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Reality
and The Taboo Against Truth
©2005 Chip Gibbons, All Rights Reserved
8
There is no universal concept of what government is or what it should be because government as most human beings understand it is not a function of Universal Reality. It is entirely man-made. As a product of individual, unique minds with no objective, universal referent in nature, concepts of government vary from individual to individual. Those concepts are uniform in one regard, however; all governments are founded on the basic premise that certain individuals have the right to dictate how other individuals live. It makes no difference if the government is a dictatorship, a democracy, an aristocracy, or a republic; the function of government has always been to give certain individuals power over others. In this way, government institutionalizes and legitimizes the aggression of some men against others.
There is only one social order that is consistent with Universal Reality: a libertarian society based on natural law where individuals have an inviolable right to control their own minds, bodies, lives and any property which they have earned in a free market. As the creator of a school of philosophy that she called Objectivism, Ayn Rand considered herself an Objectivist rather than a libertarian. A core part of her philosophy is the belief that laissez-faire capitalism is the only economic system that is consistent with individual rights.
In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand described a capitalist society:
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions, and interests dictate. They can deal with one another only in terms of and by means of reason, i.e., by means of discussion, persuasion, and contractual agreement by voluntary choice to mutual benefit.[i]
Because all relationships in a free society
must be voluntary,
The proper functions of government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.[ii]
She also stated that:
In a free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for government services—would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.[iii]
When an individual limits the choices of another individual in the marketplace in order for control a market, he might as well have tattooed on his forehead the slogan, “I am not competitive. I must cheat to win.” Any rational person who is paying attention should immediately take his business elsewhere because he is dealing with a loser. Once the market is no longer free, there is no way to determine who the best, most efficient producer is; the regulations will determine who wins in the marketplace, not the quality of the products or the level of service to customers. When any individual seeks special regulations to force people to buy his product or to pay more than it would cost in a free competitive market, he is admitting that his product lacks quality or desirability; the only way his enterprise will survive is by forcing others to buy it.
This same principle can be applied to government. If a government demands allegiance and does not allow other enterprises to compete with it in the delivery of services, it has advertised to its citizens that it knows they would not choose that form of government in a free market. It has raised a flag high on every flagpole across the land that says, “In force we trust,” knowing that without force it would not exist.
A government is
either voluntary or it is not. That is a
binary circumstance and there is no middle ground. It is puzzling that
For all of the
Instead of a single monopolistic government, they [the proponents of “competing governments”] declare, there should be a number of completing governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.
Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.[iv]
Once Man is without choice, however, his mind as a tool for judging has become as useless and an eleventh toe. The Universe, by the process of evolution gave Man a mind and a capacity for separating existence from nonexistence. Once a government monopoly or any other social organization has deprived Man of choice, it has deprived him of his natural state in life and forced him into a state of mind that is inevitably in conflict with Universal Reality.
Giving any governing organization a monopoly on the use of forcible restraint not only deprives individuals of choice which is necessary in a free society it is an invitation to abuse and tyranny. What if the government is not available to provide forcible restraint when an individual is being attacked? What if many people are being attacked at the same time and the demand for restraint far outstrips the ability of government to meet it? In reality, there can be no monopoly by government on the use of forcible restraint without violating individual rights to liberty and self-defense.
The need for government is a state of mind similar to the need to believe in a paternalistic God. Individuals want government to protect them, bestow special favors upon them and provide an order to society by creating a common language of values and a common identity. They also want to be relieved of the responsibility that comes with their capacity for reason and their instinct for judgment. Once individuals are not in control of their lives, however, they cannot rationally be responsible for their lives. Responsibility and control are inseparable corollaries; one implies the other.
Once a government has driven a wedge between Man and Universal Reality by denying him his natural state of freedom, however, it cannot be protective. Man’s natural right to freedom and self-defense are implicit in the lack of any scientific evidence that nature has given any individual the right to control the life of others.
A government exists as a collective state of mind of the individuals who fall under the government. Whether one-man dictatorship, democracy or monarchy, a government can only exist when a majority of individuals believe that the government, which is a select group if individuals, has a right to exist and control their lives. If a majority of individuals in the government really wanted to be free of government, they would rebel against it.
Governments do not exist in an emotional and intellectual vacuum; they exist as an extension of the state of mind of those who want to control the lives of others and those who agree to be controlled. All governments institutionalize parent-child and master-slave forms of human interaction. The human race can never evolve beyond those paradigms as long as human beings desire coercive forms of government to run their lives. As long as governing organizations are based on mystical principles, like religion, they will divorce Man from reality and encourage conflict. They cannot advance Mankind to a state where he is more rational or free. A coercive government is by default a selective force in evolution. It will give a selective advantage in reproduction to individuals who support the coercive form of government, facilitating the propagation of genes for those who are adapted to an environment that confuses existence with nonexistence, delusional minds at war with Universal Reality, those who aggress against others and those who are willing to tolerate such aggression. Coercive government will only thwart the progress and evolution of Mankind in the same way that religion has always thwarted the progress and evolution of Mankind.
