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]

More money, more happiness

Today my salary appeared in my bank account. I am definitely happier than I was yesterday, when my bank account contained a very little indeed. The conventional wisdom is that I should not be happier. “Money does not make you happier,” the anti-progress crowd say.

But if that were true, then Africans who get clean water for the first time are not any happier than when their children were dying from disease. OK, maybe the anti-progressites merely mean that once you get to a certain basic income, earning any more from that point does not make you happier. Really?

Let’s take a young family who pay fees to send their children to school. It is a bit of a struggle paying the fees. If they had a bit more money, they would not have to worry about it. Would that do nothing for their happiness? Or let’s say environmentalists had their way and they had less money. The fees would become much more of a burden. Surely that would make them less happy?

The enemy of our enemy…

…can also be our enemy too. Just because a person dislikes the regulatory state, that does not mean they see several liberty as first of all virtues.

Here on Samizdata.net, we have written many articles abominating the coercive law enforced process of moral relativism called ‘Political Correctness’. As a result, it is a measure of how bizarre some commenters can become when they starts accusing us of being PC because we do not have a problem with women joining the military, regardless of the fact none of us ever suggested a significant number of women have the physical strength to be front line infantry. It is apparent that the reason we are called ‘PC’ is that we do not think the only reasonable role for a woman in society is that of bearing and raising children.

Now I for one am all in favour of people who wish to have and raise children doing exactly that. Yet when it is suggested that a woman who might like to, say, spend her time flying a combat jet or wandering around lawless Basra as a military policewoman, we start seeing quack-science trotted out about ‘evolutionary biology’ and psychology and words to the effect that ‘real women are just unsuited to such things’ regardless of the mountain of evidence to the contrary… whilst somehow missing the rather obvious fact that actual biological evolution seems to have equipped woman, as well as men, with vastly powerful brains imbued with a capacity for reason and informed choices beyond crude instinctual motivations. Women have absurdly overpowered heads if the totality of their lives is driven by evolved psychological imperatives to immerse themselves in simple tasks such as having sex and keeping the house clean. → Continue reading: The enemy of our enemy…

The happy art of self-delusion

We have written a couple articles recently about the passing of Concorde, but I have just seen yet another twist which, as I am also someone who lives directly under what was that magnificent bird’s flight path, brings an incredulous smirk to my lips.

Anti-noise activists in Queens, New York, are claiming that it was their protests against the aircraft that lead to its withdrawal from service. Ok, so let me get this straight… this supersonic aircraft has been flying in and out of the USA for 25 years following the utter defeat of attempts to prevent that in 1977, and against a backdrop of the well known fact that civil aviation has suffered a general reversal in fortune in the aftermath of September 11 , and yet we are to believe1

“We lost a few battles, but after 25 years, we finally won the war,” said Frans C. Verhagen, the president of a coalition of civic groups in Queens, Sane Aviation for Everyone. “It took 25 years, but a bunch of citizens in Queens stopped the SST from proliferating into the rest of the United States and the world.”

I wonder if this is all a result of the irrationalist cult of self-esteem. It reminds me of the comical Greenham Common Women jubilantly dancing and banging drums claiming they had seen off the USA when the missiles were removed from the UK between 1989 and 1991… as if the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 with the rapidly collapsing Soviet Union did not have just a little something to do with it. Doh!

It is widespread delusional mindsets like, these with an inability to grasp anything beyond the most rudimentary causal links that sometimes get me muttering things like “the more people I meet, the more I like my cat”.

1 = NY Times link requires free registration.

Home from the hunt

This year’s hunting trip to the Great American West was (another) success, venturing forth heavily armed into the lovely country in south-central Wyoming, amongst the sagebrush flats and quaking aspen. The view from our line cabin:

Cabin view.jpg

Another look at the countryside: → Continue reading: Home from the hunt

Emotional Correctness

Given the appearance of some gloomy prognostications round here today I think it appropriate to shed a little light on what I consider to be a much under-examined issue.

Damien Thompson writes in the Telegraph about the triumph of feeling over thinking:

How many people in Britain do you think work as “counsellors” of one sort or another? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, the actual figure may be closer to half a million, though no one can be sure. What we do know is that the number of mental health professionals has more than quadrupled since 1970, and that the ranks of registered psychotherapists were swelled by more than half between 1997 and 1999.

