John C. Wright's Journal

Third, to the beleaguered National Rifle Association was he also willing to lend a much-needed dose of gravity. I will always admire the forthrightness of his slogan: From My Cold, Dead Hands.

This slogan brings into sharp relief both the frivolity of the Left — for they talk about gun control as if they had any say in the matter — and the sinister nature of the Left — they will never relinquish their quest for total control of all aspects of life, control of word and deed, speech and thought. They think, contrary to all evidence, to be smarter than us. Their proof for this is that they favor emotion over reason. They think, contrary to all evidence, to be wiser than us. Their proof for this is their delight in all things immature and novel. They think, contrary to all evidence, to be our moral superiors. Their proof for this is their hatred of decency, their contempt for moral standards, and their toleration for perversion, their fawning over third-world thugs. To control us, they must first disarm us: well do they know it, and for this reason the issue of gun control is the one from which they cannot retreat, no matter how flimsy their claims either in law or logic or in empirical evidence.

The slogan sends a sobering message to this “victim disarmament” movement: what you have to say about gun control, what the courts say, and, ultimately, what the Constitution says, simply does not matter. The Constitution merely recognizes a natural right. The right would exist whether the Bill of Rights spelled it out or not. Other that natural right matters.

By nature, we are free men. Free men are armed and prepared to defend that freedom. If you are unarmed, who cares what you say? You do not have the power to enforce your will on us.

If you are armed, then see to your own disarmament first, before meddling with us.

You see the elegance of the Hestonian slogan. You will not disarm us without killing us first. The point is not open to discussion. That you might be willing to kill us to disarm us tears the mask of compassion from your grinning skulls, my smiling foes. Whatever your motivations might be, humanity, or a concern for peace and good order, are not among them. If you are not willing to kill us to disarm us, then the conversation is over. How serious are you? How far are you willing to go? 

Charlton Heston called your bluff. Now see or fold.

Mr. Heston was a man who used his publicity wisely. Here is a photo of my president, before he marched for civil rights, protesting a “White-Only” restaurant. Would that all Hollywood activists be as thoughtful in their selection of causes to support.

To those of you who think those of us in the NRA are fascists or Nazis are worse, all I can say is shut the hell up, morons. The NRA were training blacks in firearm use so they could defend themselves against Klansman when you were still in your poopy red diapers.

Your statement, if true, means your statement is inconsequential. You have shot yourself in the foot.

On the other hand, if your statement is false, and there are objective moral rules, then I am allowed to think (even if courtesy will not let me say) that someone who says ‘Morals are not objective’ is a damned liar; that lies are wrong; and that such a someone offends the moral order of the universe, the Golden Rule, common sense, not to mention the rules of logic, by uttering so foolhardy, vile and ignoble a sentiment. In other words, if the statement is false, it also is evil.

I hope you will forgive my harsh language. I do not mean to insult you, because I like you just fine. But what is coming out of your mouth is defiling you.

You could perhaps report, as a matter of fact, that the statement ‘Morals are objective’ is false. But, in the absence of a moral imperative to love truth and hate lies, this report of yours is merely a bland and meaningless fact. My eyes are hazel. That is a fact. It has no imperative associated with it. If I say ‘Morals are Objective’ and you say I am uttering a falsehood, the fact that it is a falsehood is meaningless. It has no imperative associated with it. If I have no moral duty to say or think or follow the truth, telling me my sentence is untrue is as pointless as telling me my sentence stars with an ‘M’. So what?

You could perhaps report that it is inefficient to utter untruths, or make reference to some other disguised or indirect form a moral imperative. Unfortunately, without a foundational moral imperative no disguised or indirect form of moral imperative can exist. The fact that lying is inefficient, again, is a brute fact with no imperative associated with it. If I have no moral duty to be efficient, telling me my untruth is inefficient is as pointless as telling me my sentence stars with an ‘M’. So what?

Once you say ‘morals are not objective’ you eliminate the moral foundation for all things, including this conversation. Why should I listen to you, or concede if proven wrong? Because of an imperative to be courteous? Because of an imperative to be intellectual honest? Because of an imperative to follow the truth wherever it leads?

No, sir. A duty of honesty is something we both assume before a conversation can even start. Neither would waste our breath if it were not for this unspoken and mutually binding imperative. If you will not be honest with me in this discussion, or if I cannot convince you I will be honest with you, the conversation never begins.

Let us draw this abstract conversation back to a particular example:

Myself, I hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable rights. I mean that literally: I think the statement, merely by being uttered, as a matter of logic, is a sufficient warrant for its own affirmation.

Now, is this an objective statement, or merely a matter of preference, as if I said, “I like women to wear skirts; also, I like laws that judge men without injustice, bias or favoritism.”?

Do you think men are born with equal rights? If not, on what grounds, then, you do rest any notions of justice or social justice, any ideas of how men should arrange their political affairs?

Is preferring liberty to tyranny, life to genocide, happiness to slavery merely a matter of taste, like preferring pie to cake?

Is the peaceful religious practice of the Quakers a morally superior, morally inferior, or neither superior nor inferior to the religious practice of the bloodthirsty Aztecs? Are you seriously going to tell me you would not register even the slightest moral objection to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, steaming pyramids red with the slaughter of thousands at a time? That is just a matter of personal taste?

As for the other comments:

“…your point of view is reminiscent of the early protestants…”

The parallel you draw between moral absolutism and Christian Reformers is strained at best. The dispute between Catholic and Protestant was not a dispute between moral relativists and moral absolutists.

“The people you criticise as being reckless experimentalists very likely see themselves as rectifying unjust laws in order to grant the people their self-evident rights. In short, they think very much like you.”

Dear friend, I can only judge ideologues by what they say. I take them seriously. When they say that they mean to experiment, that they mean to overthrow Capitalism and smash the Bourgeoisie, that they have no fixed rules, no ideals, and that man produces his own morality from nothing by an act of Nietzschean will-power, I take them at their word. You might see a parallel between what they believe, and what I believe, but the whole point of nihilism, Marxism, behaviorism, Nazism, and Moral Relativism is that there is no objective moral code which applies to all people at all time. I believe the opposite. You claim that they believe in an absolute moral code, but their own writings and actions dispute this. We would need to refer to some evidence to clear this point up. At the moment, I can do no more than say: I have not met or read ideologues, socialists, Marxists, fascists, and so on, who were not firm believers that logic was not universal, and firm believers that morals were not universal.

“Even if all the people in the world wanted to fashion their societies according unchanging, rational, objective laws, there would be the problem that everyone and his mother has his own idea of what’s unchanging, rational, and objective.”

I understand your comment but I do not see your point. What are you driving at?

Two geometers might have a dispute about the soundness of a proof in mathematics, and likewise two astronomers might have an argument about steady-state theory as opposed to Big Bang theory.

