Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

That was the stupendous thought uttered by Bill O’Reilly in a discussion of marijuana legalization. For you see, apparently making the “drug” legal entails society sanctioning its use. Is he serious? Has he no concept of the difference between illegal and immoral or unadvised? Has he never heard the expression “vices are not crimes”? Just because something is legal does not mean that “society” must approve of that legal thing. Marijuana users may well be shunned, denied employment, undergo family “interventions,” whatever. Yet the grass may still be legal to produce or use, meaning that cops won’t crack your skull for a smoke. Surely, the combination of “legal yet tacitly disapproved” is conceivable, happens all the time, and does not constitute “society’s getting behind marijuana smoking.”

I mean, we can argue that a nagging wife or a stingy person has a bad character trait. “Society” certainly does not get behind such nasty vices. That does not mean that nagging or stinginess ought to be outlawed.

Moreover, it is not even clear that we ought to disapprove of marijuana use (as opposed to abuse). When legalized, marijuana’s quality will improve dramatically, as big and small companies enter the industry to serve the demand and quality and price competition commences.

And for goodness’ sake, don’t scare us with the vision of children lying in the streets in a smoked (or drunken) stupor. I thought only left-liberals used “it’s for the children” trick. Parents protect their children from numerous harms; they can easily extend this protection, as they do already, to unadvised marijuana consumption.

I mean, look, Mises was right to have written that the harm one can do to one’s soul by consuming bad ideas is far greater that the harm one can do to one’s body by smoking some pot. Seen in this light, freedom of speech is the worst thing that befell us since the bubonic plague epidemic. If paternal and benevolent government censors had been empowered to protect the masses from bad ideas, perhaps socialism would never have reach such popularity. Perhaps O’Reilly own show is dangerous to the public; what if he infects the body politic with vicious ideas?

Where does protecting people from themselves end? Must we enslave the populace? The Drug Prohibition is a policy at war with itself.

So said a woman who drove us to the airport when we were leaving Florida in mid-June regarding the death of her very mentally ill daughter years ago. And I wondered, first, for whom was it a blessing? For the woman, because her daughter’s death freed her from a tiring duty to care for her? That seems a bit selfish, don’t you think? For the daughter who may now be enjoying some sort of heavenly existence with her powers restored? But in that case, if her death was a blessing to her herself, then by all logic the mother should have mercy-killed her. That would have caused the “blessing” to occur sooner than it actually did and released the daughter from her apparently miserable and subhuman existence. The fact that it never occurred to the woman indicates that she did not use “blessing” in this sense. For the world as a whole which now has less pain and suffering than before in some utilitarian sense? But everyone undergoes suffering, and there is no perfection in this world. If the world, as I note in the previous post, were truly cleansed from the impure and the unhappy, there would be no one left.

What then is the meaning of “it was a blessing” supposed to be? When is death ever a blessing? I suggest that one must eventually give in to death and declare the earthly battle over, nevertheless death is never a blessing, whatever the state of the person is.

The only exception seems to be death that ends the painful pre-death agony. But even here we are again back to the idea that agony could be ended sooner or avoided altogether by killing the person. Praxeologically, if not legally, killing is the same as letting die, a deliberate human action that results in certain precise consequences.

Cf. Mises, Human Action, 13.

A just war is a rarity, because in order to be just, at the very least a war must be essentially private. A group of people voluntarily come under command of a general, pay for their own weapons, never attack the citizens which had nothing to do with the cause of war but fight against a precisely delineated group of enemies who are claimed to have aggrieved the soldiers.

Is the drug war going on in Mexico right now just or unjust? A simple reply is that it is neither; it is rather insane: it’s arbitrary slaughter.

Still, this is indeed a private war between the Prohibition-induced militarized drug producers and the naturally militarized government. G-men, as it were, battle against gangs of drug-men. The citizens are mostly unharmed. Yet it was the government that made this war a reality by imposing and enforcing the Drug Prohibition. The drugmen could be said to be fighting for their natural right peacefully to produce private goods for the consumers. It is true that idealists of various kinds have for many decades tried to “save us from ourselves,” and for that they have a lot to answer. They “disapprove” of drug use, as if anybody cared for their solicitude. The idealists want to be Moses-like lawgivers presenting us with commandments like “Just say no to drugs (and if you don’t, we’ll kill you).” To them drug buyers and sellers are disgusting vermin to be exterminated or shoved into a government cage. They aim to cleanse the earth from the “impure.”

