We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Generally these days ‘liberal’ means someone who supports profoundly illiberal positions. But as ‘socialist’ means someone who wants to replace social interactions with politically mediated interactions, it seems they are named after what they want to destroy.
– Perry de Havilland
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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One of the great lies of the socialists is to portray that which is ‘collective’ as ‘collegiate’ or ‘consensus’, when it is the replacement of the individual choice with the direction of the Leader, the Dear Leader, the General Secretary, The Fuehrer, Il Duce or whatever term he prefers.
I think it was von Mises who pointed out that the clarion call of socialism is to follow the diktat of the State, wherever it lead you (or shoved you), with each socialist approving as he sees himself as the Leader, or sees himself in the Leader, and then he starves, gets shot, jailed or fired.
Yea – what Edmund Burke called “social freedom” is exactly what socialists (who are now called “liberals”) do NOT believe in.
Socialists (“liberals”) do not believe in society (Civil Society) – they believe in COLLECTIVISM, organising everything via FORCE and FEAR.
The astonishing thing is that many (most?) of the rich and of the Big Business Corporations SUPPORT the socialists.
With the “Woke Billionaires” such as Mark Z (Facebook) there is some real (and horribly twisted) ideology at work. Mark Z (and the other “Woke” Corporate managers) believe that LYING about what people say (“we banned him because he said followers of Muhammed should be beheaded” – LIE, amongst many other LIES) and Censorship are the way to “protect freedom” – and by “freedom” they mean ever more government regulations, taxes and spending, till full Collectivism is “achieved”.
For other very rich people the situation is much less complicated. Jeff Bezos (who backs the left to a vast extent – the Washington Post and so on) is NOT a leftist – he does not believe in their doctrines. It is a simple matter with him “tax everyone else to bankruptcy – but not ME or MY company”.
It is difficult to decide which is more despicable – the “Woke” Corporations and Corporate managers, or the utterly corrupt scumbags who back the left without believing in any of their doctrines.
But I still have some hope…..
For example, in spite of most cinema screens (on the planet) showing “Captain Marvel” at all times – “so here are your choices for the movie theatre – Captain Marvel, or Captain Marvel, or Captain Marvel. or …….. well Captain Marvel is doing well!), I still think that Captain Marvel ticket sales will fall next weekend (if need people will just do something else rather than go to the cinema – which offers them a THERESA MAY style “choice” of the same thing on multiple screens).
The left (the “Woke Corporations” Theresa May and so on) always offer a FAKE choice – Rule by the European Union “or” Rule by the European Union, Captain Marvell (or should that be “Captain Planet”) “or” Captain Marvel – but the people can still REJECT the fake “choice” of the Woke Corporations and the Theresa May “Social Justice” types.
And I think that increasing numbers of people will REJECT all these fake “choices”.
By the way – the decay started a very long time ago.
Anyone who thinks that the enemy of Edmund Burke – Jeremy Bentham and the Bowood Circle (which later gave birth to the Westminster Review types) really believed in freedom, needs to wake up and small the coffee.
They did not believe in freedom philosophically – as they denied the very idea of human agency (free will – although I share Ralph Cudworth distaste for chopping up the human soul into “will” and “reason”), they denied human personhood (moral responsibility – without which such things as a criminal legal system are absurdities as the criminal could not have chosen NOT to have committed the crime).
And they denied freedom politically – wanting to set up government departments (controlled by professional bureaucrats – like themselves) to control every major aspect of life. And they denied the very foundation of the Old Whigs – the rights of independent private landowners (being Ricardo types on land).
But, like modern Hollywood types, they used the word “freedom” a lot.
As late as the elections of 1874 Prime Minister Gladstone was still pushing for the END of income tax – whilst Mr Mill (with his dream of income tax PLUS inheritance tax and land tax and…..) was dead. However, by the 1890s the ghost of Mr Mill was getting its way (redefining what it meant to be a liberal) and Gladstone was forced out.
As Chancellor Sir William Harcourt said “we are all socialists now” – and no one put a bullet in his face.
To put things in an American context….
What would Mr John Stuart Mill have said about the great steel mills of Andrew Carnegie or the oil production and refining plants of John D. Rockefeller (a man very different from his degenerate descendants).
Mr Mill would have said that they should be worker coops – even though the worker coops set up by Robert Owen (is the socialist Robert Owen to be called a “liberal”?) had already FAILED.
What about the great privately owned cattle ranches of Texas – the large scale private ownership of land which is the real difference between Texas and Mexico (and so many other Latin American countries) today.
Mr Mill would have preferred the system of disguised state control of land use – that his father James Mill had kept in India, real private ownership would have seemed very “vulgar” and “simplistic” to him (much in the way that he HATED the choice between agency and determinism being expressed in clear and honest terms).
I do not see Mr Mill denouncing the back-door-nationalisation-of-land that Barack Obama pushed via his EPA (“we only want to control your land if there is water on it” – try farming or ranching or anything WITHOUT water). Indeed this is the sort of sly trick the Westminister Review types would have loved. There so called “free trade in land” was not really about getting rid of entails and so on, it was about CONTROL.
It is quite true that Hollywood (and the people of “Silicon Valley” a few hundred miles to the north of Hollywood) and Harvard owe more to the thinking of Karl Marx than to J.S. Mill – but I am afraid they are closer to Mr Mill than we are.