As
To read the full text of Patrick Henry’s speech (Appendix I) and compare it with the self-aggrandizing, nonsense rhetoric of today’s world leaders is to see just how far the human race has regressed intellectually as the entire planet has been brought under the control of one form of coercive government or another. Henry knew that liberty is essential to life; not just the life of each individual but to the survival of humanity. He understood that freedom and slavery are mutually exclusive, a binary circumstance, and that individuals deny evidence and reject reality when their freedoms are being taken away. He directly addressed the process of rejecting reality:
Mr. President, it is natural to man
to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a
painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren
till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a
great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the numbers of
those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which
so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of
spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst,
and to provide for it.[vi]
While
he did not explicitly say so, he was making a direct connection between reality
and freedom. He was saying that the
refusal to see evidence of the reality of the
A war on reality that results from the rejection of evidence is a war on existence because reality is the sum of all that exists. It is a futile attempt to take what exists and make it nonexistent. To wage a war on reality, it is necessary to destroy the human mind and all individuals who are willing to see, hear, and speak the truth. Like religion, coercive government is engaged in a war on reality that must subvert Man’s natural instinct for separating existence from nonexistence. Once existence and nonexistence can no longer be distinguished, knowledge and truth cannot be distinguished from ignorance and lies. Knowledge and truth can only have meaning in relation to things that exist; there can be no knowledge or truth about nonexistence. When government forces Man to divorce his mind from reality it cannot protect him from beasts because it has become the beast--a beast that will ultimately transform all men subject to its rule into beasts.
Government is inevitably a function of the collective delusions of those who have allegiance to the government. It not only embodies their values and psychological needs it reinforces them and perpetuates them from one generation to the next. Like the concept of God, government takes on a personified, human personality that closely resembles a parent, protector and savior. Of course, government is not a living, thinking, sentient being and any notion that it has human capabilities is deeply rooted in mystical ideas.
Sigmund Freud said
of the religious man’s view of God in Civilization
and Its Discontents that, “The common man cannot imagine this
The need that individuals have to believe in a super-human government entity that created and protects their country, stems from the same psychological needs that cause humans to believe in a human-like Supreme Being that created the universe and watches over it. In both cases, individuals must reject the evidence of their natural relationship with the universe as free, rational men, and accept a view of the universe and their place in it that is entirely man-made and modeled after the parent-child relationship that dominated the earliest years of their lives. The need for super-human, authoritative Gods and governments becomes hard-wired into the brains of little children as the parents demand obedience and loyalty to their authority and their view of reality. As the child grows older, the obedience and loyalty given to the parents is transferred to other authority figures like God and government. The great majority of individuals never recover from this mental deformity that is the inevitable result of parents who give their children a mystical view of the world rather than one based on Universal Reality. In turn, they grow up and perpetuate the same delusions when they raise their own children.
Individuals who use government and religion to control the lives of others have no incentive to stop this process; a population of non-mystical, rational individuals would not be predisposed to blind obedience to authority. The only authority in a rational, free society would be Universal Reality and voluntary organizations based upon the laws of reality. Mystical individuals who reject the evidence of reality would be handicapped in a free, rational society because Universal Reality does not suffer fools gladly and evolution is completely intolerant of organisms maladapted to reality. It is only when man-made corruptions like religion and government come between an individual and Universal Reality that delusional individuals can gain an advantage over rational, free men. Religion and coercive government are the products of delusional minds that do not separate existence from nonexistence; they are the weapons that delusional minds use to wage their war on Universal Reality and other men.
If Thomas Paine had applied the same reasoning to the many forms of government that he applied to various religions in The Age of Reason, he might have said, “All national institutions of [governments, whether monarchy, dictatorship, republic, democracy, communist or parliamentary,] appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”[viii]
Due to cultural
forces at work in his time, however, Paine was vilified for suggesting that The
Bible was nothing but fantasy and hearsay.
He was accused of being an atheist when he was not.[ix] He was a Deist who believed that God could
only be understood by understanding His creation. Similarly, an individual who suggests today
that all current forms of government are an inherent assault on reason, reality
and humanity will be vilified as an anarchist devoted to chaos and conflict. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rejection of the man-made laws which rewrite
the nature of existence is a rejection of the anarchy inherent in coercive,
aggressive forms of government. Coercive
government must be rejected by any individual who wants Mankind to fully enjoy
the natural
The
A premise is an underlying assumption or core belief that serves as the foundation for other beliefs or propositions. The fundamental premise of any government is that certain individuals have a right to control the lives of others. Control is exerted by the use of weapons or a legal system or both. Some will argue that the basic premise of government is that man needs laws to create an orderly peaceful society and that government is simply a way to institutionalize and enforce those laws.
First, there is no
evidence of a law in the Universe that says that one man has a right to control
the life of another; that premise is mystical and entirely fabricated by men
who wish to control the behavior of others.
It is the same premise used to justify the institution of slavery. All governments that use force and coercion
to control individual lives are a form of slavery. Any government that is not voluntary is an
assault on Man’s natural
Second, it is ludicrous to think that any form of government that institutionalizes mysticism and the aggression of some men toward the lives, values, and goals of others will produce an orderly, peaceful society. Once humans have been forced to accept a reality that is not based on existence and evidence it is inevitable that conflict will follow. In such an environment, the only way to achieve agreement between men is to force agreement. Order and peace which are achieved by force can only last as long as all individuals in the population can suppress their innate instincts for judgment and self-defense. That is like asking humans to suppress their need for air and food and their desire for sex. Genuine order and peace can only be achieved when all men realize through the use of their individual minds that they all serve the same master; that master is not a man but Universal Reality.
