Can we prevent mass killings?

Highly publicized shootings in mosques, synagogues, high schools and work places have naturally led to questions of whether there is any way to end these events. The title of this essay was deliberately chosen. It intentionally was not titled "Can we end mass shootings?" The answer to that specific question is "probably not," since it is conceivable, and even likely that highly motivated and clever perpetrators would eventually be able to defeat any systems and strategies meant to deter them. this essay is also not limited to shootings, since there are other methods of mass killing, e.g. ramming with automobiles, arson, poison gas, stabbing, bombing, etc, that are logically of as much concern as killings perpetrated with a firearm. One particularly illustrative case is that of Eliot Rodger, who killed six people near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014. Of the people whom he killed, he shot 3 and stabbed three to death. It makes no logical sense to parse the killings by the weapon used.

In addressing the question, it may helpful to divide the motives of shooters into two simple categories, those in which specific people were the planned targets, and those in which they were not. A mafia hit, for example would fall into the first category, as would a killing seeking revenge on a particular individual. These are occasionally mass casualty events, as when a former spouse kills his or her family. In general, those killings, multiple casualty or otherwise, that involve a specific target seem easier to understand, because there is at least a nexus between the victim and the perpetrators perceived grievance.

The second category, those killings that do not involve a specific target may themselves be subdivided into two classes: those in which the killings are the direct goal of the perpetrator's act, e.g. a bank robber killing strangers during his get-away, and those in which the killing of strangers is an end in itself. This latter category includes acts of terrorism and most school shootings, and the type that seems to cause the most popular angst. These seem to be, to degree irrational or capricious. The ultimate goal of such acts is not the neutralization of the victims, but the psychological response that the wider community will have to the killing. In essence, these mass killings are a malignant form of communication. What is intended to be communicated is the disdain, loathing, and grievance that the killer feels toward amorphous groups. Adam Lanza, the Newtown school shooter, was quite explicit that he loathed humanity in general.

The observation that the more vexing type of mass killing is a form of communication is useful, because often it is not the first time that the perpetrators have attempted to communicate their psychological motives. They leave social media trails, videos, manifestos, etc. They undergo psychiatric treatment, and describe fantasies that others may find disturbing. In other words, they raise red flags. The question thus becomes, are these red flags specific enough to identify and intervene before killers shoot, burn, bomb, etc. innocent strangers.

Many of the pre-event communications of killers such as Eliot Rodger, and the Columbine killers, contain similar characteristics, the most obvious being an explicit hatred of people that the killer does not even know. When we consider the capabilities of artificial intelligence, which at base is simple a sophisticated and objective method of finding patterns, it seems plausible that we can in fact identify traits associated with psychopaths and mass killers. Algorithms target advertising based on social media entries, create implicit psychological profiles of consumers, citizens, potential voters etc., and do so with reasonable effectiveness. The question then arises whether such technologies could be used to examine a person's writings, psychological history, family history, discipline history, social profile, etc., to assess the risk of that person becoming a mass killer.

Even if it were practical to use personal data to assemble risk profiles for individuals, (and given the similarities between the pre-killing communications of known mass killers, it seems that there would be a reasonable degree of sensitivity if not specificity), the uncomfortable issue of profiling arises. What we would be doing in effect is profiling people to assess their risk of committing mass murder. This creates social, political, moral and ethical issues. Even if we could identify potential killers before they act, there may be a heavy price in doing so. It would seem, at least to a first approximation that we can prevent some mass killings by identifying potential killers before they act, but are afraid to let the profiling genie out of the bottle. Thus we focus on guns, and religion and violent video games, etc. There is a price we are reluctant to pay, so we console ourselves with cosmetic, but ineffective alternatives.

Demonization

A post below expresses the observation that identity politics is behind most of history's great atrocities. The Holocaust, Trail of Tears, Cambodian Killing Fields, Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, Rwandan Genocide, etc. had their genesis in the notion that it was legitimate to demonize certain groups and therefore kill them. It is discouraging therefore, in the aftermath of a mass shooting, to find political opportunists advocating the demonization of others; the NRA, civil libertarians, Republicans, firearm owners etc. It is puzzling how the irony of the argument seems to evade its proponents, that demonization of others is consistent with the logic and motives of the shooters. It takes a measure of hatred to kill strangers for indiosyncratic grievances and it likewise takes a measure of hatred to demonize strangers because of their beliefs and political views.

It should be obvious that the way to address a crime in a grieving community is not to further divide that community and feed us-versus-them antagonism. Appeals to hatred are not effective means of conciliation, nor of understanding tragedy.

To be certain, when one confronts a political opponent in a restaurant, the confrontation is directed at demonizing the person, not any ideas they may have or interests they support; one does not publish the addresses of ideas in hopes that mobs will harass them, nor try to get ideas fired from their jobs These are personal affronts directed toward persons, not ideas. These tactics are tactics of demonization and the lineage of this tactic is an unhappy, and frankly evil one. Demonization must be recognized for what it is: targeted hatred. It should be called out and deligitimized as a political tactic.

Prediction

In 20 years it will be generally accepted that the business models of Google and Facebook were unethical from the outset.

Stability and Dissent

Some facts about the world we live in are so obvious that we do not notice them, and consequently do not contemplate their implications. One such fact is that all stable systems have process that oppose change; i.e. that tend to return the systems to states of equilibrium when perturbed. This is true of all types of systems: economic, chemical, social, biological, physical, etc. Stable systems remain so even of the point of equilibrium changes, because the restorative process remain effective. One consequence of this fact is that systems for which the restoring effect is eliminated tend to become unstable, and an area where this is particularly dangerous is in political systems.

Regimes, typically of authoritarian or dictatorial inclination, that suppress any form of opposition or dissent become unstable and eventually fail. This is readily observed in history, which gives examples of the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge, the Third Reich, etc. Political dissent is a mechanism that tends to restore perturbations in political systems, and thus act to stabilize them. This does not mean that political methods of persuasion cannot be used to change the points of equilibrium, for example from more conservative to more progressive and vice versa, but to assert that the system will tend to excess and instability in the absence of an effective method of dissent. Dissenting views, even if highly unfavored in particular eras are likely to contain elements of wisdom that are crucial to long term survival of effective polities.

A similar concept applies not only to political systems but to individual ideologues. The hard-liners,, the Pol-Pots, and Robespierres, and Che Guevaras and Trotskys are the ones who come to bad ends, easily being outmaneuvered by more pragmatic rivals. Fanatacism does not lend itself well to stability, and the inability to accommodate dissent is a regularly fatal flaw in political movements.

Skepticism and scientific validity

An Australian scientist recently may the following comments regarding the crisis in scientific publishing:

Financial and career incentives keep researchers on a treadmill, churning out papers.
We cannot know how many of the 1.6 million or so papers now added every year to the Web of Science database are flawed as a consequence...

What this quote highlights is the skewing of scientific research and, not trivially, scientific conclusions by funding opportunities, access to publication and career considerations unrelated to the underlying science. This phenomenon is observed across all scientific fields including medical research, climate science, biological sciences etc. The undesired consequences of this include popular adoption of shabby science and political lobbies for preferred narratives.

The recent past provides many examples of sloppy and non-rigorous science that resulted in significant consequences and which proved to be ultimately wrong. Silicone breast implants were associated with development of lupus, causing the bankruptcy of Dow Corning, and subsequently the scientific link was disproven. Similarly, the McMartin preschool case involved the pseudoscience of "recovered memories" that resulted in criminal convictions that were based on bogus and unscrupulous "science."

What can be said about the flawed science mentioned above is that it's adoption occurs in the setting of insufficient scientific rigor. Specifically, claims are presented as scientific without being subjected to rigorous skepticism and challenge. This is especially obvious with regard to climate science. The state of the science right now is analogous to defenses of the geocentric universe model. Proponents of that erroneous belief, backed by ecclesiastical authorities, began proposing all manner of implausible tweaks to the theory in order to maintain the underlying thesis. Global warming advocates, when confronted with new data that does not conform to previous theory are now proposing patches and sub theories much like geocentric universe proponents proposed the theory of epicycles. The discipline of climate science suffers significantly from a mis-allocation of financial and political resources to only one side of the debate, and totally nonscientific treatment of dissenting views. Simply stated, the current state of climate science life lacks sufficient rigor to be considered valid.

