freedom and reason

The Cliven Bundy case is a useful example for clarifying some of the arguments that we often hear surrounding the power of government and the rights of individuals and the limits on each.

At the outset, we must remind the audience that states do not have rights. People have rights. This is why a people have the right to overthrow a government that is no longer respecting their liberties and rights. While people have rights, states have powers. In a republic form of government, these powers emanate from the will of the people. The more democratic the government, the more its manifested power reflects the popular will.

The individual states that make up the Union have powers delegated to them by the US federal government or reserved to them by the US Bill of Rights. In all cases, the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land. What the federal legislature and executive pass into law or the federal executive decrees by executive order (unopposed by Congress) or a federal court rules stands unless it is overturned by a higher court or superseded by new law. Article Six, Clause 2, of the US Constitution establishes the supremacy of the federal government. We are first citizens of the United States, after that residents of the various states. Bundy’s passport (if he has one or ever will) will identify him as a US citizen. When the South challenged this legal reality by seceding from the Union and establishing the Confederate States of America, the Union settled the question with war.

Congress’s legislative powers are enumerated in Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution. The Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, and imposts. The Congress has the power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, as well as suppress insurrections and repel invasions. An insurrection, or rebellion, is a violent uprising against an authority or government. The executive of the republic – the president and his agencies – has the authority as delegated by Congress to make regulations and enforce them and put down insurrections.

Here are the relevant facts: Cliven Bundy stopped paying his grazing fees in 1993. He owes the US taxpayer more than one million dollars (he admits to $300,000 of that, so that he owes some amount of money is not in dispute). In 1998, a federal court ordered Bundy to remove his cattle from the federal land, land that is neither his nor Nevada’s. The federal government owns most of the land in Nevada, and when Nevada was granted statehood, it acknowledged in its Constitution the supremacy of the US Constitution. Bundy uses federal land well beyond his family’s roughly 160 acres of land. Against federal and state law, he is grazing his cattle on taxpayer land and refusing to compensate the taxpayer for its use. Bundy has defied the law for more than 20 years. Twenty years is a lot of patience on the part of the federal government.

Bundy’s refusal to follow the law and his defiance of authority, and the rallying to his side by armed extremist elements in America’s right wing, is insurrection. To be sure, the government stood down in the face of rebellion to avoid violence, but it has the authority under the rule of law to act with armed force. That it has not—and has let the issue go for so long—testifies to the deference the US government, whether governed by Democrats or Republicans, routinely shows wealthy citizens.

One of the great ironies in American politics is that those who most aggressively champion the US Constitution and the American Republic are often the ones most likely to champion the neoconfederate position of states rights. But a person can’t have it both ways. Either one recognizes the legitimacy of the United States government or one doesn’t. And while it is not necessarily wrong to withdraw one’s recognition of the legitimacy of the any government and its laws (that is one’s right), whether one has just cause to do so depends on the reasoning—and, in any case, withdrawal of consent cannot make the person immune from the enforcement of the laws of the land.

G. William Domhoff finds problems with conspiracy theory. His essay, “There Are No Conspiracies,” is a harebrained attempt at shutting down critical thinking about how history happens. He lists five objections, none of which work.

First, conspiracy theory “assumes that a small handful of wealthy and highly educated people somehow develop an extreme psychological desire for power that leads them to do things that don’t fit with the roles they seem to have. For example, that rich capitalists are no longer out to make a profit, but to create a one-world government.” As if making profit and controlling government are mutually exclusive goals – or don’t depend on one another.

Capitalists are out to make a profit. The biggest capitalists with the most power know that they can increase their profits by controlling the global political and economic machinery. The transnational capitalist class actively seeks to bring all political power and economic activities under its control. Control over one requires control over the other. Will capitalists succeed? They largely already have. For sure, they are trying. It’s naive to believe that the most powerful groups in the world aren’t trying to shape world history towards their ends and that they are loath to do so secretly.

Domhoff scoffs at the fear that “elected officials are trying to get the constitution suspended so they can assume dictatorial powers.” This is a ridiculous claim, he writes, because it never happens. Really? It never happens? The terrible fact that political rule sometimes comes to power through conspiracy recommends conspiracy theory as a useful (albeit not the only useful) framework for analyzing history.

Domhoff writes, “Since these claims have proved wrong dozens of times by now, it makes more sense to assume that leaders act for their usual reasons, such as profit-seeking motives and institutionalized roles as elected officials.” False dilemma. It is not one or the other thing. It’s all these things. To arbitrarily close off one of the avenues for understanding history is ideology not social science.

“Second, the conspiratorial view assumes that the behind-the-scenes leaders are extremely clever and knowledgeable, whereas social science and historical research shows that leaders often make shortsighted or mistaken decisions due to the limits placed on their thinking by their social backgrounds and institutional roles.”

Criminals get busted for conspiracy all the time because they make shortsighted or mistaken decisions. Conspiracies often don’t work. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t conspiracies. Domhoff himself acknowledges conspiracy in his example of why conspiracies often don’t work: “the failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs during the Kennedy Administration.” The Bay of Pigs was a conspiracy that failed. Here a man is denying the existence of conspiracies while documenting one.

“Third, the conspiratorial view places power in the hands of only a few dozen or so people, often guided by one strong leader….” Most conspiracies are small and involve even fewer than a few dozen people. And, yes, very often, there is a mastermind, a ring leader. Bigger conspiracies involve more people. Conspiracies can be vast, involving several hundred people. These are, frankly, mundane facts about conspiracies.

