On the inconvenient truths about human sacrifice.

From Matt Bors.

A lot of what I post about is on sensitive issues, so I have come to expect the usual denial and obfuscation from my opponents. I expect a lot of denial on this issue also. Human sacrifice? HAR HAR HAR! Surely that’s a relic of past, ignorant ages!

Not really. We still practice human sacrifice and praise it, but we just do it without the pomp and circumstance. Human sacrifice happens when you know someone will die but you justify it as being for some higher purpose (be it religious, social, economic, or other). Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember this example.

However, we need not restrict ourselves to this kind of example. The simple fact is that anyone who rejects the “do no harm” principle to the point that they find some number of deaths “justifiable” supports human sacrifice in some form. I am not saying that such a position is automatically invalid, but it does have the burden of proof, and “well, I think it’s justified” doesn’t cut it.

The problem is that people who support human sacrifice also refuse to admit that they support human sacrifice. This is understandable; anyone who would openly make such an admission would discredit emself as a normal human being. So they have to finagle, whine and bitch.

A good example of that is the commenting rules I applied for a while on the pro-abortion series. I asked people the following questions:

What maximum number of women dead from botched back alley abortions per year under an anti-abortion scheme do you consider a fair and just tradeoff to prevent all abortions that would happen under a pro-abortion scheme? (for anti-abortion people)

What maximum number of children afflicted with spina bifita/Tay-Sachs/leukemia/cancer/Downs Syndrome/etc a year born under a pro-choice scheme do you consider a fair and just tradeoff to prevent the distress of women who would not be allowed to have a child under a pro-abortion scheme? (for pro-choice people)

My reasoning behind these questions was two-fold:

1. To get my opponents to admit that they support the deliberate sacrifice of human beings for their goals.

2. To get them to quantify their support of human sacrifice, so we can advance the debate beyond rationalizations and get to the heart of the matter.

Of course my attempt failed. Some people claimed they were unable to answer because the question didn’t apply to them, and tried to finagle their position so it wouldn’t apply. Other people refused to consider the issue because it was too damageable for their position. Yet others simply didn’t answer. It’s the elephant in the room.

One person tried to return the question to me, asking me how many lives my beliefs are worth. But that’s a misfire, because I can always hit that one out of the park: the answer is, and always will be, zero. I don’t give a shit who you are or what you believe, no one’s beliefs are worth the lives of innocent human beings.

When I say, “do not impose harm,” I don’t mean “do not impose harm unless you’re not doing it to a specific person.” I also don’t mean “do not impose harm unless it’s on someone you don’t like or who you think deserves it.” I also don’t mean “do not impose harm unless it’s legal.” I mean “do not impose harm.”

One may reply, what answer do I expect? Do I expect an exact number? No, not really, but at least an order of magnitude. If it is justified to have people die for your beliefs, it would be nice to have an idea of how much death is warranted, and whether the current death rate is warranted.

And there are people who are able to be clear-headed about this and answer the question, such as Biting Beaver in this entry. We need more people with her high level of honesty. I still think her position is fucking disgusting and wrong, but at least it’s something we can debate. Without some kind of starting point, how can there even be a debate?

Let’s go back to the abortion question. If you are pro-choice, it is an incontrovertible fact (no matter how much you try to finagle out of it) that you support the birth of compromised children, some of which will die in horrible sufferings, and others who will experience lives of suffering. So how many child deaths are pro-choice policies worth? It’s a simple question that demands an answer.

Sure it’s uncomfortable to advocate the death of children, but if that’s the problem, then stop advocating positions that entail the death of children. And if you really believe that the pro-choice position is right beyond pragmatic considerations, then don’t be ashamed of its consequences and answer the question. It’s as simple as that.

Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me,please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh,Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived criesaloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for.

These questions apply to any issue where people’s beliefs entail suffering or death. Natalists blather on and on about how happy they are and how life is a gift, so we have to ask: how many horrible deaths is your happiness worth? It is a fact that perpetuating the life-system entails not only natural deaths but also horrible torture for billions.

Darwin’s Hamster talks about it on this video. His point is that for the debate on natalism to advance, natalists need to answer this question. Until they continue to refuse to answer, the debate will always remain stalled.

Darwin’s Hamster also points out that this question is no different from the atheist argument that religion harms people, and that therefore it is hypocrite for an atheist to agree with the atheist question but not the antinatalist question. You can’t point out the harms of religion and claim it’s a good argument while claiming that a look at the harms of natalism is a bad argument.

When faced with this question, natalists have to divert the issue and argue that death is just a fact of life and we should accept it, that we antinatalists are just whiners who want perfect lives. The trouble is that this is a straightforward lie: we humans are the ones producing this suffering, it is not a “fact of life,” it does not need to exist or have to exist.

But like pro-choice advocates, they must ignore the fact that we are the ones producing the suffering, that we are responsible for its existence and continuation. If they can silently reclassify suffering and death as an inevitability, they get themselves off the hook. It just happens, don’t you see? Babies just pop out of thin air, I’m tellin’ ya! They just appear and there’s nothing we can do about it! In the same way, capitalism is validated because human life just is a contest for survival and there’s nothing we can do about it (when in fact it is capitalism that creates most of these rigged “contests”).

Misogynists use the same “inevitability” gambit towards pornography and prostitution. So we have to ask, how many deaths of female prostitutes are justified in order to serve men’s supposed needs? Well, prostitutes are not really human, you see, so it’s better to just forget about it. So there is an inevitability argument, but also simple bigotry. Both will do equally well.

In a more abstract way, I also talked about a similar problem relative to God giving people free will. It seems to me to be a conclusive argument against Christianity that God giving us free will implies all the crimes people have committed in history, including all murders, wars, torture, rapes, and so on.

We can also ask, how many deaths of innocents are justified in order to maintain a State? Or how many deaths of workers are justified in order to maintain coal mines? People still die of coal mining accidents every week even in the most advanced countries. How many deaths at the hands of mafias and drug impurities are justified by the War on Drugs? And so on, and so forth.

The basic principle, I hope, is clear: if you are proposing a policy that entails innocent people’s deaths, you have the burden of proof to show that such a policy is worth it. For example, having hospitals entails many deaths due to lack of hygiene (hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of it), but it’s still better than not having health care. A decentralized system would probably be far healthier and less deadly, but if we simply compare hospitals to nothing at all, I think the choice is pretty clear. Sure it takes lives, but its primary purpose is to sustain life. The medical establishment, on the other hand… the less said about that the better.

So what’s the point of these questions? Am I just trying to shut people up and drive them away? No, the topic of my entries already does that for me, and besides that wouldn’t be very productive. This is not going to be a big surprise given the topic of this blog for these past months, but it obviously has to do with radicalism.

The prevalent utilitarian worldview tells us that human sacrifice is justified if the sacrifice is of some benefit to us, no matter how small (such as in our economist believing that horrible deaths are justified by relieving a headache). That is quite a trivialization of the right to life: your life may be worth as little as a headache, so it’s barely worth even considering. Like most economists’ constructs, the mockery of ethics used by economists serves ruling class interests and trivializes workers’ lives and values, and therefore is fundamentally anti-radical.