I agree there would be a problem in finding a compromise consensus needed for a civilization to operate. If there is an objective moral code built into the logic of the universe, then the problem is soluble; if all morals are merely matters of opinion, the problem is insoluble.

In any case, there mere fact that a dispute exists, that everyone and his mother have different opinions, does not prove one way or the other that the jury of your Reason must be a hung jury on the issue. Nothing prevents you from comparing the arguments of every man and his mother, and coming to a defensible conclusion.

Indeed, if you were unable to come to a defensible conclusion, you would not be able to come to a conclusion like “No moral statement is a proposition” and then defend it.

The mere fact that you debate with me shows that you think that the mere fact that we come to different conclusions does not, in your estimation, forestall the possibility that you might be able to persuade me or someone else reading your words of the truth of your conclusion.

Like every other scarce good, the interest rate in an unhindered market is governed by the law of supply and demand. When people have a large amount of fluid currency to spend and lend, they put it in banks, the banks have a lot of it, and, in order to under-bid other banks, they charge less interest to Investors.

In an unhindered market, then, the Investor borrow money from a bank, build factories and hire worker and make widgets. They put the widgets up for sale. The people have a large amount of fluid currency to spend and lend, and so they can buy the widgets. The Investor makes his money back, he pays the workers their wages, he repays the loan, and so when the people go back to the bank to get their money, there it is.

In a distorted market, the Fearless Leader’s well-intentioned meddling causes malinvestment. The people do not have much money to spend and lend. They put less money in the bank. When Investors come to borrow money, they bid against each other, and this drives up the interest rate, the price of borrowing money, so that only the Investor with the best prospects for repaying the loan can wisely afford to risk taking out a loan at a high credit rate. Other investors hold their money, or invest in safe projects. Few factories or none are built; not many widgets are made; but that is okay, because the people do not have much spare money to lend and spend to buy the widgets.

Then along comes the Fearless Leader on his White Horse. The Leader on the White Horse threatens the banks with the sword, telling them that they cannot charge an interest rate above some arbitrary rate.

The businessmen and investors now can borrow money more cheaply than the natural rate of interest. Now, the people have little money to lend andspend, by hypothesis, for otherwise the interest rate would be low. The interest rate is high, but the Fearless Leader lowers it. This means that the investors cannot bid against each other to secure the loans they want and need. An investor with a risky project, if he gets his foot in the bank door first, take out the loan at the lower-than-natural rate of interest, and the safer investor is not in a position to offer to pay more and out-bid him, because his action has been declared illegal by the Fearless Leader.

Lo and behold, a season of what looks like boom appears. The risky investors build factories and hire workers with the loan money. Happy days are here again, and flapper dance on the tops of model-T Fords, drinking wine from slippers. But remember, by hypothesis, this is a season where the people have relatively little fluid cash to lend and spend. The risky investor puts his widgets for sale on the market, but the bidding is sluggish. The price drops, and the widgets cannot be sold. Remember, again, that by hypothesis, this is a riskier venture than the safe investment. So the factory does not make its money back; the risky investor declares bankruptcy, and cannot pay his wage-earners, and he cannot pay back the bank.

The wage-earners are out of a job at that factory, and when they go to the bank to look at their savings, lo and behold, that is the exact same capital the bank lent to the risky investor.

Now, even if the risky investor knows that the interest rate is artificially low, because some other risky investor with an even less-likely project will cut ahead of him in line and take the loans at the low rate if he does not, even if an investor knows that a bust is coming, he is put in a position where it is economically wise, in the short term, to borrow the money and make the bad investment any way.

The symptom of a depression is the universality of the malinvestments. Not just one or two bad stocks drop on Wall Street, but almost all the stocks. Not just one or two foolish banks make bad loans and go bankrupt, but almost all the banks. Not just one or two workingmen find their jobs dried up, but thousand and tens of thousands.

A universal effect argues a universal cause. No one business, no one bank, has so much influence over the market that merely one bad investment or a string of bad investments can create a depression. A depression is caused by widespread, that is by SYSTEMATIC, mal-investment.

There are other indirect ways the government can interfere with the natural interest rate, aside from the Fearless Leader on a White Horse making a decree. The Federal Reserve Board is a permanent body whose business it is to interfere with the credit cycle, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is something that encourages bad investments by underwriting inefficient or risk-taking banks. The taxpayer underwrites the FDIC ultimately.

The way to get out of a depression is by liquidated bad investments and investing in good, low-risk businesses. This requires firing workers from the bad companies and having the low-risk companies hire them. This works best in an environment of low taxes and stable laws. Uncertainty about the laws causes investors to be more cautious than otherwise.

What FDR did was

(1) Discourage businesses from firing workers. ‘Share the work’ where two or three idle men did one man’s job, became the order of the day.

(2) Raised taxes to unprecedented levels.

(3)  Seize the gold supplies from the people and inflate the currency.

Inflating currency robs creditors and gives value to debtors. Imagine if Wimpy borrowed a dollar from you to buy a hamburger on Monday, promising to pay you back on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Fearless Leader prints up one hundred one dollar bills and floods them into the market. Your dollar is now worth fifty cents; a hamburger now costs two dollars. Wimpy pays you back a dollar bill, but in reality he borrowed a hamburger from you and paid you back half a hamburger. The difference in value, half a burger, just went from you to him. This is what is known as Keynesian economics: basically Keynes persuaded FDR to screw the workingman, on the theory that they would not notice the value of their burger-buying dollar was dropping.

In the long run, inflationary policies lead to capital decumulation, which interferes with the credit cycle in its own way. But Keynes responded to this objection by the quip that we should not worry about the long run, “because in the long run, we are all dead.”

A more feckless and irresponsible attitude toward matters of state cannot be imagined. Mr. Keynes is indeed dead, but we now live with an inflation rate as a permanent part of our economy, a permanent drain. I am suffering from the short-sighted folly of Keynes, and I am not dead.

FDR not only did NOT solve the Depression, his government’s reckless and abominable policies turned a minor market down-turn into a decades-long permanent feature of American life. If there is a Dante’s Inferno reserved just for people who sin against the laws of economics, FDR is buried upside-down in it, with his feet on fire.

What about the war?

There are those who say that World War Two solved the Depression. Humbug.

I offer you the following thought experiment: the next time there is a recession, have the government seize control of the same percentage of factories that in WWII were used to make ordinance. Take all the ordinance out into a field somewhere, and blow them up. Then draft as many able-bodied young men out of the work force as were drafted during WWII. Kill and maim the appropriate percentage of workers as battlefield casualties killed and maimed. Keep these workers fed at taxpayers expense with crapped K-rations, under the miserable conditions of trench warfare for four to five years.  Have your overseas trade partners bombed and blitzed, and reduce their cities to rubble, so that they have no good to trade, and nothing to buy anything with. The have the tax-payer bear the massive expense of the Marshall Plan.