Anyway, the drugmen have the right to continue in their occupation of drug manufacture, and the government is being unjust in outlawing their trade and punishing them for it. The drugmen are in the right in jus ad bellum if obviously not in jus ad bello. But the latter injustice is, too, an easily foreseen consequence of the Drug Prohibition.

So, this guy Bolton was on Fox News today and excoriated South Korea that it failed to impose some sanctions on Iran. “The measure for which the United States is trying to rally international support, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act, targets Iran’s energy sector, which sustains its economy.” The nerve these guys have for doing something of which the US hardliners disapprove. Outrageous, apparently, and all that.

Why can’t Seoul reply as follows: “South Korea is a free country, in which free enterprise flourishes. We do not consider cutting off peaceful trade between individuals and business firms located in different countries to be a foreign policy tool. The South Korean government will not participate in the malicious program of impoverishing both the country, its trading partners, and the world.”

I mean, the sanctions explicitly “target” the sector which “sustains the economy.” How is that not a declaration of war? How is that not a total war on the citizens, including women and children, of Iran?

Are there no, you know, normal ideologies anymore? Is a single libertarian voice too hard to find these days? Is everyone either a fool or a coward? Come on, South Korea, reject the crazed sanctions idea!

Obama: Muslims have “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” It’s interesting how left-liberals suddenly rediscover their love for private property rights in such a sensitive a matter, rights for which they usually have neither interests nor patience. Then there is the fact that Obama dares to express his opinion on this matter at all. Like all US presidents, he sees no limits to his power. Even local affairs find themselves subject to his scrutiny.

But let’s be honest and point out that he is right: this is a private deal between the owner of the land and his customers. If the mosque people offer the guy the most money, there is nothing objectionable in his taking it. That’s free enterprise in action. And that’s how private property resolves conflicts: any private deal is none of anybody’s business.

Still, the terrorists derived some of their ideology from their Muslim faith. And there are plenty of “folks” out there who hate Americans with a passion. Maybe they actually hate the US federal government and its foreign policy, but, like most Americans, too, they fail to make the distinction between the state and the people. Here’s a clue: hate the state? Don’t attack the people. Again, hate the state? Attack state property, like aircraft carriers. Nobody would give a rat’s ass if a couple of these technological terrors sank. Have yourself a normal war, terrorists.

Even that will be extremely stupid, as it will only enrage the Leviathan. Look what happened after Timothy McVeigh’s own personal war. He single-handedly discredited local “leave us alone” movements against the feds. Bill Clinton bragged how McVeigh’s actions (evil surely in themselves) hurt his opposition. But a “normal” war would be an improvement.

Anyway, the key proposition I want to defend is: Let them hate so long as they (a) fear and (b) think it more profitable than dying to sell us their Middle Eastern junk. Hatred kills the hater not the hated. But as long then the former don’t fly airplanes into tall buildings or drop bombs on (again) the people, it does not matter to me what attitude they have toward me. You see, we in America have a freedom of emotions. You know, those private feelings which, if not expressed in plans and actions, are completely invisible to others? If that freedom is taken away from us, then which are going to be left?

And think about this: if terrorists feel like attacking the World Trade Center area again, maybe they’ll decide against it, because they’ll fear harming the mosque.

So, there is the story of how “a former Israeli soldier posted photos on Facebook of herself in uniform smiling beside bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners.” Over 15,000 comments have been posted in response to this Yahoo! story, all of which are extremely stupid.

For the obvious unknown so far is whether the prisoners are in her custody legitimately. If they are, then the most the woman can be accused of is bad taste, even less than that: perhaps she is a bit flighty and just snapped the photos for fun. “Oh look at me, I’m so tough, I’m holding these sons of bitches by the balls!” What is the big deal, especially when in Israel women are required to “do time” in the military? In short, if the prisoners ought to be there, then she did nothing wrong.