The only kind of government that would not be a variant of institutionalized slavery would be a completely voluntary association designed for the sole purpose of protecting individual life and liberty. Services that are now provided by a monopoly government would be provided in a free, competitive market where citizens would pay for the services that they need and use. No man would be forced to serve or support another.
Just as there is no hard evidence that God exists, there is no hard evidence that any man is intended by nature to be a slave to other men. Therefore there is no evidence that one man has the right to force his government on another any more than one man has the right to force his religion on another. In the eyes of the universe, Man is born in a state of freedom. He is only required to understand and obey the laws of the Universe in order to survive; to do this he must be free to use his rational mind. His mind must be free to evaluate evidence and make judgments about what will best support his life.
Freedom is the natural context for Man’s relationship with Universal Reality. Man-made restrictions on his freedom are an assault on his natural state in life. Once divorced from his natural state of freedom, he is by default divorced from the reality of who he is. As oxygen is to Man’s breath, freedom is to Man’s mind and thought; he cannot survive without it. Without freedom, Man cannot be the entity that the Universe created him to be, he can only be what other men who reject Universal Reality in favor of their own laws force him to be.
As with all things, the right to control the life of another individual either exists or it does not. There is no evidence that such a right derives from Universal Reality. The supposed right of one man to enslave another to his will is man-made; it exists only in individual minds. It is fabricated by those who want to control and use the lives and property of others for their own benefit. Individuals who believe that such a right exists are mystics who are divorced from Universal Reality in the same way that men who believe there is an old man in the sky watching over them are mystics.
By implication, any organization, religion, culture, or government that codifies in law the right of one man to dominate another has legitimized, institutionalized and legalized both slavery and mental illness.
Given the history
of slavery in the
It was the government that provided the courts to try, convict and imprison any individuals who challenged the authority of the laws that legalized slavery. And the courts do the same thing now that they did in the days of slavery when they enforce restrictions on individual choice and provide the legal framework for seizing the fruits of individuals’ labor through mandatory taxation. It is impossible for a social organization that is built upon the same premises as slavery to be anything other than slavery. The form of slavery can change but as long as individuals cannot make choices for their own lives and are forced to surrender the fruits of their labor through taxation, slavery still exists. Just as changing the name of a rose doesn’t change the fact that it’s a rose, changing the master’s name to “The Supreme Court” or calling the plantation a “state” doesn’t eradicate the institution of slavery. The only thing that eradicates slavery is individual liberty because liberty and slavery are mutually exclusive, they are a binary circumstance. Where slavery exists, liberty cannot exist and vice versa.
When slavery was abolished by the magic wand of Abraham Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation, government was only attempting to rectify a problem that lawyers and politicians had created in the first place. After slaves were set free, many states maintained Jim Crow laws to legalize racial segregation. These laws prohibited blacks from using hotels, restaurants, and other public facilities. Any individual who abhorred racial segregation and wanted to see former slaves integrated into the marketplace would have been engaging in illegal activity and subject to prosecution. Like all laws that limit the ability of individuals to choose their own values, Jim Crow laws were just another form of slavery to the government’s current whims.
While discrimination based on race is irrational and collectivist by its very nature, any system of government that is rooted in Universal Reality must protect the natural right of individuals to make their own judgments. An organization or government is not organically equipped to make judgments; that capacity is only inherent in individuals. Any governing organization committed to protecting individual choice would have no laws either prohibiting or mandating associations between individuals; it could only mandate that all associations had to be by mutual consent. Once the government imposes the judgments of certain men on others it has created a new form of slavery where individuals are not free to live their lives as their own instinct for judgment dictates.
Without
government, slavery might exist in isolated cases, but individual slaves could
escape with no legal consequences. Under
a system of laws that protect the natural
As long as the premises and precursors for slavery exist there will always be conflict as individuals fight for dominance; each and every individual has a powerful incentive to become a master rather than a slave. A government that is based on the same premises as slavery is waging war on Universal Reality; it dooms all those who are subject to its laws to a perpetual state of conflict as they compete for power and control over the government that will become their tool for dominating others.
Mysticism Disguised as Government
It is totally irrational and inhumane to assume that a rational living being must surrender his capacity for decision making to an entity which is non-living and irrational. Government does not have a life or a mind and therefore has no more intelligence than a block of concrete, an automobile or a refrigerator; it is incapable of making rational choices. A government is an organization created by certain individuals to impose their standards of behavior and their view of reality upon others; it is a tool used for domination and control. It is the individuals who control the government that turn their fellow human beings into slaves; no concrete block and no government has the power to make such choices. No man has a right in nature to force his will upon another, however, and the fact that politicians, majorities, dictators, lawyers and bureaucrats hide behind the cloak of government does not in any way absolve them of responsibility for their actions.
Individuals who control the government will often justify their actions by claiming they are acting in the “public interest” or for the “common good.” The “public” is a collection of human beings and cannot possibly have an interest; the collection does not have a mind and therefore cannot have an “interest.” Likewise, there can be no such thing as the “common good” except where every individual is identical. If every man is free to choose his own values and goals in life, then “good” is a value that can only pertain to individuals. A government that is run by individuals who attempt to justify its existence based on concept such as “common good” or “public interest” is based on mystical concepts that don’t exist. Such a government is institutionalized mysticism, a secular, atheistic religion.
