the Tao of Ferrotheism

11:05am: a long silence
I have been away for some time.

I am engaged in producing a translation of the Tao Te Ching of my own right now. I'm using, as reference, several other translations (interpretations) and a literal, character by character near-transliteration of the Chinese pictographic text of the original.

For some time, I have had issues with the Thomas Cleary translation. It seemed that he had taken some liberties with the underlying meaning, letting too many of his own biases slip into the translation. Without researching the matter much, however, I hadn't much to go on aside from a feeling in my gut. While that was certainly enough for my purposes, personally, it tended to fail to be of much use to others who have read his translation. I was told by several people that they thought his translation was probably the most faithful they'd read. Regardless of its faithfulness to the meaning of the original, however, I didn't like the meaning it conveyed very much.

Now that I've begun looking into the literal meanings of the original characters, I'm finding some interesting things about the various translations that I have read. I'll focus on the three I know best.

1. The Ralph Alan Dale translation takes a great deal of poetic license with it. The literality of it is to a great degree discarded in favor of a hopefully meaningfully faithful translation that is pleasant and moving to read. While the somewhat overwrought moment here and there and slightly contrived use of the term "Great Integrity" are less than optimal, it seems that the meaning is indeed quite well preserved.

2. Stephen Mitchell's translation, long my favorite (though for now it shares that spot with Dale's), seems to be the most literally faithful of the three. It adds little or nothing unnecessary, and maintains a tone that flows well. The only glaring flaw is that small pieces are excised entirely, probably in an attempt to make the whole a bit more easily accessible and a bit more smoothly presented. While it works well, I miss the bits that are not present.

3. The Thomas Cleary translation is, as I thought, colored by biases. While Dale's changes the phrasing for impact, and Mitchell's omits bits for flowing presentation after translation, Cleary's actually incorporates charged terms and judgments that are completely absent and unconceived in the original Chinese text.

What we call intuition, I believe, is the whispering of the Tao within us. We know more about our world, and our place in it, than our conscious minds realize. We know these things because we are a part of the world, and the world is a part of us. There is not the dividing line that we all imagine is there. We can touch the far side of the universe at any time, because we are never apart from it. The feeling that I had about Cleary's translation was too strong to ignore, and now it seems it was demonstrably accurate.

It's a good feeling, to see an intuition I trusted be proved trustworthy.

---

The way that can be told is not the eternal Way.
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

And yet, I natter on about it. There's a reason for that: I'm still on a path toward understanding. I'm still finding my Way.

7:15am: collectivist apologism
One of the more baffling ongoing matters for analysis in political debate is the matter of collectivist apologism for atrocities. The canonical example, of course, is the fact of American left-wing political opinion naming Hitler's acts of genocide crimes against humanity against which Lenin's and Stalin's political purges cannot be compared. Lenin, they say, "meant well", and Stalin, they say, was a bad apple who corrupted a "good system".

The fact of the matter is that one could as easily find excuses for Adolf Hitler if one desired to. In fact, as individual human beings, Hitler's personal approach was reportedly rather less vicious and methodically cold than Stalin's. Their ultimate aims were effectively identical: personal aggrandizement, and national strength and unity.

You might say that the real issue, then, isn't the individual figureheads of a national tragedy. Perhaps the real issue here is the ideology that inspired each of them. Certainly, that is the matter of greatest concern for me at the moment, for a good political philosophy should never allow its proponents to pursue such terrible methods to secure its goals as were employed in Germany and Russia during the darker periods of the Twentieth Century for each of those nations. Whether or not Stalin and Hitler were True Believers is debatable, but any system that allows a True Believer to behave as they have has, to my mind, failed utterly to be a system worth support.

Ostensibly, these systems were fascism and socialism. While they are typically described as being right-wing and left-wing, respectively, there are some definitely socialist characteristics to fascism as practiced in Nazi Germany. The two are not as different, in terms of left-wing balance, as many would have us believe. There is yet a definite bias in left-wing America toward apologizing for the atrocities in Stalinist and Leninist Russia, even obfuscating them or ignoring them, and toward excoriating Hitler and anyone considered to be associated with him whether literally or "in spirit". Something else is at work here than mere coincidence of intersecting ideologies.

The joke has been made time and again that the reason Hitler has been so badly judged by history is that, while the mass murderous actions of people like Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hussein are often overlooked, Hitler made the grave error of stepping outside the bounds of his nation to enact genocidal pogroms in other territories. There may be some truth in that, considering that there is some lingering reluctance to interfere with the "sovereignty" of a nation even among globalists such as Kofi Annan, but that is not the whole of the matter. In point of fact, it is not even the primary reason that Pol Pot is referred to as an agrarian reformer by such luminaries of the Left as Noam Chomsky, or that Iraq's military security under Saddam Hussein was so vigorously defended by France, or that Stalin is measured an "aberration". There is still more at work here than that.

