Part 26 (2/2)
See also CAPITALISM; INFLATION.
Military Conscription. See Draft.
Mill, John Stuart. Religious influences are not the only villain behind the censors.h.i.+p legislation; there is another one: the social school of morality, exemplified by John Stuart Mill. Mill rejected the concept of individual rights and replaced it with the notion that the ”public good” is the sole justification of individual freedom. (Society, he argued, has the power to enslave or destroy its exceptional men, but it should permit them to be free, because it benefits from their efforts.) Among the many defaults of the conservatives in the past hundred years, the most shameful one, perhaps, is the fact that they accepted John Stuart Mill as a defender of capitalism.
[”Thought Control,” ARL, III, 2, 2.]
The terrible aspect of Mill's influence is the fact that his followers become unable to consider great values-such as truth, science, morality, art-apart from and without the permission of ”the people's desires.”
[Ibid., 3.]
[Mill's] On Liberty is the most pernicious piece of collectivism ever adopted by suicidal defenders of liberty.
[”An Unt.i.tled Letter,” PWNI, 138; pb 114.]
A weary agnostic on most of the fundamental issues of philosophy, Mill bases his defense of capitalism on the ethics of Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor's pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man's duty is to serve-according to a purely quant.i.tative standard of value.
He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic cla.s.s, but ”the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one's own happiness, says Mill, the individual must be ”disinterested” and ”strictly impartial”; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions. ”All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life,” says Mill, ”when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world....”
Capitalism, Mill acknowledges, is not based on any desire for abnegation or renunciation; it is based on the desire for selfish profit. Nevertheless, he says, the capitalist system ensures that, most of the time, the actual result of individual profit-seeking is the happiness of society as a whole. Hence the individual should be left free of government regulation. He should be left free not as an absolute (there are no absolutes, says Mill), but under the present circ.u.mstances-not on the ground of inalienable rights (there are no such rights, Mill holds), but of social utility.
Under capitalism, concluded one American economist of the period with evident moral relief, ”the Lord maketh the selfishness of man to work for the material welfare of his kind.” As one commentator observes, the essence of this argument is the claim that capitalism is justified by its ability to convert ”man's baseness” to ”n.o.ble ends.” ”Baseness” here means egoism; ”n.o.bility” means altruism. And the justification of individual freedom in terms of its contribution to the welfare of society means collectivism.
Mill (along with Smith, Say, and the rest of the cla.s.sical economists) was trying to defend an individualist system by accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents. It did not take Mill long to grasp this contradiction in some terms and amend his political views accordingly. He ended his life as a self-proclaimed ”qualified socialist.”
[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 122; pb 119.]
See also AGNOSTICISM; ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; ”CONSERVATIVES”; FREE SPEECH; HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PLEASURE and PAIN; ”PUBLIC INTEREST,” the; UTILITARIANISM; VALUES.
Mind-Body Dichotomy. See Soul-Body Dichotomy.
Minority Rights. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 61.]
The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the ”liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.
Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.
[Ibid., 44.]
See also BUSINESSMEN; DEMOCRACY; ”ETHNICITY”; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; RACISM.
Miracles. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.
[GS, FNI, 188; pb 151.]
See also CAUSALITY; G.o.d; MYSTICISM; RELIGION; SUPERNATURALISM.
Mixed Economy. We are not a capitalist system any longer: we are a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls. A mixed economy is a country in the process of disintegration, a civil war of pressure-groups looting and devouring one another.
[”The Obliteration of Capitalism,” CUI, 185.]
A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls-with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictators.h.i.+p. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws-no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy-which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged-is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Such a system-or, more precisely, anti-system-breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands. While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country.
A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, inst.i.tutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government-i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all-is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm-material, spiritual, inteuectuat-so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure. If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone's actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.
The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.
[”The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 206.]
There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept ”just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to subst.i.tute for it the principle of the government's unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.
[”Doesn't Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 86; pb 68.]
You have seen, within the span of the last few years, that controls breed more controls, and that the proliferation of controls breeds the proliferation of pressure groups. Today, you see political manipulators setting up new conflicts, such as ethnic minorities against the majority, the young against the old, the old against the middle, women against men, even welfare-recipients against the self-supporting. Openly and cynically, these new groups clamor for ”a bigger slice of the pie” (which you have to bake).
[”The Princ.i.p.als and the Principles,” ARL, II, 21, 3.]
In a controlled (or mixed) economy, a legislator's job consists in sacrificing some men to others. No matter what choice he makes, no choice of this kind can be morally justified (and never has been). Proceeding from an immoral base, no decision of his can be honest or dishonest, just or unjust-these concepts are inapplicable. He becomes, therefore, an easy target for the promptings of any pressure group, any lobbyist, any influence-peddler, any maniputator-he has no standards by which to judge or to resist them. You do not know what hidden powers drive him or what he is doing. Neither does he.
[Ibid., 4.]
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
[”The Pull Peddlers,” CUI, 170.]
A mixed economy has to reach the day when it faces a final crossroad: either the private sector regains its freedom and starts rebuilding-or it gives up and lets the absolute state take over the shambles.
[”A Preview,” ARL, 1, 23, 4.]
See also CAPITALISM; COMPROMISE; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); LOBBYING; PHYSICAL FORCE; STATISM.
Modern Art. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 75.]
Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art-the disintegration of man's conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant.
To reduce man's consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to ”moods,” of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.
But there is a philosophically and psychopathologically instructive element in the spectacle of that gutter. It demonstrates-by the negative means of an absence-the relations.h.i.+ps of art to philosophy, of reason to man's survival, of hatred for reason to hatred for existence. After centuries of the philosophers' war against reason, they have succeeded -by the method of vivisection-in producing exponents of what man is like when deprived of his rational faculty, and these in turn are giving us images of what existence is like to a being with an empty skull.
While the alleged advocates of reason oppose ”system-building” and haggle apologetically over concrete-bound words or mystically floating abstractions, its enemies seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason, that art is man's psycho-epistemological conditioner, and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man's integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.
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