20240330 -Facing the beast
MAIN IDEA:
This is the story of awakening, but it is not of the leftist
type but rather of the awakening from leftism to reality. The author is a
well-known leftist personality, a top-level political consultant to Clinton and
Gore, and a supporter of all left causes, including Islamic extremists, producing
such pearls as the claims that Islamists’ beheading of journalists was a fake
staged by the US government. The awakening started on a personal level after
various threats led to hiring an Army veteran for security protection that
ended in marriage. The direct encounter with a representative of middle-class
working America and an outsider to liberal America caused the author to
discover the beauty of this middle-class America. In addition to this, COVID,
with its lockdowns, suppression of information flows, forced vaccinations, and other
such beauties, turned the author into a “right-wing conspiracy theorist” who
doubts the efficacy of COVID vaccination, supports the Second Amendment and
freedom of speech even for those that leftists hate. It even led to a formal
apology to conservatives.
MY TAKE ON IT:
It is quite an interesting case of recovering from the sickness of leftist totalitarianism as a result of traveling outside of the closed quarters of leftists’ intellectual circle. It also results from the work of the instinct of self-preservation when the forced COVID vaccination with the cover-up of adverse effects scared the author to her core.
This case could serve as a template of how to bring extreme leftists to reality so they would understand that the world created by Western civilization, especially its American alteration, is the one and only world where they could have a decent chance for a good life. The world of victorious leftist totalitarianism historically represented by the Soviet Union or Maoist China guarantees their pain and suffering in some GULAG or just a bullet to the back of their heads. The world of victorious Islam, historically represented by Iran’s ayatollahs, ISIS, or Hamas, would bring them just a bit of diversity in the form of beheadings rather than just plain shooting. So, the template would be simple:
- Scare them to death by massively popularizing leftist views of Israeli women who got into the hands of Hamas and what happened to them.
- Force them to encounter real life by eliminating all government support for pseudo-education and all NGOs. By the way, if this is combined with limiting all charitable exemptions from taxes to not more than double the average income, it will also eliminate the USA’s debt in very short order.
20240323 Junger, Sebastian-Tribe
MAIN IDEA:
This book is about the human need to belong to some group of humans – a tribe. The author defines it this way:” Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word “tribe” is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.” The author describes how the evolutionary developed norms of the human tribe proved to be a much better environment for human thriving than norms developed by militaristic/agricultural civilization. The author uses the historical example of interaction between societies representing these two norms: American Indian tribes and American European Settlers. This example clearly demonstrates the superiority of the norms of American Indian tribes by retelling stories of individuals who moved between these societies. On many occasions when settlers, either children or adults, were captured by Indians and accepted into a tribe, there were very few cases when these individuals wanted to return back to European society. The tribal way of life was clearly preferable. After that, the author discusses why this is the case and concludes that humans feel uncomfortable or, as he put it in a postscript: “Just dead inside” without belonging to a tribe and correspondingly sharing resources with other members of the tribe.
MY TAKE ON IT:
I think that the description of human nature provided in
this book is correct – humans do need to belong to a tribe and are miserable
when they are on their own in life. However, a lot of human life is also
defined by attitude toward other tribes, which evolutionarily developed to be
hostile by default because another tribe nearby was always a competitor for
limited resources. So, humans need both other members of their own tribe to
give life for and people who belong to other tribes to fight and kill. Without
friends and enemies, humans feel a void inside. The sad history of the clash of
Indian tribes and European tribes is a very good illustration.
Indian tribes were better adjusted to human nature in an
environment of relative abundance of natural resources when the survival of
individuals and groups was mainly dependent on effective interaction with the
environment. The European tribes were better adjusted to military competition
between groups when survival was obtained at the expense of the misery of
individual lives. As a result, the European tribes nearly completely eliminated
Indians, as it happened many times before when militaristic/agrarian societies
eliminated hunter/gatherers despite providing an inferior quality of life for
individuals.