What it truly comes down to is the value of human life, as measured by differing political philosophies.

A libertarian political philosophy, or anarcho-capitalist, or essentially any other that is typically wedded with capitalism as its economic infrastructure, values each and every human life equally as an individual. They are individualist philosophies, and as such they necessitate the regard of sovereignty as an individual trait. It is the sovereignty of the person that is ethically inviolable in any individualist political philosophy. Populations are made up of individual people, and it is to them that we must tailor our political and economic systems, to maximize their liberties. I generalize, of course, as a libertarian thinker and ethical theorist myself, and because of this my characterization of individualist political philosophies bears the flavor of libertarian ethics, but the similarities in this regard outweigh the minor variations.

At the opposite extreme is collectivist political philosophy. Such ideologies as Marxist social democracy, Soviet dictatorial socialism, anarcho-communism, and their close cousins, are based in collectivist ideals. Such principles value the collective over the individual, the society over the person, the nation over the citizen. The benefit of a governmental action is measured by such systems, wedded to some degree with socialism as their economic infrastructure, according to its effect on a demographic. Rather than considering the effect a policy will have on individuals, it considers the effect it will have on statistical data. Where capitalism aims to empower the individual to achieve his own aims, socialism aims to empower the collective to achieve its aims supposedly in the interests of the individual.

From this, we can observe that measurable effects on collectives are the primary system of measurement of value in a collectivist system — an obvious, inescapable conclusion, in retrospect. This, however, then leads to an illuminating new view of the lack of eagerness on the part of the collectivist-minded political Left in the United States to harshly judge the human rights violations of the Soviet Union and other socialist, nominally communist nations, such as China and North Korea. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union's mass murder statistics are far, far more disturbing and weighty than those of Germany in the 1900s, these statistics simply do not mean as much to collectivist ideologies.

Hitler perpetrated acts of genocide. He targeted groups of people based on race, religion, and ethnic background. He targeted groups based on appearance. He targeted demographic divisions of his nation's population, and those of neighboring nations. Stalin, meanwhile, "merely" ordered the murders of millions of political dissidents. Stalin's murderous heart was more egalitarian and, of course, egalitarianism is what collectivism is all about, after all.

Hitler's atrocities are easily packaged as a "final solution", in ominous tones, while Stalin's were merely expedient and pragmatic in nature. Soviet policies of mass murder, then, have been more excusable in the minds of the American political Left because, in essence, their victims were only individuals, while those of Hitler were demographic groups.

It is the "final solution" to the problem of demonstrating collectivist devaluation of the individual.

5:10pm: the right and wrong of capitalism
The following is a rough draft of an essay contrasting the individualist and collectivist economic impulses. I'm considering having it published at @political, perhaps after an edit or two. It's long:

The greatest economists of recent decades — NObel prize winners, reformers of policy whose theories have revolutionized the market, and researchers whose oft philosophical approach to economics has opened our eyes to some essential aspects of human nature — have all been capitalists. Political philosophy, meanwhile, has been dominated by collectivism, dialectical materialism, and a seemingly universal call for fine-grained authoritarian management of resources. The tension between these contradictory impulses has maintained an unstable balance in Western economies for dozens of years. As a result, we have the perpetually mixed economy of the United States of America — a perpetually mixed blessing.

Things are, as I've said, unstable. We shift further toward popular acceptance of the collectivist economic theories, as politicians spread its gospel, its message of moral materialism, while economists are increasingly ignored. Economists, who have made it a life's calling to examine, analyze, and understand the dynamics of the production, movement, and persistence of wealth and resources, are increasingly ignored by the mainstream when their area of expertise is of particular relevance. There is a very good reason for this.

Economists, and other capitalists, do an admirable job of defending the utility and logical desirability of capitalism as a method of producing wealth. They fail, however, to do an even passable job of defending it on any other merits. Economists make it their task to evaluate and analyze the practical application of economic principles in action. They are not philosophers by trade, and usually do not make it a habit to examine such questions as the ethical and moral value of capitalism. This leaves the field wide open for proponents of other systems to fill that void by claiming superior knowledge of the moral virtue of their own favorite economic system, and superior knowledge of the moral bakruptcy of capitalism. Other capitalists as well, aside from professional and academic economists, tend to take their cues from economists: they tend to yield to the notion that more collectivist economic systems, such as Marxism and its cousins, hold the moral high ground. They simply point to the repeated failure in the world of attempts to make such systems succeed, and point to their impracticality even in theory, as evidence of the necessity of capitalism. What use, they ask, is there in a moral system that doesn't work? Capitalism, they say, just works, and it works very well. Case closed.

