Consent of the Governed?

Consent of the Governed?

Is Religion Dangerous?

I have a friend who believes that religious ideas are dangerous, and his opinion is shared by many. He points out that colossal amounts of cruelty, destruction, death, and torture have been done in the name of God, while very little (maybe none) has been done "in the name of atheism." While this is technically true, I feel that continuing to rail against the dangers of religion in the 21st century is really beating a dying horse when the cruelty, destruction, death, and torture has pretty much picked itself up and moved into the camp of secular government. Traditional religion is no longer the problem, nor is atheism the answer. While nobody's likely to kill anyone in the name of atheism per se, millions of people have been killed in the name of "godless" communism, fascism, and democracy. Religion has certainly been useful in the past for justifying war and cruelty, but religion is not strictly necessary.

The question that interests me is, what is strictly necessary to justify war and cruelty? My friend says that communism is "like a religion." Like a religion? In what way? Communism is based on an atheistic theory of social development. Is it like a religion only in that it's been used to justify the death, torture, and economic exploitation of some people by other people? My friend seems to want to draw a line between religious and secular ideas, but I think this is the wrong place to draw the line. I want to draw the line between ideas, religious or secular, that allow some people to kill and exploit others and ideas that don't.

My friend condemns religion for man's inhumanity to man, and yet admits that at least some secular philosophies have been used the same way. I would point at something broader than religion: any belief system that gives some people permission to use aggressive violence against others. Religions have certainly done that very nicely throughout mankind's miserable history. And yet, as the grip of theistic, supernatural religions has loosened on people's minds, and science and secularism have come to the fore, secular theories have done a remarkable job of picking up the slack. It seems, then, that God is not necessary to justify exploitation and violence, and therefore atheism is not enough to save us from it.

We can't understand what is dangerous - or not - about religion unless we can define exactly what religion is. Is it dangerous to believe in a god? Is it dangerous to believe in things we can't prove through reason and evidence? Perhaps. Yet I know many, many people who use their religious beliefs to keep them on the path of love and compassion. I am tempted to believe that humans create God in their own image, rather than the other way around. That God is the essence of the way we want to relate to people, whether it is with compassion, understanding, and love, or hatred and condemnation. I am tempted to believe that God is ultimately a way of avoiding responsibility for the goodness or badness of one's own soul, and that faith is ultimately a way of avoiding responsibility for the beliefs that support one's actions.

I believe that this avoidance is ultimately what makes any belief system dangerous. What if we taught our children: before you believe something, check with your own mind - does it make sense to you? Before you do something, or say something - check with your own heart - does it feel kind to you? Perhaps God is nothing more, and nothing less, than the goodness and truth in your own soul. Religions often teach that the human mind and heart are evil. Thus we are taught to distrust our own feelings and our own reasoning, and to place our trust outside of ourselves - in the writings and preachings of some authoritative voice. Once we distrust ourselves, this authoritative voice can have its way with us.

Once we trust authority more than ourselves, we can be exploited and used in whatever way the authority wishes. The religious and political history of mankind can be seen as a competition to hold the reins of authority and control the mind of humanity. Because those who control the mind of humanity, control humanity's productive capacity, and can live at ease on the labor of others.

We can see the primitive origins of human exploitation of humans in the gangs of armed raiders that used violence to plunder the first farming communities. People could not exploit the labor of others until settled communities began producing something in excess of what was needed for survival. Then the excess could be taken without destroying the source. And so some people learned to live by taking what others had produced by threatening them with injury or death. It's not a large step, perhaps, to go from hunting and gathering animals and plants to hunting and gathering from human settlements. Certainly it would be a more thrilling way of life for the strong and brave. Such direct plundering was violent and dangerous, because those being plundered were apt to try to defend themselves and their produce. And some plunderers, perhaps as they got older, wanted a more settled and peaceful life. To get the best of both worlds, and settle into the very communities they were plundering, they had to come up with a rationale for the exploitation. To live off the labor of other humans in ease and comfort, you need to somehow neutralize their defenses.

