Because the state is grounded in a network of lies, contradictions, deceptions, and conflicts, political systems are inherently in conflict with reality and must resort to intentional distortions of truth as a way of trying to appear coherent to a gullible public. FULL ARTICLE by Butler Shaffer
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14383/how-do-we-know-what-we-know/
How Do We Know What We Know?
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Perhaps what is being said is that an individual can judge on the basis of his reason, experience, and moral standards.
Now there are things that we accept because there is an authoritative consensus (such as when an encyclopedia presents the periodic table of elements). There are also times when we must choose among experts who disagree, where we lack the competence or knowledge to directly deal with an issue. Yet most political issues can be dealt with by reliance upon an individual’s own faculties.
To this end, I proffer a meta-principle: present conclusions in as simple, brief, and commonsensical a form as is feasible, adding detail only when unavoidable. As a corollary, note that Cicero said, ‘complicated law is akin to no law at all.’ Similarly, complicated explanations are akin to no explanations at all. Unless laws and policies are clearly imperative, as understood by the common man, it is better to not have them at all.
“Unless laws and policies are clearly imperative, as understood by the common man, it is better to not have them at all.”
Surprise surprise. No laws or policies are “clearly imperative” such that the use of the State could somehow justify them. Did you even read the article?
How about not killing or stealing? Is it that these are not imperative or not understandable? Should not a community delegate a sheriff to curtail this behavior, or would that be difficult to justify? Perhaps there is something in the article (which apparently I am unable to read) that says such a law could not be justified since it is tantamount to the use of a state?
There is actually no need for a law against murder or theft because there is a direct victim. If any individual suffers loss to life, liberty or property they have justifiable cause to demand restitution in a civilized society. We do not need a goliath state to tell us that it is “illegal” to harm another person.
How, exactly, does a murdered person demand restitution???
“We do not need a goliath state to tell us that it is “illegal” to harm another person.”
We may not need a goliath state for that, but that is not the same thing as saying that we need no laws at all for such acts as murder. I happen to think that people who murder others should be punished, and it’s not fair to punish people for things without giving them fair warning that they will be punished for certain acts. That is what laws are for; they give people fair notice that certain acts are simply not acceptable.
Marie, at issue is not whether a government should tell us that murder or theft is wrong, but rather whether there is a need for a delegated power to defend against it. Do you believe that no such power is needed? Do you disagree with Russ the Apostate when he says that we need laws that prohibit such behavior?
How do you plan to pay for the salaries of this “power” to whom you have delegated my rights of self-defense? Through “taxation”?
If so, how do you distinguish theft from taxation? I thought you based your claims on the self-evident idea that theft is wrong. Or is only wrong when someone does it to you? Or does the power to steal at will magically arise when it is written down on some really old piece of paper I didn’t sign?
I have no problem with law, justice, or anyone enforcing the law. I object to pretending that some mafia-style corporate organization is somehow the imputed delegate of my rights, and that it has the power to force me to pay for its activities without my consent, that it is the final arbiter of all violence in some arbitrary territory, and that I have no right to resist it.
Those are the features that comprise the differences between law and a State.
Besides, Jordan, I don’t want to read any articles because that could falsify my position. I would rather have a theory that says I am right because my theory says I am right, and that my conclusions should not have to be bothered by the facts.
“Besides, Jordan, I don’t want to read any articles because that could falsify my position.”
Obviously.
“I would rather have a theory that says I am right because my theory says I am right, and that my conclusions should not have to be bothered by the facts.”
That theory is praxeology. Learn it and enjoy some of the confidence near-metaphysical uncertainty affords in the study of human action.
‘I don’t know which is the more fitting metaphor for our times: (a) the manner in which the Russian people regularly laughed at government “newscasts,” or (b) that poignant scene at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm, as the powerless farm animals look in the window of the farmhouse to see the ruling pigs partying with the hated humans.’
the reference to orwell’s pigs reminds me of the exquisite irony of the pre-1989 Soviet/West ideological polarisation,which gave the lie to the lofty principles espoused by both (sets of statists).
: the two most iconic symbols of Western capitalist conspicious consumptive excess were……Cuban cigars and Russian Caviar. Both exported by hardline Soviet countries, and invariably paid for in US dollars.
Usually, the good folks at Mises are great at crosslinking different versions of the same content, so I’d like to point out that the audio of this speech is available in Mises’ media section.
