Speak for Yourself: Letters to the Editor
BACK TO BASICS
Edward Hudgins’s “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party” [Fall 2006] should be required reading for the GOP. The party needs to embrace the fact that the Constitution’s primary purpose is to restrain the federal government.
There are 535 representatives in the Capitol, yet there are 300 million people in the United States. Does anyone think 535 people should have so much power or were ever intended to have it? Power needs to be returned to the States where it belongs. Instead of wasting time with flag and marriage amendments, it’s time to rein in the federal government. I propose the following:
The Constitution should be amended to eliminate private property seizures by any government entity with the intent to give it to another private company, organization, or person. Ownership of property and homes is a cornerstone of this nation.
The Constitution should be amended to block any judge from overturning legislation enacted by a majority vote of the people in any state. Only Congress could overturn that vote and only if it was below a 2/3 majority.
The Constitution should be amended to allow line-item vetoes by the President. The irresponsibility of legislators wasting money on pet projects has spiraled out of control. Only a 2/3 congressional vote could overturn a line-item veto.
The Constitution should be amended to abolish the IRS and the complex income tax code. A fairer alternative such as the Fair Tax (fairtax.org) needs to be implemented.
This amendment should also abolish property taxes as a legal means for taxation in this country. The government should have no claim on your private property. Nor should it be able to tax your home ad infinitum.
This amendment should also abolish death taxes. People are taxed all their lives, taxing after death is tantamount to theft.
Constitutional amendments take time, but if the GOP aggressively pursues these proposals over the next two years, they could secure a landside victory in 2008.
Darrick Dean
New Castle , Pennsylvania
FUNDING THE ENEMY
I read with interest the Soliloquy on “Corporate Cash for Collectivist Causes” [November 2006]. I think everyone should consider where his money is going and whom it supports.
Do you know that there are shareholders who are trying to get businesses to act like capitalists again? I have been investing in the Free Enterprise Action Fund for some time. They invest in companies and then advocate as shareholders the virtue of free enterprise. You can visit them at this website: http://www.freeenterpriseactionfund.com
Thanks for a good essay!
Andrew L. Sullivan
Omaha, Nebraska
ARGUMENT FROM INTIMIDATION?
Robert Bidinotto’s article “It’s a Conspiracy!!!” [November 2006] is written with unchecked premises and unexamined prejudices, aiming to dismiss rather than dispute, to intimidate rather than inform, to ridicule rather than reason. The article rests its whole case on a key term, “conspiracy,” which it never defines explicitly. Yet the meaning implicit in the article is: A conspiracy theory is a theory that challenges the official, mainstream version—with the assumption that all such alternate theories are false. By this definition, Objectivism’s challenge of the mainstream is a “conspiracy theory,” and so is Bidinotto’s own “econot.com” website.
The argument used in dismissing any alternate theory to the official account of 9/11 is: All conspiracy theories are false and should be ignored (rejected, dismissed, ridiculed); alternatives to the official mainstream version of the 9/11 events are all conspiracy theories; therefore, all 9/11 conspiracy theories are false and should be ignored.
The unproved premise, assumed to be true, is: All conspiracy theories are false. Yet, nowhere in the article is there refutation of any of the offered examples of conspiracy theories. And, even if most of the examples listed can be proven false, that doesn’t mean all “conspiracy theories” are false, certainly not merely by being labeled as such.
The psycho-social explanations proposed in the article about why people believe in conspiracy theories are part of the distraction from the real issue of whether a particular theory is true or false or undetermined. The far-fetched and disparaging characterizations also form part of the overall intimidation. But the characterizations are, at best, over-generalizations of the worst cranks of any movement and an attempt to dismiss the possibility that there might be rational, independent investigators and critics of the multitude of suspicious and contradictory claims in the official version.
The article is an uncritical acceptance of the official 9/11 theory, attacking and ridiculing anyone who challenges that version. The article’s only attempt to answer any of the criticisms of the official version is the reference to the Popular Mechanic’s straw-man article, which has, in turn, been refuted by many 9/11 investigators—e.g., at: http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/gopm/index.html
Was the collapse of the WTC towers due to impact-fire-and-pancaking or due to some type of controlled demolition? Was the violation of standard procedures, on that morning only, in dealing with suspected hijackings—along with the reported multiple nearby air-war games being conducted during the hijacking—were they all coincidences, with no intentional, causal relationships to the massacre? Before assuming the official account to be true, investigate for yourself. Scholarly works, like these, should be studied:
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, by David Ray Griffin; The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, by David Ray Griffin; The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed; The Terror Timeline, by Paul Thompson.