It is not
surprising that a government based on mystical premises would grant special
protections under the law to other mystical entities like religions. It is certainly to the benefit of a mystical
government to protect social organizations that promote the rejection of
evidence and wage war on Universal Reality.
The government of
the
To prohibit discrimination against people of a certain faith, is to force people to provide jobs, housing, or whatever to people who may have chosen values which are diametrically opposed to their own. Forcing one person to directly or indirectly support the religious values of another is a violation of the separation of church and state. The state should make no law with regard to religion either in support of it or prohibiting it.
The practice of a particular religion is in itself the practice of discrimination. In being baptized a Christian, a person is deciding to live by a particular set of beliefs. He was not born with those beliefs in his head, they were planted there by parents, society, the minister, or reading a religious text like The Bible. The same is true of Muslims, Jews, and Mormons, or any other organized religion. It is absurd to grant special anti-discrimination rights to people who discriminate against others by holding themselves up as a special, chosen class of people.
Every individual who believes in one religion has chosen that religion because he believes it to be superior to another. Every religion is built upon discrimination against other religions and other systems of belief. While they might similarities in beliefs and believers might tolerate other religions, the fact is that they have chosen one system of mystical beliefs over another. When a government makes it illegal to discriminate against individuals because of their religion it has created a situation where religious people and organizations can discriminate against people of other faiths, but non-religious people cannot discriminate against religion in general. The Catholic Church is not going to hire a rabbi or fundamentalist Christian to work in positions of power in their organization. Muslims won’t be hiring Jews. But a person who rejects religion and mystical and unscientific can be forced to hire people of all these faiths. Granting special protections from discrimination to religious people only robs the non-religious of freedom; it does nothing to stop the religious from discriminating against other religions.
Religions also have the right to sell their own particular brand of mysticism to the public without paying any taxes. But businesses that produce products that can be used to improve the quality of a customer’s life are taxed at federal, state and local levels. This is an enormous multi-billion dollar subsidy of mysticism. It is blatant discrimination against non-religious activities as they are forced to give up large portions of their income while religion is protected from taxation.
Religions are granted special tax status. A scientist who studies the nature of reality and learns to save lives and cure diseases, will be forced to give a percentage of his income to the government, which in turn provides special advantages to clerics who can sell their mysticism without any obligation to financially support government. This is not a separation of church and state, it is a marriage of church and state.
When the government grants special tax exempt status to mysticism but taxes those who acquire scientific knowledge that results in improved quality of life, it has blessed mysticism and penalized production that stems from knowledge based on Universal Reality.
The
Experiment without Controls
Just as the great masses of people throughout history have accepted the existence of a paternal God without question, the world is full of individuals who believe that Man cannot exist or advance without government to control the lives in individuals. There is no scientific evidence to support this theory because it has never been scientifically tested. It is ironic and further evidence of the mystical nature of government that government which exists to control human lives and never placed any scientific controls on its experiment in controlling human existence.
The only way to test the theory that coercive government elevates Mankind is to do a controlled experiment by setting aside a place on earth where individuals can choose to be free from the intellectual, emotional and social poison of mysticism in all its forms. Since mysticism is a function of an individual mind, a society cannot be mystical or non-mystical. A society is a collection of individuals and does not possess a mind; therefore, it cannot have a mind that ignores evidence. Mysticism, believing in things that are not supported by evidence, exists in an individual’s mind and it can only be corrected when individuals make the choice to study physical reality and reject the idea that things can exist without any evidence of their existence.
This would be a society built upon inquiry that abhors any efforts to block inquiry into the nature of the Universe. It would also be a society that recognizes that every man is an end in himself with the right to act in his own rational self-interest. It would be a society where every man can keep and dispose of what he has earned, but where he has no right to keep or dispose of what he has taken forcibly from others. It would be a society that recognizes that every man has only one guarantee in life—that he will die—and that he has the right to free association and to enter into rational contracts with other individuals. It would be a society where every individual has the right to control his own life and must accept full responsibility for his actions.
The great experiment in coercive government currently underway all around the world is an extension of the same mystical concepts that gave the world the Dark Ages and the Inquisition. While every government offers different levels of freedom to its citizens as well as different restrictions on personal liberty, it is impossible to know what is possible in a truly free society when no society that is truly free from mysticism has ever existed.
History is full of
evidence that Mankind progresses when free and he stagnates when controlled and
bullied by others. When the
The
WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.[x]
It has steadily
degenerated into a mystically based state largely the founding fathers did not
fully comprehend the meaning of liberty, were still at the mercy of mystical
notions about existence and because the courts have failed in their duty to
protect individuals from aggression by government and other individuals. The
Congress and the Supreme Courts have attempted to regulate equality by granting
special entitlements to certain groups of individuals which are invariably at
the expense of other individuals. It is
not possible to have liberty and eat it too; individuals either have choice or
they don’t. When mystical and
non-mystical individuals are both free to live their lives as they choose and
agree not to artificially regulate each other’s lives, the evidence will
quickly emerge of the superior strategy as it did when a wall was placed down
the middle of the city of
As long as there
is no freedom to conduct this experiment the truth will remain hidden. Freedom and Universal Reality are inextricably linked. If scientists are not free to conduct
experiments, there can be no scientific understanding of reality. If individuals are not free of religious and
government imposed mysticism, there can be no understanding of how man will act
when he is able to experience his natural
Dictators and Democracies
A one-man dictatorship is not the same as a democracy, but in many respects the impact on individual liberty is the same. A democracy is a state where a majority of individuals feel they have the right to be dictators. Acting on this mystical premise which has no scientific evidence to support it, any group of individuals who can form a majority has the state-sanctioned authority to force their will upon a target minority.