From the voluntaryist standpoint, I imagine all these questions are pointless, because a person who believes in any of these positions is not necessarily creating harm. A goose-stepping statist may not necessarily use violence against dissenters, or even support violence against dissenters (although eir statist belief still aids and abets the people who do the violence). So why should we attack the statist for eir belief? Ey’s “doing nothing wrong.”

Radical analysis tells us that it is possible for a person to voluntarily and harmlessly participate to a coercive and harmful system. One may work at some retailer or other and be completely ignorant that one’s work is subsidizing corporations that have financed or are still financing death squads (Chiquita, Dole, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, IBM… the list goes on and on). Admittedly this is unlikely to convince anyone to leave their job because, after all, we all need a job. But my point is that the actions of the worker are harmless, while serving a genocidal system.

So no, I am not saying that every single advocate of natalism, pro-choice, misogyny, statism or Christianity is committing harmful actions. Like all radical analysis, this is not about individual actions but about institutions and the harm they perpetuate on individuals. Because of their scope, institutions can magnify evil, bigotry or ignorance a million fold. One person cannot perform genocide, but an army can. Implicit in the concept of an army is not just a group of people but an ethic of obedience and violence, political aims, wages, buildings, weapons, provisions, an economy that can produce these things, and so on.

There can be no step taken towards making an equal and just society if one is unable to analyze existing institutions and their effects on society, as well as imagining institutions which are structured around egalitarian and just values. There can be no more fundamental principle for such a society than the principle that we should not impose harm. As Anarchism tells us, hierarchies are the root of the problem, and the goal of hierarchies is to exploit others for an elite’s benefit, no matter who the elite is.

As such, human sacrifice is only part of one extreme end of a spectrum that goes from genocide, to slavery, to exploitation, to alienation, to freedom. Our goal is to analyze institutions from the other end of the spectrum, that of individual freedom and social autonomy. The fact that some people openly support human sacrifice and its logic merely tells us that they are no friends of freedom.

In answer to the question “how many human lives can be justifiably sacrificed for your beliefs?”, most people will just hem and haw, argue that you don’t understand their position, that the question is not fair, that human sacrifice is worth it, and will basically do anything but answer the question. My answer is simple: zero.

To end on another quote from The Brothers Karamazov, which reiterates my challenge to my opponents:

“Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

Come on people, tell me the truth. Can you do that?

The problem of “good enough.”

UPDATE: Welcome to the readers from Clarissa’s Blog. I recommend you also read this entry.
***

The problem starts when parents want to just be “good enough” parents. When we let abuse happen because it’s “normal” and because “they’re doing what they can.”

The problem continues when we accept and try to perpetuate a “good enough” schooling system- that is just good enough to kill children’s minds.

The problem is compounded by a society that is “good enough” to give us the freedom to complain but not the freedom to change things, and an economic system that is “good enough” to inflict suffering and servitude on a worldwide scale, and keep society stratified to a point where the top 1% own 42% to 47% of the total wealth, and a third of the total net worth.

The problem is not idealism and “pie in the sky” philosophies. We need to demand the pie in the sky. We have let evil perpetuate itself for centuries because it’s “good enough” for us, because “it’s not as bad as it could be.” We in the Western world have stopped having ideals. We are wet noodles. There is no courage left because the carrots of capitalism and the sticks of the police state have turned us all into donkeys, the sophisticated indoctrination of schooling and the media have erased all alternatives from people’s minds, and everyone has something to lose.

The “good enough” is the bitter enemy of the “good.” Pragmatism is the enemy of ethics. Gradualism is the enemy of positive change. Job-ism is the enemy of personal responsibility. Dogma is the enemy of critical thinking. Tolerance of evil is the enemy of a healthy system or society.

Idealism is the only mindset which produces change. Without the determination to achieve a higher goal, and the courage to affirm that goal in the face of what exists, no one has ever achieved anything of value. The wet noodle mindset of “good enough” has never produced any value for anyone except exploiters and rulers. The willful acceptance and tolerance of evil generates more evil, and has never generated anything but more evil.

I don’t give a shit about people who push the envelope. I want people who bring a new way of thinking into being and think up new ways of being. I want people who burn the envelope, eat the ashes, and shit insights. The only useful people in this world are people who have hopes, people who have dreams, and people who have visions.

People who say this or that is “good enough” are implicitly perpetuating the evils within the systems they praise. We must demand perfection. We must demand utopia. By aiming high, we can hope to achieve some level of success. By aiming for “the next reform” or “the next law,” we can only hope to achieve more co-optation of our aims by those in power. And by refusing to aim, we can’t hope to achieve anything at all.

And this is only when “good enough” affects only ourselves. When it starts affecting other people, you have no right to make that determination for anyone else. When children are suffering because of abuse and neglect, you don’t get to determine what “good enough” is for those children. When people in the Second and Third World are suffering because of neo-liberalism or Western wars, you don’t get to determine what “good enough” is for those people. When we torture people by putting them in jail because we disapprove of the means they have used to try to escape their suffering or their hardships, you have lost the right to call “good enough.”

Enough is enough! When other people are harmed because of your “good enough,” you don’t get to say it any more, and we need to call you on it! No, it’s not good enough, not nearly good enough! It’s absolute shit!

Bring in the Fake Dissenters.

A photo op for a fake demonstration, as reported on American Everyman.

I already discussed gatekeepers and how they operate (see the second half of this entry). In an ideological movement, a gatekeeper is a person who is in charge of some organization or group, or perhaps some well-known figure, who can delimitate the acceptable margins of discourse within the movement. Usually this is a spokesperson or a public figure, someone who has a wide reach and who can mold public opinion within the movement in question.

The kind of person I want to talk about in this entry is also a role within a movement, but a different kind of role. On his epic blog Once Upon a Time, Arthur Silber calls it “the Obedient Dissenter,” and, using the example of such a dissenter (journalist Matt Taibbi, “dissenting” against the upcoming war in Iran) identifies two main traits of Obedient Dissent:

1. “[A]ccept[ing] all the assumptions and premises of those [they say they are] criticizing.”
2. “[L]ack[ing] even the faintest understanding of the false set of beliefs to which [they cling] so desperately.”

To which I would add:
3. Because they fail to criticize the premises of those they claim to criticize, their dissent is wholly superficial and contradictory.

I call them Fake Dissenters because they make the claim of being dissenters when in fact they are merely reinforcing the premises enforced by their supposed enemies. In the case of Matt Taibbi, he claims to be a dissenter towards the American government, but he reinforces the prejudices that the American government uses to demonize its chosen enemies and he reinforces the myths used to prop up American imperialism. While Taibbi may be against the upcoming war in Iran, he fails to question American terrorism, American prejudices against Iran, or claims of American exceptionalism. That’s not dissent, that’s just a normal disagreement that lies well within the margins of discourse set by the American government and American journalism (although when the war in Iran drumbeat gets going for real, it will become unacceptable).

