Poisonous Veracity (Swat that Lie!)

Poisonous Veracity (Swat that Lie!)
July 26, 2013 | Global Research | John Kozy

Was any Roman ever gullible enough to believe that Romulus and Remus founded Rome after being suckled by wolves? Given the gullibility of humankind, perhaps, but if so, a revelation about human nature emerges that the policy elite would prefer to keep secret—for the most part, human beings are dumbos; they can be led by their noses to believe anything. And so they have.

That Romulus and Remus were ever suckled by wolves is absurd. But is it more absurd than that people should defend a country which they own not a single square inch of? Isn’t that like defending some far off country, like Luxemburg, to which you have no relationship? Would you volunteer to defend Uganda? Why do people volunteer to defend the U.S.A.? Why defend what’s not yours? Let those who own it defend it. But they won’t; they never have. Jefferson knew that merchants have no national loyalties.

We pretend we’re not defending land we don’t own. We claim we’re defending our beliefs, but beliefs don’t need defending. Just try to kill one, even an absurd one.

Perhaps institutions founded upon those beliefs are being defended? But why defend institutions that don’t work for you? What are we defending when we defend “our country” anyway? You likely have no idea; yet many believe they should, that it’s the right thing to do. Ever ask yourself why? No? Why not?

Somehow or other there have come to be “truths” that are never examined but which are thought to be “unquestionably” true. Almost no one questions these beliefs that are too strong to be altered by evidence even though believing them leads to horrid consequences.

There are a lot more of these than you suspect. Whole civilizations are built on them. Romulus, who never existed, still influences human actions. How in the world did human beings get into this condition?

In 1789, the French revolted, and the monarchy was overthrown. The royal nations across Europe were threatened and led a counter revolution that by 1814 had restored the old order. The restoration also destroyed the basis of everything a civilized culture could be founded on. Along with the monarchy, reason, the basis for civilization, was also discredited, The baby went with the bath. Human beings cannot be treated irrationally by rational people.

So it had to be. Civilization depends upon standards. Differences exist between right and wrong, truth and error, kindness and cruelty, honesty and fraud. Everything is not the same. But these have all come to be the same in the world we now live in. By putting down the French revolution, which was a result of the Age of Reason, reason itself had to be discredited, so a plethora of standards emerged. We now have mythical standards, scriptural standards, institutional standards, personal standards, but no rational standards. Rational man no longer exists; mankind is now almost entirely creedal. Everyone’s varied opinion is as good as truth and we’ve become willing to kill each over those creeds. Political action, in fact action of any kind, pits opinion against opinion. Americans do it, Muslims do it, Hindus do it, Sikhs do it and no search for truth ever takes place because there is no standard that can separate the true claims from the others.

When this occurred, honesty disappeared too. Everything became a lie. Politicians and the government lies. Vendors lie to consumers. Brokers lie to investors. The culture is a total fraud.

Sectarian standards are not the only standards being adopted. If the Bible can become the source of a standard, so can Mein Kampf or Qutb’s Milestones. When the values in Milestones go head to head with the values in the Old Testament all that can ensue is violence. The Israelis, when they adopt the diasporic myth and reject the findings of Shlomo Sand, are being primitive Romans who believe in Romulus. Ignorance has become today’s standard of veracity. Is Israel really the only nation with a right to exist? Just exactly does that mean? Who conferred this right?

But scripture is not the only source of these “standards” although religion is a major source. In fact, religion has such a strong hold on humanity that one cleric has founded a church that embraces all religions. Some people just can’t give it up even stripped of all its content. But religion isn’t the only source of standards, Consider for a moment the view recently expressed by a prominent television commentator that only constitutional governments are legitimate. Really? What if the constitution allows the government to do horrid things to its people? Is it still legitimate? Consider the view that democracy regardless of its form is the best type of government. Really? The U.S.A. was a “democracy” when slavery was legal. Consider the widely held view that science and technology will save mankind from its depredations? Really? Science and technology have mainly provided the means to kill vastly more people that it has enabled anyone to save. Not much hope in salvation there! Can anyone claim that providing government with a means to track and eavesdrop on the conversations of every human being is a good thing? Rely on science to your own detriment!

