Tribes, by Robert Gore
The US legal regime enacted since the 1960s with either a primary or secondary goal of helping blacks belongs in the dustbin of failed collectivist schemes. By 1970, most, if not all, de jure discrimination based on race had been stricken from the books. That, of course, could not eliminate prejudice in the hearts and minds of some whites towards blacks, or some blacks towards whites. That will always be beyond the reach of the law, although the law can attempt to stifle their expression. In a legal system based on individual rights, equality before the law is as far as the system can go.
Unfortunately, the individual rights basis of US law has been eroding since the ink dried on the Constitution, replaced by the only alternative: collectivism. By the 1960s, the legal right of the unproductive to exact goods and services from the productive was well enshrined. However, the war on poverty has actually been a war on the impoverished, including a substantial portion of the black population. Handing people the coerced fruits of other people’s labor makes the recipients parties to theft, and it’s all downhill from there. Incentives for self-improvement are destroyed, dependency takes hold, self-respect vanishes, and social pathologies effloresce.
This is an excerpt. For the full article, please click the above link.
Unfortunately, the individual rights basis of US law has been eroding since the ink dried on the Constitution, replaced by the only alternative: collectivism. By the 1960s, the legal right of the unproductive to exact goods and services from the productive was well enshrined. However, the war on poverty has actually been a war on the impoverished, including a substantial portion of the black population. Handing people the coerced fruits of other people’s labor makes the recipients parties to theft, and it’s all downhill from there. Incentives for self-improvement are destroyed, dependency takes hold, self-respect vanishes, and social pathologies effloresce.
This is an excerpt. For the full article, please click the above link.
Natural selection has programmed lifeforms towards both endpoints of the continuum, shifting between them as survival demands. Our ancient wisdom has identified the "golden mean", the straight road, the happy medium, the golden rule, Galt's Oath, that all are created equal. For individual rights to be the prime directive of social structure, a fusion of the two ends of the continuum can be achieved for entirely selfish reasons through mutual respect and voluntary avoidance of aggression and fraud. Such self-control requires a leap of evolution in the cognitive and emotive realms.
While Rand has provided the blueprint, it is viscerally rejected by the dominant ideas in the culture. Many people just haven't reached that stage of enlightenment; they are easily led through being fed envy to accept policies claiming to establish "social justice" through redistribution of wealth and energy. They come to endorse altruism as a twisted form of benevolence, not realizing it is just another form of enslavement of some for the sake of others.
Write on, dear Robert. Your voice of reason is an antidote. Someday we will reach a critical mass to build a rational civilization. And neither shall they make war anymore.
So be it. Great comment. +1
Hope all is well with you. :)
Regards,
O.A.
[Collectivist systems don’t work because they are incompatible with human nature and the requirements of survival. Tribes do not think, reason, or make choices, individuals do. A tribe’s leader or leaders may decide what they believe the tribe should do, but the tribe’s individuals decide whether to comply, often “influenced” by the leaders’ abilities to threaten and coerce. Indeed, the capacity to wage violence is the implicit foundation for tribes’ and their leaderships’ power] There is not a more true statement.
As an aside, has anyone ever noticed how rap and hip-hop "music" resembles primitive tribal chants?
I think its just a ruse to get people dependent on the government and live quietly like sheep.
"One of today’s more inane intellectual exercises involves claiming credit for actions of forebears who share membership in the same tribe but who lived long before one was born, or apportioning blame to people in other tribes based on the reprehensible actions of that tribe’s long-dead forebears.... Just this week the UN called on the US to pay reparations to descendants of slaves. The historical record is replete with injustice, so potential tribal claims and counterclaims are virtually infinite."
Yes, the illogic is astounding. The logical conclusion of any such tribal nonsense is preposterous. Should the descendants of slaves pay some of the reparations back to the descendants of the dead white men that fought and died in the civil war? Even if one bought into this collectivist claptrap the proposed solution is unworkable and impossible to implement with any sense of equity. The pitfalls are endless, but it should never go any further than it has since at its foundation is the rot of tribalism and a ridiculous notion that somehow one is responsible for the actions of others, or that one is owed something for a perceived wrong and that someone else ought to pay, even if that someone is not culpable.
"Tribalism (which is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality) is a dominant element in Europe, as a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result of Europe’s long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars. As an example, observe the Balkan nations, which are perennially bent upon exterminating one another over minuscule differences of tradition or language. Tribalism had no place in the United States—until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed." Rand, PWNI, pg.42
We are adrift in a sea of short sighted shallow thinkers.
Respectfully,
O.A.
The battle (in this country) for freedom has been lost. There are so many corrupt bureaucrats, agencies and willing participants with a corrupt court system to demand compliance any hope of convincing the masses that liberty is a better choice is non-existent. I still search for Galt's Gulch, someplace where an individual can live unobserved by the moochers.
The identity-group tribes you're talking about belonged in the dustbin of history long ago. I'm always amazed at how much progress humankind has made, so it really stands out when we cling to racial identity groups.