Better yet, to make the thought-experiment simpler, merely add up the dollar value of the workers taken out of the market place to go soldier, the dollar value of the bombed cities in Europe, the dollar value of the loss to the civilian of gas rationing, and the cessation of all civilian industry to wartime purposes. Let us say this dollar value is, say, one third to one half of GDP.

But all that money into a big pit in the Mojave Desert, and ignite an atom bomb over it, reducing the money to ash, and making the ash radioactive. There. That is the economic recovery effect of World War Two on the American Economy.

Ideology is a sharp break from previous political philosophy, but it did not come out of a vacuum. Ideology is based on the ideas of previous centuries, political and judicial philosophy reaching all the way back to Aristotle.

The difference between an ideology and a theory of political justice is a difference of scope and meaning. Ideologies are meant to be all-embracing, to inform and influence every aspect of life. A theory of political justice, as Aristotle or Aquinas, is a theory about one aspect of life. An ideology is your life.

An analogy might be instructive. The difference between the classical paganism in the Roman Empire before Constantine, and the Church after Constantine is the difference between a ritual belief that informed part of a man’s life, and a faith that penetrated all aspects of life. The development of Christianity as a total society bloomed at the time of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire in France: religion was the underpinning of every social bond, from marriage to fealty to land-ownership to military service. The reverence for the gods of Olympus and the respect paid augurs and shrines of the ancient world was nothing like this: a man could become a votary of Serapis on Tuesday, and sacrifice to Isis on Wednesday, and burn incense to the Divine Emperor on Friday, without it making the least difference to anyone if he did the same thing next week or not.

Likewise, the political theory of Aristotle dealt with the virtues ruler and ruled must possess, the proper roles of the parts of society, but being an “Aristotelian” is not like being a “Marxist”. Being a “Marxist” is much more like being a “Christian”; Marxists are followers of a creed that changes every aspect of their lives.

The roots of the Ideological revolution came during the Enlightenment, when the theory of the Rights of Man, and the political ideas of limited government and of government ‘by the people and for the people’, were discovered and preached. Whether this early form of political theory is called an ideology or not is a matter of semantics. For my part, I will define the term ideology to mean only those all-embracing theories which spring out of this root. The reason why I cannot, without paradox, call this an ideology is that it has no name, no program, and it promises the opposite of what ideologies promise: it is a laissez-faire school of thought, which says that the governments which governs least, governs best. The Enlightenment is an attempt to limit the government to a certain sphere of life, and to leave religion, and all that religion entails, a private matter. It is an attempt to leave alone man’s property rights and his thoughts.

If we had to be technical, we would call this school of thought Liberalism, or classical Liberalism. While technically correct, this word is misleading, because its meaning has been corrupted: the word now means the stark opposite of what it once meant.

I trust the reader will simply make the appropriate adjustment in his reading: the word Liberal here means what today would be called a non-doctrinaire libertarian, a stance that is weirdly mislabeled “Conservative.”

Liberalism is “conservative” only in the sense that it seeks to conserve the classical liberal roots of the revolutionary anti-monarchist and (small-r) republican notions of the Founders in America. In no other country on Earth are these notions conservative. No where else are revolutionaries described as conserving anything.

In other countries than this one (and, in this country, in this century but not in previous) liberalism would be radical, since it would require dismantling decades and centuries of policy and political philosophy, virtues and habits, all sanctified by time. In America before FDR, liberalism was not radical, since all that the American Revolution sought to do was to conserve for the colonists the rights and liberties which the British constitution owed freeborn British subjects, the rights proclaimed during the Glorious Revolution of the generation previous. In Virginia, my home, the House of Burgesses continued in business before, during, and after the Revolution with no change. Local governments and state governments were unaltered by the new federalist arrangement.  The Revolution was not revolutionary.

Before the modern age, the ancient regime in Europe rested on classical and clerical theories of the role of the church and the duties of the prince. Machiavelli, in his much-maligned appeal for practicality and ruthlessness in a leader, can be considered the first liberal. His ideal was to form a republic, not a monarchy, taking ancient Rome or Athens as the model, and to safeguard the rights of man through arming the militia, and through limiting the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial bodies.

Ideology is the opposite of this Liberal school of thought. Since the days of the French Revolution, an ideology is a belief-system that preaches that “The People” as a mass, are a semi-divine being, in which we, as members of the People, mystically participate. The Will of the People is semi-divine, and incapable of error. All legitimacy springs from The People; anything which The People opposes is heretical, an offense against the ideology.

Ideology has several noticeable hallmarks.

Ideology is totalitarian, in the sense that laws and institutions cannot stand as a check against the power of the self-anointed representatives of the Will of the People. The officers of the state have not only the right, but the positive duty, to root out and destroy ideological heretics wheresoever situate, and no limitations on government, no laws, no institutions, must be allowed to stand in the way. The purpose of ideology is to lay the laws flat, so that the Devil can be caught and hanged (or the Capitalists, or the Jews, or the Reds, or Reactionaries, or Wreckers, or Gusano, or Goldstein. Any enemy will do.)   The point here is that ideologues always oppose the separation of powers and the sanctity of individual rights.

Ideology is totalitarian in that sense that no matters are apolitical. The state cares if you are overweight, if you are eating too much red meat, if you are teaching your children the correct ideas, if you are treating your apprentices and field hands correctly, if you are not patronizing the fine arts in sufficient numbers, if you are not speaking the approved and politically correct words and phrases, if you are not thinking the right thoughts.

Now, the paradox here is that ideology–at least some schools of it– may at first seem to be preaching in favor of limited government in the particular areas of its concern. Morality (so runs the famous slogan) cannot be legislated. When you do in the bedroom with your catamite is your concern alone, no one else’s. However, sad experience lends a lie to this limitation: it is not toleration of various victimless crimes and vices ideology seeks. Toleration is insufficient. It is approval. A neutral attitude is not desired by ideologues (even if neutrality in a binary, either-or issue were logically possible, which it is not). The desired attitude is approval for vice and contempt for virtue; approval for perversions, sexual and otherwise, and disapproval for what is normal, proportionate and sane. (“Otherwise” here means that artistic perversion is included in the definition: modern art that is visual gibberish, poem that neither rhyme nor scan nor enlighten nor edify, novels without characters or plot, music without melody or harmony. The aesthetic has infinite forms but only one object: the destruction of a healthy aesthetic norm, the rebellion against standards. Certain ideologies treat a return to older forms of art as a political matter; other variations treat the perversion of art as a political matter. The essential point is that art is a political matter to an ideologue.)

 Ideology is utopian, youth-oriented, and visionary. It is not always brutally violent, but it always excuses brutal violence, even among allegedly pacifistic branches of the movement. The swooning affection of ideologues for the most brutal of thugs, third-world mobsters, and dictators is a source of continual astonishment.