“Fourth, the conspiratorial view often assumes that clever experts (‘pointy-headed intellectuals’) with bizarre and grandiose ideas have manipulated the thinking of their hapless bosses.” He gives no examples and I have not heard anybody who theorizes “conspiracists” make this claim. Then he writes that “studies of policy-making suggest that experts work within the context of the values and goals set out by the leaders, and that they are ignored or replaced if they step outside the consensus.” Right. There are leaders who pull the strings and when people step out of line they are marginalized or eliminated. This does not exclude conspiracy.

“Finally, the conspiratorial view assumes that illegal plans to change the government or assassinate people can be kept secret for long periods of time, but all evidence shows that secret groups or plans in the United States are uncovered by civil liberties groups, infiltrated by reporters or government officials, and written about in the press.” Which means that we know there are conspiracies.

Does Domhoff’s argument: conspiracies are not real because they are exposed by those who suspect there are conspiracies. Certainly Domhoff won’t be exposing any conspiracies: he can’t see what’s in front of him: “Even secrets about wars and CIA operations – Vietnam, the Contras, the rationales for Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 – are soon exposed for everyone to see.” Right. Those were conspiracies.

“Because all their underlying assumptions are discredited by historical events and media exposures, no conspiracy theory is credible on any issue.” He admits that we have exposed numerous conspiracies, yet no conspiracy theory is credible on any issue. The argument contradicts itself.

The Soviet Union was a union of several socialist republics established in 1922. It was the result of a series of revolutions beginning in the early twentieth century and a long civil war that ended in a communist victory in 1923. For seven decades the Soviet Union stood through world war and cold war, rising to become an industrial and military superpower that provided its people with universal access to education, food, housing, jobs, medicine, and leisure, while sharply reducing inequality and poverty and raising the overall standard of living for the population. The history shows that, far from being a “failure,” the Soviet model of development represented a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production.

So why, I am asked, if the state socialist system was successful, is there no Soviet Union today? There is no Soviet Union today because the working class was betrayed and forces intent on establishing capitalism in the Soviet republics dismantled the system that had worked so well for the proletariat. The proletariat’s worst enemy came from within: Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985-1991, and head of state from 1988-1991. Ostensibly, to deal with the problem of an economic downturn, Gorbachev instituted a series of reforms (glasnost and perestroika) that gave greater autonomy to the republics and liberalized the Soviet economy. Instead of improving the situation in the Soviet Union, liberalization worsened the plight of the working class, sparking widespread dissatisfaction and unrest.

Liberalization weakened communist political hegemony, as well, and some republics took steps to secede from the union. In 1989, under Boris Yeltsin, Russia itself moved to declare sovereignty, thus bringing about a political crisis. In a referendum of nine republics in 1991, a majority, although voting to remain a socialist union, supported significant changes in the Soviet political-legal system. The New Union Treaty concerned Communist Party leadership, who (correctly) saw it as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In what is widely characterized as an attempted coup d’état, members of the CPSU, led by Gennady Yanayev, deposed Gorbachev and asserted control over the Party. The intervention lasted but three days. Key members of the military defected to a coalition led by Yeltsin. As a result, both the Gorbachev and Yanayev wings of the Communist Party were delegitimized.

From there, pro-capitalist forces quickly dismantled the Soviet Union. Yeltsin, in charge of the new Russian Federation, gave away the national wealth of the proletariat to a small corrupt network of oligarchs in a massive privatization scheme. In 1993, amid ever worsening economic conditions, Yeltsin illegally dissolved the parliament. The parliament responded by removing Yeltsin from his post. However, the military came to Yeltsin’s aid and forcibly dissolved parliament. With the military at his back, Yeltsin abolished the constitution, banned political opposition, and stepped up privatization.

This is why I say that it is inaccurate to claim that the Soviet Union collapsed. In fact, it was dismantled.

Religious schools should be abolished. Moreover, if home schooling is to be allowed, it must not involve religious education. It is a human rights crisis when children are denied the religious freedom to which they are entitled. Religious freedom requires first and foremost freedom from religious indoctrination, which becomes practically impossible when children are indoctrinated from birth. To be sure, some children escape indoctrination, but most do not. And even those who do escape often struggle with guilt and trepidation and shame, since their family and peers still believe.

Childhood is a crucial developmental period where society has to take extra care to make sure that parents, teachers, and other adults don’t use their proximity to and authority over children to impose their agenda of ideas that have no basis in reason or fact – worse, ideas that are irrational and harmful. Early socialization in mythology-as-reality changes the patterns of cognition such that children struggle to distinguish the truth from lies in adulthood. This is wrong. It should not be tolerated.

This does not mean that parents cannot hold or talk about their religious beliefs with their children. It means that society must protect children from parents who send them to religious schools or turn their household into schools of religious indoctrination. Just as protecting children means ending the practice of genital mutilation, substituting prayer and laying on of hands for science-based medicine, or administering corporal punishment and other physically and psychologically degrading disciplinary systems on children, it means not allowing parents to fill their children’s heads with irrational and poisonous ideas.

