (i.e. classic isolationism like a good pre-WWI paleocon) sealed the deal, and I meandered on.

I found littlegreenfootballs around mid-2003 and I'm still around. I have branched out to a few things from there, including Victor Davis Hanson, the National Review Online, and (very recently) One Cosmos.

So that's basically how I got here, if you're wondering. It's a cycle of branching out, being satisfied for a time, seeing hypocrisy, anger, and hatred, and going away in disgust, only to return to the start of the cycle after a few months of boredom.

I hope I'll have some time to keep this up, perhaps it will relieve some of the psychological stress I feel in this wild and crazy world of viscious, barking lunatics.

[Edit: Wow, Radley has thin skin. My fledging voice appears and it must be eviscerated.
Corrections: The Agitator began in April 2002; my phrase "conduct after 9/11" was intended as "conduct in relation to 9/11 (and especially Afghanistan and Iraq)"; perhaps instead of "bigness of the big-L libertarians" I should have written "smallness of the small-L libertarians". And the knee jerk reaction in comments seems to come from people who can grasp nothing but false antipoles--I'm no Republican publicist or partisan hack, I can assure you that.
Radley tries to reverse the quote and bungles it; is he actually suggesting that libertarianism is the "worse" that is the enemy of the good (since that was my intention by relating it to the "perfect" in the original quote)?]