Most people, particularly those without the knowledge of economics needed to know better, believe that if something seems "good" it can be made to work. Morality is a matter of absolutes: I not only believe this myself, but so it seems does everyone else in the world. Even those who claim it is wrong to judge others because morality is supposedly subjective are,, by making such claims and attempting to enforce such tolerance, practicing and absolutist morality. Since people operate, in general, from a basic assumption of absolute morality, let us take it as given for a moment that morals are absolutes. That being the case, if people think that something is moral, and thus an absolute, they will obstinately refuse to consider alternatives that are not moral — all else being equal.

Regardless of any arguments of efficiency, benefit, and utility to the capitalistic economic system, utility doesn't carry as much weight in the minds of most people because they do not see it as an absolute. Absolutes are immutable; utility is not. If something (like capitalism) has a lot of utility, that only means that there's probably something with more utility out there that we need to find. If we can but add utility to the moral, we will have the perfect system. All that remains, people might reason, is to make the moral fit the practical, or to make the practical fit the moral, or to find the right people to make them fit each other, or . . .

Thus, we see the trap, the temptation, of ignoring matters of utility in favor of morality or ethicality. We see from this how it is that no amount of demonstration of utility will ever sway the teeming masses to recognize the necessity of capitalism in the face of its alternatives if there is no treatment of morality or ethicality when extolling capitalism's virtues. One can recognize that capitalism has value — even Karl Marx recognized its value, to some extent, if only as a stepping-stone toward his workers' social democracy — without feeling in any way compelled to treat it as desirable if it is never shown to possess moral or ethical virtue.

The tragedy of this is not only in the folly of allowing the world, by popular vote, to descend into economic decay and widespread destitution that could wipe out millions of lives for simple lack of utility, if capitalism were rejected, both in total and universally. The tragedy is not even in the fact that, under such circumstances, the inspiration and strength and ingenuity of humanity's best and brightest would be crushed underfoot. The true, awful tragedy of it is that capitalism may be the only moral, and is almost certainly the only ethical, economic system of which mankind is capable. Whereas collectivist economic systems are called moral because of positive statements of what they can provide — altruistic redistribution of wealth, equality of circumstance, and the devotion of one to many, which is reasoned to be moral if for no other reason than comparative value by numbers — capitalism is truly ethical, and probably moral as well, because it does not equate two wrongs to a right.

Capitalism, unlike socialism, does not demand theft to solve inequity. Capitalism, unlike socialism, treats human beings as ends in themselves, rather than simply as means to an end. Capitalism, unlike socialism, never requires an individual to be sacrificed for another. Capitalism, unlike socialism, affirms life and happiness, rather than denying them to serve death and oppression. Capitalism never requires you to die for the good of someone no better than you are. Capitalism does not punish virtue, honor, and success. Capitalism never cuts you simply because you can heal. Capitalism assumes you are an adult, and is loath to deprive you of the freedom and responsibility to make your own decisions, while socialism assumes you are a child, a ward of the state, and is loath to allow you the right to choose your life for yourself. Capitalism rewards you for your work, your ethics, and your ingenuity, while socialism only assumes that if you work harder you certainly don't need as much reward as someone unable — or perhaps unwilling — to work as hard as you do. Socialims treats you as a resource, and capitalism treats you as a human being.

Ultimately, the reasons for capitalism's ethicality are the very reasons behind its utility as well. Capitalism rewards those who produce — both for themselves and for others. Mechanisms for distributing wealth to those in need come into being of their own accord in a capitalistic system, as the need for such mechanisms creates a market for them. Those producers in need of a market will rush to fill the void created by a market in need of a producer. Where ingenuity is rewarded, and the hard work to implement it, ingenuity will treat each problem as an opportunity: this generates the motivation to solve such problems.

Proponents of collectivist economic systems will, of course, point to gaps in the standard of living between the upper and lower classes of course, but will always ignore the gaps in current standard of living for the poor and their standard of living from the past. Taking the resentful, spiteful approach of measuring your wealth only against that of others achieves no good, and only provides motivation to ruing those whose successes you haven't much hope of matching. Comparing your own wealth in the past with your wealth today, on the other hand, grants you a clear, unfettered view of how much better off you are. The world, collectively, is better off under capitalism: the gap between classes might increase at times, because the producers like to keep some of what they produce for themselves, but if those in the lower economic classes benefit more as individuals from capitalism than from socialism there is hardly reason to complain that the successful and able are rewarded for their diligence and competence. Everyone has the potential as well, under capitalism, to be better off individually than their initial economic class might seem to indicate their fate holds in store for them. Both the generalized guarantee of a better standard of living on average for everyone in a capitalist system and the potential for great personal advancement exist.