In short, Bidinotto’s article tries to use ridicule and intimidation to discourage people from investigating the truth about 9/11 (and to sanction other supporters of the official account). It reminds me of those many anti-Rand articles whose authors have read very little of Rand and who don’t try to refute her ideas but, instead, try to misrepresent, smear, and ridicule her so as to discourage people from reading her works for themselves.
The truth, or falsehood, of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory is vitally important—important because wars are being fought with its justification, lives and wealth lost, and liberties infringed because of it.
Monart Pon
Calgary , Alberta, Canada
www.concertoofdeliverance.com
Here’s a definition. Conspiratorialism: a rationalistic method of explaining events that rejects “Occam’s razor” and scientific causality, and instead attributes those events to the deliberate planning and scheming of unknown plotters. Now, in rejecting conspiritorialism, I do not deny the existence of conspiracies per se. A conspiracy by Islamic terrorists was certainly behind the events of 9/11. Ironically, the rationalism of 9/11 conspiracy buffs compels them to deny the obvious, eye-witnessed, demonstrable, even self-admitted conspiracy of the identified al Qaeda hijackers in favor of some grandiose, secret, unbelievably complicated, and completely speculative plot involving hundreds, even thousands of tight-lipped traitors within our own government—an incomprehensible scheme by countless officials to simultaneously annihilate America’s financial center, their own Pentagon, and probably the White House. If readers therefore detected a tone of ridicule in my essay, perhaps it’s because I find such “theories” ridiculous. —RJB
CHANNELING KARL POPPER
Mr. Bidinotto, I just read your “It’s a Conspiracy!!!” Check out what Karl Popper wrote in “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition,” a transcript of a 1948 speech, published in 1949:
In order to explain what is...the central task of social science, I should like to begin by describing a theory which is held by very many rationalists....I shall call this theory “the conspiracy theory of society.” This theory...is akin to Homer’s theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of this theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?”
Randy Hudson
Lisle, Illinois
Mr. Hudson, I swear to you that I never read that passage from Popper before writing my conspiracy essay. However, my view—that conspiratorialism is a secularized version of the theological Argument from Design—does appear to mirror his own. It may not surprise you that I find Popper’s insight to be utterly brilliant. —RJB
SECULAR SPIRITUALITY
I think most of us are realistic and level-headed enough to acknowledge that the great world religions are not completely devoid of worth for guiding one’s actions in life. Like any other body of ideas, a religion must be carefully examined and weighed, keeping the pro-life elements and discarding the rest. For a person to do otherwise, living in a significantly religious culture as we do, is to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
That is why I found two essays in the most recent issues of TNI to be very helpful and encouraging. In them, I learned that: even when there is no iota of the supernatural involved in a particular social or political issue, conspiracy theorists can behave as dogmatically and rationalistically as the staunchest religious fundamentalists—and even when a particular social or political issue has arisen due to theistic influence and supernatural associations, secular people can reframe that issue and approach it with as great a sense of sacredness and spirituality as the staunchest religious fundamentalists.
That is the two-pronged message I came away with, upon reading the excellent pieces by Robert Bidinotto (“It’s a Conspiracy,” November 2006) and Edward Hudgins (“Secular Spirituality,” December 2006).
It is clear from Robert’s article that conspiracy theories reek of the Primacy of Consciousness, the idea (devoid of any evidence to support it) that some conscious being is acting behind the scenes to direct a state of affairs. His alternative explanation, that the “Invisible Hand” and the Law of Unintended Consequences are the complex causal factors at work, is well-stated and a much-needed antidote to the widespread virus of “conspiratorialism.”
What is less clear, but which Ed nicely explains, is that the sacred and the spiritual, the emotionally elevating and the deeply fulfilling, have no necessary connection to the disembodied, unearthly elements of world religions, but instead derive ultimately from our very earthly, human powers of reason, self-awareness, and goal-directedness. We regard as holy—and we worship—that which we and others can and should be, and we celebrate the achievement of those potentials by ourselves and others.
I hope these two essays are reprinted some day as part of a book on how and how not to incorporate aspects of spiritualism into a rational, secular outlook.