A new priesthood? Arguably, I suppose. But I have yet to be convinced that ‘psychotherapy’ is anything except institutionalised quackery.

Never before have so many people been dependent on some form of therapy. Night after night, our televisions instruct us to pick up the phone “if you have been affected by any of the issues in this programme”: the message is that every difficult experience requires expert help. We must all raise our “awareness” – of stress, low self-esteem or some recently identified personality disorder.

We must all raise of ‘awareness’ of this worrying trend towards mental and spiritual incontinence…

Government, social workers and charities work tirelessly in this cause. It costs money, of course, since awareness-raising requires special training; and, despite ritual denunciations of underfunding, it is usually forthcoming. In a recent disbursement of National Lottery money earmarked for health, 25 per cent went to advice and counselling schemes; only six per cent was allocated to research charities.

…and the vested interests that actively promote it.

Thanks to media willingness to spread “awareness” of previously undiagnosed emotional illness, prophecies of mental anguish tend to become self-fulfilling. People learn to be stressed (which is not to say that their unhappiness is not real).

The BBC works particularly hard at cultivating therapeutic anxiety. Last Tuesday’s Woman’s Hour opened with the alarmist statement that “one in five young people rates stress as unbearably high most of the time, and the claim is backed up by a number of organisations”.

The thing that BBC supporters seem unable to grasp is that antipathy towards that organisation is driven not just by its lockstep soft-left bias but also by the vanguard role it has arrogated unto itself in disseminating and propogandising this kind of grotesque agenda.

Yet, like the state socialism of the postwar years, the detailed management of emotion requires a formidable apparatus of bureaucratic inspectors. No government can hope to build such a structure on its own: it requires entire professions (such as the police, post-Macpherson, or the BBC) and large sections of the public to submit willingly to ideological control. That is how totalitarianism works.

That is exactly how is has worked. Nor is this class-interest driven programme of gradual infantilisation a transient or trivial matter. It isn’t about ‘caring’ its about controlling and manipulating. It isn’t about ‘help’ its about dependence. It isn’t about more humanity its about less humanity. In the final analysis, it is all about the sleep of reason and the sleep of reason will, sooner or later, breed monsters.

Yankee euphemisms go home!!

Now this is one American import we could well do without especially as it appears to be selling rather well.

Among the distributors are Simon Jenkins who devotes his latest column in the UK Times to ‘The Untimely Death of a Liberal Generation’:

Three British liberals have died in the past few days, all before their time. Jim Thompson, Gareth Williams and Hugo Young were still in their sixties. Each was outstanding in his profession, as priest, lawyer and journalist. They cut their political teeth with the rise of the welfare state and sharpened them on the Thatcher era. They lived to see what they regarded as Thatcherism’s denouement in the Labour landslide of 1997. They are gone. Something has died with them.

I certainly hope so because, as the brief obituaries which follow make abundantly clear, these men were not ‘liberals’ they were socialists.

I don’t care if I am ploughing a lonely furrow, I am not going to stop campaigning against this gross distortion of language.

Anthropology and anti-westernism

For the benefit of our student readers, here is a cartoon pointing out some of the ideas being put forward by university anthropology departments.

Attack of the social anthropology department

Shoes ‘R’ Us

For the last 15 years, or so, I’ve earned my daily bread in and around the arena of Unix programming, whether that has been managing databases, programming in various flavours of shell script, writing technical specifications, or teaching programming. When one is living in ‘Unix World’, there are certain conventions that one must adhere to, and the central one is wearing sandals.

Fortunately, being a contrary sort of person, I’ve managed to resist this. I have occasionally succumbed to the continuous 24-hour donning of SuSE Linux polo shirts, the drinking of large quantities of real ale, and the growing of beards (once), but until this year I’d managed to avoid the big one.

But alas, no longer. With the collapse of the database and telecom networking industries in the Thames Valley, where I’d carried out many cosy assignments, I was forced out of my air-conditioned sub-one-hour trips to Abingdon, Camberley, and Reading, and plonked into the sadistic clutches of Thames Trains, Network Rail, and the London Underground, as all the consultancy work contracted into a small hard-core area of central London.