You can observe this fake dissent in all areas.

* No one is for abortion, but we should allow women to choose whether they want an abortion or not.
I already discussed that one in the entry on gatekeepers.

* People who have children are doing a wonderful service to us all. But the Duggars are just ridiculous, am I right?
The Duggars, and the Quiverfull movement in general, are easy targets because they represent excess and the objectification of women. But if we start from the premise that having children is a wonderful service to society, it’s not clear how having nineteen is more or less excessive.

* Radical feminism is totally crackpot, but we should give women the same opportunities we give men.
I’ve already written about how equality of opportunity is an elitist conceit which seeks to amplify existing oppressive institutions. Radfem provides the systemic investigation which is lacking from “equality of opportunity” rhetoric, so radfem must be demonized.

* We must respect religious freedom, no matter the religion, but group X is corrupting the true religion.
I refer you to my entry on religious freedom as to why this is a terrible idea. Saying that a certain group X corrupts “true religion” assumes that “true religion” actually exists and that it’s somehow different from the religion people actually practice. Furthermore, there’s no reason to believe that this “fake religion” is any less valid as a form of “religious freedom” than the “true religion.”

* After every new example of police abuse is unveiled: the police is here to protect us, this is just the work of some bad apples.
It is not the job of cops to protect us (for more on this, see The Enterprise of Law, by Bruce Benson), and we know they lie to obtain convictions. The rhetoric of “bad apples” is used to perpetuate institutions which systemically, through noxious incentive systems, makes people act in an evil way, like the police.

* We respect the military and the sacrifices they make for us, we just think this war is unjust…
The job of soldiers is not to protect us but, like cops, to enforce the interests of the power elite. Also, the way in which people argue that a war is unjust is almost always by supporting some part of the apparatus that makes war possible (such as some part of the government which is supposed to provide checks and balances).

Fake dissenters are utterly unable to make the simplest observations about social institutions (e.g. the basic nature of the work of cops and soldiers, the basic nature of religion, the existence of the patriarchy, the lack of justification for breeding, the fact that some people are pro-abortion and that compromised children provide an obvious basis for such a position). This is because doing so would force them to question the core premises of their beliefs about those institutions. The principle at work for these people, whatever movement they are a part of, is: ignorance is bliss.

There are gatekeepers in all movements, and there are fake dissenters in all movements. So yes, there are gatekeeper atheists and fake dissenter atheists (although these have been rather less visible than the very real dissenters such as the Four Horsemen), there are gatekeeper Anarchists and fake dissenter Anarchists (like “anarcho-capitalists,” or pseudo-Anarchist State-supporters), and so on.

This fits within the mainstream media’s control of the margins of discourse, because any movement will inevitably vie for the attention of the mainstream media. Therefore gatekeepers will endeavor to cut dissent’s legs to fit in the Procrustean bed of the media’s margins of discourse, and fake dissenters will slavishly follow these operations. As long as it’s acceptable to criticize a war, they will criticize it; as soon as it becomes unacceptable, they will stop. As long as it’s acceptable to criticize a government program, they will criticize it; as soon as it’s under attack, they will start supporting it.

Fake dissenters often use tactics similar to those of gatekeepers. You will sometimes hear both use sentences like “can’t we all agree that X?” or “no one really believes X” as a way of narrowing discourse and keeping core premises out of the discussion, while blowing the existing debate out of proportion. The difference is that when a gatekeeper does it, ey is also sending a message to eir followers to limit discourse in this manner, and that’s where the fake dissenters get their marching orders.

I know this sounds conspiratorial, but there’s no conspiracy involved. It’s just part of what people naturally do when they’re in a movement.

I may be accused of not distinguishing between fake dissenters and moderates. The difference is that a moderate may take various positions which are not considered a completely coherent set, but that doesn’t mean they act as fake dissenters on any single issue. A moderate can be a fake dissenter on any issue, but ey doesn’t have to be. Unlike moderates, fake dissenters buy into the premises of their movement wholesale and want to be good followers to further the aims of the movement.

“But what about teh menz??”

From the MRA Marmoset.

The mechanisms of control I’ve described on this blog so far have been attempts to address dissent head-on (e.g. invalidation, blame) or by making dissent more difficult (e.g. thought-stopping, competition). I have not yet addressed misdirection. Magicians, and rogues in fantasy movies, know that the best way to keep someone from realizing something is by misdirecting their attention.

Mainstream media, serving the interests of the power elite in constantly setting the margins of discourse, diverting our attention, and omitting important facts, is the quintessential example of this. Noam Chomsky calls it the manufacture of consent; I would go further than that and call it the manufacture of entire worldviews. After all, television, movies, books and other narratives inform the vast majority of what we believe about other people and other times.

Misdirection also takes place at the personal level. The use of coded rhetoric, as politicians’ speeches are stereotyped, is one of them. Another is “what about teh menz??”. This is the name radfems have given to men who barge into feminist discussions demanding that men’s interests be made the center of discussion. This is especially egregious when men not only demand that they be made the center of discussion, but insist that they are the “real victims.”

As one person described it:

In any discussion focusing on women’s issues, the probability that someone will come around and say “men are [fill the blank], too!” approaches 1 the longer the discussion gets.

The “what about teh menz” argument does not only apply to radfem. One can easily observe it within pretty much any ideology. “What about the menz” complains run the gamut from the factually reasonable (“men get raped too”) to the extraordinarily bigoted (“but look at how many American soldiers have died from this war”) to the sublimely ridiculous (“Christians are the ones who are persecuted, because we’re not allowed to express our hatred of homosexuals”).

It’s obvious that part of this tactic is based on the “virtue of victimhood.” Based on the profound moral intuition, persecutors are always evil and victims are always good, members of a persecuting group will use any reasoning they can, no matter how absurd, to portray themselves as the “real victims.” The reason why this gets so absurd is because it implies that the victims are actually the persecutors. So neo-nazis fall back on Holocaust revisionism and anti-semitism, conservatives posit that “illegal immigrants” are ruining the economy, the police state portrays pot users and anarchists as dangerous criminals, and so on. This contributes to the marginalization of the real victims.

There is also a strong part of entitlement in this. The privileged feel that they are entitled to be seen as the “good guys” by virtue of being part of a privileged group. They also feel that they are entitled to the attention of the marginalized, that their issues are the only important issues. As Derailing for Dummies points out:

Privileged People® are accustomed, after all, to it being “all about them”. Not used to simply sitting back and listening to othered people‘s issues, Privileged People® like to be the centre of attention at all times. It reminds them that they are important. By doing this, you will feel good about yourself and send a crucial message to the Marginalised Person™ (yes you really can diminish their experience by making it all about you, all the time!).

Also related to trying to divert the topic is the attempt to have spaces reserved for the privileged. For instance, some men establish “men’s rights” groups, even though all rights are already men’s rights. Others want a White History Month, even though history is already about white people. This is merely a more elaborate and structured form of the same kind of misdirection. The ultimate result of such initiatives is to obscure the fact that the privileged are privileged.

