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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On my recent holiday in France I took with me a biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the one by D. M. Thomas (subtitled “A Century in His Life”, first published Little, Brown and Company, 1998). Before that I had been reading Solzhenitsyn’s own The Oak and the Calf (which came out in 1975), and now I’m reading his Invisible Allies, which came out in 1995.
These latter two books are Solzhenitsyn’s answer to the question: “How on earth did you do it?” The first puts Solzhenitsyn’s own exploits centre stage. The second names some of the many names that could finally be named safely, without endangering lives. He did a lot himself. And he had a lot of help.
It was partly being a contributor to Libertarian “Samizdata” that prodded me into this reading burst. I quite understand why Perry gave the name “Libertarian Samizdata” to Libertarian Samizdata � messages that go under the radar and past the editorial defences of the official statist oriented big media, and so forth. Nevertheless I do feel a bit uneasy decking myself out in the word that originally meant people risking their very lives, all day, every day, for years on end, copying and distributing the real Russian literature of those times. The worst that can happen to us is a few hostile e-mails.
This reading has, of course, stimulated a million thoughts, but one thought in particular relates to Adriana Cronin’s point about how Stalin, his henchmen, his successors and his middle managerial puppets throughout the Soviet empire were prone to believe their own bullshit.
Simply: Why didn’t they just kill him? Solzhenitsyn was making a monumental nuisance of himself. So why, as soon as he started doing this seriously, didn’t they just take him out the back of somewhere private and have him shot? They had their chances, as Solzhenitsyn himself relates.
There are many reasons. Western “pressure” was indeed crucial. And Solzhenitsyn was a literary and political tactician of genius. This was no dreamy, socially dyslexic wimp we’re talking about. This was a man who, until they arrested him for being incompletely reverent about Stalin, was a highly effective and courageous Red Army artillery officer, and the military metaphor he uses to describe his “battles” with Soviet officialdom is relentless and entirely appropriate. He writes particularly memorably in The Oak and the Calf of “encounter battles”, involving not only him and his Soviet enemies, but also, operating independently, the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.
But here’s another reason they didn’t kill him. They didn’t kill him because killing him would have contradicted their idea of what they thought they were doing.
It wasn’t just “idiot savants” (D. M. Thomas’ killer phrase) like Jean Paul Sartre and his ilk who swallowed Soviet lies about happy smiling people marching joyfully into the cornfields and the steel factories; they believed this drivel themselves, if not as a complete fact exactly, then certainly as an aspiration. To have killed Solzhenitsyn would have been to admit to themselves that all this socialism-with-a-human-face nonsense was indeed nonsense, and that they were just old-fashioned, self-serving tyrants whose rule was based on brute force and nothing else.
Looking at the larger picture, the tendency to believe their own lies was a major part, not only of their failure to handle the likes of Solzhenitsyn, but of their failure period. The Soviet Empire fell apart because it was founded not only on the deception of others, but on self-deception self-inflicted by and on its own rulers. They didn’t, in the end, con us. Not enough of us, anyway. But they did con themselves.
Many years ago I visited Bergen, in Norway, and the locals told me that the weather for my stay was by far the best it had ever been. Well, now I’m in the south of France, in a town called le Boulou (they call it a ‘village’ here), just south of Perpignan. The weather is the worst it’s ever been. On Wednesday night there was a, by South of England standards, regulation noisy thunderstorm, with lots of rain, as you’d expect from a thunderstorm, and there was further heavy rain the next day. This turned the pathetic little smear of dampness they call their river into a real river! A raging torrent the width of a football field in fact. Le Boulouans couldn’t sleep for the din! The weather is now improving, and by the time I leave it will have recovered its normal warmth and sunniness.
Meanwhile France is … France. The food shops are far better than in England, but finding a job is far harder than in England – two facts which may be related. Employing other people is a nightmare of expense and bureaucratic awfulness. If you aren’t something like an enarque or a multinational or some such, the only way to get ahead economically is to run a Mom and Pop store of some sort and do your own labouring. Thus France abounds with these, and they’re run like crosses between ordinary businesses and art galleries, being expressions both of love and “greed, for want of a better word” (see my previous posting about Wall Street). France has the same inane cartoons on TV as England. It also, more famously, has the same currency as nearby Spain, which I have to admit is a convenience if you live twenty minutes by car from Spain, as my hosts do. The internet seems to work.