The true irony of a collectivist economic system such as socialism, with all its moralistic posturing, is that collectively it can only do us harm when measured against the individualist economics of capitalism.

8:39am: Everyone should* have a zen sport.



















* = the word "should" here should be taken in a colloquial, non-imperative sense

4:46am: The question of how a benevolent God can allow bad things to happen to good people is not a valid one.

God doesn't allow this to happen. We do. God, if there is one, gives us free will. God, if there is one, gives us this beautiful world to live in, and gives us beautiful people to share it with. We, poor misguided souls we are, despoil our lives and hurt each other. We have the gift of free will, and we use it to do ill.

God, if there is one, grants us the Garden of Eden, and we make of it a Hell on Earth.

Please, God, grant us another chance.

3:38am: I want . . .

I want to shoot a gun.

I want to run around in the dark.

I want to sit in a Denny's for hours, talking until dawn.

I want to stay in all day doing a whole lot of nothing and not miss a moment.

I want to read in mutual comfortable silence at a coffee shop with decadent speciality drinks cooling nearby.

I want to walk bundled against the cold on a breezy, cool, overcast day through a city rendered barren of life by Thanksgiving.

. . . to be left alone.

12:44am: dinner a couple nights ago
You find beauty in ordinary things.
Do not lose this ability.
Lucky Numbers 10, 33, 41, 44, 45, 46

1:01pm: the language of liberty
Freedom is a dangerous term to use when making precise statements. It is overly broad in connotation. It can mean everything from exemption from a specific constraint to a complete lack of any limitations at all. The term liberty, on the other hand, is connotatively more restricted to the ability to act without compulsion. The result of these differences between freedom and liberty is that liberty is a far more effective and precise term for use in describing a state of freedom from coercive influences, in ethical and political philosophy. It also can be differentiated clearly from the state of having been freed from a prior state of bondage because of the term liberation, in contrast with liberty. Liberty, thus, can be left for the description of the state of freedom from coercive influence without a necessary history to it, rendering it nontemporal in application.

The term libertarian is a descriptive word used to refer to concepts associated with the state of liberty, particularly philosophies and ideals that rest on an assumption of the virtue of liberty. Capitalizing the first letter, turning libertarian into Libertarian, effectively differentiates between the principles of liberty and the realities of political application in the world. Whereas a philosopher is a libertarian, a Libertarian is a member, supporter, or subscriber to the ideals of an ostensibly liberty-directed political party. Thus, libertarianism is a political philosophy and ethical theory, whereas Libertarianism is the set of political policy standards of a political party.

The term libertarian has been much-used over the years, for a number of different purposes, but always with a liberty-oriented bent. The phrase Libertarian Socialism was used to refer to anarcho-socialist principles of self-government, particularly after anything labeled anarchist was outlawed in the wake of the 1871 elimination of the Paris Commune. Previously, the term anarchist was used to refer to these anarcho-socialists. Ultimately, the terms anarchist and socialist were extricated from each other in political usage. There is something of an association between anarchism and libertarianism in the minds of many Europeans because of this early politicizing of the term libertarian, though the etymology of the terms delineates the separation between anarchism and libertarianism as being that between a lack of authority and a presence of liberty. It becomes clear that anarchism is in other words the doctrine of complete freedom, and libertarianism is the doctrine of complete liberty.

In the United States, anarcho-capitalism is a generally accepted, though still minority, interpretation of the necessary application of libertarian political ethics, while anarcho-socialism is typically viewed as self-contradictory due to the coercive necessities of any large-scale socialistic system. In Europe, meanwhile, leftist anarchy political philosophy, such as anarcho-socialism, is more recognized as a form of libertarianism, as are the more nonsocialist ideals of purist libertarianism. Anarcho-capitalism tends to be regarded with a sense of acute puzzlement by Europeans who wonder how one can assert that a social order can be maintained in the complete absence of central authority.