The fact that huge numbers of individuals persist in the delusion that a society made up mostly of dictators is a free society does not make it a free society. Universal Reality is not up for a vote; reality is what it is regardless of popular opinion. A society is only free when all the individuals in the society are free to exercise their own free will and free from aggression from other individuals. In a system of majority rule, while the members of the majority might be exercising their free will, they have deprived the members of the minority of their free will. Whether all the individuals in a society are free or not free is a binary circumstance; if even one individual is not free to exercise his free will and own his own life then it cannot be accurately called a society of free men. Unless there is a complete consensus at the ballot box, some individuals are using their freedom to play the role of dictators to their follow citizens.
The individual who has his freedom of choice taken away is forced into submission and slavery by a mob. He has the right to self-defense in nature; but a government based on the premise of dictatorship by majority is incapable of protecting that right as it has been formed in direct violation of that right. The mob-run government will tell him that he can hire a lawyer and go through “due process” to protest his treatment, but who will compensate him for his time and for the fact that he was denied the right to live his life as a rational free man during the years that the legal action would take? What compensation is there for a rational man to spend even one hour of his life fighting to regain his freedom from men who irrationally took it away from him in the first place? What is the chance that he could win in a system that has institutionalized the mystical belief that mob rule is a rational process for living?
If a majority of people want the government, the individual who opposes any form of coercive, mystical government has no place to turn. He is a caged and tormented animal, his humanity and his devotion to Universal Reality spat upon and discriminated against. He is forced to live in a state that is hostile to his natural state in life; sold into slavery simply because a majority of his fellow men are barbaric, delusional dictators who relish the stolen power that comes from imposing their will upon others.
Just as there is no evidence in nature to support the notion that one individual has the right to control and enslave the lives of others, there is also no law in the universe that gives a collection of individuals, big or small, the right to control the lives of others. It makes no difference if it is a single ruthless dictator controlling an entire country or a mob of individual dictators controlling the lives of a minority. As with ugagagas, it is not possible to rationally discuss the “right” to control the life of another because no such right exists. There are no words or concepts to describe something that doesn’t exist.
It is only possible to discuss the desire of certain individuals to control the lives of others because that desire exists and is manifested in the structure of governments and religions all around the world. A “right” on the other hand can only come from mutual agreement by contract between free men because rights do not exist in nature. No rational man would voluntarily agree to be a slave to another man’s will; but rational men agree all the time to treat each other by certain standards of conduct.
Man, by his nature, is born free. The universe gave him a life and liberty and that is not the property of any other individual or mob of individuals. It is solely the property of the individual. He has total freedom in the defense of his life and liberty. Free individuals can contract with others to protect them from predatory forces only if the contract is not mandatory or forced; as forcing an individual into a contractual relationship would in itself violate the individual’s right to choice.
What can be said of a man who willingly surrenders to some form of dictatorship? At the very least, he has no self-esteem. He is also has no consciousness of his natural relationship to Universal Reality. He does not value his mind, his freedom to use it, or his life and consequently does not have the courage to do what is necessary to win back his freedom and his life. His acquiescence speaks volumes about his support of dictators whose power can only be the product of mystical thinking. His passivity and willingness to accept slavery as his natural station in life will win him the approval of those who seek to control the lives of others.
The implications for evolution of life on earth are disastrous. Once a government have institutionalized one man’s aggression toward another is has by default placed enormous selective pressure on those men who value freedom and their natural relationship with Universal Reality. It has given an artificial advantage to those who have a delusional relationship with reality and seek to dominate and control the lives of others. It has also given an artificial advantage to those who are willing to be slaves. By law it becomes illegal and anti-social to respect the liberty and the free will of others or to use liberty and free-will in one’s own rational self-interest. It becomes illegal for individuals to be responsible, free traders who respect their own choices as well as the choices of others. Peaceful, productive, free-market trade becomes impossible in such an environment; those who attempt it will be punished under the law.
All governments that wage war on individual liberty and free markets are building aggression into the gene pool because the give selective advantage to those with a talent for coercion and force rather than those who produce and trade freely and rationally. Governments that build coercion into markets are a carryover from tribal, caveman days and they will insure that a caveman mentality become genetically encoded into the human species. It is not surprising that the world repeatedly finds itself embroiled in one conflict after another since the great majority of men are now subjugated by force to other men as a function of government. It will also not be surprising when Mankind wipes himself off the face of the earth, for that is the inevitable outcome when governments institutionalize and reward the use of force by some men against others as the foundation of government and society.
With regard to the right of every rational human being to choose his own destiny and his own values, there is one fundamental difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. In a one-man dictatorship, one individual has total control over how every individual lives his life. In a democracy the power to control the actions of individuals is vested in whoever can muster a majority to support his values and views. It is a fallacy to think that a dictator is inherently worse than democracy. It is possible that a brilliant and benevolent dictator would do more for his people than an angry, irrational mob that has gained control of the ballot box and consequently the government.