On the bright side, humanity is now moving to form a global
tribe when all humans are included, and a superabundance of resources makes
military competition meaningless. It is not an easy process, which will take
decades or maybe even a century or two because one of the legacies of human
militaristic/agricultural societies is the psychological need to suppress
others and control them. Whether this need is expressed via the expansion of
the bureaucratic machinery of the big and deep state, via the religious
extremism of Islamists, or through activities of white or black supremacists,
it will have to be eliminated. Only after eliminating individuals who act
according to these views will humanity be able to move to a better place when
psychological comfort provided by tribes of hunter/gatherers will be combined
with the material comforts of technological civilization. Such elimination
could be psychological when individuals decide that they will be better off
without the ability to control others in exchange for the freedom of not being
controlled by others. However, for some, it would not be possible, so for these
cases, military and/or law enforcement options will become necessary. In either
case, it will take lots of time and struggle to get to this better place from
where we are now in human development.
20240316 – American Homicide
MAIN IDEA:
Here is the author’s definition of the book:” This book presents a working hypothesis about why adult homicide rates in the United States are so high. The hypothesis is based on tens of thousands of murder cases from the United States and Europe and includes complete or near-complete data from scores of counties across the United States.”
The book reviews the history of homicide not just in the USA but also in European countries from which Americans came. After reviewing this history, it concludes that while deterrence works, the rate of homicide depends on more important factors:” That rate is also dependent upon forces that are hard to engineer: political stability, the legitimacy of the government, the degree of unity and fellow feeling in the nation, and men’s prospects for achieving a satisfactory place in society.”
Here is a very clear graphic representation supporting the author’s hypothesis:
MY TAKE ON IT:
I completely agree with the author that the rate of homicide could not be treated as some kind of isolated problem, somehow dependent on such factors as the availability of guns or drugs or education. Even the level of deterrence that does minimize homicide rate by removing individuals that commit it after the first offense could not remove it completely. This book’s historical statistical data convincingly supports the author’s hypothesis. So, I would suggest that people who really want to live without homicide should direct their efforts to support political stability and the feeling of belonging to a unified society. It is also necessary to support the belief that it is not just possible but realistic to achieve satisfactory conditions in one’s life. If one adds to it a decent system of early warning and psychiatric care for a small number of mentally disturbed individuals, the rate of homicide could be brought to very close to zero. Correspondingly, all efforts directed at increasing divisions in society, either in the form of antiwhite or antiblack racism or in the form of equalization of results or the form of antisemitism, even if the intention is just to obtain political power, will always lead to the increase in homicide as a side effect of these efforts. Similarly, increased political and economic corruption, which is an inevitable consequence of the growth of a government, would also lead to an increase in homicide, even if the objective is just to steal public money and get control over the lives of other people. One also needs to understand that the idea of law and order seemingly provided by totalitarian societies is just plain wrong because in such societies, crimes such as murders, robberies, and kidnappings are committed by government bureaucrats on the massive scale and just not considered crimes.
20240309 – Determined
MAIN IDEA:
The main point of this book is that free will does not exist and that everything humans do is predefined by their biological, cultural, and evolutionary history, which happens within time frames ranging from milliseconds to millions of years. The author presents four possible positions regarding the issue of free will, clearly stating that he supports the first one and then proceeds to discuss why the other three are incorrect. Here are the choices:
- The world is deterministic and there’s no free will.
- The world is deterministic and there is free will.
- The world is not deterministic; there’s no free will.
- The world is not deterministic; there’s free will.
The author is a very good scientist and, therefore, clearly defines free will and a deterministic world.
About free will: “Here’s the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man’s brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, smells, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, nor whether he had experienced a life-changing event in recent months or years. And show me that this neuron’s supposedly freely willed functioning wasn’t affected by the man’s genes, or by the lifelong changes in regulation of those genes caused by experiences during his childhood. Nor by levels of hormones he was exposed to as a fetus, when that brain was being constructed. Nor by the centuries of history and ecology that shaped the invention of the culture in which he was raised. Show me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense.”