They can also be based on voluntaryist analysis, which omits the context or history behind existing institutions and judges them purely on the basis of their present, isolated actions. This means that patterns of inequality are ignored. This can lead to a “you want to complain, then I get to complain too, so it’s fair” mindset. The problem is that this concept of fairness relies on a perspective completely divorced from reality. Fairness means to treat each other as equals, not to turn a blind eye to exploitation and deal with people as if every action exists independently of any other.

Taking socio-political critique as a personal attack.

From Sinfest.

There is a peculiar phenomenon which exists in all critiques of social institutions, but especially in radfem: every time a radfem provides criticism of some social institution, many women will object on the grounds that their experiences are different or by communicating their Not My Nigel! syndrome. When talking about pornography, some women will say that the pornography they’re into is less exploitative; when talking about prostitution, some women will say that they know some privileged prostitutes who are not exploited or abused; when talking about the inequality of sex, some women will say that their Nigel is the bestest in all the world and that he would never ever ever abuse his privilege.

It must always be pointed out that radfem is not about the individual, but rather about the patriarchy, which is a universal system of privilege. Within this system, women have to decide how to “deal”: deciding where on the scale from complete submission to complete revolt they wish to position themselves. Whether a woman who voluntarily, and in full knowledge of what she is doing, positions herself at the end of complete submission (think Sarah Palin or Phyllis Schafly) should be blamed is an issue of contention. But it is widely agreed by radfem women that women who make compromises with the patriarchy are not to be blamed for those compromises.

These knee-jerk reactions to criticism apply to any socio-political issue, not just radfem. It can be pretty obviously transposed to other statements against institutionalized prejudice, such as racism or classism. Other ideologies may receive variants of the “my X is not that bad” rhetoric (“my religion is not that bad,” “my version of statism is not that bad,” “my parenting is not that bad,” and so on). These responses are as irrelevant as the “Not My Nigel!” responses.

In a variant of this, socio-political critique can also be explicitly used as a personal attack by people who oppose the critique. All the opponent has to do is “remind” you that your position is supported or exists only because of the mainstream. For instance, men may lament “but what about the menz??” or argue that men have made modern society possible for women (“we hunted the mammoth for you!”). Statists may argue that anarchists are hypocrites for using public roads and public libraries (or may even argue that such usage disproves anarchism). Atheists may be reminded that they were raised in a Judeo-Christian culture and should not stray from it, that science came from a Judeo-Christian culture, and so on.

Feeling personally attacked by a structural analysis is as bizarre as blaming one slat of a wooden floor for the fact that the house is in bad repair. But it makes sense when you keep in mind that we are taught that methodological individualism is the only serious way to approach any issue, and that methodological collectivism is mainly relegated to the dustbin of history.

This all may not be as obvious as I think, so let me clearly state my main argument:

1. We are indoctrinated to believe that our society is egalitarian and that therefore problems can only be solved at the individual level. (see atomistic individualism)

2. Victims of social institutions are held to be responsible for their own victimhood. (see cultivating hatred through personal responsibility)

3. Therefore non-radfem women see radfem criticism of social institutions as a personal attack against their own actions and as a statement that they are responsible for their own patriarchal exploitation, even though this is not the radfem intent and that it really makes no sense.

This reasoning is ingrained in our linear thinking, and the reaction by non-radfem women is instant and automatic, as any thread on some radfem conclusion reveals. No matter what the topic, women will pipe up and feel offended that the radfem is attacking their own lives, even though she is doing nothing of the kind.

The consequence for activism is what we observe with funfems and other forms of mainstream activism- their solutions are tailored to an individualistic, capitalistic, democratic society. They try to address collective problems at an individualistic level, a noble but ultimately pointless process. Obviously we do need people on the ground resolving individual problems, but to only address individual problems is to put oneself on an unending treadmill. As anarchists say, one needs to “strike at the root,” the systemic causes of the individual problems.

These mainstream activists, like funfems, liberals, pro-choicers, church-state separation advocates, and so on, are effective at helping individuals but are ineffective as agents of change because their actions are framed within the system that oppresses them. And they frame their actions in this way because the system is invisible to their methodologically individualistic ideologies.

What about “the personal is the political”? Aren’t all of our decisions political in nature? Sure, but there’s a step between evaluating actions in a political context and berating people for them. I believe we do bear collective responsibility for the harm caused by our social institutions. In the same way, men and women share a collective blame for the patriarchy, but no individual man or woman is directly responsible for the patriarchy and its effects on individual women (hence the word “collective”).

More importantly, “the personal is the political” also tells us that our actions must be analyzed within the larger context of the patriarchy’s vast influence. Personal decisions are made in response to the situation a person is in, and the situation a person is in reflects the political situation.

Maybe it isn’t all about you. Maybe the things that turn you on, make you feel hot, and give you orgasms aren’t *just* about your own personal, private, individual life. Maybe the things you do are shaped by outside forces like patriarchy. Maybe your actions have a larger impact. Maybe you didn’t spend your formative years deep asleep in a magical fairy cave only to awake from your slumber to suddenly and mysteriously have fantasies about hog-tying and raping women…

Just like I don’t care what specific kinds of porn you are into, just like I don’t care how much super awesome empowering fun stripping on stage for an audience is for you. You liking something doesn’t make it innately ‘good’. There is no protective bubble around things we think are fun.

As I said before, it’s hard to look at a Sarah Palin or a Phyllis Schafly and excuse their actions. That’s because we recognize at some level that there’s a difference between passively coping with the patriarchy and actively, voluntarily supporting the patriarchy. It’s the difference between a woman getting pepper spray to cope with rapists and a woman holding a rapist’s victims down so he won’t rape her instead. Both are coping mechanisms, but the latter is a crime, while the former is not.

But, and here’s the thing, we blame these actions for being criminal in nature, not because of a prior socio-political criticism. Radfem does not say “it’s wrong to hold down a woman so she can get raped” or “it’s wrong to speak against the equality of all individuals” because these things are basic ethical issues which should not even need to be stated. People may disagree on the punishment or restitution to be imposed on the accomplice, or on the kind of equality that one should advocate, but those are finer points.

If a woman calls the cop on a man who assaulted her, she is legitimizing the violence of the State (including the disproportionate violence directed against women), and putting herself and her assailant under an unjust amount of risk. But we can’t blame any woman who makes the calculation of risk and decides that calling the cops is better than not. It’s the system we need to blame, not the woman who feels she has no better choice.

But if a woman decides to become a cop, go through the schooling needed to do so, and threaten, assault and railroad innocent people as all cops do, then we have to blame that woman as a criminal element. But by and large, this is not the kind of woman we talk about. On the whole, we talk about normal women with an ethical compass struggling to cope with a patriarchal society, not sociopaths who love to degrade or hurt other women. It is to these women that we say, “it’s not about you/your Nigel.” It’s about the P.