Ideology is not a theory of anything: it is a theory of everything. For example, Marxism, the most famous and coherent of the ideologies, was not an economic theory merely. Economic theories concern the market, and deal with topic like interest rates.  Marxism is a millenarian vision that explains (or pretends it explains) the origins of society, the forces behind historical evolution, the science of man, the emergence of consciousness, the relations between classes and categories of human beings: it maps out the future of mankind with scientific inevitability, predicting the downfall of the capitalistic system of exploitation, a prediction now ninety years overdue and counting. This is a total theory of everything. Everything from proletarian art to the rights of women is covered in Marxism. Other ideologies are as ambitious, even if they tend to have something of a crazy-quilt pattern to them, being made of bits and pieces of other theories and popular prejudices.

Ideology is intellectual, rather than experiential. It is based on theory rather than on experience, reality, or a sober assessment of human nature. The weird sensation that one gets talking to ideologues is that they are men from Mars, who never met a human being, and never read a book about one; that sensation has its roots in the institutional naivety endemic to ideologies.

Ideology is coercive. Ideology is a vision, not an argument: ideologists yearn for force and power. There metaphors and themes come from Darwin, particularly its emphasis on a struggle red in tooth and claw, out from which a stronger breed emerges. Individual suffering counts for nothing, as long as the race or the collective is advantaged. The metaphors and themes also come from from Hegel, with his clash of dialectic opposites, or from  Nietzsche, with his ‘will to power’ as the root of moral (or amoral) behavior.

Ideology is historicist. Unlike Darwin, who spoke only of change through modification, ideologues are intoxicated with the notion that all change is necessarily change for the better. A mystical force, an unnamed goddess of history, ensures that whatever acts, good or bad, is done by the people will create a finer, better, and more just social arrangement. This theme is stronger in some streams of ideology than others, but the anti-conservative impulse, the will to change for the sake of change, underpins most ideological thinking.

Because of this intoxication with the metaphor of evolution, ideology is paradoxically experimental. Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were famous for their insistence that laws and customs be overthrown without any planned legal arrangements to take their place. The Leader interferes with the workings of the market, the family, the law courts, with no clear ideas, no ideas at all, of where they are going or how they are going to get there.

Ideologues, absurdly, think of this lack of practical plans as practical. This willingness to build a complex engine without blueprints is thought of as being pragmatic, even though, in real life, this is the opposite of pragmatism. What is really going on is that the ideologue is a mystic. He does not understand economics or politics, human nature or the nature of peace or war. Instead of understanding, he has a vision, an all-consuming vision.

What is really going on is that the ‘pragmatic’ impatience with theory is insincere rhetoric; their own theories, the ideologue believes with the fervor of a true believer; it is merely the theories of the science of economics, the liberal theories of limited government, that the true believer does not believe. When you tell the true believer that the workingman’s labor is worth the time he puts into making a good, the labor theory of value, that is accepted as merely a practical reality; when you tell the true believer that the workingman’s labor is worth what the law of supply and demand dictate, and that you cannot raise wages without producing unemployment, that is rejected as being ‘too theoretical’ and ‘impractical’ and wags joke that we need not look at the long term cost of meddling in the market, because ‘in the long run, we are all dead’.

Absurdly again, ideologies also embrace the exact opposite of the idea of an experimental alteration of laws on a case-by-case basis. They are fetishists for planning. One of the saddest and most risible aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution is that the words “a planned economy” had been on the lips of socialists for over a generation. The moment the soviet system was open for business, 7:00 Monday morning, so to speak, of Year One of the revolution, all the revolutionaries set down, shouted “hurrah for a planned economy!” and then looked at each other numbly, wondering who had drawn up the plans.

Of course, there were no plans. The revolutionaries did not know enough about economics even to know what would have to go into a plan. When the time came for the People’s Wage and Price Control Board to meet, instead of using the scientifically planned system they had promised the world they would use to distribute the resources of human labor and talent in their so-called planned economy, the board looked to see what was being charged for various goods and services in the West, and ordered their underlings to follow suit. If potatoes were selling for a franc apiece in Paris, the commissar ordered the grocer to charge a ruble a apiece in Moscow. There was no rhyme nor reason to it: it was the opposite of planning. It was merely economic chaos, random actions having no connections to any articulated goal.

Since ideology is experimental, one would think that each experiment with the social machinery would be conducted under carefully controlled circumstances, and the results carefully noted. One would think the nature of mankind, the nature of the free market, the nature of political arrangements, the customs and laws would be studied as carefully as a doctor studies his patient, so that the object of the experiment would be defined. In fact, the opposite is the case. The reason why ideology is experimental is not because the ideologue has discovered a new truth about human nature or human rights. The ideology is experimental for the same reason a man in a burning building will try any door or any window, the same reason a ship will try any port in a storm.

The ideologue rejects the liberal theories on market place forces, and the industrial society that results is intolerable to him. Because he has no rational alternative to a free market system, the ideologue dismisses the rational approach: his motto becomes ‘try anything.’

In a calm debate, no free people would tolerate for a moment allowing their neighbors to trample their rights; how much less would they be willing to allow their neighbors to trample their rights for no reason? For the sake of an aimless experiment?

(“Gee Mr. Wizard, what are we doing today?” “Well, FDR, today we are going off the Gold Standard, just to see what happens! Then we will see what happens if we revoke the licenses of any radio stations broadcasting crimethink!”)

But in an emergency, people are willing to do exactly that. In a crisis, you experiment, because doing something, doing anything, is better than doing nothing.

Inevitably, ideologies are wedded to crisis. Everything is a crisis. No matter what time it is, the time for talk is over. It is no longer responsible or respectable to question whether the emergency has reached crises proportions. No matter what time it is, it is too late to question whether the proposed policy with be counter-productive. No time ask whether drilling holes in the hull as opposed to bailing the boat is a better method of draining water from the boat. The boat is sinking! All hands to the pumps! Stop asking questions! You don’t want us to drown!

Ideologies do not operate at room temperature.

Ideology is both elitist and populist in different aspects. The emotional strength and drive of ideology rests in the discontent found (or created) during the industrial revolution, the same period where religious sentiment, for the first time in European history, had lost its hold on the political imaginations of man.

Unmoored from the Church, men drifted into this substitute Church. Their envy and resentments now at large to strike down the ancient regime, ideology is populists in the sense that old authority figures are held in contempt. In Europe, this is a hatred for kings, aristocrats, popes, priests, and the other power structures of the ancient regime; it includes hatred of bankers and Jews and industrialists and landowners, and, to a lesser degree, hatred of scholar and intellectuals. In America, populism is hatred for bankers and Jews and industrialists, and, to a lesser degree, hatred of scholars and intellectuals. Oddly enough, in America, a hatred for popular entertainers, Hollywood people, is also a populist theme, the ones who popularized this theme of rebellion. Even more oddly, intellectuals and scholars in Europe and America support these attitudes, and support revolutions and regimes that would, if brought to power, send them to the gulag and the firing squad.