So what’s all this got to do with sandals? Well, I’m a cold weather person. I like snow. I like skiing. I like warm fires, and thick blankets, and cocoa round the hearth. What I really can’t tolerate is hot humid weather of the sort we’ve been having this summer in London and its surrounding regions, especially when trapped within a Thames Train cattle-truck where the windows won’t open and the air-conditioning has failed, or at any time on the Bakerloo line, where I swear the humidity last week hit 763%. Or at least it felt like it did. → Continue reading: Shoes ‘R’ Us

Pessimism, precaution and the nature of the lawyer threat

Yesterday I had an interesting experience. I watched a lawyer at work. It was David Carr. We were due to dine together but he had some work to finish with some people who were setting up a business. David was crafting a contract that the business would be using. It got complicated. What exactly is meant by this? If so-and-so fails to provide that, who exactly pays? The point was: not the people David was helping.

Afterwards I talked about this with David, and he said, yes, it’s the job of a lawyer to look ahead and try to see the pitfalls, and to clarify exactly who is obligated to do what in circumstances which nobody wants beforehand, but which may nevertheless crop up. Lawyers aren’t paid to take you to court. They’re paid to spare you the horror of ever having to go to court. What if? – What if? – What if? � they ask. What if the world price of marble doubles, and your Malaysian contractor simply can’t supply marble at the price he originally and in good faith promised, but upon which the winning design depends for its aesthetic and price superiority? What if there’s a hurricane and the factory is wrecked? What if the ship sinks? Who, then, is obligated to do what, and to pay for what?

This reminded me of my late father, who used to behave exactly like this if any of us were going on a journey of any complexity or expense. What if? � the train is late and you miss your connection. What if? � you get ill. What if? � the car breaks down. What if? � a meteorite from outer space lands nearby.

I made that last one up, because of course we used to tease my Dad about this habit of his. We all took a ruggedly entrepreneurial attitude to future hazards. Dad, we’ll worry about that if it happens, okay? We’ll climb over any barriers in our path as and when we get to them, but we won’t waste our energy worrying about what we can’t possibly hope to anticipate. It’s a holiday. Enjoy yourself. Well, he would reply, don’t come running to me if that meteorite hits!!! � blah, blah, blah, big family row, just when we were supposed to be having holiday fun.

My Dad, like David, was also a lawyer. But he was a litigator, or barrister as we call that here, and maybe because he therefore did the arguing, and later in his career the judging, when the waste matter had already hit the fan, rather than the duller commercial job of preventing the need for all that, I had never quite connected his pessimism with him being a lawyer. I had just thought that my Dad was simply a pessimist, and that the lawyer bit was coincidence.

But lawyers, I was reminded, after watching David at work yesterday are paid to be gloomy. They are paid to see bad things coming, and to concoct complicated documents to take care of everything beforehand. And although my Dad may not have spent his life writing such documents, he did spend his life looking at them, and noting which ones solved the problem he was trying to deal with, and which ones didn’t.

Like David, my Dad was a devotee of the precautionary principle, and my Dad was a moralist and David is a moralist, and I don’t just mean in their Sunday best pronouncements about World Affairs, but in their daily lives. You must (moral issue) look ahead, and see bad things coming, and have a plan ready. Letting bad stuff hit you when you aren’t ready but could and should (moral issue) have prepared for it is bad (moral issue). David yesterday, and my Dad always, was trying to do the right (moral issue) thing. Neither of them were just sneaky lawyers who wanted to tie people up in legal chewing gum for the mere sneaky sake of it, just for the profit and the pleasure of it. And I don’t believe that most other lawyers are any more deliberately wicked than David or my Dad.

It is widely noted that (a) legislatures and parliaments everywhere are crawling with lawyers, and that (b) laws and regulations of ever increasing volume and complexity are piling up like there’s no tomorrow, to the point where for millions of people there aren’t going to be any tomorrows of remotely the kind they were hoping for. What’s going on? What are all the lawyers doing wrong, and why? → Continue reading: Pessimism, precaution and the nature of the lawyer threat

Ode to the future

You know, some days I wake up and I despair. Samizdata is filled with a waterfall of stories because we’re living in one of the most dangerous hate-filled ages of humanity, festooned with statists, hatists and ecologists.