This is not to say that global warming proponents cannot be correct. Is to point out that the basis for their claims is not scientific. The nonsense regarding "scientific consensus" is not legitimate. The "scientific consensus" was previously that beta blockers were contraindicated in patients with congestive heart failure. This consensus was proven wrong. One can only wonder the current state of our understanding if skeptics of the then accepted consensus had been subjected to the same bullying, deplatforming and professional sanctions currently encountered by climate change skeptics.

Activism and seriousness.

Contemporary public discourse is remarkable for one paradoxical type of participant. This is the grimly unserious ideologue, the fairweather fanatic. Many of the most vocal activists are notable both for their unseriousness and their unawareness of it. This is easily seen, for example, with regard to "climate change." Whatever one may think of the issues or merits of a particular claim one cannot help but notice how unserious climate change activists are. If they were serious, they would support actual science pertaining to the subject. Instead they promote and refer to scientific-sounding claims that are not scientific. Actual science would not seek to censor conflicting views from scientific publications. This is not serious science. Claims of warming based on climate modeling would be self-conscious about "correction factors," and "data smoothing." There would be no reference to "consensus" as a surrogate for scientific rigor. Such conduct is not serious. Activists who do believe that the Earth faces CO2-caused climate catastrophe within the next couple of decades would not be finicky about the use of nuclear power as a replacement for fossil fuels. Climate change celebrities would not jet around to media events to demonstrate how dedicated they are to the cause. This is not serious.

This same lack of seriousness is also observed in discourse regarding "toxic masculinity," "white privilege," and "cultural appropriation." None of these things are subjects that lend themselves to thoughtful discussion, and none of them are starting points for people who are serious about their views. These terms are tactical rather than descriptive. They are meant to convey information regarding the character of groups of people rather than characteristics of actual phenomena. They are introduced into public discourse not as perspectives by which to facilitate discussion, but rather are hostile devices by which to foreclose it. People who claim to feel unsafe because of the opinions of another are not serious. People who imply that words are violence are not serious. They think they are, but they are not. Equating disagreement with "hate" is not serious, nor is implying that someone is hateful by characterizing honest opinions as a phobia. The people who think that anything that hurts their feelings, or conflicts with their world-view is racist, or fill-in-the-blank phobic are unserious.

This lack of seriousness is, in essence, playacting. The modern activist thinks that there is a casting call for the eco-warrior, provided it is does not involve too much effort or inconvenience. There is an assumption that someone is needed to play the roles of the early civil rights activists who contended with actual violence, but who now may do so by merely re-tweeting a hash tag.

Comfort, affluence, and complacency makes it easy to "speak truth to power" provided that nearly everyone agrees with you. It makes it easy to pretend to be brave and virtuous about changing the world, when what it really does is to allow people to play-act roles in romantic, and historic dramas while being, at heart, unserious.

Identity politics, atrocities and humanity

The assortment of atrocities, genocide, and man-made human misery of the last 150 years has an astonishingly consistent origin. It is not difficult to come up with a  partial list of such occurrences, such as the Taiping rebellion, the Trail of Tears, both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Rwandan genocide, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields. What each of these has in common is that they can trace their origins to the destructive results of identity politics. Even in situations where it is convenient to blame war and the resulting human disasters on religious belief, it is not the belief itself that matters, but the use of it to identify discrete, conflicting groups that is crucial.

It is easy to separate human beings into identifiable groups based upon racial traits, religious beliefs, political affiliations, cultural practices etc. and use these resulting groups to define the targets of mankind's more primitive and destructive instincts. This phenomenon is the result of a very basic and unjustified inversion of priorities. Simply stated, the great number of wars, persecutions, atrocities and genocide result from attitudes that we attach to subdivisions of humanity rather than to humanity itself. It seems to be rather curious that a person's dignity and basic rights do not arise from the fact of being human, but rather from being a particular type of human. There would seem to be little compelling argument in favor of the proposition that an individual person's significance, right to existence and pursuit of meaning is not assumed by the mere fact of being human, or even what that person does or does not do, but rather is a consequence of the groups to which such person is perceived to belong. Human life would seem to be much simpler, less prone to conflict and the horrors to which human ingenuity may subject it if that's simple inversion of priorities were corrected, i.e. that the fact of being human takes precedence over any subsequent categorization into discrete groups, and were to be given precedence in determining how humans treat each other.

It does not seem to be a prerequisite that humans love each other as humans in order to avoid the undeniable atrocities related to identity politics. What is determinative, and apparently not innate, is that individual human beings assume that other human beings are entitled to respect, without reference to how people identify themselves or others. Love is an emotion with its own objects and influences. Respect is more a matter of volition; we can choose how we treat each other. It would seem to be more intuitive to respect the humanity of a transgendered person, or someone with particular religious beliefs, or background without first trying to determine if such respect is either required or prohibited by taxonomy. This would seem to be especially obvious in light of the fact that whatever groups one may belong to is frequently a matter of chance. Furthermore, the number of ways that humanity may be divided is practically endless. An individual person may be a member of any number of groups that are simultaneously favored, disfavored, privileged and despised. It is difficult to imagine how such a circumstance will not result in chaos and eventual resort to violence.

It may have been reasonable in the past, when resources were scarce, and starvation, privation and poverty were the natural state of mankind, that conflict would be inevitable, and that categorizing potential rivals into easily identifiable groups had some merit. There may have been a distinct advantage belonging to a particular team. It would now seem however that humankind has reached the point that it is reasonable to question the underlying assumptions. Is there any point to discriminating between one's own group and the other when the only perceived benefit is the exercise of power or persecution? Or is it the case that humanity has advanced to the point where being part of one group in existential struggle against others is a vestigial delusion and unnecessary? Has humanity progressed to the point where the mere fact of being human is something extraordinary and to be cherished?

The problems of capitalism

The problems of capitalism arise from the same source as those of socialism: the excessive concentration of control of capital. In the case of socialism, this controlled is exercised by the government and necessarily degenerates into unhealthy reliance on ban's, mandates, and the use of force. In the case of capitalism, capital is controlled by private individuals and corporations, and when capital is excessively concentrated, those entities can engage in conduct that negates the benefits of capitalism. Specifically, they can engage in anticompetitive behavior, counteracting one of the optimizing mechanisms by which capitalism produces progress, as well as manipulating markets and thus abnormally skewing the value of commodities.

As stated previously, capitalism is on the whole much better for human progress and is socialism, which inevitably becomes tyrannical and oppressive. It is also excessively prone to corruption. This latter characteristic is also a weakness of capitalism, as it is the control of capital itself that provides the corrupting influence. Capitalism also is subject to an instability in that the concentration of control of capital facilitates even greater concentration. The best defense against this is increased access to capital in smaller, more focused entities that can exploit weaknesses that inevitably arise from the concentration of capital. This is consistent with the concept of subsidiarity as described by Distributists. T go to sleephe difficulty encountered with subsidiary arises from matters of implementation and will be discussed subsequently.

Abstractions, abortion and struggle

It is interesting to note how  progressive ideas are based upon abstractions. From micro aggressions, to cultural appropriation, equality, inclusion, etc., much progressive discourse involves concepts that are poorly defined, infused with unresolvable subjectivity, and that change from time to time and context to context. Occasionally however this penchant for abstractions wanders into realms where the abstractions conflict with actual experience and with reality. One such area is abortion.

The idea of abortion is much easier to accept when the conceptus is microscopic and has not yet developed outward characteristics of a human being. The description of an embryo as a "clump of cells" makes the idea that it is a human life seem itself like an abstraction. However, this perspective becomes less reasonable as an embryo develops into a fetus, with a heartbeat and developing organs, fingers and a face. At some point, it becomes necessary to identify what allows discrimination between a fetus and other vulnerable humans worthy of protection and dignity, such as Jewish babies carried in their mother's arms to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Upon what basis do we distinguish the death of one as a private matter, and the death of the other is a crime against humanity? A more fundamental question would be why do we bother considering crimes against humanity at all?

The regard for human life is a characteristic of civilized societies. It is the basis of human dignity and the fundamental principle by which such things as genocide, inhumane treatment, torture, and rape are condemned. The regard for human life and human dignity is not merely a convention or cultural fad. There ares element of instinct, and natural human decency that predispose humans to be repulsed by atrocity. Even the Nazis realized the necessity of hiding their crimes. There is a reason why most humans have well-defined traits of empathy and sympathy. It is part if human nature to be disturbed by the suffering of another, even a stranger. It seems intuitive that there is some point in the development of a being that will naturally become a young  human, at which is worthy of the empathy and consideration of others. While some people have argued that the determining factor is the ability of the fetus to survive outside of the mother's womb, others draw the line when the baby draws its first breath, and others have proposed that it is the point at which the fetus can feel pain. There is no universally accepted discriminant that settles the point. There is however no reasonable argument that no such point exists.