Le Boulou seems to be a real ‘community’. People know each other, perhaps because they still shop in the same local Mom and Pop stores that the English have abandoned for supermarkets. Tomorrow I am attending a rugby match, which will presumably abound with local spirit, rugby being at its strongest in this part of France (France having just beaten England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy, i.e. everybody, in the recently concluded Six Nations Rugby Championship). I’m looking forward to this game greatly.
I’ve not been able to meet any local libertarian intellectuals so far. It would seem that they’re all on holiday, elsewhere.
Postings have been a bit thin today. That means (a) that the Samizdata team mostly have lives and in particular lives at the weekend, and (b) that another Perry de Havilland blockbuster is probably due. I look forward to it. Ah, the joy of writing when you know that your editor will accept your stuff, on account of your editor being you. I know exactly the feeling. In the meantime, to keep the blog rolling, here’s another quicky from me, on the same theme as that of my exchange with David Carr about multi- and monoculturalism, melting pots, etc., that of finding or not finding the right word for what you want to say.
Some months back I gave an illustrated talk about politics – libertarian politics in particular and politics generally – in the movies. You will not be astonished to learn that one of the movies I played a bit from was Wall Street and nor will you be shocked to learn that the bit I played was that speech. However, it may surprise you that in that speech Michael Douglas does not say: “Greed is good.” What he actually says is: “Greed, for want of a better word, is good.” Maybe you knew that. I didn’t until I was preparing my talk and I strongly suspect I’m not the only one. And even if you did already know this, I hope you agree that this extra little phrase makes quite a difference.
Plain “greed is good” is a brazen, screw-you-Jack, in-your-face announcement that vice is virtue, or to put it another way, that virtue doesn’t matter. “Greed, for want of a better word, is good” is no such thing. It’s a genuine attempt at moral debate. It’s a morally sincere attempt to challenge existing moral assumptions, of the sort now bundled up in the word “greed”, which is explicitly identified as an unsatisfactory word for what is really being talked about. Which of course is why the enemies of “greed, for want of a better word” took out the “for want of a better word” bit.
The job of middlebrow propagandists like ourselves is, among many other things, to supply our ideological comrades and customers with better words, so that when they are making speeches about what they believe in, they don’t have to use phrases like “for want of a better word”.
I’m off to France shortly for a holiday. When I return I will get a fixed-price internet connection sorted. I will then include lots of interesting blue bits charging off in all directions in my postings, like a real blogger. In the meantime, assuming I can get my hands on an emailing device of some kind, there may be a few further blueless postings from me about whatever holiday excitements I encounter, and about my views on the state of France. And then again there may not.
The world is divided into those who can stop dog-fights and those who cannot.
-P.G.Wodehouse (‘Ruth in Exile’, The Man Upstairs, 1914)
Thanks for the response, David. Here are my corrections.
I just plain disagree that “multiculturalism” has no meaning. I said it has two meanings and I stick to that. Hence the problems I diagnose. If the word meant nothing, it wouldn’t be such a trap. To say that it does mean nothing is to surrender the verbal field to the “multicultural outcome” enemy.
I said: watch out for this word. I did not say (although it sounds as if you think I said): I will go on using this word even though it’s a dodgy word. I favour the search for different and better words, as do you.
However, your suggested alternative word is a bad one. “Monoculturalist” has similar problems to “multiculturalist”, and if anything even worse ones.
Does “monoculturalism” mean re-establishing the white, pre-coloured-immigration “monoculture” that we once had, by chucking lots of coloured people out? Does it perhaps mean keeping the “monoculture” we could now have if we kept the coloured people we’ve got, but shut out any more? Those are both reasonable guesses as to what the word might mean and they’re both racist meanings, especially the first.
Perhaps “monoculturalism” means lots more people coming into Britain, but only from the white Anglo-Saxon world – from white America and the white Commonwealth? Or maybe white folks from anywhere? Again, reasonable guesses, and again, decidedly racist meanings.