On the other hand, if the prisoners are not supposed to be there, have in fact been kidnapped, are being held without trial, etc., then a picture (are you kidding?) is beside the point. The outrage is not that she is seemingly enjoying her power over the inmates (have people not heard of the Stanford prison experiment?) but that an injustice is being perpetrated: these men are innocent or at least have been wronged by the Israeli state and must be freed at once, and those who seized and imprisoned them unlawfully ought to be punished. The woman may have done us a favor by exposing a corrupt prison regime.

That’s about it.

Oh yes, the numerous back and forth accusations of hypocrisy, you know, “if it were Muslims holding Israelis captive, no one would care,” etc. are nonsense. The “argument,” if it can be called that, comes down to “everyone’s a scumbag, so it’s OK if the Israeli folks are, too.” Bleah.

So, there is a legal battle in California about the details of gay marriage. I contend that in this battle the gays are either evil or stupid. Those against gay marriage perceive, rightly in my view, that gays want the same dignity to their marriage, dignity allotted to it by tradition, utility, and religion, that normal marriage has. But in attempting to measure up to normal marriage gays do not pull themselves up but instead drag marriage down. It’s no wonder people say that gays want to undermine morals and working social institutions and basically demean something holy.

If that is indeed the case, then gays stand condemned. But suppose that they have no such nefarious plans. Surely, the gays recognize the inferiority of their “marriage.” Then why rattle the good folks? The issue, it seems to me, turns entirely on a word. Gays should say: it’s fine if you don’t let us marry, but we’d like to be able to… shmarry! Shmarriage would be actuated by a different ritual (civil or religious or whatever — perhaps instead of rings, gays would exchange pens) and be governed by a different set of laws. Perhaps the legislators would simply copy the normal marriage laws into a new book called “Shmarriage Laws” without any alterations. Or maybe with a few alterations, big deal. Really, no one would be the wiser.

This way, it seems to me, the dispute could be resolved peacefully.

Here is a little piece of environmentalist propaganda on the “Science” channel: “Recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees.” Well, whoopty doo. Nonsense! First, recycling increases the supply of paper. That means that given a demand, the equilibrium quantity demanded rises. The quantity demanded for tree-made paper does not diminish by the entire amount of the produced recycled paper but by something less. (Yes, it is possible that “17 trees” takes this into account but how likely is that?)

Second, this assumes that forest-owning entrepreneurs do not plant new trees when mature trees are cut down. Yes, some trees are unowned and people do not care to replenish their supply, because such trees are not private property. But in many cases the trees suitable to be a material for making paper are specifically re-grown. It is simply not the case that forests are not well cared for resources.

Third, the reason why I have such a wide choice of shoes is precisely that so many other people also want shoes. Their demand and their consumer competition are not an obstacle to me but a blessing. Similarly, if the environmentalists convinced everyone to stop eating meat, then the number of chickens alive would plummet. Same with the trees. Some tree farms are deliberately created where there were no trees before at all in order to satisfy the demand. The “derived demand” for the trees exists only because of the original demand for paper. If people stopped using the paper, these farms would cease to exist.

If you’ve played the campaign correctly, then at the beginning of the last scenario you should end up with something like this:

In the last scenario don’t forget to buy the Athrikus’ Ring of Power from Magic Rings and Things and Tome of Forbidden Knowledge from Helbrim’s Potions.

There are my own personal problems. 1) The Original Sin. I believe that man damaged God’s perfect created world, but as to when, where, and how, I don’t know and don’t care to speculate. The details are unknowable, but my solution is to thank our lucky stars that this non-trivial explanation of why the omnipotent God would apparently create imperfectly is suggested in the Bible.

2) That God is a utilitarian and sacrifices some men to hellfire in order to maximize total heavenly happiness, glory, or whatever. In some situations God may be faced with two choices, such as to save Smith and Robinson by condemning Jones (or allowing Jones to condemn himself; it does not matter for this case, because praxeologically killing is the same as letting die) versus saving Jones but in the process condemning Smith and Robinson. The inevitable result is God’s choosing the former as resulting in the greater good for whose sake Jones is sacrificed. I don’t like the idea. My solution is to accept that hell is real but to deny that people go there. Hell is empty. God’s power is not so little that He can’t even prevent the summum malum.