It is instructive to note that other forms of suffering evoke human feelings of empathy and cause distress to those who witness them. One circumstance that seems quite potent in eliciting empathy and sympathy is the idea of a creature, whether an animal or human, struggling to survive. Struggle resonates emotionally with healthy humans. The idea of something fighting for its life is very effective at dispelling indifference to suffering. It does seems reasonable to feel for a fetus, a developing human, from the point that it is able to struggle in an attempt to live, even though its chances of survival are very small, and even though it struggles against powers that are trying to destroy it. This is the point when abortion has departed the realm of abstraction and begins to weigh on the conscience of decent people. There is no other way to describe the destruction of something struggling to survive as anything other than violence. Struggle is not an abstraction. Reality will not tolerate antiseptic and obfuscating language of "medical procedures," and "reproductive freedom." These latter phrases are used to try and perpetuate the idea that what started as an abstract argument regarding the humanity of an embryo should continue to be treated as such even though the beating heart and unmistakably human form belies that argument. This is why ultrasound images of the fetus can dissuade mothers contemplating abortion from that decision.

It should be an uncomfortable fact that an argument for aborting a fetus just before delivery, where it is capable of struggling against the violence that will end its life, could apply to allowing newborns to die, or allowing children to be euthanized if they become disabled by accident or disease. True believers will make such arguments invoking language such as "burdens," and "hardship." Such language is uncomfortable and disquieting because there is no intellectually honest way of distinguishing it from the notion of "leben unwerten leben," or life unworthy of life, a precept of Nazi inhumanity.

It is conceded that both sides of the abortion debate have good-faith beliefs in their positions. There are however extremists on both sides, and in the case of some pro-abortion activists they have become overly exuberant in trying to expand the boundaries of their interests. One would expect that extremists can be found who have no qualms about infanticide, just as there are extremists that have no qualms about genocide. Empathy and decency are not equally distributed among human beings. One can in good faith acknowledge the pro-choice perspective, even if one disagrees with it, and argue vehemently that a society that permits babies to be killed just before or as the are being born, has gone too far. We will always have Kermit Gosnells, and those who support them, just as we will always have inhumane, obsessive and psychopathic people. We are under no obligation to accord them a presumption of good faith.

Traitism

The availability of home genetic testing kits has made it possible for large numbers of people to explore their ethnic and racial backgrounds. These tests sometimes yield surprising results, and people find that their genetic backgrounds differ from their assumed family histories and beliefs about their heritage. For example, someone who's name, family lore, and known histories are Italian are surprised to learn that their genetic origin is only 20 or 30% "Italian." While such findings may result in subjective surprise, the phenomenon itself is not unexpected. Over the centuries, persons whose remote family origins were from such places as Gaul, central or eastern Europe, northern Africa, Greece or the Middle East may have had occasion to live in Italy. While someone whose family has Italian roots that go back tens of generations understandably considers himself to be of Italian origin, that period of time is insufficient to Italicize genes that originated elsewhere. One would not expect a person who traces both parental lineages to early settlers of Alabama to be genetically Alabamian.

If one accords the theory of evolution, and origin of species credibility, one may suspect that very few people belong to a formal race at all. It may be recalled that Darwin's opus "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" had a subtitle, and this was "The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." Putting aside for the moment that the concept of a "favored race" is disquieting in contemporary discourse, the theory remains that race arises in populations that interact in a geographically defined area with a relatively stable environment over many generations. If a person is able to trace both parental lineages to such an area and environment over hundreds of generations it is reasonable to ascribe a defined "race" to that person. If, however, in such history an ancestor had origins that did not fill these conditions the concept of race makes less sense. The notion of "mixed race" would seem to be of little utility since there are virtually innumerable ways that such mixing may occur. This would seem to create problems for modern racial issues since only full siblings might be expected to have the same racial background. If all of a person's ancestors save one, through 50 generations, came from the same region of Scotland, it matters if that single exception occurred 22 as opposed to 20 generations ago, at least in terms of the fundamental idea of race.

The foregoing is significant only to the extent that one attaches significance to strict details of race, what race means and where race comes from. This however is not apparent from contemporary discussions of race. When people discuss matters of race, to distinguish the experiences of what our only colloquially referred to as races, what is actually of importance are racial traits. Barack Obama, whose mother was white, or at least appeared white, noted that if he was trying to hail a cab, he was black. This notion gets amplified when issues that are nominally racial are infused with the notion of "lived experience." If someone has significant outward racial traits, suggesting for example that they are from a far Eastern race, and their life experiences are culturally and ethnically Japanese, it may seem quite natural for them to adopt racial interests that are associated with the Japanese, even though their genetic background may include a significant amount of Swedish or German DNA. The person's subjective experience is Japanese; however what is perceived by others are traits. When we discuss treating people differently based on race, we are discussing no more than treating them differently based on racial traits. Let's call it traitism and realize that racial traits vary even among persons considered to be of the same race.

It may seem that this is a merely academic or semantic discussion, however it does have some bearing on the way racial issues are treated in contemporary discourse. For example, when certain academicians talk about racial disparities in intelligence, personality and behavior, these discussions would appear to make unjustified assumptions about how inherently isolated races are. Attempts to correlate traits with racial characteristics would seem to be exceedingly difficult given that a person of one racial background can produce fertile offspring by mating with someone from a different racial background. The genetic variation introduced by sexual reproduction makes one wonder why someone would try to detect variances in populations that are not clearly defined.

This also has implications for the epithet of "racism" since the concept of race is too malleable for serious people to use as a basis of discrimination. As mentioned, racial traits are therefore used as a surrogate, but even these traits very significantly, even among siblings. The upshot of this is that solemn conversations about race, racial disparities, and other significant issues produce diminishing returns. If one were to treat someone who has one quarter African ancestry the same as someone who has 100% African ancestry, the matter of African ancestry would seem to be rather irrelevant. This is in fact most likely the case, as the concept of human dignity and basic humanity does not require, nor even accommodate, considerations of either race or racial traits. The more that people of different racial backgrounds or with different racial traits interact and produce offspring, the more ridiculous discussion of "race" become. The lazy epithets of "racism" or "racist" would become anachronisms if people would attend first to respecting and recognizing the humanity of the people they encounter in their everyday lives regardless of race, rather than indulging in abstract doctrines and identity politics grievances.

The undesirable consequences of Twitter

Damage to a brain structure known as the amygdala can result in a spectrum of social disabilities. Conditions such as Asperger's syndrome and autism, as well as less common conditions such as Kluber-Bucy syndrome are thought to involve some degree of damage or abnormality in the amygdala. One such condition is known as social-emotional  anagnosia. This is defined as the inability to perceive facial expressions, body language and voice intonations. Since these are part of normal communication and social interaction, the person with social-emotional anagnosia has a disability with regard to these functions.

The important thing to note is that inability to perceive facial expressions, body language and voice intonations results in a disability or impairment when verbal communication is limited. One may read a book magazine article, in which careful exposition by the author adequately compensates for the lack of non-verbal communication. What follows the word "however" often serves to mitigate any confusion that may have been caused by what preceded it.

If we take limited access to verbal clarification and combine it with an inability to convey non-verbal communication, we would expect to have impaired social functioning. Yet, this is in effect what we have with Twitter. This combined with the remoteness of a keyword an Internet connection from its intended audience, and one has a platform that is skewed toward boorishness, inanity, and pseudo-courageous provocation. The format of twitter makes it easier to express the less admirable aspects of one's personality then it does those that are more praiseworthy. It is easier to express destructive and hateful views, because those require less sophisticated diction, then it is to convey more constructive and worthwhile thoughts. This is particularly so when Twitter is used as a political platform. Ironically, although Twitter is ill-suited to conveying subtleties in the emotions of the writer, it is quite good at provoking base emotional responses in its audience. This is of very little benefit in rational political discourse.

