Archive for July 25th, 2009

An Example of Missing the Point

In “Servitude and Slavery” below, I referred to my own specialty in graduate economics, Public Choice:

“If libertarianism and its theoretical expression, Public Choice, can’t even explain why people vote it certainly cannot explain the rest of life.

Under pure Public Choice Theory, as all the experts in that field agree, no votes would occur, no public choices would be made. They admit they can’t doesn’t explain why people vote, but they don’t worry about that.”

If you do a straight Public Choice libertarian calculation on whether you should vote, you wouldn’t. The cost is going to the polling place and standing in line. And, if we are just talking about the benefit to you PERSONALLY of casting your ballot, what do you get for it? What is the real probability that your particular vote will affect YOU personally?

Zilch.

No pure libertarian would bother to vote. The reason we DO vote goes to the very fundamental error of libertarianism. Voters want to influence how their SOCIETY goes, not just to benefit themselves.

Like Marx and Rand everyone else Public Choice is still in the age when animals did not fight wars. All we have learned about the nature of all social animals has been completely missed.

In other words, Public Choice and libertarianism declare that LOYALTY has nothing to do with humans. The whole Wordist superstructure of libertarianism founders on that one point, just as “anti-racism” founders on the Mantra.

I sent this logic to someone in Public Choice. Remember that I said that the job of respectable conservatism is to miss the point while appearing to address it. The same is true of Public Choice. Our whole training was that of a professional knife thrower, to always MISS just right.

This person is NOT an anti-white. But his TRAINING is to miss the point. He saw what I said. one would vote at all. His reply to me will sound familiar to anyone who has ever actually WORKED with the Mantra.

He said that Public Choicers do still mention the point that if self-interest were the only basis of voting no one would vote at all. But that was ALL he addressed. What I wrote about loyalty might as well have been blank space. I wrote him again to remind him of it and he said I should pay attention to what HE said.

You have to USE the Mantra to understand this reaction. We have here a form of HYPNOTISM. A proposition that will undermine a whole world-view runs into this.

It is vital that you recognize this form of hypnotism. You cannot just “mention the logic of the Mantra.” No one will SEE the Mantra even when you first ram it down their throats. All of us who have fought it out know well that you simply CANNOT get onto other topics and that you cannot just “mention the logic.”

You must HIT THE TARGET again and again and again. In a week, even someone you have forced to face it will have HYPNOTICALLY forgotten it.

Let us go back to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. A friend of his died of a cut on his finger while he was doing a dissection for anatomy on an old corpse. Semmelweis looked at his friend’s symptoms and discovered that they were the same as those of “childbed fever” of which so many of the mothers and babies in his hospital died. Doctors in his hospital were doing dissections and then going straight to deliver babies without washing their hands.

It was obvious where the childbed fever was coming from.

Semmelweis explained it and explained it and explained it. The doctors replied that they were discussing childbed fever, just as my friend said they were DISCUSSING why people wouldn’t vote at all using Public Choice logic. They got him into discussions of Galen and Hippocrates. They talked about the Simplism of just washing your hands in carbolic acid. The moment he mentioned childbed fever they went off on their own tack.

Semmelweis’s deliveries were without the huge mortality rate theirs was. He was denounced as a monomaniac. In other words, they talked about everything but what he told them. They didn’t try his simplistic solution.. Hell, they didn’t even SEE it.

In the end Semmelweis won, but only after he died in a madhouse.

THAT is what we are facing. It is life and death, and “mentioning the Mantra” while you are going along with someone’s discussion won’t do the trick.

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