About the deterministic world: If you had a superhuman who knew the location of every particle in the universe at this moment, they’d be able to accurately predict every moment in the future. Moreover, if this superhuman (eventually termed “Laplace’s demon”) could re-create the exact location of every particle at any point in the past, it would lead to a present identical to our current one. The past and future of the universe are already determined… Contemporary views of determinism have to incorporate the fact that certain types of predictability turn out to be impossible and certain aspects of the universe are actually nondeterministic. Moreover, contemporary models of determinism must also accommodate the role played by meta-level consciousness.
Finally, the author defines the issue’s importance by using the analogy of the graduate ceremony in an elite college, where some people are graduates, and others of the same age are garbage collectors: “Because we all know that the graduate and the garbage collector would switch places. And because, nevertheless, we rarely reflect on that sort of fact; we congratulate the graduate on all she’s accomplished and move out of the way of the garbage guy without glancing at him.
MY TAKE ON IT:
The author’s view of free will is just plain materialism. If no neuron activates spontaneously without any signals from other neurons or its previous internal condition, then there is no free will. This means that if there is no material cause for such activation, and we can identify some non-material(spiritual) cause, then there is free will. I think it is just incorrect to switch the issue from human free will and, consequently, human responsibility for actions to biological, cultural, and social factors that influence these actions. I also think it is incorrect to discount the non-deterministic character of physical reality proved by quantum mechanics, even if it applies at the micro level of reality. So, in my opinion, the world is non-deterministic, and even if human actions are influenced by a multitude of factors, these actions still represent choices made by humans and, therefore, are subject to their responsibility for these actions. The proof of the validity is the simple fact that human actions are easily changed by the external circumstances that provide reward or punishment for such actions, making any such actions only partially predictable. Actually, the predictability of human actions is directly correlated with levels of rewards and punishments. Light rewards or punishments make actions much less probable than heavy rewards or punishments.
For example, a university professor promoting antisemitism on campus, knowing that he will be formally slightly reprimanded and informally admired for his heroic stand against all-powerful Jews, will keep doing it again and again. However, he would find some other cause to promote if the punishment would be immediate dismissal and the impossibility of having a job in the educational system. The professor would still have free will to promote antisemitism, but there would be no openly antisemitic professors, only antisemitic former professors. The implementation of such a measure would change nothing in the biological and cultural history of antisemitic professors, so if there is no free will, sociological departments would be empty within a week. Since I believe in free will, I do not doubt that they continue to function as always, and only a few hard-core antisemites, if any, resign. Surely, they will still remain antisemitic, but quietly.
20240302 – Crowds and Power
MAIN IDEA:
This book goes all the way back to 1960 and explores the dynamic relationship between different types of crowds and power. The author differentiates types of crowds into crowds and packs and provides a detailed analysis of each type. Similarly, he analyses the process of applying power and the psychology of the people who do it and to whom it is done. Finally, a lot of attention and space is allocated to the components of power and processes relevant to its use.
MY TAKE ON IT:
In my view, it is way too detailed and a minuscule analysis of relatively simple things. Obviously, the individuals in the crowd act and behave differently than they do by themselves, but they remain individuals all the same. So, the question is how to train individuals to maintain psychological independence and avoid becoming an insignificant and passive part of a bigger organism. I believe that it is necessary because only by maintaining such psychological independence among the significant share of the population can humanity avoid the collective madness of wars, revolutions, and massive witch-hunt movements periodically exploding within human societies. All these forms of organized massive violence are based on the elimination of individual responsibility for actions and mistaken beliefs in the tremendous rewards in the future for all members of the crowd. Such future collectivistic rewards usually never come, while pain and suffering caused by all this greatly damage people’s lives, whether they are victims or perpetrators. In short, only individual freedom of action with sufficient resources to implement these actions could lead to human happiness. At the same time, “great” ideas, like Nazis and Islamists’ idea to kill all Jews or communists’ idea to build a society perfectly controlled by the elite from the top down, could never do it.
Equal Rights Libertarian 