And another reasonable guess would be that it means people becoming part of a monoculture when they (from wherever) get here? This is the meaning you attach to the word.
Even more ambiguous. Even worse confusion. Even worse traps to dodge.
Just to be clear about what I want, although I favour a “monocultural” and “British” (in the sense of all this taking place in Britain) outcome, I don’t expect or want this monoculture to be white British folks plus lots of other folks behaving exactly like white British folks. I favour a genuine melting pot with the resulting combined culture containing influences and ingredients from all the new arrivals from the many different feeder cultures.
In my original posting I used the phrase “melting pot”, and this is a much better phrase for what I believe in than “monoculturalism”. “Melting pot” communicates both the extreme diversity of the cultural ingredients I want us and expect us to welcome in, and the unified nature of the combined outcome that I likewise want and expect.
To bring all this down to earth and back to life, when I started writing this last night I was also watching the small-hours-of-Friday-morning repeat of CD UK. After a two year silence, Oasis are playing their new single called, if I heard it right, “Hindu Times”. This is good hard Oasis-rock with a scrawny, bearded Gallagher brother doing high-decibel mid-Atlantic Manchester-Irish whining at the front like it was 1997, but with the backing spiced up with sitars – or maybe sitar-like guitars, I couldn’t tell – twanging and singing away in among the drums and bass. Melting. pot rock. Oasis have been listening to bhangra rock (itself a classic melting pot phenomenon) unless I’m much mistaken. It sounded good to me.
You can sometimes overdo the business of defining your terms. Often the trick is just to get ahead and use them, and everyone can get your point clearly enough. But sometimes it is necessary to focus in on exact meanings.
Words to look out for especially are those crafted and launched into regular use by Marxists, of the ex-, sub-, gutter- or plain generic brand variety. Often the entire point of these words is to create confusion – typically to bundle together two ideas that ought to be kept separate and then to use the muddle to accuse opponents of thinking what they don’t think, of liking bad stuff and opposing good stuff.
“Exploitation” for example. Does that mean people using you in a way that is to your advantage? Or does it mean people using you nastily, against your will, for a lousy wage you haven’t agreed to? Big difference. You’re using me to spice up you dreary life right now, and you’re paying me nothing, you skinflint. But do I mind? No I do not. Exploit away.
Multiculturalism. Now there’s a word. Does it mean people from different cultures? Or does it mean people remaining in separate cultures? If from, then I’m all for it, in the sense of multicultural people coming to live and work in Britain. If remaining in, then I’m flat against it. I want the British melting pot to melt us all into a new culture – but just the one new culture please – where we can all get along contentedly, which won’t happen if we all stay stuck in ghettoes. So again: big difference.
This difference matters hugely. If you are arguing against “remaining in” multiculturalism, then you are liable, if you just carry on using the word “multiculturalism” uncritically, to come over as opposing “from” multiculturalism, in other words as a racist. But suppose, perhaps because you are determined above all else not to come over as a racist, you support “multiculturalism”. Then you risk supporting, without meaning to, the project of keeping ethnic minorities herded into ghettoes and exploited (in the bad way, nastily) by “multiculturalist” politicians like slaves exploited by plantation owners.
So, before you support or oppose “multiculturalism”, make it entirely clear which version you are talking about.
That’s it. I’ve said my bit. I love blogging. You can say in twenty minutes what it would take hours or even days to say in an “article”.
UK Transport isn’t a blog name to make the heart race, or so Perry and I have been telling Patrick Crozier. Transports of Delight? Freedom Wheels? Libertarian Travelblog? But UK Transport by any other name would smell just as sweet, for just as long as he can keep it going and keep it coming.
For example, among several nice things there was a beautiful little piece there yesterday (Wed April 3) entitled Safety Costs Soar. I know: yawn. But read it. Says Patrick: “There is something of a shifting of the tectonic plates going on in government circles at the moment.” Trust me, this is about more than safety. It is but the grain of sand in the molecular depths of which a whole world is revealed.