I appreciate my parents creating an environment where I was allowed to know about and free to express ideas other than Christian ones. It was this freedom that allowed me to grow up free of the deep religious socialization that likely would have made it difficult as an adult to know and accept the deeper understanding of the universe that comes with secular humanism and scientific knowledge. I want all children to have the same opportunity I had: to be treated as a free individual who could, if he so desired, choose his religion when he was ready to do so – or choose not to be religious at all.

Can you imagine that in the wake of racially-motivated killings staging events aimed as celebrating the ideology that fed those killings? This instead of condemning the beliefs that motivated the violence? There’s a lot of that sort of thing going on around the country, only these events are celebrating the ideology that feeds religious-motivated killings. The events masquerade under the guise of promoting “religious tolerance,” falsely drawing an equivalency between ideology and skin color – when the real comparison is between religion and racism.  

It is well worth remembering that, unlike skin color, which persons are born with, religion is an exclusive ideology and a practice that is taught to persons, typically without their consent. Like fascism, nationalism, and racism, religion is a system of myths and rituals the purpose and function of which is to either divide people into the groups “us” and “them” or force everybody under irrational doctrine. Moreover, as we have seen, like other systems of an exclusive character, religion has inflicted and continues to inflict great harm upon human populations.

Examples of benevolence notwithstanding, the harmful behavior of the institution of religion as a whole and of a significant proportion of its adherents tells us that there is reason we should neither accept nor tolerate religious belief and practice in the same way we accept and tolerate skin color. It is not irrational for a person to question the motives and judgment of those who are adherents to a particular ideology. How did we allow this idea to shape our response to the problems religion causes?

If parents, believing that prayer will save their children from a life-threatening illness, fail to take their child to a physician, do we ignore the fact that their belief in supernatural forces played a crucial role in their actions? Such beliefs are not benevolent. Likewise, if two brothers blow up a crowd of people at a sporting event because they believe their god commands it, must we ignore the self-evident fact that their belief in supernatural forces played a role in their actions? We do so at our peril. 

Religion, like other exclusive ideologies and practices, is a serious threat to the freedom and safety of people. If we want to reduce the likelihood that persons will do terrible things to other people, then we need to push religion to the dark corners of society in the same way that we have taught people to reject fascism and racism. To be sure, we are still fighting the good fight against these other hateful ideologies, but the problem is much less severe and, crucially, nobody celebrates these ideologies. 

A bigot is somebody who expresses intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself. Religious bigotry is the expression or practice of intolerance towards those who hold different religious opinions from oneself. Atheists don’t hold religious opinions, therefore the intolerance of the religious opinions of others is not an example of religious bigotry. In fact, atheism isn’t an opinion at all, but rather the absence of opinion, and rigidly adhering to ones commitment to not believe in the unbelievable is not the same thing as rigidly adhering to one’s zealous commitment to a given belief. Atheists can’t be bigots. Anti-theism is opposition to theological wickedness. 

Today, I was asked for my opinion about an argument posed by the black conservative Ben Carson. It’s not actually an argument, but a complaint about white liberals who speak for the black community. The gist of his grievance is that white liberals are racist because they expect all blacks to support the liberal policies that, ostensibly designed to help blacks, are, in fact, destructive to the black community. Carson and his ilk contend that problems of the black community are better addressed through conservative (or, from Carson’s point of view, centrist) policies. Liberals should back off and allow a diversity of policy viewpoints.

I responded that, on the contrary, white liberals are too tolerant of conservative voices in the black community. Moreover, this tolerance comes at the price of marginalizing radical black voices, voices that carry the real answer to the problems of black America. Carson is confused, I emphasized, because he sees the world as a liberal-conservative dichotomy. Since liberalism doesn’t work, conservatism must. But the liberal-conservative binary takes us rightward. This is the danger of tolerating conservatism. But, this does not mean that blacks should tolerate liberalism as the alternative. Like most Americans, Carson does not see the other side of the political spectrum. The path to democracy and equality lies neither through nor between liberalism and conservatism.

But liberals are responsible for racism. To be sure, they are not solely responsible; but they are responsible for much of the situation blacks face today. Part of this is because of the liberal fetish for status quo, their love of law and order, not for the sake of justice, but for maintaining existing social relations (which, at the material level, is protecting the relations of production). Martin Luther King Jr. identfied this problem in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail:

I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

We must also say that liberalism is racist because racism is a feature of capitalism, the economic system to which both liberalism and conservatism attend, but which liberalism is the major ideological and philosophical underpinning (it is more accurate to say that modern conservatism is a variety of liberalism than a negation of it). Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, this problem, as well, when he argued that racism cannot be eliminated without also eliminating capitalist relations, redistributing economic and cultural power, and instituting a regime of reparations. Such solutions preclude liberalism as a path to racial and, more broadly, social justice. So liberalism is detrimental to the black community, just not for the reason Carson thinks.

I was then asked by another person to clarify why I said that liberals are responsible for racism. Furthermore, this person wanted to know, why would I say that capitalism is racist. She proudly identified herself as a liberal, a person who believes in separation of church and state, in equal rights for all, and in the priority of the constitution over biblical law. Liberals also believe those things (within a definite system of assumptions). At the same time, believing these things does not require a person to be a liberal.