This lack of a standard has consequences that few recognize even though they surround us. Ignorance (crime, violence, hatred, dishonesty, just plain evil, the uncouth) can easily overwhelm society, Instead of teaching people to live together, western practice has been to force compliance by the use of law and punishment instead of conviction. But it usually takes more than one official to capture one criminal. Sooner or later the number of guards will be insufficient for the task, the number of prisons too few. At that point evil will predominate. Human beings are rapidly approaching that state. The Earth is being overcome by evil.

In the U.S.A., for instance, thanks to the wonders of technology, a young person makes a mistake and commits a crime. If convicted, s/he serves a sentence and his/her name is placed in a permanent database of offenders which employers and others are encouraged to check for background information. The class of “criminals” thus increases continually. One day it will outnumber the “law abiding.” This policy, along with many others, can only have been instituted by people dumb enough to believe that Romulus and Remus founded Rome after being suckled by wolves. Such policies are countless.

Violence can not be controlled by punishing the violent; punishment requires that the violence has already occurred. The elimination of violence requires that people be convinced that force and violence are wrong . Jim Crow cannot be eliminated by outlawing expressions; it requires the elimination of the desire to use them. But conviction requires a rational basis, not just heads full of opinions.

In rejecting the enlightened values of the age of reason, European conservatives were forced to reject reason itself, In rejecting reason itself, they enshrined a Babel of Opinions without providing any way of evaluating them. The result is that everyone’s opinion is equally true (false). (Examples can be heard on any 24 hour news channel at any time of day.) These opinions are now the basis of human action, and they are leading us to perdition. Instead of punishing people, we need to perfect them.

The problem here is that bad ideas based on big errors do not get filtered out of the public debate. In fact, the opposite happens. Politics is a marketing exercise in which the media and politicians pander to public prejudice with the result that bad ideas are actually adopted. What no one seems to realize is that we cannot kill our way to goodness or even salvation or security. One and a half billion Muslims cannot be killed without killing ourselves.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

America's Descent to Depravity

America's Descent to Depravity by Prof. John Kozy

I suspect that most people would like to believe that societies, no matter how base their origins, become better over time. Unfortunately history belies this notion; societies have often grown worse over time. The United States of America is no exception. It was not benign at its origin and has now descended to a region of depravity seldom matched by even the worst nations of history.

Although it is impossible to find hard numbers to prove that morality in America has declined, anecdotal evidence is everywhere to be seen. Almost everyone can cite situations in which the welfare of people was sacrificed for the sake of public or private institutions, but it seems impossible to cite a single instance of a public or private institution's having been sacrificed for the sake of people. If morality has to do with how people are dealt with, one can legitimately ask where morality plays a role in what happens in America? The answer seems to be, "Nowhere!" So what has happened in America to account for the current epidemic of claims that morality in America has collapsed? Well the culture has changed drastically in the last half century, that's what.

Once upon a time in America, the American character was defined in terms of what was called the Protestant Ethic. The sociologist, Max Weber, attributed Capitalism's success to it. Unfortunately Max was lax; he got it wrong, completely wrong. Capitalism and the Protestant ethic are inconsistent with each other. Neither can have been responsible for the other.

The Protestant (or Puritan) ethic is based upon the notion that hard work and frugality are two important consequences of being one of Christianity's elect. If a person is hard working and frugal, s/he is considered to be one of the elect. Those beneficent attributes, it was believed, made Americans a more industrious people than people elsewhere (although Europe's Protestant societies were considered a close second while Southern Europe's Catholic peoples were considered slothful.) Some now claim that we are witnessing the decline and fall of the Protestant ethic in Western societies. Since the Protestant ethic has a religious root, the decline is often attributed to a rise in secularism. But that case is considerably easier to make in Europe than in America where Protestant fundamentalism still has a huge following. So there must be some other explanation for the decline. Nevertheless, the increase in secularism has led many to claim that secularism has destroyed religious values along with the moral values religion teaches. There's another explanation.

In 17th Century Colonial America, the economy was agrarian. Hard work and frugality fit that economy perfectly. But America is no longer agrarian. The American economy today is defined as industrial capitalism. Agrarian economies rarely produce more than can be consumed, but industrial economies do every day. So in order to keep an industrial economy functioning, consumption must not only be continuous, it must continually increase.

I doubt that there is a reader who has not heard that 70% of the American economy results from consumption. But 70% of one is 0.7, of two, 1.4, of three, 2.1, etc. As the economy grows from one unit of GNP to two units, consumption must grow from 0.7 units to 1.4 units. But continually increasing consumption is not compatible with frugality. An industrial economy requires people to spend and spend and spend while frugality requires people to save and save and save. The American economy destroyed the Protestant ethic and the religious views upon which it was founded. Conspicuous consumption replaced hard work and thrift.