Hmmm, wonder where the author got this information, could it be from some Nasa data? I don’t suppose the Author has actually verified this himself.
While I tend to agree with the sentiment in that comment, I too don’t really know anything first hand about many of these issues. My neighbor said to me the other day, “It’s funny, I said I don’t believe anything I see on the internet, and you said you don’t believe anything you see anywhere else”.
It’s a bit like the “hot tub” discussions at my health club. It becomes a battle of what I’ve read vs. what they’ve read. And never has any of us really had any first hand knowledge of what we argue for or against.
So, how in the world do we ever know what’s true? Everyone seems to have an agenda.
For instance, sometimes I think that certain prominent libertarians secretly don’t want anything to change. It can be quite a nice job being the most popular libertarian website on the planet railing against the bad guys. Just as the DEA likely hopes that the drug dealers are never wiped out, so it might go for some libertarians.
I recall when Harry Browne ran for president the second time he was attacked by other libertarians. He was forced to spend most of his time defending himself of charges from one libertarian source.
So, while I tend to agree with most of what I see here and LRC, I am mindful that we’re all human with human frailties. Not only do the bad guys tell lies.
I think the great take away from this article that wasn’t mentioned and will help everyone is non-attachment. The buddhist have been studying the nature of mind that Mr. Butler is taking about and non-attachment is one of those great guides to life. Not being attached to ideas of right and wrong but seeing ideas as tools that help guide you through this world to be relinquish as a better idea comes along. The trouble begins when you become attached to your idea of truth and fight all signs to revise your idea so much so that your willing to die than to “change your mind”.
It’s ironic that the reference to Hitler and “the big lie” is in fact a great example of a big lie of exactly the kind Hitler was speaking of. The big lie is that the reference is always used as if Hitler was promoting it, when in fact he was talking about the way other people used it.
In the history of the world I seriously doubt if so many “big lies” have ever been told about anything as are routinely still being told about Hitler. I’ll go so far as to say anyone who hasn’t read his book for themselves has nothing but a head full of lies.
@ Lee: yeah, like the one repeatedly alleging Hitler to have been an atheist.
Criminal laws help layout a means in dealing with weakness in the human condition. Religion is no exception. Viewing criminal law as the “state” or “government” telling you what you should and should not do is an emotional response that is not addressing the logic of criminal law. In order for a society to remain civil, it must respond to acts of unwanted violence in a way that is orderly, justifiable and acceptable(to the majority) and repeatable. Otherwise, a lynch mob mentality will surely arise and similar criminal acts created by different persons would end up being resolved via different punishments.
Now if we remove the state and federal governments from authoring laws and allow society itself to author them, you would still end up with a group of citizens (a pseudo government/committee) that is charged with the task. The natural order is to create such groups. It is inescapable. You simply can not have criminal law managed by the masses. What you can have is law managed by the few and either accepted or rejected by the masses.
Civil law is a different question.
Dear Mr Shaffer: Could you please expound upon what you call, “the truth surrounding 9/11″ – I am curious as to what you are referring.
If you want to know the truth about 9/11, just read what Bin Laden wrote about it and take him at his word. It is not like he has any motive to cover anything up – lying and hypocrisy are not part of his culture. He has no interest in not telling us the truth just to make us feel good.
“It is not like he has any motive to cover anything up – lying and hypocrisy are not part of his culture. ”
Oh, please! What is this, terrorist as noble savage? Hypocrisy is part of the human condition, and lying is a well-known tactic for those fighting a war, which he is.
“A belief in absolute truths…is a pathology that must be confronted head on if we are to preserve any semblance of humanity.”
Sadly, the whole article reads like a pitch for relativism and subjectivism.
A belief in absolute truths is a pathology? That’s funny. What is *IS* doing in
that statement? Is that “is” in the non-absolute, relative, subjective, clintonesque
no-one-can-ever-possibly-know-if-this-is-true sense? In which case, I should
ignore it and give it no more credence than if he had said that he likes
pretzels with mustard? Or does he expect me to take his statement as true?
Absolutely true? Partially true? True on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
Since I believe in absolute truths, I’m wondering where I should check myself
in for treatment of my “pathology”. Does anyone know if insurance covers
belief in absolute truths? Will I need a lobotomy or just shock treatment, do you
think?
“There is no truth,” says the relativist. And we ask, “Is that statement true?”
Sorry, but relativism is self-refuting nonsense in whatever context it appears.