The problems of socialism

A CRITIQUE OF THE CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF SOCIALISM

The contemporary resurgence of socialist language in political discourse is curious given the unpleasant history of that doctrine. There are likely many reasons for this resurgence, some being characteristics of the ideology itself and others being characteristics of the population that adopts it. The former includes pleasant sounding aspirations such as equality and justice, and the latter consists of such things as confusion and ignorance regarding socialism's past. One would think that a working knowledge of the socialist histories of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist People's Republic of China or the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela would create obstacles to adoption of socialist theories. It is likely that there is a significant measure of ignorance regarding the body count, general misery and economic failure associated with 20th century socialist regimes. However, ignorance in itself is not persuasive. Proponents of socialism promote their doctrine by defining the atrocities away from other elements of socialist beliefs. Nazi aggression and genocide, the Holodomor, the gulags, the Killing Fields, and the Cultural Revolution are either not acknowledged or presented as historical accidents coinciding with socialist practice.

It is not unfair to say that history has not been kind to socialism and vice versa. It is not hyperbole to note that the results of socialist government have been simply evil. It is also reasonable, and in fact necessary, to conclude that many of the failures of socialism were due to inherent weaknesses in its doctrines and philosophies. Stated simply, the history of socialism as a large scale governing principle is one of misery and failure. There must be something other than the objective historical record and semantic skill in describing what socialism is and is not that accounts for its ability to insinuate itself into current political thought.

The theory of Socialism has much to recommend it if one is willing to neglect its practical effects. The ideal of Socialism seems to address a problem that needs addressing, i.e. the observable inequitable distribution of resources and wealth within a society. Socialism, with its de-emphasis of competition appears to promote a more cohesive and agreeable community. It also has an intuitive appeal in that it presents as an extrapolation of the types of behaviors that are necessary to succeed in a society and which are taught in early childhood: sharing, concern for others, and empathy for the struggling and disadvantaged. In a related manner there are many socialist institutions that appear to function well within non-socialist societies. There are also practical appeals that, theoretically at least, endorse a socialist approach. For example, using the authority and access to force that is conferred upon government provides a shortcut to constructing a social safety net. Finally, there is a defect in capitalism, against which socialism is frequently counter posed, and that is described in Chesterton's observation that "too much capitalism results in too few capitalists." Capitalism creates a problem of concentration of wealth as a by-product of economic growth, a problem that socialism pretends to solve.

When these appeals are made to a audience that is largely comfortable, and in fact complacent given the relative affluence and lack of existential threats, it is easy to indulge uncritical acceptance of them if for no other reason than the self flattery that results from the adoption of nice-sounding, and theoretically virtuous ideas. Until the unpleasant realities that intruded upon earlier socialist experiments arise, socialism can remain fashionable. Socialism will always appear more attractive as an idea than it becomes in reality. This is not a defect of either socialism or its proponents; it simply reflects the truth that ideas may promise more than does experience, and that one is naturally prone to aspire to more than what the world will ultimately deliver. Anyone who cannot imagine a utopia, even with no prospect of ever achieving it, does not have much of an imagination. Thus the appeal of the socialist ideal is compelling even though it is false.

Some of the appeal of socialism is due to its proponents selectively disavowing socialism's past failures while also adopting successes that are not socialist. It is common to hear that the mass deaths that accompanied the socialist enterprises of the 20th century and the ongoing economic catastrophe that is Venezuela were not part of socialism per se but rather an artifact of circumstance. In a similar way it is claimed that public financing of endeavors such as roads, schools and public services are species of socialism when they are in fact methods of allocating the benefits of private enterprise to public purposes. Medicare for example is not socialized medicine, as it is a method of financing health care that is provided by a variety of public, private, charitable, for-profit and nonprofit entities. Robust public enterprises, such as are seen in Scandinavian countries, are presented as triumphs of socialism even though the economic systems that produce the ability to fund them are market-based and reliant on protection of property rights. 

The inevitable confusion that results from these loose definitions of what is and is not socialism makes socialism appear more appealing that it otherwise would be. The disclaiming of responsibility for socialism's more spectacular human and economic catastrophes, as well as its claimed association with enterprises that are simply good public policy, but not socialism, do not function to hone socialism into a useful doctrine; rather they obscure the inherent defects of the ideology.

The observable fact that socialism in general, as opposed to isolated examples of socialist institutions within larger non-socialist ones, is unable to produce the socialist ideal is due to fundamental defects rather than poor execution. The benefits of ideal socialism are often highlighted against the real-world drawbacks of capitalism, thus offering socialism as a preferred alternative. In practice, capitalism does what capitalism is intended to better than socialism does what it is intended to do. There are certainly some things that capitalism leaves undone but these deficiencies are not endorsements of socialism.

The fundamental and unremediable flaw of socialism is that it lacks an optimizing mechanism. The complementary flaw in capitalism is that it's optimizing mechanisms work too well. Capitalism contains two such mechanisms that are largely responsible for the human progress and improved quality of life experienced by humankind over the preceding three centuries. These are the market and competition. The market is the mechanism by which matters of value are communicated among members of a society such that the total value of items in that market are increased by the transactions that occur there. One party to a transaction gives up something that is of less value to him for something that he values more and the other party to the transaction does likewise. The market is indispensable to people improving their lives because the value of a particular item is subjective and varies among different persons. Markets allow people to obtain those things which are most valuable to them, as opposed to acquiring those which an authority tells them should be valuable to them.

Competition can be understood by comparing it with collaboration or cooperation. These latter processes are most useful when allocating limited resources, for which hoarding would be disadvantageous to the larger society. Competition is an optimizing mechanism for processes. It is the method that nature has chosen to achieve optimization in evolution. It is also the process by which one identifies the most and least promising methods for accomplishing a particular end. It is the process that allows one to determine what is best with respect to objective criteria, rather than sentiment, ephemeral emotion or fashion. Furthermore while cooperation and collaboration may initially provide a rational basis of allocation of limited resources, competition may produce a process that most efficiently uses those same resources.

Socialism lacks the objective processes of optimization and improving efficiency. Instead, it seeks to determine relative merit and improve processes by planning and resort to "experts." This creates an endless regression of shortcomings in that there is no optimizing mechanism for planning or choosing experts. More particularly, there is no optimizing mechanism for choosing who should be given control of the process, and those who attain such positions often do so because of abilities largely irrelevant to the claims of the socialist ideal. Particular attention should be paid to selection of leadership. Human history has not yet identified the optimal mechanism for choosing leaders. Large institutions with ancient and successful histories, such as the Catholic Church have taken approaches that were not universally successful. Democracy has some laudable attributes and some drawbacks as a method for conferring power and authority. Native American Indian tribes, hereditary monarchies, Mafia families, and various other sorts of organizations have used different and often changing methods for selecting leaders. The lack of emergence of an optimal method for selecting leaders is not surprising. If a person attains the position of leader to which he has long aspired, such as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, or Mao Zedong, he would not be friendly to optimizing processes that may depose him as not being the optimal leader. In this circumstance these leaders attention must be allocated to remaining the leader and to accomplishing whatever agenda the leader may prefer at any given time. It should not escape notice that many of the socialist regimes that were associated with mass death and economic calamity had leaders whose terms were limited only by their deaths or forceful removal following war.

The success of socialism depends on leadership whose selection is, in reality, not based on their ability to bring about the ideals of socialism. Those who successfully obtain leadership do so largely on their ability to exploit political weaknesses and understand inefficient and insular bureaucratic machinery, rather than their ability to improve the overall quality of life of others. The inherent dependence of socialism on bureaucracy is another weakness of the doctrine. Bureaucracies have interests beyond their stated purpose. The longer they exist, the more self perpetuating they become for their own sake. They become risk averse, complacent, inefficient and possessed of interests that do not coincide with a larger society. This has the tendency to stifle innovation. In a similar manner it neglects the fact that innovation and progress often involve significant risk-taking and does not compensate people for the assumption of risk. Socialism in fact does the opposite, encouraging risk avoidance.

One of the most pernicious and profound defects of socialism is that incentives within a socialist system are incompatible with human nature. The fundamental point was expressed by Schopenhauer's observation that a man can do what he wants but cannot want what he wants. A person is motivated by those things that he inherently values. and he expends his time and resources in the manner that is most meaningful to him. This applies to truly selfish interests as well as to public minded ones, such as charitable giving and service in the military during time of national emergency. These are things that arise from the interplay of socializing instincts, self-interest, personality, spiritual beliefs and how each interacts with the community around him. They are not taught, and cannot be instilled on command. The socialist cannot tell a man what is important to him and expect it to be so. This is why black markets arise in planned economies and why socialist enterprises of any scale, such as the Israeli kibbutzim and Plymouth Plantation were forced to reform their economic models.