The term liberal in the United States referred to a set of beliefs closer in spirit to libertarianism prior to the 1950s. Since that time, as the term liberal has been increasingly adopted by social democrat US politics embodied by the ideological leaders of the Democratic Party, the contrasting term "classical liberal" has come into being and largely parallelled the term libertarian. The two are almost synonymous in application, and in fact both have gained their widespread recognition by way of being used as replacements for older applications of the word liberal. In Europe, again, the term classical liberal has never really come into play, and while the word liberal has been somewhat contaminated by leftist governmental policy there, it still is a left-libertarian impulse in application more than it is in the United States. This explains, to some extent, the manner in which explanations of political leanings in the United States and Europe are often at odds with one another. Both the Democrats and Republicans in the United States, as more bureaucratically authoritarian-leaning parties, are viewed as being somewhat conservative, whereas in the United States the older use of the term liberal has largely been discarded entirely, and the more recent connotative meanings are that liberal means left-wing democrat and conservative means right-wing republican. Luckily, the definitions of left-wing and right-wing tend to remain static in any country where the terms are used, varying only in degree of ideological saturation necessary to warrant the label.

The terms liberal and conservative are thus almost useless in discussions of political philosophy without very clear definitions of them contained within the discussion so that they are understood as matching certain intended meanings in a given instance. Rather, the useful and germane terms for the various political impulses have become authoritarian, elitist, populist, capitalist, communist, libertarian, and anarchist. There are clear dichotomies in this arrangement of terms. Authoritarian political philosophy maintains a need primarily for authority, as opposed to libertarian assertion of a primary concern for liberty. Elitism and populism are, in fact, forms of distribution of political franchise and motive that differentiate between an aristocratic necessity for qualifying characteristics to participate directly in government and a universal, egalitarian participation by the entire population. Elitism and populism also become de facto descriptions of the manner in which the propagandizing of a population takes place. Communist and capitalist orders are quite antithetical to one another, and socialism, often referred to as being opposed to capitalism, actually combines aspects of populist and communist policy with a minimally capitalist assumption of standardized value and property ownership. Anarchy, finally, is not as closely aligned with libertarianism as one might expect, being the antithesis of central authority of any kind and in any measure.

12:36pm: libertarianism from contrast with authoritarianism
Authoritarian and libertarian political philosophies differentiate in the concept on which each depends to organize its policy. While libertarianism is predicated upon the notion that the most important goal of policy is the liberty of individual citizens, authoritarianism aims to achieve a goal of centralized governmental authority over the individual. Each, of course, is ordered so as to maximize the effective social order of a society so that it becomes strong, "successful", and otherwise is benefited by its political form. I speak here of legitimate political policies, as opposed to totalitarianism whose sole goal is the centralization of power even at the risk of the society's solvency itself.

Another manner of defining and differentiating authoritarianism and libertarianism, however, is to note the application of the term sovereignty. Whereas the authoritarian government recognizes the sovereignty — the inviolable right of command over all that exists within its borders, independent of outside pressures — of the state, the libertarian government exists to preserve the sovereignty of the individual. Any sovereignty of a state in libertarian government can only derive from the extent to which it is a necessary outgrowth of the sovereignty of its individual constituents, and any sovereignty of an individual in authoritarian government can only derive from the extent to which it is a necessary outgrowth of the sovereignty of the state.

Libertarian policy must proceed from some formulation of principles for individual liberty. The most commonly recognized of these is the so-called Zero Aggression Principle, which states that a person cannot act directly or through some agency to initiate force through violence or coercion. Many statements of this principle — perhaps most notably the Objectivist formulation — make the prohibition of fraud explicit. The fact of the matter is that an initiating application of force, taken in its most accurate denotative form, includes violence, fraud, and coercion, by necessity of logical application. There is essentially one basic statement of principle at work here from which the others are derived as varying degrees of explication. We can thus take that basic statement — the initiation of force is wrong — as our first formulation of the principles of individual liberty. A second, and less common, formulation is a statement to the effect that the only true sovereign entity is the individual, pursuant to the above discussion of sovereignty.

12:52am: necessities of ethics
It can, I hope, be taken as self-evident by the reader that Descartes' infamous pronouncement "Cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am," is axiomatic. That is, it is absolute and unimpeachable. It is rooted in the concept that in being aware of oneself one has performed the necessary act of proving one's own existence. As a second premise, let us accept the assumption that logic is a necessary and absolute component of what is "real" (to include the validity of identity; A is A, in the Aristotelean vernacular), in addition to the existence of the self. A third absolute must simply be taken on faith to proceed meaningfully with any endeavor, however. It is far from self-evident to the philosopher that he is not alone. Solipsistic denial of anyone or anything outside of the self can be viewed as a logically consistent belief, for there is nothing possible to contradict this. To succumb to solipsistic beliefs, however, is to invalidate anything and everything, leaving no point in continuing. It is from this untenable philosophical position that we proceed to embrace the assumption that we are not alone and that, indeed, there is a great deal of validity to empirical data indicating a world full of people. Thus, we take it as a given, or as a matter of faith, that we live in a social world populated by something more than six billion human beings. This overarching assumption about the state of the world in fact is comprised of a plethora of smaller assumptions, but it is not productive for purposes of this endeavor to question them individually, and I will instead proceed to declare the apparently common reality in all its particulars to be valid.