What you need is a world view and a moral code that makes your exploitation of them right, proper, legitimate, and good. This is the role of religion, the authoritative voice that neutralizes the self interest of the exploited. When goodness consists in obedience to authority, the brute force on which it ultimately rests can be kept in the background as a last resort. Brute force then becomes a righteous thing that happens only to "bad" people. While an independent community might band together to fight off marauders, the mythology of legitimate power brings the community over to the marauders' side, leaving anyone who resists alone against the community and the marauders together. Given that humans are social animals, this technique is extremely effective.

We could say that religion is the mind control and government is the brute force, but it's not quite that simple and divisible. Religion has always been used to legitimize power, to condemn self-defense by the exploited, and give its holy blessing to aggressive violence by authority. Religion promises rewards in heaven for obedience to authority here and now. Religion and government can at times be indistinguishable. But increasingly, over the centuries, power has sought to legitimize itself with more secular ideas, to give itself scientific underpinnings that the modern mind will still accept. This process has produced many power struggles and territorial disputes between religious and secular authorities.

The questing rational mind is always a danger to authority, as the questing rational mind likes nothing better than to knock over old theories and propose new ones, and this includes the ideas that support authority and the exploitation of some humans by others. And so authority has long waged war on the rational mind and sought to freeze ideas where it wants them. This is ultimately an impossible task. So along with trying to suppress thinking, exploiters must come up new and better theories of exploitation, and new and better ways to impress them on people.

I believe that the concept of freedom of religion was a big signal to humanity that theistic religion was no longer needed as the rationale for exploitation. When the supernatural realm was set free from this function of justifying power, it no longer mattered what people believed about it. The Age of Reason had brought forth new rationales for power, new secular mythologies that could be sold to an increasingly secular-thinking populace. Only the dullest witted person could fail to notice that freedom of religion never extends to freedom from exploitation by secular authority. Neither personal nor religious moral codes are ever allowed to interfere with the economic exploitation of the community by those in power. Freedom of religion was the power elite kissing the supernatural world goodbye - people can have whatever fantasies they like on Sundays, as long as they are loyal to the State and pay the tribute it demands. Of course, wherever people still believe in religion, the authorities will use it shamelessly to promote their power, but for those who think themselves too sophisticated for religion, authority now has other philosophical cards to play.

To understand power, community, and morals, it is essential to comprehend the division between people getting along with each other, and people getting along with an exploiting power class. To get along with each other, people must of necessity have rules of conduct and ways to resolve conflicts between them. The magic of society is that when (and only when) certain boundaries are respected, individual interests harmonize and promote the well being of all. We are a social species, and social rules come naturally to most of us, like language. Yet there are always those few who do not internalize social rules, and the rule-abiding people must have ways to defend themselves and the fruits of their labor from these antisocial people.

Authority is all about getting past the defenses of the productive community to get people's stuff without getting hurt.

In the modern age, centralized, monopolistic, official power has been increasingly sold to humanity as a way to protect social boundaries, thus placing the moral rationale for power squarely on society's need for order and peace. This is the central power myth of our age, and yet it is the exact opposite of the truth.

Authority is all about getting past the defenses of the productive community to get people's stuff without getting hurt.

The Social Contract is no more true than the Divine Right of Kings. Far from protecting social rules and boundaries, government-created legislation breaks through those essential boundaries, allowing some people to plunder others without getting hurt. Government is like an insidious virus that attaches itself to our white blood cells, hiding inside our defensive mechanisms so they cannot protect us. We cannot live without our white blood cells, but neither can we thrive when they are turned against us. We cannot live in society without order; but neither can we thrive when that order is turned against us.

The exploiting classes have taken the rules that help society function peacefully, claimed them as its own, and mixed them into the rules that maintain their power. Most of us have a deep-seated respect for society and its rules: we respect the law and take pride in being law abiding. I believe this comes to us naturally and instinctively, and in most people these feelings and instincts are naive and unanalyzed. Those in power would have it this way. If people were educated about law and legislation, they might see the difference. They might begin to see that legislation is not law, but permission for antisocial behavior disguised as law. They might see the difference between the rules of the community and the rules that protect the plunderer.