The socialist enterprise relies on appeals to what the socialist thinks that the people should want rather than what they actually do want. Since these appeals predictably do not work, the socialist authority necessarily must resort to threats of and use of government force. Force, and all of the negative consequences that it inspires is inherent to a system that is so much at odds with individual values and human nature. This, probably more than anything else is what explains the atrocities associated with socialism in the 20th century.

The above observations apply to socialism as an over-arching political and economic system. The historical record indicates that large scale socialism does not work. This is not to deny that there are some communities within market-capitalist societies that function quite well on socialist principles. In addition, some societies that have market-based economies have socialist institutions that function reasonably well as part of their social welfare systems. The choice between capitalism and socialism is often presented as a false dichotomy, that a society must be either one or the other. This is contrary to both experience and common sense. There are alternatives that seek to incorporate the practical benefits of capitalism with the ideal aspirations of socialism, such as Distributism advocated by Dorothy Day and Hillaire Belloc. While the goal of Distributism had much in common with socialism, e.g. redistributing the resources of a society in an equitable manner, it recognized the importance of private property.

Capitalism and socialism may be ideologically opposed but in practice they have a great deal in common. Economic prosperity is produced by capital. In the capitalist model the capital is held by private citizens and the socialist model is held by the government, but it is nonetheless capital. In the capitalist model there is a disparity in the wealth accumulated by those who provide value and those who do not, and in the socialist model there is a disparity in the wealth accumulated by those who rule and those who do not. In both cases wealth accrues to those who control the capital.

One of the claims of socialism's proponents is that it produces more "equality" than does capitalism. This is likely true, however it is not at all certain that this equality results from improving the bad as opposed to degrading the good. One institution that may fairly be described as socialist in the United States is the public education system. Yet one cannot reasonably claim that the outcomes of this system are even arguably equal. There are vast discrepancies in the outcomes of wealthy suburban school districts compared to their impoverished inner-city counterparts. Even within the same socialized school building the outcomes vary markedly. This is not a shortcoming that is unique to socialism. It is an inescapable fact of human life. If one were to go to an explicitly socialist country one would also observe discrepancies and outcomes between various identifiable groups, such as the children of government leaders and the children of less prominent status. This is true not only of education but of a great many other things that are presumed to derive equality by adopting some socialist characteristics. There is no society on earth that has a single tiered education system. There is no society on earth that has a single tiered health care system or justice system. This does not result from any inherent, fixable flaw in a political or economic doctrine, is a natural consequence of the fact that hierarchies are inherent and immutable. This is simply a practical observation of Orwell's aphorism that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

The resurgent approval of socialism does not result from improvements in the doctrine of socialism over that which has such an unhappy history. It does have something to do with disregard of that history. Just as it is easier to assume that an iconic image of Che Guevara represents revolutionary heroism than it is to do the minimal investigation necessary to see that he was a psychotic killer, it is easier to be seduced by the platitudes of socialism than it is to inquire into its reality. Socialism is most appealing where it is least understood. Socialism, for all of its appeal to virtue, and even given its occasional successes in limited environments, cannot be scaled up to a workable governing principle. It has its place, but it is a small one. One does not need to believe capitalist propaganda to realize this, or dismiss the claims of socialism's defenders outright to arrive at this conclusion. One needs only investigate the historical difference between what the socialists promised and the misery that they actually delivered.

Gun talk

The reason why discourse about firearms never seems to provide any insight, much less useful thought, is that such discourse is not so much policy discussion as political campaign. The goal of a political campaign is to achieve political power, not to collaborate in analysis of social problems.

This circumstance is understandable; the people who are in favor of restricting the right to bear arms have little interest in exercising that right themselves. If they can give up something that is of no value to them for something which is an ultimate goal, political power, the decision to do so is a no-brainer.

However, the popular appetite for relinquishing rights, regardless of the breadth of their exercise is unpredictable and volatile. The experience with alcohol prohibition is a good example. It is difficult to convince people that they are better off foregoing a right that they have exercised for generations.

Political Courage

There is one thing that modern political movements, such a #MeToo, Antifa, and #MarchforOurlives have that previous, more substantive historical movements, e.g. abolition, civil rights, fair labor laws, etc. lacked: fashion. Likewise there is something that the historical movements had that their contemporary counterparts lack: courage.

Marches on Washington in which a speaker addresses a gathering of hundreds of thousands of like-minded and approving activists, with the support of mass media and pop culture figures takes little courage. The payoff is not in achieving the stated goals of the underlying movement but in garnering the accolades of fellow travelers, all withing the safety of popular emotional trends. The courage of the mob really isn't courage, it is pandering.

If someone asserts that they are courageous for standing up to the "patriarchy," or "fascists," or the "gun lobby," ask them if they would continue to do so if it meant being labelled a racist, by one's peers. would they still be courageous? The neighbors of the San Bernadino killers weren't. The Broward county school district wasn't. the police in Rotherham weren't either. Emotional trendiness is not courage. If someone asserts that there is nothing more important than school safety, ask them if they support doing research into all of the factors that might bear upon teenage violence including race, single parent families, psychological history and drug use. Would they advocate this even though it means being accused of "shifting the focus" or injecting race, or doing something that must be similar to something the Nazis did not did not do?

Hashtag advocacy, guerrilla theater on sympathetic campuses and social media celebrity are reflections of transient emotional appeal. They lack the essential spine necessary for long lasting and just change.

Equality

Equality is one of those virtues so esteemed that we seem not to care that our conception of it is totally contrary to our experience. It has assumed sort of a free-form righteousness that anything other than unthinking deference to it is scandalous.

Equality is of course something, and our western tradition is that it is something desirable. (“…did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” [Phil 2:6]; Liberté,Égalité, Fraternité; and “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.”) But the concept enjoys much greater esteem in slogans than in practice. Evolutionary biology is possible precisely because individual organisms are not equal. The field of metrology exists only because things are unequal, and in fact the only reason to measure and rank things is because they are unequal. The number of ways that humans are unequal to each other are too numerous to list, or even contemplate. Individuality is a consequence of inequality in certain characteristics. "All animals are equal" of course, but some are more equal than others.This witticism would not resonate if the political concept of equality did not carry its own inherent contradictions.

Equality is the very rare exception to the natural rule; yet when it comes time to criticize social and political institutions, confuse sentiment with thought, and look for a cudgel with which to bludgeon social order, equality vaults to the top of the list of virtues. When the reality of inherent inequality makes us tongue tied and confused, we regain our bearings by talking about fairness.

None of this is to say that equality, in those interstices where it is actually found or seriously pursued, is bad or foolish, but those instances are limited. Religious traditions at least postulate an equality that makes sense: that humans are equal in the eyes of God. All persons are endowed with equal human dignity until they relinquish it by their choices.The legal concept that all persons are equal before the law can at least be given the benefit of the doubt. Beyond this, reality demands consideration. People are not biologically equal. They are not equal with respect to fortune and misfortune; they are not economically equal. They are, in general, not equal in any way that can be remedied by social engineering, government meddling or use of force. Decent people and wise governments treat people equally, all else being, well… equal, but they do not make people equal. The moral is that it is not equality itself that it the virtue, it is the way we freely treat each other that is. That is what we should really care about, not how we measure it, not how we enforce it, not how we codify it, but simply how we do it when no one is watching.

The role of government

With regard to the proper role of government, the issue is not whether centralization is good or bad per se, or whether people would be happy with any amount of government service as long as it is provided well. There are some things that I would want government and only government to do, and there are some things I would not want it to do at all regardless of how well it is perceived at doing them.

I want government and only government to provide an army. Same with local police protection. I only want the government to investigate the cause of plane crashes, perform foreign espionage, and operate criminal courts. I do not want the government to run newspapers, churches or social organizations (implicating respectively freedom of the press, religion and association). I don’t want the government to be responsible for the details of airplane design, or fashion design for that matter. I don;t want the government to manage musical bands or comedy tours.

These preferences arise from consideration of how different types of incentives affect different institutions. Some institutions thrive with a profit motive, others are corrupted by it. Some institutions function well because of a sense of community that is missing from larger entities. The incentives that optimize the performance of government are different than those that do the same for private enterprise or charitable organizations. Sometimes this works in favor of the government doing stuff, sometimes it means the government should defer to better options.