I leave the final word to a IBTP commenter named “eb”:

For all I know, you can be the Holy Fucking Virgin Mary mother of God but you still don’t live in a vacuum. Just because you are a good person, doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen in your name or because of your choices.

Step outside the ‘I’.

“Adjusting” to society is wrong.

One way to cope with military or cultural defeat is assimilation. One cannot fault people who do that. It’s a hard thing to do but it contains within itself the hope for a better future for oneself and one’s family, for those who believe in such things. Obviously it’s not the only solution, but it is one solution.

Likewise, people who know that the societies they live in are profoundly wrong also raise their children to adapt those wrong societies, so that they may experience material success. Once again we are faced with the same dilemma, but the dilemma is in all cases caused by procreation. Without the fear that one’s child will be unhappy, there would be no particular drive to assimilate.

This perfect adaptation to society’s norms–in other words, to what is called “healthy normality”–carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology.
Alice Miller

Beyond that, the issue is one of pragmatism. Even staunch opponents of our social institutions need money to live, and the most accessible way to make money is to submit to those institutions. It is humiliating, and it undermines our position, but we have little choice.

There is a tremendous pressure for rebels to conform to the ways in which people normally own and control things and each other, because they need to use the tools of the oppressors in order to have the means to be heard, to assemble, and so on. Even if we just take a simple example such as a protest, the protesters must use the streets and sidewalks owned by government, and therefore be subject to the means of enforcement of that ownership, cops. So protests are useless, because it’s virtually impossible to defend against cops unless you have a vast numerical advantage and a willingness to fight. But this is also true of buildings to operate in, which require rent and are controlled by local governments, computers which can be reported and seized by cops, and so on.

This may not necessarily be a problem for those of us who believe that the law is basically good, that cops are just doing their job, and that we live in a just society. As a pessimist, of course, I think that’s bullshit. Pessimists believe there is something profoundly wrong about human society, even though they may disagree on what that is. Wanting to change or reform society does not solve the fundamental problem and only serves to reinforce the unjust foundations of society. It is the very fact of living in society that makes people stupid and evil.

One obvious cause of this is games conditions. Games conditions make people stupid and evil because it provides a strong incentive for people to follow impersonal, non-human values (whether it be the sole pursuit of profit, the power to implement your preferences on the rest of society, the middle class ideal, racial domination, holiness, “saving the world,” or whatever else people play for). Everywhere in our society, and all over the news, we see example after example of games making people stupid and evil, and yet we keep saying it’s just a bad apple, over and over.

One thing people can say is, let’s build a society without games conditions, or at least a society where games conditions do not affect one’s livelihood. And I agree that this is an extremely, crucially worthy goal. But at the same time, I have to concede that a society without games conditions would clearly prove to us all that human lives are profoundly pointless. And while I can’t argue against the spread of truth, I doubt most people would like that. Eventually games conditions would re-emerge in some new dogmatic form, and we’d probably be back to killing each other.

So there are few things that annoy me more than the liberal insistence that we need to level the playing field and ensure that everyone has a chance to succeed. The success of one person in our societies means to ensure the failure of ten others, and the propagation of evil both on one’s fellow Westerners and on a global scale. Why are liberals cheering for gay people and women to join the US Army, when they know very well that the US Army is fighting for American elite and corporate interests, not for American citizens’ interests? Why are liberals cheering for more women to become CEOs of sociopathic corporations which rob, cheat and kill innocents? Because, like everyone else, they have been made stupid and evil by the game of gender interests or racial interests, just like capitalists have been made stupid and evil by the game of profits or control. There is no one stupider than one who honestly and wholeheartedly believes he is not playing any game. This is self-delusion at its most profound.

The solution is not to pretend to not be under any games conditions. The solution is to realize that we are subject to them, and to clearly differentiate our own interests from those of the games we are acting under. As a worker, I am interested in following corporate rules and serving corporate interests, even when they lead me to defraud people or lie to people. That’s how I play the game. But swallowing my own lies while believing I am a freethinker would just be pathetic, and becoming an activist for corporations would be braindead. And yet this is the kind of thing people do. It makes about as much sense as becoming an activist for putting Chess in the Olympics on the sole basis that you’ve once played a game of Chess and thus had to follow the rules (a better reason to become an activist for Chess would be honestly believing Chess is actually a great game, and sure there are people stupid enough to believe that corporatism or religion are great games).

It is possible to free one’s mind from the strictures of games conditions and penetrate to the truth of the human condition. It is also extremely difficult. I feel like I’ve only just started to really do this. And I understand why people don’t want to do this: having just started I am already labeled a crackpot by most people, even a lot of radicals, and I expect it’s only going to get worse. Such is life… if it bothered me, I wouldn’t be doing this blog.

Voluntaryism: it’s not just about capitalism…

Voluntaryism is the belief that whatever people voluntarily agree to is inherently good, regardless of what that agreement actually is. People don’t tend to follow it to its logical conclusion, as few voluntaryists would say that, for instance, slave contracts should be allowed. Voluntaryists don’t usually identify as voluntaryists, but they follow various schools, most likely capitalists and “anarcho-capitalism,” Libertarianism, and sometimes liberals (although liberals tend to be voluntaryists only on social issues).

I have written numerous entries against voluntaryism and its logical consequences. This may seem like a strange, overly abstract target. The reason why I attack voluntaryism so much is because we need to strike at the roots that support the institutionalized evils around us, and voluntaryism is one of those roots.

I think radical feminism is an eloquent confirmation of that fact. When radical feminists address issues such as femininity, sexism, porn, prostitution, the rape culture, and so on, their opponents will without fail invoke some form of voluntaryism as a counter-argument. As I’ve seen it happen again and again, it usually goes something like this:

RF: “Pornography participates to the objectification of women and the molding of women’s sexuality to the requirements of men’s orgasms. It also contributes to the rape culture. Pornography is an obstacle to feminism as a whole.”
FF: “I watch pornography and I’m a feminist! How can you say that’s bad or anti-feminist? The pornography I like is the one where female sexuality is respected. So you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
RF: “I’m not saying what you should or should not do. I’m stating facts about pornography as an industry and as a force against women’s interests. The fact that you watch pornography is not anti-feminist, but you can’t claim it’s feminist, either.”
FF: “You’re trying to tell me what to do, you fascist! I can be a feminist and do whatever turns me on! Stop shaming me!”