As I write, Britain’s Parliament is speechifying about the recently deceased Queen Mother. It occurs to me that her death may in time come to symbolise a change in the style of British public life, and in particular an end to the extraordinary episode of generational/emotional warfare initiated by the death of Princess Diana. This untimely event, together with the memory of the unhappy life that preceded it and with the lamentations that followed it, provoked praise of a more theatrical style of public emotional deportment. Stoicism, dignity and emotional reticence in the face of loss was held up to bitter and strident ridicule, most especially in connection with the public demeanour of the Queen.
Emotionally I am a true son of my late father, or at any rate I try to be. In his capacity as a Posh Lawyer he met the Queen Mother a few times, and, in common with most men and women of his time and type, he adored her. Like the Queen Mum, my father was a stoic. Life was a pleasure to be enjoyed, if necessary an ordeal to be endured, and a duty to be done. Pains and pleasures were both keenly felt, but both to be kept in proportion, at arm’s length so to speak.
Being my father’s son, I miss the days when footballers would score goals and then nod in modestly happy acknowledgement, instead of (as now) being mobbed like victorious streetfighters. When Halle Berry embarked upon her emotionally incontinent Oscar acceptance speech not long ago (made all the more repulsive to me by the suspicion that she may have been deliberately exaggerating the emotional incontinence of it all) I switched off my television as if killing a nasty insect. Many of Princess Diana’s performances were like that, both in their emotional revelation and in the sense you got that it was all rather calculated.
Emotional style matters. Style provokes, constrains and conditions actions. Devotees of the Emotional Incontinence school of public deportment are liable to make rasher, more impulsive decisions. My father and the Queen Mum lived to be ninety and a hundred respectively, and made themselves thoroughly useful and appreciated throughout their lives. When their contemporaries and emotional confreres died young or otherwise came to grief, they mostly did this while winning a world war. Princess Di got herself killed, pointlessly, in her thirties, in a car crash.
In the small hours of Monday morning I went to visit A Coyote at the Dog Show, on account of it being the first on the blog list on the Samizdata sidebar links. The Coyote man quoted (on Thursday March 28) an interesting opinion from Bill Quick:
Tens of thousands of folks are getting a charge out of creating and maintaining blogs, with absolutely no financial rewards – except for a handful of bloggers so tiny their numbers are statistically meaningless noise. The charge is enough for now, but it won’t last, and the blogosphere, currently in full expansion, will shrink like a popped balloon in another year or so, as hundreds of thousands of blogs go dark and dead.
The problem is simple: it requires too much work and talent to maintain a good blog, work and talent that brings in nothing tangible for the creator.
A similar thought had been occurring to me. Patrick Crozier tells me that keeping UK Transport in full flow is already an effort. Natalie Solent is off at the seaside. Will they go dark and dead? I do hope not.
I don’t think Samizdata will expire soon. Perry seems like a stayer to me, and is not arrogant enough to assume that he can keep Samizdata going indefinitely all by himself. Maybe he could, but why take the chance? There’s a team of us, and Perry is always on the lookout for more. (Libertarian, supermodel, good sense of humour, advanced philosophy degree, is the kind of CV he seems to like best, if you’re thinking of applying.)
Plus: We’re ideologically motivated. We have something big to say, and to keep on saying. We don’t get money, but we do get prestige within the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Alliance has chuntered along for two decades fuelled by little else, inspired by the mere dream of readership numbers per year of the sort that Samizdata now gets in a week. Samizdatans will come and go, but Samizdata itself could well continue into the 2020s.
Nor will Samizdata be the only survivor. Blogging won’t go away, any more than insects will merely because so many of them die per hour. Bill Quick thinking that it will sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a professional writer (which the talented Bill Quick is), wanting to believe that these damned amateurs will vanish and restore the status quo ante. Many will, true. Blogging, like the internet as a whole, will have downs as well as ups, but enough blogs will stick around to prove Bill wrong. Even if blogging is for many only a brief shining moment, millions will want that moment, and then millions more, until some even better way of writing your mind comes along.
And some of the blogs that do stick around will become much bigger than any blog is now.
There was a demonstration in London yesterday. It was described on the local London TV news as being “against the war on terrorism”.