Roger E. Bissell
Orange , California
NATURE’S “NOBLE REBEL”
Edward Hudgins’s “Secular Spirituality” did make a good case that a spiritual high might be possible without the invocation of spirits and spooks. Sometimes I worry that it’s a tough sell, though. I do agree with those who point out that a thoroughgoing secular society is still a fairly new experiment, and it is still not a cert that it will be able to provide the emotional sustenance needed to generate loyalty in its members. And there is always the risk that formal religion will be replaced by a nominally nonreligious fanatic movement that is de facto Torquemada Redux. The jury remains in deliberation.
One way that a secular belief system might work as a seductive model is to appeal to the most dramatic visions of the heroic—and do I mean existentially dramatic. A universe without a God is one of matter, both animate and inanimate, with no sense of concern or benevolence for the human race, no sense of morals or philosophy, and no sense of the artistic or beautiful. It can just as easily kill us as support us, and frankly it is more inclined to the former. If one were to try personify Nature, the image would not be of Mother Gaia but rather of an indifferent psychopath.
And where does that dismal-sounding vision leave us? As the sole repository of intellect, morals, and esthetics. As the beleaguered yet noble outpost of anything above grunting mindlessness. Talk about the noble rebel writ large; talk about heroic casting! This could be the sort of stuff that epics are made out of. Now it’s up to the next issue of Homers and Shakespeares.
J. Wroblewski
British Columbia , Canada
SUBJECTIVIST SCHOOLS
It is very unfortunate that C.A. Baylor had such a poor experience teaching at a high school in New England [“Schools for Subjectivists,” December 2006]. But I can’t quite buy the notion that the various strains of subjectivism (progressivism and traditionalism) dominate and degrade existing private high-school education in all, or even most, cases.
As a specific counter-example, my son, a long-term Camp Indecon veteran, read the article and noted that the school described there is nothing like the private, secular, college-preparatory school that he attends here in the Midwest. Overall, his school is objective and rational in many ways. It also provides real data about test scores relative to school averages, about class standing, and about other specific attributes of each student in the material it submits in support of college applications. This renders relatively moot any concerns about grade inflation or lack thereof (his school is a tough grader by modern standards).
In my view, the real tragedy in education is the absence of a market, because public education is so dominant that very few private schools can survive within driving distance of any particular residence. Were education to be fully privatized, the schools offering real value would do well on average and in the long run. Good approaches to education would prove themselves and would win out. This would no doubt include both new innovations and a diversity of approaches far beyond what we see at present. As one can see in markets from automobiles to groceries to electronics, in the presence of a broad and deep market, information develops and flows in ways that help people make good decisions and steer them away from superficial and short-sighted ones.
R. Paul Drake
Professor, Atmospheric Oceanic and Space Sciences
Professor, Applied Physics
University of Michigan
I always find The New Individualist packed with lively and thoughtful articles that stress the moral values of liberty, individualism, the quest for excellence, and the main ingredient for their attainment—limited government. This is precisely what’s needed if there’s to be a reawakening of the values that helped make us a great nation.
Mr. Baylor’s discussion in the December issue was the best summary of the sad state of secondary education that I’ve read in recent times. His observations about low standards, mediocrity, plagiarism, and cultural equality apply also to college education. His mention of today’s concern for student self-esteem reminded me of an encounter I had twenty or so years ago with my daughter’s fifth-grade mathematics teacher who didn’t flunk her for sloppy performance out of a concern for her self-esteem and feeling good about herself.
I told him that I felt good about myself every time I solved a set of quadratic equations.
Professor Walter E. Williams
Department of Economics
George Mason University
I have to admit that I spent too much of today reading the latest [January-February] issue of The New Individualist when I should have been doing other things! Please convey my appreciation to Robert Bidinotto.
I particularly enjoyed Ed Hudgins’s interview of Professor Michael Shermer. It recalled a conversation I had with Ed last year when he was about to go to the Skeptics Convention in Las Vegas. The Skeptics Society can thank Ed for a substantial book order from The Social Relations of Knowledge Institute, Inc. It’s okay by me if you call Professor Shermer and give The New Individualist credit for it.
Sherrie Gossett’s article about Kosovo and the notion of “war only if it’s altruistic” was also long overdue.
John Laing
Social Relations of Knowledge Institute, Inc. Sylmar, California