As a general observation, by no means rigorously verified, government seem to be at its best with projects; defeating the nazis, going to the moon, building the interstate highway system, etc. and at its worst with the ongoing management of the mundane. Hence the familiar jokes about the DMV,, Amtrak and less funny jokes that are the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Service.

The choice is not dichotomous between government and private industry. My own personal opinion is the the hospital system in this country was at its best when it was primarily a charitable enterprise, organized by religious orders and civic organizations, and it has not been improved by intervention of either government or profit-seeking institutions. I would not want to see the Boy Scouts listed on either the New York Stock Exchange or the Blue Pages of the phone book.

Government, private enterprise and charitable organizations are all necessary and beneficial. Each does some things better than the others; and there are certain things to which each is ill-suited.

Because diversity or something.

Name calling

It is remarkable how much progressive policy discourse consists of name-calling. Rather than refine and hone the principles and substance of a particular position, energy is diverted into discovering new ways of implying malignant character on the other side. The contemporary political vocabulary contains a dearth of rights, obligations, duties, compromise and political philosophy, and an excess of racist, sexist, homophobe, climate denier, rape apologist, hater,Iislamophobe, white supremacist, bitter clinger, etc. The governor of California described those who disagreed with his views on immigration enforcement as “troglodyte.” In addition, there are more subtle forms of name calling, less directly offensive but equally content-free such as denouncing another’s “privilege,” insinuating that another is aggressive or violent by claiming they make one feel “unsafe,” and by implying that the only possible basis for disagreement is “hate.” There is also the cynical and rather deluded gibe that one;s political opponents are “on the wrong side of history.”

It is interesting to contemplate the details of this phenomenon. When did we decide that the argument methods of second graders is preferable to reason and common courtesy? When did we decide that logic is subordinate to emotional satisfaction? I would suggest that name-calling is simply a cheap way of exploiting a socializing instinct, a boorish way of implying that if ones opponent does not agree or at least silence his own argument, that he is “the other.” It attacks the emotional security one finds in a good reputation and explicitly declares that a person;s beliefs either conform with those of the name-caller, or are the result of bad character. This approach to discourse lacks room for complexity or the notion of “however.” Thus, when it moves people to action (usually poorly thought out and silly action) it is prone to excess and obsession, such as pulling the Dukes of Hazard from TVLand, disinviting commencement speakers, sanctioning fraternities, for the conduct of other fraternities (or conduct that turns out to have been imaginary) and banishing those who are insufficiently outraged by the "right" things.

I suspect that our age invented none of these things; that there have always been principled thinkers of all political orientations as well as mountebanks and populists, bullies, sophists, con artists, and demagogues. But our age seems to have been overcome lately with a discourse of name-calling and political opportunism that not only obscures thoughtful and innovative dialogue, but hinders real progress. We seem to be more interested at the moment in emotional indulgence rather than thinking through many of the complex problems in our civic life.

Moral outrage

The term “moral outrage” is misleading. The subjects are not selected for their moral basis but for their immediate emotional appeal. The progressive enterprise is not a twilight struggle between good and evil, it is a ceaseless campaign of emotional bullying. Strident emotional appeals are used, not because there is some moral principle in need of a champion, but because the tactic is a useful to those whose ultimate goals are political power.

H.L. Mencken observe that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless stream of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” “Moral outrage” is simply a newer version of this same principle. Now the premise is that the “good” people are in constant moral peril from the “bitter clingers” who will not see the light and therefore must have their views delegitimized.

Plaintiff’s lawyers are quite transparent about the underlying principle. A good number of them have adopted the “Reptile Strategy”, so named because it appeals to the emotional “reptile” part of jurors’ brains, rather than the more troublesome, rational part. Recall that, after the Sandy Hook shootings that gun control advocates explicitly demanded that action be taken before passions cooled. Emotions tend to override reason in the short term and therefore emotional appeals demand immediate action. Emotions also tend to be notoriously bad counselors, and the strategy of using them to whip up the populace has a rather shameful pedigree: lynchings, pogroms, riots, and revenge massacres.

As practiced in modern politics, the “moral outrage” gambit has a few distinguishing characteristics:

1.) Being an emotional appeal, it cannot bear rational scrutiny; something must be done now without reflection. The science after all, is settled; the counter arguments are invalid because they were advocated by the Cato Institute or heard on Fox News (the ad hominem fallacy); “Reagan did something similar” (the tu quoque fallacy,) “a new poll says that….” (argumentum ad populum), “Experts say…” (argumentum ad verecundiam), etc., etc., If you are appealing to emotion, fallacies are your friend.

2.) There is a clearly defined, malevolent other. Dissent can only be based in bad character with no room for good faith disagreement. The goal is not to persuade but to divide and demonize. “We” are entitled to have our way because we ‘think right’.” If the opponents words are insufficiently outrage inducing, resort to one of President Obama;s favorite rhetorical device, “there are those who say…,” the straw man fallacy; there can be no good faith disagreement.

3.) Because the other is defined solely by their opposition, consistency of the proponent’s arguments is unnecessary. Therefore, President Obama can “evolve,” Senators can be for something before they are against, and we can take credit for successes that we actively opposed. It doesn’t matter if Elizabeth Warren, or Diane Feinstein, or Al Gore has one set of rules for themselves and another for everyone else, because the contest is between “us and them,” not between differing concepts of what is best for the country.

4.) People who do not think right should be banned from participating in civic life. “Moral outragers” like to ban things. Support traditional marriage, lose your job. Question global warming or campus rape statistics, face expulsion from professional institutions. Show insufficient fealty for the emotional play of the day and endure death treats on Twitter. “Moral outrage” does, and always has created a lot of ugliness; bigotry pretending to unearned virtue.

This is not to say that there are not true moral outrages. The proper response however requires a resort to reason and not emotion; to think, and not merely to feel. It is a real tragedy when moral people do immoral things because they are “outraged.”

Competition, collaboration and regulation

Competition and regulation are not alternatives for each other. Competition, collaboration and government regulation serve different purposes. I would not leave it to competition to replace the FDA or the FAA.

Competition and collaboration are optimizing mechanisms, but they are not interchangeable. Competition optimizes processes whereas collaboration optimizes resources. Both have their role. 

Competition and collaboration are concerned with optimization. Regulation is (or should be) concerned with general welfare. Optimization relates to the maximum possible, regulation to the minimum acceptable. They serve different purposes and are essential in different ways. Successful societies seek out that elusive balance between competition, collaboration and regulation, and flourishing societies come close to finding it, but of course, being human, never quite get it exactly right.

Gun policymaking

There is one circumstance that even the must ardent gun control advocate must admit, if not of the fact, at least of the possibility: that the people who would profit or otherwise benefit from circumventing gun control regulations are smarter and better motivated than those doing the regulating. We see this phenomenon played out regularly with, for example, reference to the prevalence of illicit drug use, and historically with the prohibition of alcohol. The motivated creativity of someone who would make tens of thousands of dollars providing firearms manufactured in Mexico or Honduras to street gangs in a given American city is likely to trump the naive determination of earnest bureaucrats who do not understand the limited influence that government has on human nature. The semi-literate gang enforcer in Chino has much more in the way of practical smarts, at least in acquiring the minimum firepower necessary to an international criminal enterprise, than Dianne Feinstein or Bret Stephens. This disparity is likely to widen with advances in technology. Say what you will about bump sticks, the guy who came up with the idea was pretty sharp.

This is not an argument against gun control; it is an argument against the notion that restrictions will do much good. For good or ill, the technology of repeating firearms is about 150 years old; gun smithing is a community college degree, not an advanced course offering in the theoretical physics department at Harvard. An advanced civilization is much more reliant on the decency of its citizens for its survival than it is the force of its statutes. The Second Amendment applies only to the right to keep and bear arms, it is not necessary to their existence, nor to their availability in the criminal underground. Firearms themselves are not essential to the madness that perpetrates mass murder.

If Mr. Paddock, the perpetrator of the Las Vegas had not provided his own demise, one might reasonably wish to ask: was his primary motivation to shoot or to kill? Would he have foregone the anticipated satisfaction of killing if he had to forego the expected pleasure of shooting? We of course will never know, but even so, we can note, with just a cursory, off-the-top-of-the-head list, dates verified by Wikipedia, the following sample:

Date Number killed
May 18, 1927 45
December 12, 1986 98
December 7, 1981 43
April 19, 1995 168
March 24, 2015 150
March 20, 1995 12
March 11, 2004 192
June 11, 1964 10
December 19, 2016 12
March 1, 2014 31
February 27, 2002 59
May 17, 2010 44
June 3, 2017 8
July 7, 2005 56

The means used for these deaths included airplanes,, knives, sarin gas, explosives, motor vehicles, a flame thrower(!) and matches.