These two questions are really the same question. Thomas Jefferson, arguably the quintessential liberal, believed in the separation of church and state, argued that all men are equal, and was a strong advocate of constitutional over biblical law. He was also an ardent defender of private property, owned slaves, and believed that blacks were inferior to whites (which did not prevent him or his liberal colleagues from raping them). Blacks weren’t quite men in the eyes of the white liberals who ran the world then. Of course, blacks are said to be men today, but crucially only where equal treatment before law allows group differences to persist – that is, equal treatment as a strategy for maintaining racial (and class and gender) inequality.

The only real concern the founding liberals seemed to have had about race-based slavery – beyond the pangs of conscience that suggested to them blacks might be men after all – was the possible corrupting impact it would have on white people. Most liberals argued – the great white liberal Abe Lincoln among them – that, if ever freed, blacks should be crowded onto boats and shipped back to Africa, as they were, what with their small heads and primitive instincts and lust for white women, constitutionally ill-equipped to live among the whites (a belief that persists in occupational and residential segregation). It was the Great Emancipator himself who said that, short of eliminationist schemes, apartheid would have to be the order of the day, with whites on top and blacks on bottom naturally, because innate racial differences fated the races to eternal antagonisms. And this is what was done, first through Jim and Jane Crow (de jure apartheid), now through ghettoization, and mass incarceration (de facto apartheid).

I hastened to add that the father of liberalism, as much as there can be one, John Locke, was a major investor in the Royal African Company, the major corporate player in the British slave trade, and, sitting on both the Council of Trade and Plantations and the Board of Trade, was personally involved in drafting the Fundamental Constitution of Carolinas, which gave the slave holders total sway over their slaves. This was no slight involvement on the great liberal’s part. Only around a half a dozen men, with Locke playing the significant role, created and supervised both the colonies and the slave system from which they acquired huge sums of money. This was in the mid-1600s, I reminded my audience, so Locke and his fellow white liberals were busy at the early morning hour of the “peculiar institution.” Moreover, Locke views on unenclosed property justified the dispossession and depopulation of Indian lands; because the savages had not developed the land, they were not entitled to it or its bounty.

From the beginning, capitalism was created by white Europeans who colonized and racialized the world, sickening, massacring, and enslaving humans the whole way. Racialization was the strategy of control, an expression of the belief in white supremacy, and a justification for exploitation of labor and elimination of those who were in the way. Capitalism everywhere is both a class and a caste system, its division of labor what Edna Bonacich calls the “split labor” market. As a consequence, blacks substantially trail whites in every significant aspect of the social profile of capitalism nationally and globally. It is no accident that such a proud white liberal of today as Chicago’s Rahm Emmanuel, the faithful servant of the first black president, wakes up every day seeking to polish his schemes to impoverish the black community in order to enrich his white liberal friends and the handful of liberal blacks who have sucked up to white power to improve their own conditions over against those of their brothers and sisters (fortunately, for the bourgeoisie, capitalism has never suffered a shortage of colonial collaborators, externally or internally).

This is, after all, the liberal trick: liberalism institutionalizes racism by denying its abolition via the sanctity of the property right: let’s call it the individual right to group inequality. Liberalism is the desired system of domination because it appears just democratic enough to placate those who desire to breathe free, but not democratic enough to actually be free. Democracy means the end of capitalism. In contrast, liberalism, which includes some individual rights that could ostensibly extend to everyone in principle, covers for the tyranny of the propertied class by allowing certain subordinate segments of society limited participation in the political order of things at levels that do not interfere with the ceaseless accumulation of wealth by the handful of families who own the productive means. And where rights do interfere, they are quickly rolled back. The principle of equality carries no real substance because the system of private property is the raison d’etre of modernity. Liberalism is the illusion of universal freedom where in truth a few are free to exploit the many. Of course, the many are free to go hungry and homeless or work to survive (wage slavery).

At its core, then, liberalism supports exploitative and oppressive arrangements by functioning as an ideology that roots hierarchy and group inequality in individual differences, thereby claiming that inequality is natural and inevitable, and by serving as a legal philosophy justifying inequality by demanding equal treatment before the law. Since those who are poor come by it honestly, in light of the empirical fact that blacks seem to have a knack for being poor, racial inequality is normalized. No extraordinary efforts to end the suffering of millions need follow (albeit some band aids here and there paint a compassionate face), for this is the natural working out of things. Private property under capitalist arrangements has always had this open-now-dissimulated racial character.

This is why I renounced liberalism years ago. It is the ideology of the capitalist oppressor, of white supremacy. Liberalism is the perpetrator’s ideology. The moral imperative commands us to take the perspective of the victim. This is even a self-interested position for majority of humanity. The thinking and practice that aligns with this attitude is socialism.

Three additional points: First, there is a distinction to be made between “negative” and “positive” freedom, the best treatment of this given to us by the brilliant Erich Fromm, but perhaps more famously in the form given by Isaiah Berlin. This distinction is helpful in seeing how liberal freedom can ever only be a partial freedom. This is why liberty, however desirable, is an incomplete form of freedom. Fromm points out that, although liberalism frees the individual from the tyranny of tradition and, in theory, state oppression (negative freedom), because its economic practice is capitalism, it provides no universal means for self-realization (positive freedom). Self-realization (or self-actualization) is only obtainable when everybody has equal access to the means of production and can thus make their own way in life. Capitalism cannot allow this since it rests upon conditions of majority dispossession of the productive means, thus making the majority wage slaves. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It is intrinsically immoral and rapacious. It must be overthrown.