I think people who hate and fear theistic religion have missed a few centuries. Democracy is the religion of America now. We kill and torture in the name of democracy now. We indoctrinate our children in the myths of democracy. Democracy does not promise us rewards in the afterlife, but more cynically, promises us all a chance to plunder our neighbors.

An Earth Day statement

Well, it's Earth Day. A day for lots of people to say lots of silly things about Our Mother, The Planet. Like how good she is to us and how we should be kind to her and "save" her, and so on.

Mother Earth does not love the human race. Nor does she hate us. She has no feelings about us at all. She was here long before we evolved to scamper around on her surface, and she will likely be here long after we're gone. We, on the other hand, depend completely upon her for life and everything that makes life enjoyable. Mother Earth is a stunningly beautiful, dreadfully abusive, and unforgiving mother from whom there is no escape.

Humans are not capable of destroying the planet, or even life on the planet. But from a completely humanocentric perspective, it is important to preserve the planet's capacity to sustain our lives. And beyond that, most of us want much more than just a life; we want a life that is enjoyable, comfortable, and interesting.

Now I will stop speaking for others, and just say that an enjoyable, comfortable, and interesting life, for me, includes lots of other species, large areas of wilderness, clean air and water, lots of energy and technology, peace, and freedom to pursue my individual interests. Furthermore, I don't just want all that for myself. I won't be really satisfied until every human being on the planet has an enjoyable, comfortable, and interesting life as well. Their specific requirements for that may be somewhat different from mine, but I suspect that much of what I mentioned is basic to all of us. And I'm not done yet. I also want to accomplish all this in a way that will be sustainable for many future generations.

Why does that feel like an impossible dream? If we all want these things, in various degrees, what is getting in the way of their achievement? It seems to me that our current numbers are too large for all of us to have a really good life. I would rather see four billion people well-fed, happy, and free, than 12 billion with many of them hopelessly starving, miserable, and/or enslaved. Watching nature shows, it does rather look like it's in the nature of every species to expand its population to the point where survival becomes increasingly difficult for many. That difficulty, of course, is caused by all the other species doing the same thing. And as people grow more numerous, the pressure on those other species, and the wild, humanity-free places where many of them thrive, grows greater.

But I wonder if humans are even capable of reducing their own population voluntarily, and I wonder if there are as yet undiscovered ways to make all of us comfortable here. Perhaps what is needed is more ingenuity. More smart people. Or more freedom for smart people to accomplish things.

Human beings spend a tremendous amount of energy killing, torturing, enslaving, and imprisoning each other; and a great deal of ingenuity figuring out new ways to do these things. This is something I have never really understood. Isn't our gigantic, abusive, inescapable Mother Earth a big enough adversary for us? Shouldn't we be using all our combined intelligence and strength figuring out ways to deal with the disasters and diseases she throws at us? Why do Earth's children insist on fighting all the time instead of cooperating to make their lives better?

I regret that I cannot publish comments in Chinese

I'm not an English-only fascist, but despite my best efforts, I cannot read Chinese, and I don't want to publish comments when I don't know what they say. Write in Spanish, and I might have a fighting chance!

Imagine there's no government ...

It's very easy to listen to government advocates tell you what they're going to provide for you and just believe it. They paint a picture, and you don't have to use your imagination at all. This is especially appealing if you've been raised by television and school, and actually have no imagination.

Schools for everyone - health care for everyone - roads and bridges and dams - national parks and clean water - protection from criminals, and so on. You just obey, and cough up a lot of money, and a bunch of people called "government" will provide all of these good things for you. It takes a bit of imagination to picture what could be there if these people called "government" didn't take your money, didn't demand your obedience, didn't provide anything - and instead left us in freedom to use our own resources and come up with our own solutions. Why do so many people assume that we'd have nothing -- that we'd just sit on our hands, lamenting that we have no education, no doctors, and no roads to drive on? The assumption is that problems can't be solved unless someone is holding a gun to someone else's head - either to get the funding for something or to make sure that the something gets done.

Why so much faith in the power of violence? Why so little faith in the power of cooperation?

Should we put God back in Schools?