I don’t hate demonstrations, because demonstrations are easily ignored or got around. But I do hate demonstrating, that is, taking part in the damned things. Occasionally someone sends me an e-mail begging me to be somewhere at such-and-such a time on behalf of this or that. Such e-mails usually involve the European Union. But I never go. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Many others with political opinions like mine are, I think, equally reluctant to demonstrate.
I hate the idea that instead of expressing the exact opinion that is my own, I must instead attach myself to a collectively expressed opinion which isn’t exactly my own. I see no virtue in collective agreement for its own sake.
I hate that demonstrations are, in addition to being an intellectual pretence of unanimity, also an emotional pretence. Demonstrations are not events. They are pseudo-events. Their purpose is to create the appearance of a spontaneous outburst of mass anger or enthusiasm, by planning this spontaneous outburst weeks or even months in advance.
Demonstrators are like movie extras. I wouldn’t mind being a real movie extra. That’s honest pretence, for which you are even paid a bob or two if you’re lucky. Neither the makers of movies with big crowd scenes in them nor the viewers of them are under any illusions about the illusions they are dealing in. But political demonstrations aren’t like that. They are dishonestly dishonest, really dishonest. The idea is to suggest that all those contrived emotions – all those frenzied emotional states that the demonstrators work themselves into – are the real thing.
I hate that the meaning of a demonstration will be decided not be those organising it, but by the news media. Take yesterday’s demonstration “against the war on terrorism”. How many of the demonstrators thought that this was what they were saying? Some maybe. But others were merely trying to say that declaring war on entire countries isn’t the right way to chase after terrorists, and that chasing after terrorists should be done differently and better. (Personally I think that chasing terrorists by declaring wars on entire countries makes a lot of sense, but that’s not my point here.) In my case, if I attended a demonstration against some aspect of the European Union, then in the unlikely event that the media deigned to notice it at all, I would almost certainly find myself described as “anti-European”, which I’m not.
Demonstrations can only enact melodramas that are already established in the minds of the news media and their customers. They don’t change thinking. They only take sides between thoughts that have already become established.
What interests me is changing how people think. For that, there is no substitute for my own exactly chosen words, words that I’ve thought about, words that I’ve written. Then, if they want to, media people can read these words and invite me to participate in indoor discussions about the exact rights and wrongs of it all, in conversation and in further writings. In these discussions I speak with my own individual voice.
Political partisanship used to be measured by the willingness to demonstrate. But the conventional political radar kits underestimated the size and strength of the libertarian movement. Like I say, I’m not the only one. I believe that libertarians in general are, because of and as an inseparable part of being libertarians, reluctant to demonstrate in great massed gobs of collectivised dishonesty.
But now the internet is registering what the TV news cameras missed, because the internet allows us each to speak with our own voice. That’s what we want. That’s a crowd we are willing to join, because we can each join it on our own exact terms.
In all your dealings with them you must always try pitching your voice an octave higher. Generalise as long as the words last. Don’t just defend yourself, your own narrow little sector; set out to shatter their whole system!
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The Oak and the Calf)
Why is it called the “Kate Kennedy Club”? Search me. And search The Liberty Log while you’re about it and you still won’t know. But you will find a thoughtful piece posted this lunchtime about the Kate Kennedy club by St Andrews University Liberty Club‘s Alex Singleton. Apparently this evil Kate Kennedy Club is run entirely by males, and the PC meddler tendency of St Andrews U’ want something done about that. Alex ends his piece thus:
The distinction the anti-Kate Kennedy Club protesters are making between public and private is a false one. The Kate Kennedy Club is a private club, funded and organised privately. If the University decides to ban the Club, it needs to be able to explain just why it is OK for a collection of individuals to do something but not for a collection of individuals who have chosen to give themselves a name.
It’s a nice piece, but this last bit bothers me. One must be careful about telling meddlers to be more consistent. They might reply: “Singleton, you’re right. Good point. We must do something about all those damned collections of individuals.”
Don’t worry Alex. I’m being contrary pretty much for the sake of it. The way to spread ideas is to argue about them. Keep it coming. And thanks for the speaking invite.
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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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