Second, following from this, wage slavery is a brute fact of capitalism and in its fundamental essence wage slavery is little different from chattel slavery. If a person truly opposes slavery, then they do so not only because it allows one person to own another, as despicable as this is, but for the fact that it makes some persons labor for the profit of other persons – that is, it is exploitative. What most people do not recognize – because liberalism, of which modern conservatism is a variety, is an ideology fashioned to confuse them – is that chattel slavery is but one form capitalism takes. It may indeed be (formally) illegal for one person to own another, but if some are made to labor for others, then exploitation has not ended. And what do we make of debt to banks, etc.? Capitalism takes many forms. And, while liberalism isn’t the only ideology justifying capitalist relations (fascism is another), it is the most insidious expression in the long run because of its pretensions to freedom and democracy.

Third, as the ideology of capitalism, liberalism is designed (or at least functions) to make capitalist relations appear as a natural fact, a reflection of human nature and natural law, and therefore normal and beyond the political interests and control of the majority. Adam Smith expressed this idea in his concept of “the invisible hand,” which is the source of Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” notion, which in turn inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which, while applicable in the natural world, is false and ideological when applied to cultural and social matters. It is easy to see racism’s connection to liberalism when this link is exposed. Smith roots inequality in innate individual differences. Yet we see that there are group differences in rates of everything associated with inequality. It follows that, if biological differences explain inequality, then racial disparities in inequality measures reflect biological differences, and thus races are biological realities and, moreover, some races are superior to others. Blacks as a group are poor because they are inferior and nothing can be done about this since property is a natural right. Liberalism is therefore as much a form of racism as it is classism. This is why social Darwinism – and sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which, when stripped of their scientific pretentious, are merely modern expressions of the then-equally scientistic claims of the social Darwinist – is such a despicable idea. It’s liberalism expressed in its ultimate form.

To understand what liberalism ultimately means in a political economic sense, one needs to remember that the core principle is exclusive ownership of and control over the means of production. The imperative inherent in these relations is commodity production for the purposes of profit making, i.e. capitalism. All rights associated with liberalism – albeit none are unique to it – are subordinated to the core principle of wealth accumulation via the exploitation of human labor. Capitalism requires violence and coercion to enforce this oppressive state of affairs, not just domestically, though the police and disciplining of the workforce, but externally, militarily, in the colonies it establishes around the world. The language of liberalism is chock full of peaceful order and due process, but these desirables mask the necessary violence that embeds in the social relations liberals rationalize. This is how you can have simultaneous liberty and imperialism, peace and war. These contradictions mean that freedom will always be elusive under liberalism, enjoyed by the privileged few, purchased at the expense of the many.

The rhetoric of “liberty” in liberal doctrine is a grand deception. By giving the masses limited degrees of personal freedom and seeming participation in the political system, degrees insufficient to threaten the conditions of ceaseless accumulation, the ruling class establishes legitimacy via an engineered consent that appeals to the natural inclination of the human being to aspire to both autonomy and inclusion in things greater than herself. But it can never deliver on the promise of its slogan. This is why the framers of the US republic – an assortment of capitalist elites, including men who kept people as property – were so eager to clarify that, while granting rights and liberties, the United States is not a democracy. Democracy entails control over the machinery of historical production by the whole population. This, all capitalists recognize, requires a different type of economic system, namely socialism. Socialism means no more capitalists.

In the final analysis, although more palatable than authoritarian forms of capitalism, liberalism does not liberate the individual from exploitation and the rule of the few. If you believe that human beings should not have to rent themselves to others to survive, if you believe in democracy, then you are not a liberal. If you are not a liberal, stop calling yourself one.

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Austrian economist F A Hayek, author of The Constitution of Liberty and other influential books, argues that one’s social position, as measured by wealth and success, is primarily the result of individual intelligence and talents. The more intelligent and talented a person is, the higher will be his social position, unless stymied by the state.

It is argued, therefore, that the state should permit individuals to rise and fall on their own talents by making no effort to assist those who have neither the intelligence nor the talents to naturally become wealthy and successful. Government intervention in economic matters represents interference with the natural order of things. Assumed in all this, of course, is the theory that capitalism represents the natural ordering of human action.

The only role the government has in such a natural order is to enforce property laws without regard to any group identity, principally race and gender. Equality before the law is the only type equality allowable in a free society, according to Hayek, because, by not taking account of material advantage, it upholds the natural hierarchy. This limited role for government is necessary because individuals may band together, become a mob, and dispossess individuals of what the latter has naturally obtained through their intelligence and talents. Crucially, the government must never act as a mob.

In its inception, liberalism was a left-wing political ideology; it stood to the left of politics supporting the aristocracy, the church, and the monarchy (the real Holy Trinity of the Ancien Régime). In its early form, liberals made the radical assumption that all individuals are born equal and therefore no one stood outside the law. But the great disparaties of wealth caused by the capitalist economy posed problems for liberalism.

Inequality must come from one of two places. The first possible cause of inequality is unjust economic order in which the wealth produced by the majority is appropriated by a minority that does not produce that wealth. I could wait until the end of this essay to tell you that this is in reality the source of inequality, but those who read Freedom and Reason know the score. Inequality has always been caused by the social class dynamics. Inequality has nothing to do with individual differences. The person who digs the trench produces no less wealth than the person who designs the trench – and in a just world, the designer, if able-bodied, should be right alongside everybody else digging the trench.