From here, we come to social interaction, which is the source of the initial requirement for ethical theory. As an ethical requirement for complete absence of social interaction is roughly equivalent to a form of solipsism, we will assume a need or desire for positive social interaction, the shunning of all social interaction being the negative of that. While in individual cases a person may find it rewarding to live in isolation, the very survival of the species requires interaction, and at minimum any individual must enjoy social interactions as a child. If social interaction is indeed necessary or desirable, it then becomes clear that some code of acceptable behavior is a necessity. That code constitutes an ethical system, and the justification behind the validity and appropriateness of such a system is its attendant ethical theory. Thus, we reach the beginning of our definition of a valid ethical system.

An ethical system, to be valid, must be self-supporting. This means that it must support and affirm that which makes its existence necessary. What makes its existence necessary, given the preceding premises, is the facilitation of mutually beneficial social interaction.

3:53pm: quote time again
European intellectuals stayed at their desks, visiting Syracuse only in their imaginations, developing interesting, sometimes brilliant ideas to explain away the sufferings of peoples whose eyes they would never meet. Distinguished professors, gifted poets, and influential journalists summoned their talents to convince all who would listen that modern tyrants were liberators and that their unconscionable crimes were noble, when seen in the proper perspective. Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach.

But he will need something more. He will need to overcome his disgust long enough to ponder the roots of this strange and puzzling phenomenon. What is it about the human mind that made the intellectual defense of tryanny possible in the twentieth century? How did the Western tradition of political thought, which begins with Plato's critique of tyranny in The Republic and his unsuccessful trips to Syracuse, reach the point where it became respectable to argue that tyranny was good, even beautiful? Our historian will need to pose these larger questions, for he will find himself dealing with a gerneral phenomenon, not isolated cases of extravagant behavior.

Mark Lilla

Another good bit from the same essay:
Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceausescu and Milosevic — one's pen runs dry. In the ninteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food-tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived.

Frankly, I'd transcribe the entire essay here if I didn't think it would be a little irresponsible of me to do so. It's the afterword of Lilla's book The Reckless Mind. The entire book is insightful and engaging. I recommend it.

10:20am: It's ironic to me that Chomsky and Derrida, both left-wingnut intellectuals with powerful appeal to the post-modernist American tradition of thought and intense personal emotional investment in the concepts of Marxism-inspired politics, approach their politics from the directions they do.

Noam Chomsky, you see, is a linguist. He has developed theories of linguistics that indicate that human language has certain characteristics that are present in every human language as a necessary outgrowth of the natural, immutable foundations of human thought. Once developed, language then influences human thought — it comes full circle — and the fact and form of language necessarily causes human thought to consist of certain things. From this, Chomsky developed his notions of what it is possible to achieve in human politics, and also what is acceptable ethically. He has folded, spindled, and mutilated his linguistic theories to match a personally motivated need for justification of a very immature view of political philosophy, denying to himself the ethical bankruptcy and impossibility of pragmatic success of Marxism-inspired political goals.

Jaques Derrida, meanwhile, developed a very behaviorist-flavored view of the effect of language on politics. He sees Western linguistic conventions as mandating, by control of thought processes put to words, certain conventions of actions that he represents as tyrannical and dangerous. He developed his ideas to support the notion that only by freeing ourselves from the bondage of Western linguistic conventions can we reach some kind of Promised Land of human interaction in the leftist traditions of postmarxist politics.

In short, Chomsky believes that language mandates and justifies leftist politics, and Derrida believes that language must be "deconstructed" ("Deconstruction" is the name given to the school of thought he developed) to free humanity to pursue leftist politics, which are justified and mandated by what he believes to be true human nature when liberated from the tyranny of Western language.

Each of them, of course, is off his nut. Both of them, in various ways, deny and devalue the sovereignty of the individual. Both of them arrived at their conclusions as part of a long tradition of French and German intellectuals who simultaneously derided political study and made declarations of political necessity. They both engaged in the dangerous and irresponsible activity of refusing to learn the logical realities of political forces while trying to shape them. They have both begun with an assumed, unexamined, seat-of-the-pants moralizing and proceeded to attempt to enforce that moralistic view as the only "right" way to order society. Being quite powerful intellects, they have managed to pull something of a pied piper act, leading a great many credulous admirers down a path paved in good intentions whose destination is all too easily guessed by anyone willing to examine their respective philosophical notions in the harsh light of reality.