It must be remembered that the main appeal of Nazism in Germany was egalitarianism; strength through unity. Class divisions were to be overcome. All Germans, born high or low, were to put aside their social ranks, and work shoulder-to-shoulder to defeat the international Jewish conspiracy of Bankers and Bolsheviks.  He was not just preaching hate: Hitler also preached teamwork, equality, fraternity, and, above all, unity.

Ideology is elitist in the sense that it appeals to the vanity of the intellectual: he tells himself he is smarter and more morally astute than the main body of mankind, even though, honestly, his own real-world accomplishments are usually quite modest. The appeal of ideology, after all, is an intellectual appeal: the beauty of having a simple explanation that totally explains everything in life is the primary aesthetic pleasure of the physical sciences.

Most scientists are aware of the beauty of science; many are ravished by it. It dazzles the mind when one sees the elegance, nay, the beauty, of the reduction of all moving bodies to a few simply-phrased, precise Newtonian laws. Ideologies are envious of this scientific approach, and many of them use the words and metaphors of science to describe themselves. In others, the envy is opposite, and the intellectual embraces a romanticized or mystical hatred of intellectuals.

Ideology is stupid. It is this hunger for elegance, for simplicity, is why ideologies are so risible. The application of this scientific standard of elegance to the complexities of human behavior, morals, manners and political economy of past and present leads the intellectual immediately to absurd and comically bone-headed paradoxes.

The Marxist, for example, reduces the complexity of human intellectual growth to an ad Hominem: everyone’s conclusions are no more than an ‘ideological superstructure’ programmed into helpless humans by material forces of production. Standing near a millwheel convinces a man to believe in Feudalism, and standing near an steam engine or assembly line makes him a Capitalist. So goes the theory. An honest man, if asked what Marx was standing next to, when Marx was programmed to be a Socialist, would wondering if shoving Marx next to a millwheel would make him a medievalist. If Marxism is true and all conclusions are mere by-products of social forces (and therefore not true) and if Marxism is a conclusion, then Marxism is therefore not true. If Marxism is true it is not true.

Ideologies, in other words, are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe in them. The agile intellect and book-learning of the intellectual allow him to explain away (usually by an ad Hominem attack on any critic) the various inconsistencies and shortcomings that inevitably surround such a system.

Because ad Hominem is the main defense, usually the only defense, of an ideology, another hallmark of ideology is terror. The critic is always an enemy, and is always sinister. There is no honest dissent, no polite disagreement between men of good faith. All dissent is disloyalty, and worse, disloyalty during the crisis (whatever the present crisis happens to be) which means that dissent is sabotage. The ideologue lives in a world of pod people, of secret foes with sinister designs. He is always fighting a world-wide conspiracyof some sort, Oil companies, Jewish Banking Interests, World Monetary Powers, the forces of reaction, the Bourgeoisie. This zany conspiracy style of analysis springs directly out of the simplicity of the world view, its attempt to copy scientific elegance, and its innately mystical and religious trappings. You cannot be one of the Sons of Light if there are not Sons of Darkness out to get you.

Ideology is not merely false, but in love with falsehood. The reason for this spring from the nature of the hunger for theoretical simplicity. Because the theories are simple rather than correct, the system has shortfalls. The data do not fit the prediction. The intellectual is the opposite of the scientists. The scientist abandons his theory and seeks a new one in order to save the appearances, in order to fit the facts. The facts are the ultimate arbiter. Nature is mute, but she tells no lies. The intellectual, on the other hand, takes either the writings of his founder as the authority, Mein Kampf or Das Kapital, or the charisma of his Leader. The existence of contrary facts, data that contradict the theory or fall outside the theory, must be denied. To face facts is thoughtcrime.

Keep in mind the central difference between ideology and science. Ideology is concerned with a vision, the ideal of a new heaven and a new earth. Ideology is a theory of everything. Science is particular and specialized. An entomologist discovering a new type of beetle would have no effect, none at all, on an astronomer discovering a new type of star. Ideologies, on the other hand, are global and universal. An intellectual discovering, for example, that pacifism cannot bring about the world socialist revolution, but that nationalism can, would change from an international version of socialism to a nationalistic version, and, on the spot, become a heretic. One error, one thoughtcrime, one heresy in the system, destroys the ideology.

Ideologies are therefore wedded to the practice of rewriting history, ignoring evidence, and altering the meaning of plain words to mean their opposite.

Because ideologies are totalitarian, they are incompatible with checks on power. Ideologies never support private ownership of firearms, because an armed populous is difficult to cow, difficult to reduce to sniveling dependency. This issue in particular looms large in the psychology of the ideologue, because it is the touchstone for all issues fundamental to the rights of man. If you discover what a partisan of one party or another thinks of gun control, you know what he thinks of mankind. You know whether he is a liberal, in love with freedom, or an ideologue, in love with terror. If he wants to take your gun away, you can be pretty sure he wants to take everything away. You might not use your liberties in the right way, or spend your money as the party, the elite, would like it spent. See?

Now, the question naturally arises, how did Liberalism come to mean the exact opposite of the meaning of the word?

The answer is quite simple: ideology is a corruption of liberalism in the same way it is a corruption of science. It is a rotted, bloated, stinking corpse of what was once a beautiful and powerful ideal. The ideologues, seeking a substitute for religion, take as their object of faith several of the valid and useful discoveries of the Enlightenment. They borrow the terminology of the Liberal Enlightenment for the same reason they borrow the terminology of Darwin and the Physical Sciences. These things have a glamour and prestige.

It is not a coincidence that the most ruthless totalitarianisms on Earth named themselves “People’s Republics.” This was merely to barrow the prestige the Enlightenment had earned for republicanism and for equality. Show trials and show ballots are put on display for  the same reason.

Liberalism gets its strongest intellectual support from the findings of economics. When Adam Smith discovered, and Ricardo clarified, the principle of comparative advantage, for the first time in political theory, the idea of a natural harmony of interests, of a rational and non-destructive avenue for selfishness and greed, emerged.

The implications of this idea are tremendous. Before the Enlightenment, writers operated from the assumption that Man exist in a natural and eternal and irreconcilable conflict of interests. The only way for irreconcilable enemies to coexist in peace was for a divinely-anointed sovereign to keep them all in awe by means of the power of the sword, or for some equally supernatural body, a philosopher-king or the spirit of the church to teach the mutual enemies self-abnegation. In the first case, the irreconcilable enmity is suspended while the crown’s power commands peace; in the second case, people voluntarily act against their own best interests, and serve the society for the sake of the common good, not for the sake of their own good.  

Modern readers might scoff at these ancient concepts, but experience more often confirms these concepts than denies them. 

When a tyrant topples in the Middle East, the tribes whom the tyrant held at bay immediately draw daggers and have at each other, to settle ancient feuds. The sword of the sovereign did indeed impose peace by imposing terror.