The second possible cause is that individuals are not born equal. This view must ignore the reality of the social order order described above. Ideoloques have little problem ignoring reality, as we can well see with all manner of things, most obviously religion.

Here’s the point. If one accepts the reality of the unjust economic order, then one is pushed further to the left in order to resolve the contradiction. Liberalism’s contradictions resolve in socialism. Think about it. John Locke says that the wealth produced by labor belongs to the person doing the laboring. Under capitalist arrangments, the person producing the wealth is estranged from the wealth she produces, hence the obvious contradiction between liberalism ideas and capitalist realities. Communism resolves this contradiction. If one rejects the reality that all individuals are born equal, then one is pushed to the right. However, this does not resolve the contradiction. Indeed, as should be obvious to all, it makes the contradiction even more blatant.

Hayek’s version of liberalism is of the latter sort. He jettisons the inherent equality premise, radically changing the character of liberalism. Natural hierarchy and order emerge as Hayek’s foci, which he legitimates by appeal to biology. These are traditionally right-wing political committments (before often legitimated by appeal to religion). This leads to notions of hereditary ownership of wealth and power. Hayek sees the successful as a new aristocracy and celebrates them. They are, with their pretty faces and lovely voices, the beautiful (I’m serious, read his book). Hayek’s liberalism is Social Darwinism.

The argument assumes a causal explanation: material inequality is caused by variation in intelligence and talents. Let us assume this, as well, and examine the matter more closely.

If one looks at material inequality globally or in the United States, one will inevitably discover the following pattern: individuals with lighter skin color are in disproportionate numbers wealthy and successful, whereas individuals with darker skin color are in disproportionate numbers poor and failures. To be sure, there are exceptions, but examined using the methods of science and mathematics there is a strong and significant correlation between skin color and social position: the lighter one’s skin color, the greater likelihood they will enjoy superior wealth and success compared to those with darker skin color. Since material inequality is caused by variation in intelligence and talents, this correlation is restated thusly: the lighter one’s skin color, the greater likelihood of superior intelligence and talents.

As one can plainly see, the standard liberal argument in its pure form, when examined in light of material reality, becomes a form of racist ideology. Racist ideology of this type holds that some individuals are superior to other individuals and that this superiority is determined by skin color. The liberal often argues that racism is a unnatural system that interferes with the workings of truly liberal society. But raising this objection negates the premise of his argument, since, given the strength and significance of the correlation, it is obviously untrue that individuals rise and fall on their own intelligence and talents; rather, the evidence shows, individuals rise and fall based on group differences. This goes for gender, as well. If one looks at patterns of wealth and success, one discovers there is a correlation between gender and social station: the male enjoys a much greater likelihood of superior wealth and success compared to the female. Put another way, men are more intelligent and talented that are women.

The liberal might object in this fashion: “Well, this is the natural order of things; whites do enjoy an advantage in intelligence and talents. And, yes, men do enjoy this advantage over women, too. However you feel about it, that’s the natural facts.” Fine, but now the liberal must, if he is to be anti-racist and anti-sexist, to one of two things: (1) give up on the argument that the state mustn’t interfere with the order of things, since to continue advancing the liberal argument as Hayek has formulated it is to participate in the perpetuation of a racist and sexist society. And, given the strength and significance of the correlation, the government intervention required to create a just society, one where individuals are treated without regard of their group identities, must be considerable. In fact, it must be gargantuan. Or (2) denounce liberalism and become an open racist. This is because liberalism, if it means to value the individual in real terms, cannot also support a material system in which persons rise and fall on the basis of their group identities. For no system in which persons rise and fall on the basis of their group identities can be said to a system celebrating the individual.

Police encounters can be very frightening experiences, particularly when they bring a child’s sexual integrity or his relationship with a parent or friend into question. It’s important to remind ourselves of the emotional toll that unfounded suspicions and false accusations of child abuse have on children. Writer Will Self is correct when he describes as abusive “exposing my son to the spectacle of his father—who was guilty of nothing—being grilled by the police on the roadside as if he were engaged in a perverse activity.” 

The suggestion that a child has been molested can be extremely unsettling to children, whose imaginations are almost infinite and understandings of such matters unsophisticated. The McMartin preschool case (1983-1990) is instructive in this regard. Many adults believe to this day that they were sexually molested as children because of unfounded suspicions and false accusations, manufactured suspicions and accusations in which the police played a key role. The police, often through the act of “merely gathering information,” caused the children to believe they were the victims of sexual abuse. (The McMartin case is not unique, but one of several cases in which the state has suspected adults of child molestation without evidence and in the course of investigating traumatized children with lasting and debilitating false memories.)

Self and his child are lucky the police didn’t separate them and interrogate the child outside of the father’s presence—or worse, submitted the child to a violating medical examination. As the McMartin case demonstrates, the police are quite adept at convincing people, especially children, that things happened which did not happen—and then perpetrating the violations themselves. The police are notorious for manufacturing evidence to justify suspicions. This is the problem of the presumption of guilt and demanding suspects explain themselves. Self knows full well that even the act of questioning a father over sexual abuse can traumatize a child. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t understand this and think it’s just fine for the police to stop and question parents and their children for no reason or on obviously absurd suspicions.