In both cases, the individual's rights are not protected by the laws of Universal Reality. In the case of a single dictator, however, the dictatorship can be ended with one bullet. How many bullets does it take to end dictatorship by a majority of citizens? It appears superficially that a dictatorship by a Hitler, Castro or Saddam Hussein is worse because the face of the dictator doesn’t change for many decades. In addition, people feel deeply resentful that one individual should have so much power over their lives. In a democracy the role of dictator is shared by a mindless, faceless mob. It is not possible to put the blame for the loss of freedom on any one person; the blame must be put on a majority of one’s neighbors.
Democracy is a form of dictatorship that can last far beyond the lifespan of an individual dictator because the political system itself is the dictator. There is nobody to blame for the dictatorship but whatever majority of individuals currently has control of the government. Blaming a mob, which is a collection of individuals, however, is a futile process that inevitably results in irrational, collectivist thinking. To say that Republicans are responsible for certain problems or Democrats are responsible for another makes no more sense than to say that ugagagas are responsible for a particular problem. Only individuals think and vote. A collection of Republicans or a collection of Democrats does not think or vote. Collections cannot be responsible for anything because they cannot be personified any more than an ugagaga can be personified. Only individuals can be responsible because only individuals act. Democracy allows individual dictators to disappear into a huge crowd and avoid responsibility for their assaults on individual rights.
Just as plantation owners in the slave-owning South saw no problem with slavery, a majority comprised of many individual dictators will see no problem with the government’s sanction of their dictatorship. Since they are a majority, the dictators will have their way until another larger mob takes the right to dictate away from them. Dictatorship by democracy is perfect insurance against the end of a dictatorship since any mob which is large enough can become the dictator. At any given time, by definition, the majority of citizens support the dictator because they are the dictator. They can use the machinery of government to grant special favors to their friends and to cripple or enslave any minority they disapprove of. The history of the United States is full of examples: the internment of Japanese during World War II, slavery in the South, assaults on women’s rights to vote and control their own bodies, laws that prohibit homosexuality, and laws that force consumers to pay higher rates for goods and services so that privileged groups or industries can artificially increase their profits are just a few examples.
It is a logical fallacy
to assume that simply because most people feel or think a certain way, that the
electoral outcome will produce the greatest benefit for all. There is no relationship between reason,
reality and majority rule. Majorities
don’t have minds because they are collections of individuals. They pass laws that apply uniform, man-made
standards on collections of individuals in spite of the fact that every
individual is unique and doesn’t have the same exact needs as every other
person. Democracy does not in any way
guarantee individual liberty; in fact, it sacrifices individual liberty to the
rule of the majority.
The Role of the Supreme Court
The government of
the
The Constitution
is just a piece of paper with words written on it; it can do nothing to stop
human beings from doing whatever they want because human beings have minds and
bodies, a will and the power to act. It
is the content of his mind that ultimately determines how an individual will
act, not words on a piece of paper.
Words on paper can change minds and lead to changes in actions, but it
is the mind that determines how a human being acts, not the words on paper. At
the final interpreter of the Constitution, the small number of individuals who
sit on the Supreme Court dictate how the citizens of the
The Congress and the President enact laws through a process of voting. It always takes a majority to win; it is impossible for a minority opinion to win. As in general elections, there is no requirement that the majority be more rational, more intelligent or better informed than the minority, only that it has the most votes. The Supreme Court is a mini-democracy and any majority has the final say in the direction of the American system of democracy.
Majorities, however, are collections of individuals; they do not posses the ability to reason. The notion that a mindless entity like a majority should determine how an individual lives his life is absurd and dehumanizing. While the a majority is made up of individuals who do possess minds and the ability to reason, there is no evidence that any individual has the right to control the life of another which is the basic premise of slavery. The notion that a majority on the Supreme Court has a right to deprive an individual of his free choice is inherently irrational because it has no foundation in Universal Reality; it is impossible to describe something that does not exist. Yet the Supreme Court, judges, lawyers and countless legal organizations devote lifetimes and billions of dollars to writing, arguing and discussing this right. Thousands of decisions are based on it and millions of lives are controlled by those decisions. The truth, however, is that talking about the right of certain individuals to dictate how others live their lives is analogous to talking about how many angels will fit on the head of a pin. A dialogue based on a right that does not exist is doomed to produce nothing but arguments, nonsense, and irrational conclusions.
The only legitimate function of the Supreme Court is to insure that laws passed by the Legislative and Executive branches do not infringe on individual liberty. The purpose of the Supreme Court is to strike down laws passed by the President and Congress that infringe upon individual freedom and liberty and to uphold laws that protect the right of every individual to be free and defend his life and the property that he has earned.
If
the Supreme Court has taught us anything, it is that very intelligent people
often disagree on very important issues.
It is not uncommon for the high court to be split on very important
decisions. In such cases, one swing vote
will determine the law of the land. The
judge with the swing vote has all the power of a single dictator. The opinion of one judge can determine the
direction that all lives within the borders of the
The function of the Supreme Court should be to limit the power of government over individuals. It cannot do this when it has taken over the role of government, when it embraces the dictatorship of majority rule, or allows a single swing vote to disenfranchise entire segments of our society. It can only limit the power of government when it limits its own power.
The separation of powers built into the Constitution has failed to protect the rights of individuals. Instead, it has protected a perpetual conflict among the three branches of government at the cost of individual liberty and Man’s natural, rational relationship with Universal Reality. This is exactly the result that would be expected from a system of government that is based on irrational, nonexistent premises.