Having read an innumerable number of comments threads on various radfem blogs, I can tell you that this is actually not much of an exaggeration. The same exact voluntaryist arguments are used than for capitalism, just in a different context. So it seems there is at least some connection. Nine Deuce, of Rage Against the Man-chine, operates under the thesis that there are three stages of reasoning about radfem issues:

1. Reactionary: People who have absorbed what the patriarchy has to teach about women’s sexual suboordination are frightened by women exercising their sexuality and voicing their desires, so they attempt to shame women who transgress patriarchal norms to force them back into line.
2. Libertarian: Anyone with a brain can see that’s bullshit, so many women have fought for our right to participate in and enjoy sex without the fear of recrimination. That’s a good thing, but women’s sexual liberation has yet to be achieved, and sexual libertarianism has led to some problematic ways of looking at things. Many women have absorbed the idea that women’s sexual liberation is the goal, and then have gone on to assume that any sex act a woman might want to participate in is liberating and thus unproblematic and/or unassailable.
3. Liberationist: It is taken for granted that women ought to be free to express and explore their sexuality, but that does not mean that sex is a sacred cow and that we have no right to question the morality of a sexual behavior. Does a sex act hinder the cause of women’s wholesale sexual liberation or the progress toward women’s legal, social, and cultural liberation? Does it pose the risk of harm to individual women? A sexual Liberationist would never argue that a sex act ought to be banned or that women ought to not be allowed to participate in whatever activities they deem appropriate, but she might question the choice to do so and the impact that choice has on women as a whole. With freedom comes responsibility, blah blah.

In political terms, “libertarian” is voluntaryism, and “Liberationist” is libsoc or libertarian in the Anarchist sense. Not much difference there, and the schemes of thinking are very similar. Egalitarian concerns as a bulwark against capitalistic voluntaryism is strongly analogous to radical feminist concerns as a bulwark against sexual voluntaryism.

My main criticism of voluntaryism is that it assumes actions exist in a vacuum. Like the political Libertarians, sexual libertarians can only arrive at their positive conclusions about “laissez-faire”/sexual liberation by completely omitting the institutions which embody past coercion and continue to exploit these “liberated” individuals and the energy they devote to “make the best out of it.”

There is of course a lot of intersection between sexual exploitation and economic exploitation. Many women enter prostitution because of the fact that women suffer more from unemployment, are paid less, and the fact that approximately one female child out of five is sexually abused in North America, making them more vulnerable to sex traffickers. These are all directly or indirectly the result of economic inequality.

So there is this personal/political dichotomy that we have to be very much aware of. Now granted, the personal is the political, and the political is the personal, and there’s not too much point in distinguishing the two as concepts. But there is clearly a difference between putting all the blame on a woman who works in pornography and putting the blame on pornography as an institution which exploits women, objectifies them, and reduces their sexuality to that of men. It’s more of a blame dichotomy, or a responsibility dichotomy, or a cause and effect dichotomy (“the political causes the personal”), than an ontological one (“the personal is not the political”).

There’s absolutely no point in blaming women who work for the interests of the patriarchy, as they usually have very good reasons for doing so. Those motives are constructed by the patriarchy itself, and their work serves to further bolster said motives for other women. But by far the most important cause and effect relations are between patriarchal institutions and incentive systems, and between incentive systems and individual decisions. Any given women only adds a tiny bit of credibility to the patriarchy, but the patriarchy is in a great part responsible for any given woman’s choice.

Anti-theist, socialist, antinatalist or feminist, every individual has to decide how best to deal with a corrupt society on a long-term basis. What we attack is that corruption, not the individual. This never stops people from claiming that we want to tell them what to do. This is based on the implicit belief that telling people what they shouldn’t do represents a real harm to those people. But this is a strange belief. If person A thinks person B shouldn’t do something, should A not tell B? If A is right, then ey is doing a service to B. If A is not right, or the issue is not an ethical one, then ey is merely expressing an opinion, which should be seen as such.

This is a point I seem to have to repeat over and over: we most certainly do want to tell people what they shouldn’t do. We definitely want to tell people not to kill each other, and we’ll go to great lengths to prevent them from doing so. We definitely want to tell people not to lie to each other for profit, or break someone’s legs, or stalk them and make them live in fear. To go towards more feminist topics, we also definitely want to tell people that they shouldn’t sexually harass women, sexually assault women, or rape women. So I don’t think any Libertarian “feminist” has a leg to stand on as regards to “not telling people what they shouldn’t do.”

One may argue that the things I listed are, in fact, illegal. So what? Laws are written by the power elite for the power elite. This can be somewhat reduced to saying that laws are written by men and for men, although they are written against men as well as against women (and no, I am not aiming for a “the patriarchy hurts men too” argument… no offense, but it’s just a laughable argument in my opinion). One should not see the rule of law as a feminist construct, especially when it’s always been used, and is still used, as a way for men to oppress women. That makes about as much sense as gay people defending organized Christianity or black people defending the Drug War; and before you start flaming me, note that the irony that these things actually happen does not escape me… and no, I am not blaming them for what they do, although I do blame them for deploying illogical or unethical arguments.

There is an even deeper problem with the voluntaryist argument, and that’s the confusion between voluntary and consensual. Here’s a discussion of this on Womononajourney:

In reality, consent is something people lower in the hierarchy give to people higher in the hierarchy all the time. For example, we may “consent” to the TSA screening system at the airports in Amerika, but that’s only because if we don’t go through them (or “consent” to be patted down by a stranger), we will not be able to fly.

Think about other times you have to give your consent. Just by being born in a specific location at a certain time, you are “consenting” to a specific legal system… one you did not create, and that may not have been created by anyone who resembled you in terms of sex, race, and/or ethnicity…

The people who having their homes taken out from under them because of an inability to pay, “consented,” to pay a certain amount over a specific period. yet, I don’t hear too many progressives faulting them for “consenting” to payment and not being able to follow through with it. Guess consent isn’t so sexy when the ones being fucked over are men.

This brings up again the point of the law being a tool of oppression used against women, which I think is very important. The age of consent draws a line beyond which anything that happens is your fault, making it possible for prostitution activists to draw a line between child trafficking and “normal” prostitution:

People chose though, before and after those in-between years, whether I was blameless or blameworthy. In the interim, while I existed in the in-between, each individual who looked at me or fucked me had the privilege of making up their own mind. Many did, and most chose the latter.

After that, when I was identifiably a woman, it was not a case of ‘most’ anymore, but ‘almost all’ – because almost all those who looked at me in my young adulthood decided that I’d chosen what was happening, and saw it as what I was doing rather than what was being done to me.

The ‘done to me’ aspect died, you see, along with my adolescence in the perspectives of other people. The problem was it didn’t die, and I was still alive, living the ‘done to me’ reality every day.

It also brings out the confusion between something being voluntary and something being consensual. As I’ve discussed before, consent is a much, much more specific criterion than voluntary agreement. To take one example from above:

by being born in a specific location at a certain time, you are “consenting” to a specific legal system

Note the quotes around “consenting” here, which are quite appropriate. At the most, we can be said to agree to a specific legal system by virtue of acquiescing to its representatives (cops, judges, jailers, etc), but consent with any such monopoloid legal system, one which we not only did not create but had absolutely no hand in and towards which we have no alternatives, is literally and completely impossible. The example of a justice system is perhaps not the best, since its legitimacy is said to derive from an ownership claim on us, not on agreement at all, but I hope you get the gist of what I am talking about here.