In fact, today, I encountered a person who believes that the police were right in questioning Self despite having no evidence of any wrong doing. Not content with characterizing such police actions as acts of responsibility, the person went further and made Self out to be a bad father for rambling with his child. Given that human beings have been rambling with their children for literally tens of thousands of years, for days and weeks and months on end, how a father in such an outing with his child could be criticized is beyond me. What on earth could be the motive for making such a normal human activities as rambling and camping seem untoward?

What happened to Will Self is the consequence of a world in which civilians are treated as suspects with the expectation that they need to explain their relationships and their actions to the authorities. This is precisely the opposite of what defines a free society. In a free society, when the state has no evidence that persons are doing something wrong, then the state is not allowed to interfere with their travels in any manner. The police have no business knowing who you are, who you are with, why you are with them, or what you have done, are doing, or planning to do. One of the most important fights in which you can engage right now is the fight against the presumption of guilt and toleration for the interference of government agents in our lives.

The op-ed: “‘Its Name Is Fascism’ The supporters of Egypt’s military aren’t liberals” is a terrific example of how the conflation of democracy and liberalism confuses a complex issue. But for the equation mob = majority, this sentence is true (although the author and I do not share the same idea of the politics necessary for this transformation): “Democracy is not whatever a mob, or a majority, wants. Indeed, democracy was designed to thwart the mob, and set limits to the tyranny of the majority, by reconfiguring it, by means of politics, into a free and self-governing people.”

But the next sentence confuses the issue by conflating democracy (people rule) with liberalism (rule of a minority of the opulent): “It is time to stop calling these people [supporters of the ‘coup’] liberals. A military dictator supported by the masses in the streets: there is another name for such a phenomenon, which is not unfamiliar in the annals of modern politics. Its name is fascism.” And then this utterly false and reckless characterization: “Which is another name for the wisdom of crowds.” Did you get that? Fascism is the wisdom of crowds.

Fascism is neither liberalism nor the expression of crowd wisdom. However, fascism has historically been the result of the erosion of liberalism through the working out of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the concentration of wealth and power in monopolies. If the Egyptian people had a robust tradition of democracy, then fascism wouldn’t be a possibility (or at least it would be a remote one), since the working people would run the productive machinery—not the other way around, as it is under liberalism (or fascism). Economic liberalism without adequate democracy prepares the ground for fascist power because economic liberalism systematically disempowers the people. Liberalism is, from the point of view of the ruling (i.e. capitalist) class, a safe substitute for democracy.

Democracy was not the result of the revolution that removed Mubarak from power. It was business as usual with respect to the fundamental economic relations that direct Egyptian life. Instead, religious authoritarians hijacked the popular political energy and, in a counterrevolutionary moment, seized the government and began implementing Islamist rule, albeit not strictly fascism but, in many ways, an analog to fascism (counterrevolutionary and reactionary). This analog to fascism was overthrown by the military which, at least in the early phase, appears to represent the interests of the majority—at least as the majority understands those interests.

Leon Wieseltier, author of the linked op-ed (recall that Wieseltier served with Gingrich, Kristol, Lieberman, Perle, and other neoconservatives on Committee for the Liberation of Iraq), recognizes the majority support for the Egyptian military’s actions, but he dismisses majority opinion as an expression of fascism. Was it true of Germany under Hitler or Italy under Mussolini that national socialist and fascist rule were expressions of the majority? The degree to which fascism is happening in Egypt depends on the degree to which the military is doing the bidding of corporate power over against the wisdom of the crowds. 

The highly neurotoxic family of chemicals known as neonicotinoids (contained in brand names such as Actara® and Crusier®) are used in leading pesticide products and sprayed on crops. The neurotoxins are picked up by bees as they collect food and pollinate flowers. The neurotoxins, spread from plant to bee to bee, confuse the insects, disrupting activities necessary for survival. This leads to the collapse of hives resulting in mass bee die-off.

Without sufficient bee numbers, natural pollination is sharply reduced and crop yields decline. As crop yields decline, human populations become progressively dependent on other sources of seeds for food production. These other sources of seeds have not been left to chance. The companies that produce the neurotoxic pesticides—Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—control almost all of the global market for genetically-modified seeds. In other words, the same companies that control the global market for pesticides containing neonicotinoids also own the patients for genetically-modified plants. Sounds like a plan: eliminate bee populations and force human populations to turn to genetically-modified crops—many of which contain neurotoxins dangerous to humans.

In the end, if everything goes according to plan, four corporations and their subsidiaries will eventually control nearly all of global agribusiness. The question for the world community is whether and when we are going to investigate these corporate entities for a possible conspiracy to monopolize the global food supply and enslave the world’s population.

Whenever one argues for this god from the perspective of this doctrine in the context of a discussion that has participants hailing from different perspectives, the argument is immediately problematic because the assumptions it deals in, at least the very big ones, carry no validity outside of the doctrine itself or, perhaps, its derivations.

Gollum was imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien. In this instance, we know who created a myth. But just because we don’t know who created other myths, we nonetheless know they are such just the same

In order for arguments to carry universal validity they must flow from a universal position that necessarily exists beyond doctrinal or theological perspective. It may be that you do not believe there is a universal position, in which case you are uninterested in establishing the truth of anything. You may believe that your perspective is universal, which it very well may be as long as it is also my position.

This is not an expression of arrogance; it is a recognition that the only universal position is one founded on reason and evidence and self-acknowledgement that this is the position with which I associate my arguments.