In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith claims that Capitalism benefits everyone since acting in one's own self-interest benefits others. Now we are being told that, "Saving more and cutting debt might sound like a good plan to deal with the recession. But if everyone does that, it'll only make matters worse. . . . what the economy needs most is for consumers to be spending more freely." The great recession has stood Adam Smith on his head, but no economist will admit it. "[A]n environment where everyone wants to save cannot be conducive to growth. Production needs to be sold and for that you need customers."

Saving is (presumably) good for individuals but bad for the economy which requires continuously increasing spending. If an economist had told that to me to my face, I would have told him that that clearly means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nature of the economy, that it means that the economy does not exist to provide for the needs of people but that people exist only to fulfill the needs of the economy. Although it may not look like it, such an economy enslaves the people it claims to serve. So in effect, industrial capitalism has perpetuated slavery; it has re-enslaved those who were once emancipated.

When consumption replaced thrift in the American psyche, the rest of morality sank into depravity with it. The need to sell requires marketing which is nothing but a liar's lair. After all, the entire enterprise is founded on Edward L. Bernays 1928 book, Propaganda. The American culture has been inundated by a tsunami of lies. Marketing has become the culture's predominant activity. No one can isolate her/himself from it. It's carried on by businesses, politicians, and the media. No one can be certain s/he's being told the truth by anyone. No moral code can survive in a culture of dishonesty, and none has!

Having subverted the Protestant ethic, the economy destroyed every ethic America has ever promoted. It became a society without an ethos, a society with no humane purpose. Americans have become lambs sacrificable for the sake of machines. Then a new ethos emerged from the chaos, one that the governing elite completely misunderstands.

It is often claimed that Washington has lost touch with the Americans it governs, that it no longer understands its people or how its common culture operates. Washington and the nation's elite don't realize it but the culture no longer values right over wrong or hard work and frugality over sloth and profligacy. Americans today are looking for the "big break," the "jackpot," the "next big idea." The American Dream has now been reduced to "hitting it big!" The slow and deliberate road to success is anathema. Watch American Idol, The X Factor, and America's Got Talent and survey the Mongolian hoards that show up for auditions. These people, for the most part, have not worked hard at anything. Count the number of people who wager on the Lotto regularly. Such wagering requires no work at all. All these people want to do is hit it big. And who are our most extolled businessmen? Entrepreneurs! Entrepreneurs are, for the most part, one time flashes in the pan although there are notable exceptions. The trouble with entrepreneurship, however, is the high regard in which it is held. But the only value attached to it is the amounts of money entrepreneurs have made. We rarely hear anything about the nefarious ways in which they have made it. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, hardly present images of people with sterling moral characters, but in an economy without moral scruples, no one cares; all that matters is the money. Given that attitude, why should anyone in this society express moral concerns? Few in America do. So while the American elite still talk about the need to produce a workforce suitable to the needs of industry, the people want none of it.

The elite often bemoan the American educational system's failure and have been trying to fix it unsuccessfully for several decades. But if one remembers that many of America's present, most successful entrepreneurs are college dropouts, how can the young be convinced that a college education is a worthwhile endeavor? As Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg have shown, learning to write software does not require a college degree. Neither does winning the Lotto or a place on American Idol. Being drafted by the NFL may require a stint in college, but it doesn't require a degree. All entrepreneurship requires is a new marketable idea.

Entertainment and sports, lotteries and game shows, consumer products that people have had no need for for billions of years are now the stuff of American culture. But they're not stuff, they're fluff; they cannot form the basis of a stable, prosperous, humane society. It is a culture governed by merely one attribute - wealth, ill gotten or not!

The human capacity for self-delusion is limitless. Americans have deluded themselves into believing that aggregate wealth, the sum total of wealth rather than how it is distributed, makes right. It matters not how it is gotten or what is done with it. Aggregate wealth is its own reward; it is even worth destroying ourselves for. And if we haven't yet, we surely soon will.

History describes many nations that have become depraved. None that has has ever reformed itself. No beautiful boy can be counted on to come forth to undo the catastrophe of the Midas touch. Money, after all, is not one of the things human beings need to survive, and if money isn't used to produce and distribute the things needed, human survival is impossible no matter how much aggregate wealth is accumulated.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found here and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.