Any political philosophy, ethical theorizing, or other systems of thought regarding interaction that declare necessary manners of interacting in which individual sovereignty is rendered irrelevant or obsolete to any notable degree cannot achieve good ends in practice. Chomsky and Derrida followed antithetical paths to reach nearly identical conclusions that place truly democratic equalization above individual sovereignty and created followings that sympathize with these conclusions. Each has, in his own way, lent credence to totalitarian communistic regimes that have murdered millions. Each has, despite what I believe to be a sincere desire to do good for his fellow man, done humanity great ills.

12:50am: recent items of import
"polethical" theory:  about politics and ethics as possibly indivisible studies

a too-narrow focus:  on the subject of genius, monomania, and the danger of philosophical passions

delineation by contrast:  separating political theories by antonymous comparison

utility vs. the deon:  a bit about my problems with utilitarian ethics

restriction vs. imperative:  more on the differences between utilitarian and deontological ethics

four quotes I collected

give yourself up for Lent:  the thought that prompted me to start using this LJ more and apotheon less for a while

4:00am: quick thought about defining characteristics
It suddenly occurs to me, in the midst of my longstanding love affair with attempting to articulate the dividing line between the ethical and the moral, that ethicality is necessarily social, or interactive in nature, whereas morality applies regardless of the presence or absence of others within the context of application. This is, of course, a descriptive differentiation rather than prescriptive, but it seems both accurate and precise, and is thus useful all the same.

The description of these terms as being either social or personal in application is actually quite clearly symptomatic of the underlying principles of the concepts the terms name. The necessarily social application of ethics arises due to the origin of ethics in a necessity for definitions of right and wrong in a state of interaction (i.e. within society). The unwaveringly personal nature of mores arises from the fact of morality's basis in the metaphysical. Whereas metaphysics can certainly limit the range of ethical possibilities, it actually defines moral nature.

An example of this division between ethicality and morality is the analogous division between judgment of act and judgment of thought. Impure thoughts are not the purview of ethics, but they are within the realm of mores. Likewise, moral thought might justify a typifying authoritarian redistribution of wealth, but any valid ethical system cannot abide such a state of affairs because it involves the forcible invasion of a person's life in the name of another, no more ethically valid, life.

3:02am: This LiveJournal and crepusculum are converging, of late. Each is beginning to overlap the other in feel and focus. They may soon end up being essentially copies of one another, and I am beginning to think that I should combine the two. I don't know which one I would eliminate, however, and which I would choose as the continuing LJ. Perhaps I should continue, consciously now, to guide the two into convergence, then create something new to pick up where these two leave off. It's not like either of these sees enough posting by Yours Truly to fully justify keeping both of them going. . . .

1:45am: naok
How can you avoid the shame of being bested by ignorance expertly wielded?

2:57pm: cognitive dissonance betwixt individuals
I'm suddenly disappointed with the ability to reach fundamental consensus with reasonable, intelligent people on what things really mean. I have friends that are facing difficult challenges in their lives that are discarding ideas that, to me, seem perfectly possible and reasonable, as though they are impossible and incompatible with reasonability. There is a lack of understanding in any comfortable sense between people in general, it seesm. There may be points of superficial concurrence, but nobody ever really agrees on anything important or essential. Postmodernists have a tendency to declare this proof that nothing means anything, but I think it is truer to say that we simply have a basic, intractable inability to open ourselves to each others' perspectives and truly understand and identify with the views of others.

Bah, I say. Humbug.

1:12am: definition of terms
a·lim´·er·ent (adj.): not limerent; characterized by a lack of reciprocation-dependent longing

a·lim´·er·ence (n.):
1. the state of lacking reciprocation anxiety
2. affection or admiration not dependent upon romantic reciprocation
3. nonromantic attachment

It's odd how I seem less confined to traditionally platonic expectations than most humans even while feeling distinctly platonic affection for others. I'm amused and, somehow, pleased with my own oddities from time to time.

2:35am: Where did my willingness to sleep go?

11:53pm: The Way to God
I had a conversation over IMs tonight about religion, philosophy, and the character of both Christian and Taoist metaphysics. I've decided to record here the gist of what I said. It is largely unchanged from what I actually said in IMs — altered only to make it one complete essay rather than a collection of individual, discreet comments, interspersed with comments and questions from the person I was talking to. It starts with my euphemised explanation of whether or not I believe in God, and the relation of that to my stated belief system as Taoist.:

( This is not light reading. If you are very interested in philosophy and theology, you might find this interesting. If not, you may want to go back to reading my lighter material the next time I post, and simply ignore this. Warning: THIS WILL MAKE YOU THINK, and it may even make you angry. )

cross-posted to apotheon

4:25am: I thought I was going to bed, but I seem to have a couple of things to attend to, first.