Capitalism works and adapts itself by commodifying (and thereby profiting from) everything it can, including that which initially opposes it. We can see this process of absorption and regurgitation all throughout the history of capitalism, including unions and labor in general, warmongering, fascism and patriotism, the free press, rebellious music styles, and nowadays environmentalism, the Internet, anti-sexism, “fair trade” and “organic foods,” just to name these.

So are love and sexuality. A loving relation and a healthy sexuality by themselves are threatening to the capitalist order because they form a closed, self-defining, self-sufficient circle. In order for capitalism to function, it must constantly penetrate closed systems (whether cultures, sub-cultures, or direct relations) and permeate them with material desires. The traditional ways to smash the circle of love and sexuality are through the institution of marriage and its association with material success, mandatory or strongly encoureged procreation, and by giving men an ownership claim over women. Nowadays the latter is no longer acceptable, but pornography, prostitution, the rape culture, and so on, reinforce men’s biological desire to objectify women and constitute a more implicit, but probably as powerful, ownership claim over women.

It is probable that these things would still exist in a socialist economy, but it’s hard to imagine that they would exist in the same form. Imagine, for instance, that the women who work in pornography get an equal say (or more say- after all, they are the ones actually doing it) in what gets filmed than the men behind the camera. Would we still see as many cumshots to the face, anal sex, sexual slurs against women, women getting dick-slapped, simulated rape, underage porn, etc etc? I really don’t think so.

Capitalism does, however, provide funfems with an argument, which is that some women do these things willingly and make a lot of money from it. As Mary Tracy pointed out, and I thought this was a great insight on her part, if someone was to argue with a group of Marxists by saying “well capitalism is great because it allows some workers to make a lot of money,” ey would rightly be laughed out of the room. The fact that an unethical and competitive system deigns to crown a few winners does not justify the existence of that system. Some fucked up, abused little six year old girl will win the pageant, but that doesn’t make the pageant wonderful.

In capitalist thought, this is related to the myth of the heroic entrepreneur who is “rewarded” by the market for eir downright ascetic self-denial in saving enough money and eir skillful exploitation of eir fellow humans by ever-increasing profit margins. The entrepreneur is the capitalist’s idea of a winner as well as a justification for the losers, who just weren’t ascetic or skillful enough. Social Darwinism ho!

When one pushes back on these “feminists” or any other person on the margins of an ideology, one is bound to get the inevitable backlash of “who are you to tell me what feminism is about?” They want feminism to be purely about allowing individual women’s choices. In my entry “Anomie is tyranny,” I point out that this can only lead to the rule of the most powerful, in this case, the most powerful institutions that have an effect on women’s choices. To flip the maxim around, what we refuse to see is what can most hurt us, because we have no defenses against it. Acting as if the patriarchy doesn’t exist makes you all the more vulnerable to its baleful effects.

There may be some connection between this and positive thinking/Panglossian thinking. It’s understandable that these women don’t want to think about how they are exploited and vilified on a daily basis, so they just ignore it and hope that there actually is equality and that there’s really nothing to worry about. Voluntaryism does slip rather easily into “the bliss of ignorance” and then further into outright Stockholm-like identification with our oppressors, and this happens in feminism as well.

The key word in our opponents’ arsenal is “agency.” Standard sociological theories define agency and structure as two countervailing forces, the former being the capacity of individuals to make their own “free choices” (free will), and the latter being the limits on those “free choices” imposed by social patterns. So the word “agency” is the banner behind which they rally.

There is no such thing as a “free choice,” and the residual of social patterns is not choice but rather genetics. So whatever is labeled “agency” can be more accurately described as the result of genetic diversity in humans. There is no fundamental opposition between these forces, as all social patterns are ultimately the product of the interactions of beings possessing human genetics. Where the opposition occurs is when the interests of people clash in a stratified class society (e.g. workers v property owners, slaves and abolitionists v slaveowners, women v misogynists, or, more individually, the clash between an inferior and a superior), and the issue is a solely structural one of class pitted against class.

So even in individual cases, agency is not relevant. All acts are political acts, all issues are structural, all personal problems are ultimately the result of institutional failures. To promote people’s agency is gibberish insofar as it does not designate an actual phenomenon. No one freely chooses anything. The “voluntaryist” attitude only serves to divert attention from the structures which provide negative incentives to people, and therefore perpetuate inequality, crime and slavery.

Also, concentrating solely on agency ultimately leads to blaming the victim. While, for example, funfems would vehemently deny that they are blaming the victims (and accusing people like me of doing so), this is a projection. And this can be seen in how they treat the prostitution issue: funfem believe that women who get raped in prostitution are not really being raped (but rather being not!raped) because they chose to become prostitutes, and we have to respect their choice (to get not!raped). Likewise, workers who have to take on dangerous or psychologically degrading jobs in order to survive are merely expressing their agency through the Almighty Free Market (Praise Be Upon It), which is merely an aggregate of choices. The victims, therefore, must be blamed for making choices which led to their not!rape or their psychological degradation. There is only one small step from that to blaming female rape victims for choosing to be drunk or choosing to wear short skirts, or blaming people for choosing to remain on welfare.

I’ve concentrated on feminism as one counterpoint, but voluntaryism is not just an opposition to feminism. It is also, for instance, an opposition to atheism. One of the claims made about God, and perhaps the most egregious example of religious insanity, is that whatever God declares good, in his subjective opinion, is good, regardless of what it is. But voluntaryists preach that whatever an individual wants to do should be permitted. I find it hard to see any difference between that and saying that the individual declares what is good for emself based on eir own subjective opinion.

It may be that when Christians accuse atheists of being autotheists (belief that one is god), this is what they have in mind. Well, I can’t speak for them. But I certainly think that voluntaryism comes dangerously close to autotheism. Insofar as voluntaryists claim that any person’s subjective opinion must be respected above and beyond the facts, they are putting that person in a God-like position. Granted, they are not saying that we should all obey everyone’s ideal of what morality is, which would be self-contradictory, but they are saying that the individual’s subjective evaluation of eir own actions trump the facts of the matter (some may argue that there are no “facts of the matter” when talking about morality, but this is a rather bizarre sort of statement which is easily disproven).

Arguing against voluntaryism within such a broad scope is difficult because the voluntaryist ideology is widely associated with self-ownership and freedom (“my body” -> “my choice” -> “freedom to act”). Therefore, anyone who argues against voluntaryism is believed to be arguing against freedom. But it should be clear to anyone who’s interested in freedom that voluntaryism clearly goes against said freedom when it sustains the existence of institutions which attack it. Free market capitalism is “voluntaryist” but it is not “freedom.” The patriarchy is “voluntaryist” but it is not “freedom,” at least not for women.

We see echoes here of the distinction between voluntary and consensual: the former is atomistic and the latter is systemic. This is not too surprising because consensus and freedom are necessary for each other. Voluntaryism presents itself as an ideology of freedom but, by removing systemic analysis from the ethical equation and only considering the individual’s actions faced with an abstracted context, supports the dominant worldview. Once again, my entry “Anomie is tyranny” gives a full explanation of this phenomenon.