In a society organized by hierarchy, where each man is born to his place, high or low, and cannot move from it, those who serve act against their own best interest by serving well. Their hard work is not rewarded by gaining rank. In such societies, the Promotion Board never meets. Maybe a lucky yeoman will be knighted on the battlefield, but if you do not speak the French they speak in the capital, forget it. Rewarding a Saxon dog for his efficiency and loyalty is out of the question: what if the other Saxons saw him dressed up in clothing fit for his betters, and grew discontent? In such a society, whether resting on the backs of serfs or on the backs of slaves, the philosopher-king and the church must teach each man to be content with his lot, humble or high. Morality consists of teaching the princes and nobles to govern their base appetites, so as not to oppress the people, to be moderate and gentle masters. This is the flip side of the same coin; it is not in the prince’s self-interest to check his base instincts, because you don’t vote for princes. He does not get a pay cut if he misbehaves. He cannot get impeached. He cannot be fired.

So sad experience rendered the theory of harmony of interests counter-intuitive. Economics, as a science, is the most maligned and misunderstood. It is as counter-intuitive as modern physics, but since it also speaks directly to the best and worst passions of man, an objective hearing is rare. Envy is one of the ugliest passions festering the human heart, once of the easiest to enflame: and all one need do to enflame it is to tell a discontented workingman that the entrepreneur that gave him his job did not come by his fortune honestly.

Guilt is also an easy passion to enflame, and all one need do to enflame that is tell the rich man’s son his father did not come by his fortune honestly.  Righteous indignation over the injustices of the world is the easiest of all to inflame because honest men already are indignant with injustice.

All these passions militate against the cool and collected reflection on the conclusions of the dismal science of economics. Nonetheless, despite all these obstacles, the doctrine of a harmony of interests is a true one: not all human interactions are irreconcilable enmity; not all games are zero-sum. 

The contrast between the ancient regime and the liberal society would be hard to overstate.  For the first time in human history, in one limited area of human life, natural harmonies of interest were recognized and allowed. Now, allowing men to be selfish is not without dangers, and it runs against the entire history of moral philosophy: but the success of the industrial revolution is without precedent. There closest thing in history to be found was the agrarian revolution, when hunter gatherers changed from a nomadic hand-to-mouth existence to a civilized and calendar-based existence, tied to the land.

The genius of the Founders of the American Republic follows this same model, and has the same intellectual roots.

In a government of separation of powers, checks and balances, it is not in the self-interest of any one officer of the state to abuse or overstep his annotated powers, because the other branches, equally jealous of their own prerogatives, will step in to check him, or the voters through the ballot box, or, if all else fails, the militia through force of arms. In short, Locke and the Founders used the principle of self-interest rightly understood as the core of their understanding of how government must work if it is to work.

The French Revolution, dating from the same period, was a spectacular failure for the same reason the American was a spectacular success. The French Revolutionaries were ideologues and corrupted the idea. Their aims were radical and totalitarian. All of the evils of the Twentieth Century are present in miniature or are foreshadowed in the French Revolution, from the use of terror, to delators and secret police, to the idolatrous grant of divine honors to the Will of The People and The State, to the revolutionary impatience with settled forms of constitution, to bitter hatred of religion.

John Adams famous warned the revolutionaries of France to enact a bicameral legislature, but the French theory was too high flown for mere Yankee practicality. The whole body of the General Assembly would handle everything. The Committee of Public Safety would handle everything. The Emperor would handle everything.  

What the American rebels wanted was settled law. Their charters and grants, some of them hundreds of years old, were being trampled, not by the constitution of England, but by the innovations of the King acting beyond His Majesty’s constitutional authority. Had the parliament checked His Majesty, the American rebellion might never have happened. The Americans wanted objective, settled, fixed, reliable law and order. In American there was no titled nobility, except perhaps for Lord Baltimore, and no clerical rights and abuses, except perhaps in Massachusetts. There was no deeply-rooted Aristocracy to uproot, no ancient Church with ancient possessions and rights. To build a new house on virgin ground is not the same task as tearing up the foundations of an old house hauling the rotten stone away, and digging new ones. The French Revolutionaries saw their mission as destroying the old regime to found the new.

The reason is this: the classical liberals believe in law, fixed law, and in natural rights. They view mankind as naturally free, innately born equal. The ideologies believe in force and power. They view mankind as naturally childlike, and needing a strong Leader, coming from an innate Elite of our moral superiors. They believe in a Living Constitution and an ever-evolving every changing swamp of meaningless regulations.   

After the Second World War, after the abomination of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations, classical liberalism died in America. Socialism, under a new name, or given no name at all, was adopted as the new national philosophy. Both parties adopted it to some degree, or, in the case of the Republican Party adopted it in fact even though they continue, at least to a degree, to speak like classical liberals in theory, even thought they vote like ideologues in every practical matter.

For all the reasons given above, the legal system in America is no longer liberal, no longer a guarantor of freedom, no longer based on Enlightenment principles of the natural Rights of Man. It is ideological, and therefore experimental, mystical, irrational, intrusive.

So. Here we come to the crux of the matter. Our current legal system is built on human opinion and changes with the wind.

The comment is correct in part and incorrect in part. The Anglo-American notion of Common Law is not meant to change with the political wind. Indeed, the second strongest guarantor of our liberties is the edifice of  judicial opinion which abides by the established precedent of our ancestors against the winds and shocks of current political opinion. (The first guarantor, of course, is the right to bear arms.)

But keep in mind the conservative, Whig, traditional, Enlightenment and rationalistic attitude toward law. It can only exist in a culture that respects law and founds its law on eternal and immutable truths: the natural rights of man discovered, not invented, by natural reason.

The other view of law is the ideologue  view. Their view of law is evolutionary, encroaching, pliant, arbitrary. A ideologue would not even bother to laugh if you told him the Rights of Man are self-evident and eternal truths: he would stare at you like a cow in the headlights, stunned and stupid, because the word “truth” has no corresponding concept in his mind.

Under the influence of the Progressive movement in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, the role of judges devolved rapidly from upholders of precedent to extra-legislative ad hoc dictators– I mean a “dictator” in the original Roman sense of the term, an emergency leader granted temporary but extraordinary powers.

No English nor American judge of one hundred years ago could have even understood the legal theory on which, for example, bussing black schoolchildren to white schools was based. Judges simply did not have the power to invent new rights and write new laws out of their own imaginations, no matter what the emergency. Even sovereign monarchs of Christian lands, for hundreds of years, in theory were upholders of the law, supreme executives not inventors of the law.  

The overlawyering of lawyers in America today is entirely a product of modern ideology. It is the ideologues, not the classical liberals, who lust, as men in heat lust for the flesh of women, to regulate and supervise every tiniest aspect of life; it is they who thrive, as vermin thrive in the dark, on the politics of grievance, the economics theory that to envy another gives you the right to take his goods. It is they who hunger, as barbarians hunger to sack the splendid cities of ancient civilization they cannot emulate, to tear down family, community, church, and local authority, and award all power to a charismatic Leader, and emergency dictator with the power to make and unmake laws as he sees fit.