This list is not a sample of inadequate regulation, it is rather a specimen of psychopathic depravity against which the most competent of government is impotent.

The call for gun control is a symbolic protest against an uncomfortable fact: people that are crazy in their motives might be quite rational in their methods; they may in fact be quite ingenious in them. It is a form of inexcusable arrogance to assume that people who seem so illogical in their motives cannot outwit well-intentioned regulation, and the advice of “experts.”

None of which is to say that there should be no limits on guns or gun ownership. Reasonable regulation should be expected to have reasonable results. Expecting to confine the darker and disordered impulses of the psychopath by assuming that decent people cannot be trusted with the means of emergent defense is not reasonable.

Scientism

Scientism, like any ism, is an ideology, and, like any ideology, is driven as much by ambition, wishful thinking, and base emotion as it is by rational analysis. Science is not the fount of human perfection and happiness; it is a product of humankind’s ability to reason and to apply reason in human affairs. The beneficial application of science requires moral guidance and ethical scrutiny, because blind pursuit of scientific knowledge leads to uncomfortable spaces.

The Nazis dunked soviet POWs in frigid water in a “scientific” attempt to devise strategies to help downed Luftwaffe pilots survive in the North Sea. One conclusion of such experiments was that exposure to cold caused cerebral hemorrhages. This “scientific” discovery turned out to be wrong. The United States government scientifically investigated the course of untreated syphilis in African-Americans; very scientific, yet somehow unpraiseworthy. The Imperial Japanese Unit 731 did competent scientific work, so much so that their biological warfare experiments were able to decimate several Chinese villages. (The scientifically oriented American government, rather than opting for war crimes complaints gave many of the perpetrators immunity, because, hey, SCIENCE!). The soviets' use of psychiatry on political dissidents is probably not an example of “improved policies and regulations that serve our best interests.” Orbiting the white nationalist fringe is the “human biodiversity” movement that uses scientific evidence to argue that certain racial and ethnic groups have intelligence, behavioral and personality traits that are heritable and therefore partially genetically determined, a scientific hypothesis that would likely be rejected by scientism on grounds unrelated to method.

One concern that naturally arises is that of avoiding "abuses" of science. Science has no reliable way of identifying “abuses” apart from human values. Science has no inherent conscience.

The modern scientist has much in common with the prehistoric thinker who thought that virgin sacrifice kept volcanoes from erupting or that fickle gods made the sun rise and rains come., Both applied the evidence at hand to questions relevant to their interests and reached conclusions constrained by the state of their knowledge. Much of what modern science knows is wrong; there is even a book, “Ending Medical Reversals” that focuses on the harm done by adopting  therapies and theories as scientific based more on apophenia and wishful thinking than on rational rigor This is why “consensus” is irrelevant to the advance of scientific knowledge, and is no substitute for it. Remember saccharin and how it causes cancer? Or how drotrecogin was the holy grail of sepsis treatment? What was the state of consensus regarding phlogiston theory 400 years ago? What does one one say about the scientific certainty regarding “gender fluidity?”

Science, is a tool without an inherent moral or ethical constraint. The scientific method is useful, for both good and ill, but is not infallible. Its usefulness derives from the ability of human reason to make sense of objective evidence, and that is all it is. It is not something to be venerated or blindly believed. It is something that can be cynically exploited by charlatans. It may be used as a prop to argue for greater government control over people’s lives just as hucksters with knowledge of solar eclipses were able to con those innocent of astronomic knowledge by implying some mysterious power. Science does not validate atrocity or immorality (as the Tuskegee syphilis and Unit 731 experiments show) merely by their being scientific, and science does not validate any ideology or political fashion that presumes otherwise. The use of science for political ends does not have a happy history.

Healthcare policy principles

There are a few principles that should govern healthcare policy-making:

1.)  The fundamental characteristic of a sustainable healthcare system is not compassion, or comprehensiveness, or justice, or equality, or cost effectiveness. It is predictability. Predictability is why we have written laws it is the characteristic that allows engineers to design aircraft and computers, and chemists to develop new pharmaceuticals. Predictability is what allows actuarial analysis and rational assessment of risk. Predictability is what allows people to make plans with a reasonable expectation of favorable outcomes. The first step in formulating a sustainable healthcare policy is to excise as much caprice, and uncertainty as possible.

2.) Healthcare policy does not determine who gets care, it determines who gets rich. In point of fact there is almost no one in this country who does not have access to at least least some healthcare. It may be inefficient; it may not be cost effective and it may not be particularly thoughtful, but no one need die of tuberculosis or typhus or beri-beri unless psycho-social factors intervene. The future of healthcare as asocial asset will be determined more by technology and the principles of economics; the future of healthcare as an industry will be determined by regulation and policy.

3.) The Pareto principle applies to healthcare: 80 % of the care can be delivered for 20% of the cost.

4.) All systems of benefits and resource allocation become multi-tiered. There is a multi-tiered educational system in this, and every country. There is a multi-tiered judicial system. there is a multi-tiered public health system and a mult-tiered infrastructure system. It does not matter if policy prescribes a single payer system, some sort of hybrid, or a totally market-based system, it will be multi-tiered. This is not the avoidable result of corruption or malign intent on the part of policy makers, although that will certainly make matters worse. It is rather the result of the uneven distribution of inherent advantages and disadvantages, tangible and intangible, across any sizable group of people.

5.) The next big revolution in healthcare will be probabilistic medicine driven by enormous strides in data processing. the cognitive aspects of computers will yield to a significant degree to massive decision algorithms that incorporate huge volumes of data from tens of millions of patients.

The future of healthcare

There are a few principles that will dictate the future of the American healthcare system:

1. There will always be a two-tiered system. This will not be due to a flaw in system design or implementation, but is due to the unalterable dynamics of societies. there is not a country on earth that does not have multi-tiered healthcare. The United States will not have a single tiered system for the same reason that it does not have, in fact, a single tiered educational system, or a single tiered legal system, or a single tiered social welfare system. Economics, technology and data management will have a much greater influence on the shape of the American healthcare system than will politics. Politics however, will have a much greater influence on who becomes rich as a result.

2. Healthcare in general, and medical care in particular, can be divided up into three functional categories:
     i. The technical or procedural aspect. This is the part of healthcare where someone takes out your appendix, adminsters chemotherapy, does endoscopy, or performs a CT scan;
     ii. The cognitive aspect. This is where someone interprets data and makes decisions about interventions, and
     iii. The clerical aspect. This is where data is collected, collated,and and packaged.

These three aspects will become more distinct and regardless of what type of healthcare reform or payment system is implemented, will dictate the future of healthcare.

The procedural aspect will be taken over by technicians. this trend has been underway for a couple of decades and has resulted in niche practices by "proceduralists.: It is also apparent in the now common practice of attending physicians or primary care providers referring patients to specialists who perform procedures on request, with no other role in diagnosing or managing a patient;s condition. In the future, these people will be less educated in broad aspects of medicine and will be hyper-specialized technicians. Since these procedures will be will established and understood, the practitioners performing them will be more like tradesmen than professional decison makers. They will have less education and more procedural training, and consequently will be expected to do less and will be paid less.

The cognitive aspect will largely be displaced by massive data management systems. This will commonly be referred to as AI, but will involve computer algorithms classifying each patient and processing huge amounts of epidemiologic, genetic, and clinical data to arrive at diagnostic and treatment plans for individual patients. These systems will become more reliable as experience is gained and they will drive down the costs associated with routine care. One offshoot of this will be a new medical specialty: the "outlierist" or the "anomalist" who will be looked to for the artisanal elements of medicine when the data driven computer algorithms are unsuccessful.

The clerical aspect is taking up a larger portion of providers time right now. They spend significant time gathering and entering data that eventually will form the databases on which the artificial neural networks, inference engines, Bayesian belief networks, and other computer modeling systems will operate. Provider systems and payers will soon realize that these tasks can be both largely automated and performed by medium skilled workers without medical degrees.

Respect

If you earn respect, you will have self respect.
If you demand respect, you will have self pity.

There are two things with which self respect should never be confused: self pity and self esteem.

When faced with challenges, self esteem often becomes self pity; self respect becomes courage and determination.