The world is awash with these idiots, fools, and destroyers of the human spirit.

But then…

But then on other days I know, I feel it in my bones, from the smile on my son’s face, that we will emerge triumphant from this gathering gateway of horror.

Oh I pray, I pray to the atheistic God I worship, that a saviour will come to free us from this tyranny.

And then I realise that we don’t need a God, and we don’t need a saviour.

The spirit is within us all. This is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of adventure, and the spirit of hope.

It has sustained us since we crawled out of Africa one hundred thousand years ago, the product of four billion years of evolution. It has sustained us through four thousand bitter years of recorded history, and it has sustained us throughout that most terrible of centuries, the twentieth century of socialism, fascism, and communism.

We will not let these people destroy us; we will not let these people crush us underfoot. We will defeat them. We will free them from the horror which wraps their minds.

Yes, the past and the present belong to them, my friends, and may belong to them for a few more years yet.

But.

The future? The future, be assured. The future belongs to us.

Think Different

My good friend Alex Singleton’s liberty loving credentials are impeccable… he was the founder and driving force behind the St. Andrews Liberty Club blog in fact. Thus I never dismiss his views out hand and I certainly understand the points he makes in his most recent article on Samizdata.net.

I would of course be delighted to see the major political parties start being influenced by libertarian ideas. However the basic thrust of Alex’s views must be predicated on the notion that some sort of Perestroika with the system of party politics under which we are governed is actually possible, which is to say, the system can reform itself and kick the habit of tax addicted encroaching regulatory gradualism and ever more force mandated political interaction replacing the very notion there is something called civil society and non-force mandated social interaction. I do not think any such Perestroika is possible from within the system. As a result, I pin much of my hope of the trend across much of the western world of decreasing voting numbers and think it is indeed possible in the long run to delegitimise the whole notion of democratically sanctified kleptomania and its corrosive effects on civil society. I am, in short, anti-political.

Does that mean I am indifferent to Party Politics completely? Alas no… I too have to live in the here and now world and certainly we do not have the luxury of just standing by when dire things are happening. Matters such as the war against Ba’athist Iraq and events like the current power grab by the €uro-political tranzi elite force folks like me to take an interest in the foetid waters establish politics… but I try to never loose sight of the fact party politics is inherently corrupting. It does not matter how much you are in the side of the Angels, to become truly successful in democratic party politics requires you to become a whore-for-hire and to constantly feed the vast kleptocratic machine or be devoured by it.

So if you want to join a party and try to nudge them in the direction of respecting individual liberty, well God bless you. I wish you well and will certainly count you as a fellow traveller of mine even if I do worry that you may be legitimising the very process which is the root of the problem. However I will never embrace or respect any political party myself and I sure as hell will never join one. My object is get as many people as possible to, as Apple Computers likes to say, “Think Different”.

Does politics matter?

The section of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets I find most interesting is Tactical Notes. One of the most important questions for Libertarian strategists should be: how close to party politics is it advantageous to be?

I spent my four years at University distant from the Conservative group. The group was, most of the time, largely worthless. Sometimes they were wet, other times just offensive. I remember the time when one Tory president went into a chip shop and exclaimed loudly, “I think it’s great that I buy from the common people here! It keeps them in a job.”

The Liberty Club, which is non-partisan and interested in ideas, was much more successful, with more members, a higher budget and a higher profile. One of the Tory presidents declined our invitation to join saying that the Liberty Club seemed “extreme”. I replied: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Being independent of a political party was very useful because we could express ideas seen as being slightly on the fringe.

But I do think it harmful when libertarians completely remove themselves from mainstream party politics. The creation of a Libertarian Party in the US has been wholly unhelpful because it allowed the religious right much more influence over the Republican Party. It has taken away the influence of libertarian ideas. Giving centre-right parties a libertarian hook does seem to me to be worthwhile.

Yes, I know all of you on this blog disagree with me. So I’ll shut up now, and promise not to write on this subject again.