An objective and unchanging law is the very hallmark of civilization. Laws that change and fade and spring into being from nothing is the hallmark and herald of barbarism.

We are correct to hate the profession of ideological lawyers, judges, and to hate and fear the awards of ideological juries.   Nonobjective law is worse than an honest barbarism, because it rests on “white blackmail.” In order to work, the victimizers have to have no respect for law, and the victims have to have respect for law, so that when the victimizers dismantle the machinery of the law in order to carry out their legalized looting and power-grabbing, the victims are willing to abide by the decisions of a corrupt system as if it were a legitimate and objective system. The victims have to be willing to defer to a kangaroo court as if it were a real court.

A “real court” is one who applies the same law to all comers, with a justice who is blind to faction, to party, to special interests. A real court is one where all men are created equal, and the special members of grievance groups do not have special laws and set-asides to grant them privileges denied to the rest of us.

So it is not lawyers who are hateful. In a society that respects the law, they do a useful and socially beneficial service. They help you guard your rights. In a society corrupted by the mental disease I here called “ideology”, they turn into a socially detriment, and accelerate the corruption of the law from an objective standard to a meaningless exercise of coercion.

Conclusion:

There are three touchstones that define the difference between a classical liberal and the corruption of liberalism I here call Ideology:

The first is the sanctity of private property. Socialists are economic retards. They do not understand the science of economics, they don’t grasp the rudiments, and they don’t speak the language. They say things like “the free market leads INEVITABLY to a monopoly” but then they don’t understand what a monopoly price is. They think minimum wage laws don’t create unemployment. They think fiat currency is money. They think businessmen create recessions and depressions, not state interference in the credit cycle. And so on. When it comes to economics, for them, the earth is flat.

The second is the Orwellian corruption of the language. Anyone who, in an organized way, falsifies his language to make it an instrument of deception and mind-control rather than an instrument of communication is a totalitarian in essence, even if he calls himself a socialist or a fascist or a Third Way or something else. For a classical liberal, thought is a private matter. For an ideologist, political ideas are religious dogma and a public matter.

The reason why Capitalists use the word “capitalism” to describe the free market system is the same reason why liberals allow their archenemies to call themselves liberals. We are not word-fetishists. We don’t think it matters if you call your cat a dog: it still will not fetch. The ideology is the opposite. To him, words are hoodoo dolls. If you use the phrase “African American” as opposed to the word “Negro”, you can pretend you are not thinking and feeling thoughts and emotions you might otherwise.  You can pretend that discord between the races is caused solely by factors within the control of the state and polity, and that sufficient power awarded to your party would solve all discord. Or whatever the fashionable word-game is for that season, whatever the agreed-upon pretense might be, you can play.

All that happens when you word-magicians use words to mean the opposite of what you really mean, is that the old meanings mutate to the new meanings. Everyone now uses the word “Capitalism” as a badge of honor, as a synonym for freedom. The word “Liberal” now means “Welfare-state crypto-totalitarian.”

The third and the only really important one is the disarmament of the citizen: anyone who seeks to disarm freeborn men is a totalitarian in essence.

These three are the keys. Everything else is non-essential: merely a matter of time and fashion, priority or rhetoric.

Oh, wait a minute:

This is from this site. http://www.enlighted.com/pages/fuzzy.shtml#whitepimp

We are still wearing flashlights in our hair.But thank goodness we have evolved to a reasonable fashion style this season!

If you cannot make out the fine print: Madame Carven thinks Miss 2000 will hark back to romantic drapery. Concession to the age might be a triangular hat to cover a head aerial and full dress panels convertible to electric wings.

 Forget the darn flying car. Where are my convertible electric wings?

I would agree with the writer, and argue that violent dispossession of the Ring by Isildur does not act as abandonment in any sense of the word by Sauron. Sauron did not relinquish the Ring, it was cut from his finger.

However, there is one point the writer here may have overlooked. As best we mortals can tell, the great and fell spirit of Sauron died, or, at least, was reduced to a shadow, when he fell before Elendil and Gil-Galad. If being reduced to a shadow is considered, in the eyes of the law, to be the same as death (a point by no means clear in Anglo-American common law) then the passage of property to Sauron’s heirs obtains. If Sauron died intestate (and there is no evidence in the text that the Dark Lord wrote a will) and the Ring should pass to his natural heirs as defined by the controlling statute, or defined by common law.

It is not clear from the text who the Dark Lord’s next relative was. He had no wife, no children, and, aside from Eru, the One, no father. As best we can tell, Maiar neither marry nor are given in marriage. The five Istari were the only Maiar walking Middle Earth in the Third Age: we must assume they were cousins or second cousins or where clearly more closely related as heirs than members of mortal non-Maiar intelligent species. As the chief of the Istari, Saruman of the Many Colors, also called Curunir, probably has the best claim. The Ring was meant to be his: I am sure he would use it wisely.

Of course, in real life, the courts defer to political considerations, such as the outcome of battles. In the absence of a treaty, property disputes between sovereigns are settled by what is delicately called “the last argument of kings.” Oratio Ultima Regem.

Analyzing  the universe into simple binary opposites, while necessary, has limited value.

FOUR

Gosseyn watched from a balcony as Mahren, dressed in Gosseyn’s clothing and wearing a convincing flesh-mask, departed the police station. Gosseyn, dressed in Nireni fashion, departed a few minutes later, going the other direction.

The papers he had been given by Commissar Veeds included a badge: with this he was able to hire a robotic cab.

A half an hour ride found him two hundred miles south of the city, in a metropolis that, on a smaller would, would have been a major city, but, here, was merely a suburb. The lawns and campuses of the Semantics Institute shined with the blue vegetation typical of Nirene, but in certain flowerpots were the roses and lilies of Earth. The architecture was airy and light, all soaring arches and weightlessly high roofs, in sharp contrast to the heavy and blocky Nireni buildings.

One building made of blue-gray metal, in a dell surrounded by trees and flowering bushes, was the medical center. He showed his pass to the clerk at the wicket.

The clerk was a Venusian Null-A. The rapid glance at Gosseyn’s face, the suppressed smile, the small nod, told him his disguise had been penetrated.  

The clerk said, “You cannot travel the grounds without an escort, who, in this case, is me. Now I have one errand to run first, to check the power switches in the dynamo room, so you’ll have to come with me while I do that, and then we can see the patient you requested.”

The dynamo room had one wall filled with power sockets of the atomic type, as well as step-down converters for changing the energy to electromagnetic, nucleonic, or gravitic of various types and wavelengths. During the clerk’s system check, energies of various types pulsed through the rooms, and Gosseyn memorized dozens of sockets of various voltages and roentgens.