There are other statements in the article which seem to indicate that this is
not a case of sloppy presentation but that he is actually attempting to throw
out the baby with the bathwater. Knowledge is difficult to come by and we
should proceed with caution and skepticism, but somehow he ends up
rejecting truth – for the boneheads who believe in “absolute truth,” not him
of course! He has lots of truth claims to make that somehow escape being
pathological, but he doesn’t tell us why. Probably because we haven’t reached
that stage of Enlightenment yet.
To be fair, he qualifies that by stating that it was bad when “coupled with a self-righteous resolve to enforce such views upon the world”
He says:
“A belief in absolute truths, coupled with a self-righteous resolve to enforce such views upon the world, is a pathology…”
There is no “when coupled” offered as a condition. Read what follows. He asks
if there is such a thing as objective truth and then gives an example from economics
regarding prices. So the answer is apparently no. There are no objective or absolute
truths because people value economic goods subjectively. The whole article reads like that.
I could have quoted a bunch of things to that effect.
This is very bad philosophy. You don’t take examples which are inherently subjective
because they depend on choice and then let this bleed into your overall epistemology.
To refute that is simple since it is OBJECTIVELY TRUE *that* economic value *is* subjective
(it requires a subject valuing it in order to have a price). If this were not true, then he’d have nothing to say about economics and therefore nothing to say about knowledge and certainty in general which he derived from this and every other example.
Relativism is self-refuting like that. It’s just plain nonsense and ought to
be rejected wherever and whenever it raises its head.
Butler, this is an interesting post.
1. You might be interested in this post by Gene Callahan at ThinkMarkets, the blog of the NYU Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes: http://thinkmarkets.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/evolutionary-epistemology/
I just left the following comment there: November 7, 2010 at 9:37 am
Gray overstates his objection to evolutionary epistemology, as there is very good reason for supposing that the various “webs of belief” which have emerged via natural and cultural evolution have enhanced our survival chances and thus to some degree mirror nature or track reality.
What Gray and Callahan miss is that our belief systems are more often than not GROUP “cultural” systems that give particular groups a competitive edge in survival stakes, in the environment in which such belief systems evolved.
See, e.g.,
- Bruce Yandle,
- Roy Rappaport (former head of the American Anthropology Assn.) in his book “Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity”; and
- David Sloan Wilson in his book “Darwin`s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society”.
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/09/10/more-from-gene-callahan-are-external-quot-objective-moral-truths-quot-needed-in-order-for-a-community-to-enforce-shared-rules.aspx
The problem, of course, is that the acceleration of technological innovation means that cultures adapted to particular physical environments have been under severe stress for the past few millenia, and different cultures are very much in conflict.
Gene still seems to be on a quest to find an “objective” moral order: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=rappaport
2. I like your skepticism of government, but I notice that you fail to explicitly direct it to any of the state’s chief partners – the mega-corporations that it has empowered (via limited liability, and a mass of regulations intended to control excesses that instead serve as barriers to entry, and allow corporations to escape local and state control).
3. “For this reason, the lies that have been inseparable from the truth surrounding 9/11 continue to be accepted by vast numbers of Americans. Likewise, the state-serving myth that global warming is the product of human activity continues to be recited by politicians and other government officials, academics, and members of the media, despite the refutations offered by literally hundreds of highly respected scientists who have refused to be baptized into the secular religion of Algoreism. With the surface temperatures of Mars increasing, and its polar ice melting, I have heard none of the high-church environmentalists respond to my claim that this proves the existence of humanlike beings — with their SUVs and aerosol sprays — on Mars!”
Unfortunately, it seems that your skepticism of government here – and your lack of familiarity with basic physics – leads you to ignore the rent-seeking role played by powerful corporations that are happy with the status quo. Every gas molecule with more than two atoms exerts a comparative greenhouse gas effect (the atmosphere is composed chiefly of N2 and O2). While there may certainly be some “Algoreism” – we can’t all independently evaluate the climate evidence after all – but there certainly seems to be a fair amount of reflexive “Know-Nothing-ism” on the right as well: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/08/18/not-that-it-matters-to-libertarians-but-the-conservative-national-post-says-quot-global-warming-deniers-are-a-liability-to-the-conservative-cause-quot.aspx
Even with disagreements over science, it still seems to me that there are productive ways for libertarians to engage on climate: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/02/10/towards-a-productive-libertarian-approach-on-climate-energy-and-environmental-issues.aspx
TT
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