Coaching

It is very difficult to teach a person something that he is convinced he already knows.

Speech as action

A piece by David Solway entitled "Free Speech vs. 'Hate Speech'" makes the following assertion:

Of course, speech itself can be an act, as philosopher J.L. Austin has shown in How to Do Things with Words: in his most famous example, when the minister states “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” an act has been performed since it changes the status of the participants.

This is wrong. The words themselves are innocuous absent other considerations. If a second grader speaks the quoted words to two other second graders,the latter are not thereby married. More importantly, if a minister says the words to two people who do not wish to be married, or in fact merely disagree with those words, their status does not change. In the former case, the words are powerless because of the status of the speaker. She has no authority to change the status of her classmates, regardless of the words used. The latter case is more fundamental, because it is an example of a larger principle: the effect of words in the absence of external force is dependent on the acceptance of the hearer. Certainly, when a judge pronounces a sentence, the words used wold be of little significance apart from a mechanism to enforce them. The same result holds if the judge has no authority to pass such a sentence, as for example if  jury had acquitted the accused.

The effect of words in such case would depend on the subjective acceptance of their object. To put the matter more succinctly, no one is obligated to be offended by speech, and no one is required to perceive injuries in mere opinions. 

Safe spaces

The concept of civilization only makes sense in the context of interactions between humans. A solitary individual having no interactions with others would have no use for norms and traditions that are useful in public life. A civilized society is one in which the clashes and confrontations that inevitable arise when human beings interact are managed by certain understandings regarding tolerance, accommodation and compromise. The norms and institutions of civilization are means by which the clashes of individual interests and diversity of opinions are processed so as to make social interactions worthwhile. Civilization is a consequence of the public benefits which arise from preserving individuality. Civilization thrives when individual differences are allowed to compete.

A "safe space," in the current usage of the term, is a place that is free from distressing opinions or disquieting deviations from uniformity. They are precincts where feeble ideas are allowed to persist unchallenged and unimproved, not because of the intellectual validity of those ideas but because of the emotional discomfort occasioned by alternative views. Safe spaces only appear so because of uniformity and conformity, and as such are intellectually stagnant. The aversion to individual thought and dispute makes them intellectually inert and emotionally anesthetic. The adjective "safe" is a euphemism intended to disguise an environment that is intellectually desolate, intolerant and craven.

Outcomes

The most significant difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, at least as it concerns practical politics, is that there was a significantly greater risk of corruption being normalized under a Clinton administration than under Trump. This is independent of whether a Clinton led government would be any more or less corrupt than the current administration. In the former case, corruption would be viewed by institutions such as the media and entrenched interests as a price to be paid for favorable policies; in the latter case, it is a target of opportunity by which to advance one's agenda and protect one's interests. Normalization of corruption is far more damaging than any policy which could be reasonably implemented by either candidate.

Thought experiment

Consider a woman, a citizen in a western democracy, Now consider that it is desirable to someone, for whatever reason, to have her behave in a particular way, to conform to some model, or submit to some reform. One way to accomplish this would be to use coercion, to invoke force or the prospect of undesirable consequences to influence her in the desired direction. Another alternative would be to use persuasion, appeal to reason, and try to convince her of the wisdom and benefit of the desired behavior, model or reform.

The first method is the resort to force. She will be made to conform regardless of her her own reason, values or choice. The second is a resort to rational discourse, to principles of analysis and evidence. Only the second of these is consistent with a respect for dignity; i.e. that a person is worthy, all else being equal, of living her life in accord with her own conscience.

Now image that the second method, the use of persuasion, is discouraged on grounds that the method of persuasion, i.e. free speech, might cause offense to someone. Thus we have in stark relief the malignancy at the heart of political correctness: that it is better to use force and the threat of personal consequences to bring about some policy or other, because to allow reasoned debate might offend subjective sensibilities. Rejection of political correctness is rejection of the notion that the benefits and individual dignity must be surrendered to protect the sensitive from disquieting opinions..

Racism

Charges of racism seem to be an inexhaustible element of public discourse in the United States. Race is injected into a wide swath of public debates and the allegations of racist motives are regularly used to discredit and silence opposing views. Some people claim that the United States is an inherently racist country; others that the single minded search for any hint of potentially racist or race-tinged thought has reached the point that it is doing more harm than good.

Certainly, overt and institutionalized racism has declined steadily since the second World War. Certainly there are those, in all races who still harbor racist attitudes, and there is a corresponding disparity in perceptions of just how racist America really is. A simple explanation for this phenomenon is found not in comparing attitudes and conduct to some mythical non-racist standards, but in understanding different peoples' priorities in considering matters of race.

Let us assume you have two people of different races, each of whom honestly considers herself non-racist. Now construct a list of attitudes and actions that are, or could potentially be considered racist, and rank them, from most obviously racist to spurious at best. this list would range from the egregious, such as lynching a teenager for kissing a person of a different race, to things like refusing to hire a person because of their race, to telling stereotyping jokes, etc, to the silly, such as objecting to terms like "black sheep" or "black mark, to the weird, like complaining about "cultural appropriation" to the just plain ignorant, such as claiming that the word "niggardly" has anything at all to do with race.

If we take our two subjects and present them with this list and ask them to prioritize each item on the list against other social concerns, such as economic efficiency or freedom of expression, it is likely that there would be a great deal of agreement at the more flagrant examples; both would agree that lynching is abhorrent racism. There would most likely be agreement that discrimination in employment and housing are improper, and that stereotyping jokes do reflect racist attitudes. But as you go down the list, it would be expected that there will be a point that the two people will disagree on whether a particular act or attitude is sufficiently serious that it should override other concerns. there will be a disagreement on the priority that a potential racist thought or action should be given in everyday life, and it is at this point that one person will accuse the other of racism. And it is not just an accusation as to that contested point; it will be assumed that the point of disagreement, e.g. that "Taco Tuesday" should be condemned is simply the point where the closet racist lets the mask slip, Thus, what should be simply a good faith disagreement as to whether an arguably innocuous, or even an obviously innocuous view can be transformed by racial prospectors into invidious racism. This is why the vast majority of people honestly do not consider themselves racist, and those who suspect others of racism readily think they have evidence to support their suspicions.

The clearest example of this is affirmative action. There are competing priorities here: countering the prospect that qualified minorities will be denied opportunity because of their race, and ensuring that race-neutral merit is the basis for allocating potentially limited opportunities. Neither view is necessarily racist. The allegation of racism, when it inevitably comes out is not directed at the principles underlying either position, rather it is directed solely at opposition to the accuser's position. The allegation is not that merit is racist it is that prioritizing merit over racial considerations is.

Of course, there are racists. There are those who believe that there are certain genetic traits that justify treating races differently. But for the majority of people what determines how they treat one another regardless of race depends on their experiences. It is much more likely that a black man who loves his wife and raises his children, and respects others has much more in common with a white man who loves his wife and raises his children and respects others than either has with a black drug dealer who abuses women or with a white methamphetamine addict who steals to support his habit and abuses women.

Sure, there are racists. There are also race hustlers who would contort facts and logic to smear otherwise decent people in support of  a cynical narrative that is destructive to people of all races.

Libertarians

A libertarian view begins with the premise that liberty is incompatible with coercion, and that a civil society should not substitute instruments of violence for persuasion. This view requires that all uses of force be justified, because force is never assumed to be just. There are certain categories of force, such as government force used against one person for the exclusive private advantage of another, or force used to protect subjective sensibilities, or to vindicate matters of etiquette that should never be justified.The rules for use of force should be predictable and of general application, neither singling out nor exempting particular parties. No person who is capable of reason should be subjected to force solely on grounds that it is for his or her own good.

Force and governmental violence is sometimes necessary but its legitimate use usually signals the breakdown of reason. The lapse of reason is not always on the part of the person against whom the force is directed. Force, or the ability to resort to force by authorities, is a tempting shortcut to assure compliance with questionable policies or to promote partisan interests, or worse, to attempt to compensate for incompetence in administering the laws. It is the enabler of oppressive laws and a hallmark of governing interests at odds with the will of the people.

Force is inherently inelegant and imprecise. There is no guarantee that "non-lethal" force will remain "non-lethal" just because the circumstances do not justify more severe measures.

Hostile

Of all the drawbacks of an excessive regulatory, bureaucratic state, perhaps the most significant is that all of the necessary mandates and prohibitions eventually mkes the government adverse to the citizenry.