It has often been said that war is the health of the State – but the argument could also be made that the reverse is more true: that the State is the health of war. In other words, that war – the greatest of all human evils – is impossible without the State.
Practical Anarchy by Stefan Molyneux, p. 61
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The egalitarian revolt against biological reality, as significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of nature”; against the universe as such. At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will — in short, that reality can be instantly transformed by the mere wish or whim of human beings.
Murray N. Rothbard
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 17
Walter Block, Ph.D., is an Austrian school economist and anarcho-libertarian philosopher, the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans, and a Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Find his work here: http://www.walterblock.com/
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Excerpt from Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy by Michael Huemer, Ph.D.
Credulity
Humans are born credulous – we instinctively believe what people tell us, even with no corroboration. We are especially credulous about statistics or other information that sounds like objective facts. Unfortunately, we are not so scrupulous when it comes to accurately and non-misleadingly reporting facts. There is an enormous amount of disinformation in the world, particularly about politics and other matters of public interest. If the public is interested in it, there is bullshit about it.
I have noticed that this bullshit tends to fall into three main categories.
First, ideological propaganda. If you “learn” about an issue from a partisan source – for instance, you read about gun control on a gun control advocacy website, or you hear the day’s news from a conservative radio show – you will get pretty much 100% propaganda. Facts will be exaggerated, cherry picked, deceptively phrased, or otherwise misleading. Normally, you will have no way of guessing the specific way in which the information is deceptive, making the information essentially worthless for drawing inferences.
Second, sensationalism. Mainstream news sources make money by getting as many people as possible to watch their shows, read their articles, and so on. To do that, they try to make everything sound as scary, exciting, outrageous, or otherwise dramatic as possible.
Third, laziness. Most people who write for public consumption are lazy and lack expertise about the things they write about. If a story has some technical aspect (e.g., science news), journalists probably won’t understand it, and they may get basic facts backwards. Also, they often just talk to one or a few sources and print whatever those sources say, even if the sources have obvious biases.
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What all these moral crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:
- Assertions of a great danger to the whole of society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
- An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
- A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
- A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (Pg. 5)
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(The)…first complete data set of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world from 1980 to 2009…nearly all emerged from communities resisting foreign military occupation…
Pape and Feldman 2010, pg. 8
Sources in PDF format: https://odysee.com/@libertariantruther:0/Bin-Laden-Quotes:a
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… bureaucratic opportunists and unprincipled technicians and would-be technicians find it difficult to engage in any sort of reasoned argument. Argument means principle, and principle is precisely what opportunists are always weak on. … What bureaucrats and power elites always want is for the opposition to shut up and go away, to obey orders, to accept their assigned tasks.
Murray N. Rothbard
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 970
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than seventy academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as seven books.
Justice Before the Law on Amazon
Michel Huemer’s website: http://owl232.net/
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… an opposition or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives. For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But for that to happen, the masses must be fired up by ideology. Only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion or by a passion for justice, can arouse the interest of the masses (in the current jargon, “raise their consciousness”) and lead them out of the morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the state.
Murray N. Rothbard
Conceived in Liberty v. 3, p. 353; p. 1117
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… while Ludwig von Mises was acknowledged as one of Europe’s most eminent economists in the 1920s and 30s, the language barrier shut off any recognition of Mises in the Anglo-American world until the mid-1930s; then, just as his business cycle theory was beginning to achieve renown as an explanation for the Great Depression, Mises’s overdue recognition was lost in the hoopla of the Keynesian Revolution.
A refugee deprived of his academic or social base in Europe, Mises emigrated to the United States at the mercy of his new-found environment. But while, in the climate of the day, the leftist and socialist refugees from Europe were cultivated, feted, and given prestigious academic posts, a different fate was meted out to a man who embodied a methodological and political individualism that was anathema to American academia. Indeed, the fact that a man of Mises’s eminence was not offered a single regular academic post and that he was never able to teach in a prestigious graduate department in this country is one of the most shameful blots on the none too illustrious history of American higher education. The fact that Mises himself was able to preserve his great energy, his remarkable productivity, and his unfailing gentleness and good humor in the face of this shabby treatment is simply one more tribute to the qualities of this remarkable man …
… Ludwig von Mises’s writings are the embodiment of a courageous and eminent man hewing to his discipline and to his vision, unheeding of shabby maltreatment.
Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Controversies, p. 232
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the 2019 winner of the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award from the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna. He is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute and host of The Tom Woods Show, which releases a new episode every weekday.
FREE must read e-book: https://aociswrong.com/
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