If the law is irrational, then it is inevitable that rational people will run afoul of the law, just as scientists have throughout history run afoul of the Church’s law. The very natural act of using his mind and acting accordingly can put an individual at odds with the legal system, just as Galileo’s attempts to act on his observations about the movement of planets in the solar system inevitably put him at odds with the religious orthodoxy of the Church. When there is no mandate for a government to make its laws consistent with the evidence and logic of Universal Reality, there can be no guarantee that government will be anything other than a form of secular mysticism.
If being rational will get an individual into trouble with the law then there is an obvious incentive for individuals to act irrationally. Acting in accordance with irrational laws, however, will by definition put individuals at odds with Universal Reality. It would be hard to find individuals who think that it is rational to have laws that require individuals off of a skyscraper. Yet it is not difficult to find individuals who accept without question all the laws that require individuals to sacrifice their own capacity to make choices to another individual or any mob that gains control of the ballot box and the government. The principle is the same, however; both laws require men to reject the nature of Universal Reality. In the first case, individuals must reject the reality of the Law of Gravity; in the second, they must reject the reality of the Law of Identity. The Law of Identity says that A is A, an entity is what it is, it is not something else. Individuals have minds and are capable of reason; while collections of individuals do not have minds and are therefore not capable of reason just as concrete blocks do not have minds and are not capable of reason.
When man-made laws force people to act irrationally, they enslave men to a culture of stupidity and delusion. They act against the evolutionary forces that have made the human mind the greatest natural resource in the known Universe. Man’s capacity for reason is what separates him from lower forms of life; when he is punished for being rational, a selective advantage has been given to irrationality and a liability has been attached to reason. The only possible outcome is the destruction of the human race and the capacity of individuals to work independently and together to achieve great things.
Man is a social animal and he also a free being. He must be free so contract with other free, rational beings in ways that promote mutual happiness, comfort and safety as long as the association does not aggress against the life, liberty and property of others. A free-market legal system that is built upon these premises does not rob Man of his freedom of choice in the same way that a government mandated legal system does.
Choice and lack of choice are mutually exclusive; if an individual is compelled by force to use a particular system of courts he has no choice, he is living under a dictatorship. The legal system itself has violated his rights and divorced him from his natural relationship with Universal Reality. All the individuals who are deprived of their natural right of choice by the courts have been compelled by law to live in an irrational, delusional state; it is nothing short of forced insanity.
By default, mandatory government is an assault Universal Reality as it deprives reason-capable, free human beings of their nature. Mandatory government is an assault on nature in general and human nature specifically, like trying to compel a cat to be a boat, or a nail to be a flower. Such an assault on Universal Reality can only produce bizarre results in society. The field of education is a good example as it a place where ignorance is legislated to look like knowledge. Universal Reality is fundamental to education because it is impossible to learn anything about things which do not exist. A system of education that is founded upon premises that don’t exist will produce an assault on reality, which is a rejection of evidence and consequently, an assault on education. In such an environment, students will only learn to confuse ignorance with knowledge and slavery with freedom. There can be no education without evidence. Universal Reality is the sum of all that exists and is therefore the basis for all knowledge and truth; it is a prerequisite for education.
The failures of the public system have been well-documented; there are millions of examples of young adults who graduate from high-school who cannot read, write or do grade-school mathematics. The great majority of students including those with advanced degrees from both public and private schools believe that choice and no choice can exist at the same time. They believe that individuals can be free by surrendering their freedoms and that self-esteem is synonymous with self-sacrifice to a nonexistent entity like public good. Even Hamlet understood that he had “to be” or “not to be” and there was no middle ground. Four hundred years ago Shakespeare used Hamlet to point out that existence is a binary circumstance, yet it would be very easy to find millions of individuals who have graduated with Ph.D.s who believe that choice exists when it does not exist. In other words, they believe it is possible to be free and be a slave at the same time; or one can have their freedom and eat it too.
It is only necessary to look at the ongoing debates about school choice or reproductive choice to illustrate this point. Both provide ample evidence that vast numbers of individuals have been taught to habitually violate the laws of Universal Reality, the nature of existence and the Law of Identity.
For all the talk about vouchers and school choice, there is absolutely no choice for people without children when it comes to schools. The childless are all forced to pay child support through various forms of mandatory taxation for the education of children than they didn’t produce. It doesn’t matter how many children a couple chooses to have, if they are unwilling or unable to pay for their children’s education, the government will force everyone, including those who have chosen to remain childless, to pay this form of child support. How is this justified? If parents aren’t willing to pay for their own children’s education, why should somebody who doesn’t have children be willing to pay for it? They will say it’s for the public good as they trot out their favorite personified, nonexistent entity to justify their crimes against the free choice of their fellow citizens. But there is no public good. Good is a value that varies from individual to individual; it is a function of choices that only individuals can make.
The argument that the forced financing of education is for the public good is similar to the argument that paying above-market wages to union workers is for the good of society. Above market-wages are great for those who receive them, but create an additional financial burden on those who must pay more for basic goods and services. When above-market wages become law, the above-market wage earner is getting richer while the individual who pays above market prices to finance the wage is getting poorer. Just as forced financing of public education is good for some individuals at the expense of others, legally mandated above-market wages are good for some individuals at the expense of others. Similarly, upper-middle class parents who force others to subsidize their children’s education will reap huge financial rewards at the expense of the childless worker who is forced to pay for it. The parents will benefit in their senior years by having educated children to care for them but the childless individual will pay for any services that he needs from the children he was forced to educate. The cost of educating the children is socialized across everybody but the profits are private and pocketed by a family unit.