“Then said Mary unto the angel, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’” (LK 1:34)

I agree that a couple contemplating marriage should know everything about each other, including their sexual “kinks.” But it is not necessary that they know each other intimately, i.e., by experience.

They should know each other abstractly, and on the basis of these data decide whether they are compatible or want to spend their life with each other, but not through intimate experience.

I don’t need to jump from a 7th story of a building or eat rat poison to know that I’ll die if I do so. I can know lots of things without testing them on myself.

Update. So, if there was a girl I really liked and even thought I might want to marry, I’d sit her down and ask: “So, honey, what are your sexual perversions? And you have to be honest: if you like it with animals, say, then you’d better tell me now, before I have to, as per Ex 22:19 or Lev 18:23, you know, stone you. And please don’t seduce my cat.”

Hayek: “The problem assumes the greatest importance when we consider that we are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first as innocuous or beneficial powers over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of government. The greatest threats to human freedom probably still lie in the future. The day may not be far off when authority, by adding appropriate drugs to our water supply or by some other similar device, will be able to elate or depress, stimulate or paralyze, the minds of whole populations for its own purposes.” (The Constitution of Liberty, 216)

Rothbard on fluoridation.

Deer Park water’s mineral contents.

Some non-fluoride toothpastes, perfectly respectable:

Tom’s of Maine
Burt’s Bees
More…

Yes, if we mean that it does not “care” whether it is A or B or C…

But there is another sense of indifference. Nature is not indifferent to man’s endeavors to change it, to make it suit his desires better. It allows human beings to manipulate it. If nature were indifferent to men in the second sense, then it would treat them with contempt. It would say, in effect: “I despise you and spit on your pathetic attempts to act on me. I will not yield nor condescend to be altered by you.” Nature gives up its secrets, given sufficient and proper effort, and nature is responsive to human action. A truly indifferent nature would simply crush us, giving us no chance to live.

Consider your own house. This is nature, a crucial part of your environment. Home improvement is a huge industry. Your house is very malleable, and you decide what to create out of it. The power is yours.

Nature says to men: “Do with me as you please. I dare you: make something useful out of me. Civilize me, if you are good enough.” Now, of course, there are rules you must know to manipulate nature: nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. But learning the rules is, too, part of mastering and subduing nature. This is not at all indifference. That is a very friendly and amiable attitude of nature toward men.

What men seek is harmony between themselves and the world. And the East and West approach this problem, namely, the disharmony, in different ways. The West seeks to change the world and bring it into conformity with how man thinks things ought to be. The East changes oneself, the soul, the psyche, consciousness, also in order to make it conform to the harsh realities of the world. The West may in its less wise moments imagine the East to be weak and fatalistic; and on its part, the East can retaliate by considering the West to be blind and materialistic, all caught up in external human action.

Thus, when faced with a disease, a Westerner would want to develop a drug to cure the disease. An Easterner would want to control his consciousness, manage his internal experience, so that the disease does not bother him. A yogi may be poor, malnourished, and sick, but his consciousness flows in such a way that he is unaffected by these external maladies.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defends his practices as follows:

“Yet the psychiatrist who enjoys his trade is also receiving constant feedback: the way the patient holds himself, the expression on his face, the hesitation in his voice, the content of the material he brings up in the therapeutic hour — all these bits of information are important clues the psychiatrist uses to monitor the progress of the therapy. The difference between a surgeon and a psychiatrist is that the former considers blood and excision the only feedback worth attending to, whereas the latter considers the signals reflecting a patient’s state of mind to be significant information. The surgeon judges the psychiatrist to be soft because he is interested in such ephemeral goals; the psychiatrist thinks the surgeon crude for his concentration on mechanics.” (Flow, 56)

Isn’t it odd for a person who has written a treatise on happiness to despise people who are not like him, in fact, people who simply perform other tasks within social cooperation? And moreover, to ascribe to those other people the predilection for having similar contempt for himself?

Judging from a few sentences here and there, our author is very insecure about his science. Studying consciousness appears to him to be a “soft” endeavor, not unlike the far “harder” chemistry and even biology. How boring.