Gosseyn was impressed. The Clerk, whose name was Daley, had recognized not merely that the imposter was a Null-A Venusian, but which one he was, and what needed to be done to provide him with a well-stocked armory.   

Gosseyn said, “As a security precaution, I assume you have all visitors pass a lie-detector test?”

Daley shot him a quizzical look, but, for the benefit of any unseen eyes watching them, he said, “Of course.”

They stepped into one of the unoccupied rooms. The medical appliances were, for the most part, hidden: a complex structure of electron tubes and neural psychology machines were built into the bed and walls. Otherwise, it looked like a well-appointed hotel room. A broad window (and this was an Earth window, made of glass) showed the lawns and grounds outside.

Gosseyn merely put his hand on the pillow. His extra brain sensed the electron flows from the lie detector were hidden under that spot. “Analyze the insanity afflicting me.”

The lie detector spoke: “It is a possessive jealous obsession, combined with incest-guilt, of the typical Violent Man syndrome. The false image of the object of your romantic obsession has been mutated by repeated subconscious neurotic redactions of your memory: it is tied to deep impulses of you most fundamental identity-concepts: a leader of men, a defender of the One True Faith.”

Gosseyn said, “But—I have no such concepts.”

“The concepts did not arise in your mind. Your mind merely interpreted them according to its own structure.”

“How is that possible?”

“The question is beyond the capacity of this unit to answer.”

Daley said, “I can answer. Lie on the bed; I will take an energy-photograph of your brain.”

Gosseyn lay. Daley asked him to induce a semi-hypnotic state. Gosseyn did not need relaxing drugs to accomplish this, merely a silent effort of will sufficed. A special camera arrangement lowered itself from the ceiling on a telescoping arm.

A moment later, Daley pulled a treated sheet from the equipment in the ceiling, put it under a reader, and studied it.

Gosseyn felt a moment of grim satisfaction when Daley confirmed his suspicions. Gosseyn was not insane. Daley said, “The memory records in your brain are a sympathetic resonance phenomenon. The record in your mind was created in another mind. Imagine a brain in a completely in a passive state, so that another brain of the exact same electro-molecular composition could transmit thoughts to you below the level of your conscious awareness.”

Daley did not need to say it, for they both knew Gosseyn’s secondary brain was kept in an artificially passive state, for just the purpose of picking up energy signals from the surrounding universe.

Daley said cautiously: “ I see that you enjoy an exceptional level of Null-A training.”

Gosseyn understood. Daley meant that his well-trained primary brain was able to cleanse itself of the external impulses at a preverbal level, automatically. Gosseyn’s second cortex, which was not used for abstract thought, not a seat of awareness, could have no such training, no immunity.

Gosseyn spoke without rising from the bed. “Is it possible to suffer pain without damage?”

“If the pain signals were false, originating in another nervous system, and transmitted to yours.”

Gosseyn had come to the same conclusion. His system of immortality depended on the law of nature that created a subatomic confusion, an uncertainty of location, between two identical brains. But—how could the signal reach from the Shadow Galaxy to this one? Had Gosseyn Three returned in secret? And when did Gosseyn Three go insane? To the best of his knowledge, there were no other cellular-duplicates of the Gosseyn/Lavoisseur body line still alive, anywhere.

Awake bodies, that is. Was it possible that the accident which woke his “twin” Gosseyn Three prematurely had been repeated? The body would be young: the growth tanks had not had time to mature any clones beyond the biological equivalent of seventeen. Normally Gosseyn and his twin Gosseyn Three would have been immediately aware of the thoughts of another duplicate: unless the thought-signals were particularly weak.

Gosseyn had to make his primary brain aware of the subconscious whisper his super-sensitive secondary brain was picking up. There was a chance that it would drive him insane. Gosseyn smiled, though. Here he was in one of the most advanced psychiatric facilities outside Venus; where better for a man to go mad?

Relaxation was the key.  His primary brain had to be put into a passive mode.

Gosseyn said, “I’ve read that, in the old days, on Earth, there were sensory depravation tanks that cut off all sensation from the outside world.”

Daley said, “We can accomplish that merely by interrupting the neural flow along your sensory nerves. It is painless. A lie detector can continue to monitor your brain for disturbances, in case the lack of sensation begins to damage you.”

“Please make periodic energy photographs of my brain structure while I do this: I am interesting to see what forces interact with my nervous system during this condition. Perhaps five minutes at first, then a longer period if the first test produces no result?”

Daley set the controls.

He was floating in a silent darkness. Immediately came a sense of burning pain. His flesh was being scalded, his nerves burnt inch by inch.

Gosseyn blinked. He was upright, on his feet, standing in the bright sunlight. He caught the railing he found underneath his fingers. There were planters to his left and right, and blue metal wall behind, some chairs and tables, but no people. Underfoot was a dizzying drop to the street, half a mile below.

By his previously-established reflex, the moment pain touched his nerves, he had automatically shifted himself across the city and found himself on the balcony of the building across from Crang’s apartment.

His limbs were shaking. Rage. There was rage inside his body. Not his own. Some other man’s rage was making Gosseyn’s face red with wrath, eyes narrow and teeth clenched so hard that they chattered. The untrained, raw impulses of another man were making his skin crawl with hate, making his trembling fists curl into fists, eager for bones to break beneath them.

He sank into one of the chairs. Clutching his head.

What had that been?

There was something distinctly… corrosive…about the sensation. Like finding another man has been wearing your clothes, leaving his things in your pockets, his smell on your shirt.  

He paused to clear his mind. Then Gosseyn used his double brain to “memorize” his own body, and take a crude mental picture of it. He could feel the energy imbalance in his nervous system, connecting him to distant locations in time-space. He could sense which neural paths led to the trigger-concepts in his brain associated with each location. The most recent ones were here, this balcony; Veeds’ pistol; the dynamo room at the Nirene General Semantics Institute. His modest brownstone in the City of the Machine back on Earth, his tree apartment on Venus, tens of thousands of light-years away, existed as trace patterns in his brain, but were too far away, without use of another special technique, to reach.

There was nothing else.

Nothing else he could detect. Equipment at the Nirene Institute would be able to do more delicate analysis than any he could perform on himself.

He similarized himself back into the dynamo room. It took him a moment, at a run, to cross the lawn to the main building. Daley was in the room where he’d been standing a moment before.

At Daley’s feet was a blackened corpse, naked.

“Mr. Gosseyn,” said Daley in surprise. The young man closed his eyes and drew a slow breath. The cortical-thalamic pause. He opened them again. His voice was calm: “You are dead.”

From the throbbing sensations passing through him, Gosseyn did not have to kneel and turn the body over to confirm the identity. He could feel the partial attunement still active, though fading, from a life-rhythm perfectly matched with his own.

He turned the body over nonetheless. This murder had been committed in a more professional fashion, a wound through the chest, not the slow torture of Crang’s death. The face was intact.

His face.