I am quite satisfied with the workings of serendipity this night/morning.

I have a general need, it seems, to cultivate a more "normal" sleep schedule, and yet I seem to do my best work in the dead of night between midnight and three or four in the morning. Some part of it, I think, has to do with the lack of life near me during that time.

I think, perhaps, that the social-animal aspect of humanity is more emphasized than we realize, and more sensitive. I feel as though the lack of active human life near me is palpable, on some level, during the wee hours. It is as though I can sense that the city sleeps (in contrast with its daily bustle). Even when there is nobody talking to me on IMs, it is dark out at 9 PM, nobody else is in the house, no traffic is passing, the telephone isn't ringing, and there is no sound from any television or stereo, I still feel nowhere near as alone as when the hour is slightly past midnight. I know on some visceral level that people sleep, that there is less company in this world near me, and as a result the primeval reactions and existential despairs that arise in utter isolation begin to creep into my perspective.

I think I would be a prolific poet again if I allowed myself to be during these hours. I find, however, that I focus more on finding my center, understanding my completeness, and recovering balance in the Tao . . . or I simply shift into an analytical mode and type something like this. My artistic streak is most well-fed when I feel most alone in this world.

This night was not an example of that. Rather, I had a very rewarding telephone conversation, several interesting conversations through IMs, and a great deal of fun in general. I did not find myself feeling alone, perhaps because so much of my time was spent in discussing issues of limerency with a kindred spirit.

kindred spirit . . .

It is good to be able to say that about a few people in my life.

. . . and sometimes, the timing is perfect.

2:28am: stumbling toward shared harmony
I am, for the first time in my life, faced with the suspicion that I am falling into two entirely different sorts of love with two different people at the same time.

One: agape
Two: limerence

The comparisons and contrasts are startling and absorbing. I'm intrigued by the possibilities and consequences of these.

Each is only a suspicion, at this point. Well . . . I suppose that at least an infatuative limerence is a foregone conclusion in one case, and certainly there is a genuine affection that cannot be denied in the other. As for the full-blown "True" aspect of each variety of Love . . . we shall have to wait and see. In any case, I think it is all for the good.

I really do. It's a good feeling.

6:49pm: I've taken to reading one "chapter" of a Cleary translation of the Tao Te Ching before bed each night. This is the first time I've read a Cleary translation of anything. I must say . . . I'm somewhat disappointed. His phrasings in translation seem judgmental and weighted with personal bias. Maybe my opinion will change.

1:28am: I have been thinking about it too much. I have been worrying about it too much. I have been trying too hard to find something to hold on to. Let go; let come what may.

She is beautiful, and so is life, and so am I. These are not difficulties we face, but simply the characteristics of the way before us. We would not know our way if not for the characteristics that exist to show it to us.

In time, we will find our way, she and I, whether it be one between us or two. With that, I am at peace.

a door clicks open
the stillness bestirs itself
quiet echoes fade

2:10am: One does not choose to devalue objects, or to ignore their value, in choosing to cease to grasp at them. One simply realizes that when we perceive "objects" we are already grasping at what does not exist, for all so-called objects are in fact manifestations of processes of change. A desk is only a desk until that process has moved on — it is only a desk because we label it so. When the process has moved on enough that our label no longer applies, it ceases to be a desk. The transitory nature of "objects" is revealed.

It is difficult to let go, not because it is difficult to discard notions of the value of objects, but because it is difficult to recognize the fact that there are no objects — only phenomena, where processes inersect, interact, and interpenetrate. I felt a great deal of consternation at the idea that losing my computer to some physical catastrophe would mean the loss of much that I have recorded there — notes, writings, ideas, and collected trivia that could never fully be replaced. It seemed to me that I should see past this attachment to things, somehow.

Finally, I realized in an epiphanic moment that, as process, this collected data has a function, and that my intent for this function to lead to specific directions for this state of process is not where I grasped at that which cannot be held. The moment of frustration arose in the fact that I forgot that the process only has value in that it leads to changes. I shall move toward these "objects" serving their purpose, that the process may move on. Thus, I will not be trapped by my attempts to hold on to ephemeral phenomena that only exist for the span of their occurrence.

It is not any given moment's measure of the state of progress that we should value, but the growth and change — the state of becoming — that is worthy of value.