Mises has this to say about economics:

“It is common with narrow-minded people to reflect upon every respect in which other people differ from themselves. The camel in the fable takes exception to all other animals for not having a hump, and the Ruritanian criticizes the Laputanian for not being a Ruritanian. The research worker in the laboratory considers it as the sole worthy home of inquiry, and differential equations as the only sound method of expressing the results of scientific thought. He is simply incapable of seeing the epistemological problems of human action. For him economics cannot be anything but a kind of mechanics.” (Human Action, 8)

Oh well.

Is there such a thing? Why would you need reason or intelligence in order to look about yourself, see what exists, and decide to… keep it exactly the way it is?!

These are the two basic worldviews. Pessimism brought to its logical conclusion says: “Nothing will be.” The opposite of pessimism is “something will be,” which is just barely optimistic, but I am interested in what optimism is when also brought to its logical conclusion. And that is expressed in the Catholic prayer: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.” That is the ultimate choice, between “nothing” and “a world without end.” Which worldview is healthier for a man to adopt? Surely, Russell’s “unyielding despair” is grotesque. Be, therefore, I advise, optimistic.

An acquaintance has expressed the following opinion. One should have plenty of sex with his future wife, because one should marry for love not for sex. One should get “sex out of his mind” before marrying the girl. This is the exact opposite of truth. One should marry for sex! As with all things Catholic, most people travel from the sensual to the intellectual and spiritual. But sex before marriage does not bond the lovers spiritually. And if sexual desire is exhausted before marriage, then sex afterward within marriage will no longer be a stepping stone toward a more sophisticated spiritual friendship. The whole point of waiting to have sex until one is married is to use sex to produce love.

“On that same day the LORD told Moses, ‘Go up into the Abarim Range to Mount Nebo in Moab, across from Jericho, and view Canaan, the land I am giving the Israelites as their own possession. There on the mountain that you have climbed you will die and be gathered to your people, just as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his people.’” (Deut 32: 48-50)

Wouldn’t this solve the bioethical problems, if God told each individual when and where to die? Maybe God does tell but only to His chosen saints. Here is another reason to be holy: you don’t have to worry whether to cling to life or let go; you get God’s explicit guidance before death.

Let’s take a particular moral theory, utilitarianism. Its essence is the extent of one’s love and prudence. In Moral Minds Marc D. Hauser has been trying for 400 pages to convince us that many animals have prudence. I have no doubt of that. What animals do not have is love for each other, such that brings union, mutual indwelling, and all that. Animals cannot love, because they have no will and no speculative intellect. When a chimp cares for her young, she does not have any feelings of love toward the child. At most, there is some pleasurable tingling of the senses. Regardless, there is care only to maximize one’s reproductive fitness. There is no love that cannot be reduced to pursuing successful survival and reproduction strategies.

The reason for man’s civilizational success is the recognition of higher productivity of divided labor and therefore of the usefulness of association even on the global scale. Hauser says that dolphins also have some rudimentary division of labor during cooperative hunts. Of course, human social bonds and their specializations are permanent, unlike, I assume, those of dolphins. Is it the case that a particular dolphin would always be a driver, having developed the right skills, and others would always be barriers? If so, then division of labor is, though understood as causing prosperity by humans, would still exist in an instinctive form in dolphins, though Hauser does not tell us.

I think, therefore, that, though human prudence is enlightened by the speculative intellect and therefore far exceeds the capacities of animal prudence, the difference is one of degree not kind. What separates man from the animals with respect to morality is love not prudence, though the fact that all other people in the world can be loved at least for their usefulness to the agent is due to understanding of the basics of social cooperation. The clue is that this understanding is fairly sublime, as is realizing the long-term harmony of interests of all human beings, and people do easily hate the foreigners, in the US from the Chinese to the Mexicans. In other words, it is the capacity to love not love’s reach, intensity, or even that natural love can be upgraded to charity that makes man unique and makes morality apply to him.

Therefore, animals can never be utilitarians, because they can’t be disinterestedly benevolent impartial spectators over some group of people which is the form of love required by utilitarianism.