This is the advantage atheists have in argument. Put another way, it must never be the case that I have to enter your ontological framework to engage an argument concerning the question of truth; it must always be that you have to step outside your framework to engage the question on universal grounds if the identification of truth is a serious endeavor. In this way, position is very different than perspective, in that the former does not always reduce to the latter.

To make the point succinctly: if the universal position is held to be relative in the same way that a theological perspective necessarily is, then no rational discussion is possible. (None of this prevents me from also arguing within the context of your doctrinal framework. But then it would only be about relative and provisional truths, except in the case of contradiction, for then logical rules are violated – a fact that doesn’t faze most religious thinkers.)

From the position of reason, I can say with complete certainty that god does and does not exist. I am not being playful by saying this. If by existence we mean that god is an idea, then everybody, except for those who have never heard of god, knows god exists. We may call this the “god-idea.” Most people not only know about the god-idea that they believe refers to a real thing, but they know something about the god-ideas held by other people, which they are sure refer to unreal things (unlike their god-idea).

On this last point, they are indeed correct. The god-idea comes in a lot of different forms and names (Odin, Osiris, Yahweh, and Zeus), some more interesting than others. Ideas exist in the minds of those who think them. In this way, god exists in the same way demons—or elves, fairies, trolls, dragons, unicorns, and whatnot—exist. Indeed, anything that can be imagined exists in this way. This is what we called the subjective, that is, that which proceeds from or takes place in a person’s mind rather than out in the external world. (I hasten to note that not everything is subjective, obviously, since the mind must exist prior to the subjective expression; it is a contradiction to suppose that the mind thinks itself—whatever the mind thinks of itself—as opposed to its contents.)

If, on the other hand, we mean that god is an objective thing, i.e. a thing independent of those beings who conceptualize it either actively or share/store it in external fixed symbolic media, then clearly god does not exist. We don’t need to trouble ourselves with debating the problem of proving a negative (an obvious problem, at any rate). Science ruthlessly contradicts truth claims made by religious authorities, whether these truth claims are made by persons or in scriptures.

This is not a digression: denying (more accurately, rationalizing) the falsification of truth claims made by religious authorities by claiming that such claims lie beyond the realm of rational inquiry—that is, that religious thought exists as a form of truth outside of fact and reason and therefore not subject to evaluation on these grounds—is a dodge so self-evidently transparent and insulting to the intelligence that we shall dismiss it without debate; either truth claims are true or they are untrue, and the method for addressing truth involves reason and fact. Why? Again, because these are the foundation of a universal position.

To be sure, there are truths that have yet been reasoned or discovered (the latter is especially practically infinite). However, god, whatever its form and name, has always been constructed in a manner which makes it impossible not only to prove (that’s by design) but, given the material structure of reality, impossible. In other words, not only are the central claims of religion either shown to be untrue or have never been demonstrated to be true (that settles the empirical question), they couldn’t be true even if an audience was convinced by the reason and facts that they were. It would have to be the case that some deception had been perpetrated if claims of supernatural agency presented with empirical symptoms.

This is the truth of impossibility, and it’s something that is rarely raised in the context of debates over the material existence of god. The best I can figure, the truth of impossibility feels like an arrogant position, as intolerant, a sort of bigotry. But it’s none of those things. It’s obvious and everybody already knows that it is true. We just have to give ourselves permission to accept it.

The character of reality is such that persons cannot levitate from the ground—to walk on the water, to use a well-known claim of Christianity regarding Jesus in his divine demonstration of faith and control over the natural world—without the aid of some technology. It simply cannot be done, not only because nobody has shown it can be done, but also because the reality of things make it impossible to do. If somebody were to appear to walk on water, then you would know a trick was being performed. Jesus could not have possibly done the things it is claimed he did—not in the way it is claimed he did. Since it is impossible, no one need falsify it or demand that somebody confirm or verify it.

Likewise, a person cannot rise or be risen from the dead by miracles; for if the walking “dead” should appear, then we would not that this person was in fact not actually dead. We were mistaken in our diagnosis. And if ever there was some way of raising the dead through technology then, by definition, it would involve no miracle. Et cetera. You cannot turn water into wine, feed multitudes with insufficient stores, sight the blind, or exist as a ghost (holy or otherwise). If you think you see a ghost you can relax knowing that either somebody is pranking you or you are in need of psychiatric help. Ghosts are not real. They cannot be real. They can only be imagined.

I will finish by noting that every piece of historiographical and scientific inquiry demonstrates that god and her/his/its/their attributes and exploits are human/social constructions.  The talking snake, the burning bush, the demigods, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascension, the golden tablets, the seer stones – all of these things are complete works of fantasy invented by human beings. God as a force in human life is the distorted projection (a refraction, if you will) of a given sociocultural context.

This is why “god” is spatially and temporally variable (and internally contradictory). We know when, where, and by whom the various forms and names of “god” were created. Even if we did not know that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, we would know with complete certainty that Frodo and Gollum were invented in a particular time and place by an individual or individuals belonging to a particular group. Any belief that the characters of The Lord of the Rings were actual persons or things or that their deeds were actual deeds would be irrational on the grounds that (a) they are impossible and (b) we know who wrote the story. Such is true with all religion everywhere.

My own view is that we have tolerated the absurdity of claiming as truth the impossible and imagined things of religion for far too long. The sooner we can get humanity thinking rationally the sooner humanity can stop behaving irrationally.