Not only are childless individuals forced to pay the educational expenses of parents who have no intention of paying for their own children’s education, but many individuals are forced to subsidize educational systems that teach a view of existence contrary to their own. In some states parents can obtain vouchers to send their children to private and religious schools. An atheist is required to finance the religious beliefs of any Christian, Jew or Muslim who cannot or will not support their children. Any religious person is required to finance the religious indoctrination of children being raised in another religion, even if that religion is completely contrary to his own beliefs.
Gay and lesbian individuals are forced to finance the indoctrination of children in religions which teach that homosexuality is abnormal or morally wrong. In this way, homosexuals are forced to finance the indoctrination of those who are being taught to hate them and work against their success.
It is one thing for the law to force individuals to give up their freedom to others; it adds insult to injury to force those same individuals to pay for the system that keeps them enslaved. The American Revolution was fought over this exact issue; the American colonists were being forced by the British government to pay for a legal system that was depriving them of liberty. In the years preceding the Revolutionary War, England had imposed numerous taxes: The Sugar Act of 1764 was passed to pay off the war debt of the French and Indian War and to increase duties on imported sugar and prohibit import of foreign rum and French wines, the Stamp Act of 1765 was passed by the English Parliament to pay for the cost of the British military organization in America. The Quartering Act of 1765 required colonists to feed and house British troops in their homes.[xi]
In response to
these new taxes, Patrick Henry, who would speak so eloquently of liberty in
1775, maintained in 1765 that only the
What kind of
delusional mind could think that the
Mandatory taxation is inherently an assault on individual choice and freedom; it exists for the sole purpose of forcing certain individuals to finance the choices and values of others. It makes no difference how the government is spending the tax dollars, the individual who earned the money with his labor and could have spent it to support his own life and the lives of those he loves, is being forced to spend it on those who have gained control of the government.
What of a person facing a serious illness who would prefer to spend his money on research to fight the disease that is threatening his life? A single person with multiple sclerosis may be forced to surrender large sums of his income to subsidize irresponsible breeders who have children they cannot afford to educate, when it would be to his benefit, and to the benefit of many others, that he donate that same money to research, or simply using it make his own life more comfortable. If the person with MS has children, he might wish to place the money in a trust fund to provide financial assistance to his own children at the time when the disease ultimately claims his life but the government might instead force him to subsidize a huge, wealthy multi-national corporation.
If individuals want to voluntarily support the education of other people’s children they can do that by making contributions directly to the schools. This form of support would eliminate the all the government middle-men, allowing a much higher percentage of the money to be used for education as opposed to financing bureaucratic jobs. The same principle applies to roads, medical care or housing; when individuals pay directly in a free, competitive market for the goods and services that they need, they eliminate support for all the non-productive, economic parasites who never produce or invent anything except countless ways to prohibit individual choice.
***
The “right to choose” is a popular political mantra when it comes to the subject of human reproduction. Many people speak passionately about a woman’s right to choose when it comes to the decision to abort or carry a pregnancy to term. Of course a woman has the right to choose what happens with her own body; if she wants to terminate a pregnancy, no individual has the right to stop her. To say that she must be pregnant when she does not want to be pregnant is to say that she is a slave, not only to a fetus but to those who feel they have the right to control her body.
The right to choose is the right of all free women. It is not, however, a right that is exclusive to women. It is also the right of all free men. It is the right of all human beings because the Universe gave them a mind and an instinct for judging. Just as they have the right to use their legs for walking, they have the right to use their minds for making choices. It is in the nature of all minds to think, to choose and to judge.
Women have the right to choose but they don’t have the right to choose for everybody else. Currently, the American legal system has institutionalized the notion that choice is a right only belonging to women. When a woman chooses to have a baby that she cannot or will not support, she is also choosing to force everybody else to pay for it, even those who are not the father. Many individuals might prefer to use their bodies for something other than working to support the children of every anonymous single mother who can’t financially support her baby, but they don’t have any choice in the matter. The Supreme Court gave women the right to choose but took it away from everybody else. Individuals who choose not to have children and do not wish to support them have no choice at all.
In order to protect the rights of those who choose not to pay child support, the Supreme Court should have qualified the woman’s right to choose by noting that any support for her baby must be voluntary and cannot be forced. She must get a contact of support from the father if they are not already married, be financially capable of supporting the child on her own, or set up a trust fund so that other individuals can voluntarily contribute child support. In this way, women have the right to choose without depriving others of their right to choose. When the right to choose is exclusive to women it can only polarize society into haves and have-nots; those who have choice in the matter and those who don’t have choice in the matter.
For a society to be truly free, freedom must be a property and characteristic belonging equally to every individual. One man cannot be free at the expense of another’s freedom without turning the country into a nation of slave traders with every individual sacrificing other individuals’ freedoms to enhance his own.
Every individual possesses a unique consciousness of Universal Reality (UCUR) based upon his unique genetic makeup, his unique experiences and that fact that he sees the universe from a unique point of view due to his unique position in the space-time continuum. Any mandatory government is an assault on reality, diversity and liberty. Because freedom and reality are inextricably linked, an assault on one is an assault on the other. Diversity is the norm in nature; it is essential for the survival of life in the Universe