The Moving Train fallacy.

JR has written a number of comments on this topic, and I wanted to expand on them a bit in a full blog entry, because I think it’s an interesting topic which relates to my examination of various mechanisms of control and bad arguments.

JR has identified a rhetorical device which ey calls the Moving Train fallacy (named after Howard Zinn’s book You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train):

It’s a type of innuendo, where the innuendo is conveyed through a pragmatic implication. Like you are a riding in a car and you say, “I think we need a new driver, Harry is not a good driver.” And the other passenger says “well, I think you’re being very subjective and extreme, Harry is both a good driver and a bad driver.” So, they are on one hand saying that their opponent is holding an extreme view, but it’s pretty obvious that there is a pragmatic implication here that Harry will continue driving. In every case I can think of, it’s a superficial rationalization for the opposite view. But it’s difficult to prove they hold the opposite view, since the innuendo is pragmatic.

Basically the fallacy is based on the fact that often “neutral” (or non-extreme) positions do not entail changes to the status quo. In the case of the car, believing that Harry is a middling driver (neither really good or really bad) means in practice that Harry will continue driving, because no one’s gonna go through the trouble of changing drivers.

JR points out the application of this fallacy to antinatalism. Antinatalists make the claim that life is an overall negative and that we should not start new lives. Natalists may then try to take the “moderate” position and claim that life is both positive and negative, that the positives and the negatives need each other to exist, and so on. But there is no “moderate” consequence: you can’t bring half a life into existence. Obviously the “moderate” position is supposed to lead to the conclusion that it can be good to start new lives. In practice, therefore, the “nuanced” view leads to the “extremist” position of natalism.

The other point relevant here is that, while they may talk as if they hold a “moderate” position, natalists generally do not really hold such positions. Rather, they generally believe that the positives of life are primary, but give us a “moderate” position as a rhetorical device meant to portray themselves as reasonable people who are looking at both sides of the argument, and to portray the opponent as an extremist.

What we are really faced with, in practice, is a binary decision: to start a new life, or to not start a new life, both of which are “extremes.” So to advocate a “moderate” position is to advocate the continuation of the status quo, to advocate more new lives (even if fewer of them, but often not even that).

We can observe the Moving Train fallacy in other areas. For instance, religious people may argue with atheists by saying something like “but don’t you think there exists a force greater than us?” But what people really believe in is not “a force,” but a religion, a whole worldview. Saying that one can believe in an abstract force may appease some people but we all know it really means God. There isn’t really any other direction to go towards but either atheism or religion.

Another example is people who object to feminism by arguing that the physical differences between the sexes entail social differences as well. While this may be technically true, the level of social differences we’re talking about here is so small compared to what people infer (even many feminists) that we know they’re not serious about using physical differences as their basis for social differences. We also know that any acceptance of such differences is supposed to lead one to rejecting the equality of the sexes, accepting larger differences, and so on.

Yet another example is the belief that we, as a society, need some kind of common values or direction, and that they should be enforced in some way. This is a silly argument because where common values exist, there is no need to enforce them, and where common values do not exist, it would be cruel and unjust to enforce them. But that aside, we know that no one only believes in enforcing common values, and that it’s unworkable; any hierarchy which is strong enough to determine and enforce “common values” is also strong enough to do everything else that governments do. These people are just trying to get you to accept the validity of authority and hierarchies, to eventually get you to agree with statist principles.

In all cases the Moving Train fallacy only supports the status quo, because it always brings us back to the default position. A radical trying to use a similar kind of argument to drag a voluntaryist away from individualistic analysis will usually meet with failure; the voluntaryist can at any time decide to stop at any point on the way to the radical side (“sure I agree with you that capitalism is not great, but… we absolutely need public schools!”), ending the argument on failure.

The Moving Train fallacy circumvents our natural skepticism because it doesn’t openly admit irrationality, it only encourages you to exert seemingly healthy doubt. Uses of this fallacy, like some of the ones I’ve already described, can be based on facts, but the importance of the facts is distorted.

Take the antinatalist example again. Natalists will often argue that life contains pleasures as well, and that we should give both equal importance. The fact that life contains pleasures is true, but it’s given equal importance to suffering. Antinatalists contend that suffering is primary and that, whether you agree or not, suffering imposes ethical duties on us which pleasures do not. We have a duty to not inflict suffering, but we do not have a duty to provide pleasures. So the importance of pleasure is distorted; pleasure does not confer ethical duty on us, neither is it of equal causal relevance.

Likewise with the sexes. No matter how generously you interpret them, biological differences between men and women can’t possibly explain more than a tiny percentage of the social differences between men and women, such as modes of dress, most of the wage and power differentials, the widespread objectification of women, prostitution, rape and abuse statistics, and so on. There is simply no way to make biological differences that important (what I am saying, to be clear, is that in order to go from “the differences between men’s bodies and women’s bodies” to “men shouldn’t wear dresses and women shouldn’t wear suits” or “it is okay to abuse some women for money,” you need to add the construction of class, hierarchy and gender into the equation first). So again there is an attribution of vastly disproportionate importance to some fact.

JR also posits that there are three levels of strength to the fallacy:

In the strongest form of it, N, the neutral view, is just impossible to imagine. In the next strongest form, there is no neutral action (N1) imaginable– maybe the case with natalism. In the weak form, there are conceivable neutral actions, but they aren’t suggested.

An example of the weak form would be the “force greater than us” argument. One can be a pantheist or a deist, for example, but few people actually are, and there are no pantheists or deists out there making this argument; most people who make the argument are Christians trying to persuade others to adopt Christianity. The case of sexism also belongs to the weak form, insofar as it is possible to imagine a society where social differences are solely caused by biological differences but such a society is not what anyone actually advocates, while the case of minarchism I would say belongs to the next strongest form, insofar as the minarchist ideal is logically and pragmatically impossible to achieve (but that doesn’t stop people from dreaming about it).

We are predisposed to follow moderate arguments because we’re taught that the truth is always “somewhere in the middle.” Sometimes people confuse this with the process of competing hypotheses. But competing hypotheses is not a rush to the middle, and scientists are not busy mashing them together. Rather, they’re looking for the hypothesis that best fits to the observed facts. By definition any theory that results will be an “extreme.”

Moderation is also associated with compromise, which is considered to be laudable and reasonable. I think that this association of moderation with reasonableness is the main tool that proponents of the status quo have going for them, because who doesn’t want to be reasonable?

This is compounded by the fact that most people believe in political means, and the only way to succeed using political means is by being “reasonable” enough (i.e. moderate enough) that you appeal to a wide swath of the population. This means, at the very least, not questioning the core premises of the status quo; in practice we know it’s much, much worse than that, because any politician who exhibits slight deviations from the margins of discourse is pretty much automatically labeled crazy. So, for people who reject the status quo in some way but accept political means as the only valid path, there is a tremendous pressure to conform, and therefore to be “reasonable” and moderate.