This post is in response to a Facebook conversation resulting from the question: Should we put God back in Schools?

Okay, since people seem determined to address this question seriously, I will try to be serious myself, instead of just poking fun at the question itself.

It can be very hard to say which particular moves are better or worse within a political system as screwed up as this one is. Ideally, there would be no public schools, no taxes, no guys with guns taking kids away from their parents if they didn't send them to school, and so on. As always, it's impossible to predict the spontaneous order that would result from the free actions of millions of individuals, so I won't even try to describe my own imaginings of what might come to be. Let's just assume that parents would choose the education they thought best for their children (or children would choose...) within the means of their unexploited income. They would obviously choose to educate their children according to what they believe is true: their own worldview and their own values. To do otherwise is insane (unless you're living under a regime so oppressive that it will kill you if you express unapproved beliefs).

Some people have world views that are based - however imperfectly - on scientific thinking: i.e., reasoning logically from the available evidence. Others believe in other epistemological methods in addition to that, such as faith and divine revelation. Many have secular moral views that are held with as much religious fervor and as little evidential grounding as those of religious people. But none of us perceives the world perfectly, and the best we can do for our children and students is to teach them what we believe to be true, and how we believe truth is acquired.

When people start picking up guns (making laws) to force their own world views on others or on others' children, oppression and strife results. I think this is the inevitable result of a national, tax-funded, mandatory educational system. People are forced to fund it, children are forced to go there, and bitter strife over what should be taught follows as inevitably as night follows day. The strife over how all our children should be educated results from the nationalistic assumption that all children living under the control of a specific "government" within some political boundary can and should be educated the same way. Everyone has ideas about it, and everyone believes that their ideas should be forced on everyone else.

A vague question like: should we put God back into schools? entails so many undefined assumptions that it really can't be answered. Distinctions must be made between schools that are freely chosen and those that are forced on people. Also, "God" certainly must be defined if the question is to be answered.

I bring whatever divinity I possess wherever I go. I try to bring love, and a profound respect for the humanity of others wherever I go. I try to seek the truth with an open mind. I would say that if you think God needs to be in a school or anywhere else, you must take him (or it) there yourself: you must take your own conception of him (or it) inside of yourself. Don't try to make laws about it. Leave others in freedom to pray or not pray to whomever they please. Leave others in freedom to seek truth the way they think best, and to speak what they believe to be true. Beliefs, values, and world views cannot be changed by force. But if you live your own conception of God, others may be drawn to that conception.

Of course, these are just my ideas, based on my values ...

Free Health Care or Health Care Freedom?

I've been wanting to write a follow-up to my first post about health care, and here it is. I believe that we do have a right to "free" health care, but not in the sense of having a right to goods and services that someone else has produced without having to pay for them. What we do have a right to is the freedom to take care of our bodies as we see fit. We have a right to be unmolested in the area of health care as much as we have this right in every other area of life. We also have a right to health care services that cost what they would cost in a voluntary market, free from government intervention. I think that most people vastly underestimate the effect of more than a century of government intervention on the prices in the health care market.

Interventions are rarely initiated by government itself, much less by popular demand, but by business interests seeking government protection from the ruthless demands of the voluntary market. Those most able to pay the admission price to the government's boudoir can buy government guns to protect their interests from the free will of health care customers and providers.

The AMA became a national organization in 1847. Its publicly stated goals were to raise the quality of health care, and protect people from "quacks." And its not-publicly-stated goals included: to protect and increase the income and status of white male doctors within the profession; to restrict the practices of other professionals and other schools of thought in medicine; to control medical schools to restrict the supply of doctors; and to punish price competition among doctors. Of special note was the Flexner Report of 1910, which resulted in legislation further restricting entry into the profession, especially for women, blacks, and Jews. Jews were often able to acquire their education abroad; many medical schools especially for blacks were shut down.

The AMA recently apologized for its racist policies of the past. But at the time, the AMA was just doing its thing as a trade union for white male doctors; it was government enforcement that allowed them to succeed. And the gains of any trade union, monopoly, or cartel always come at the expense of other workers and businesses. The free market is the ever-present enemy of established business. Once you're on top, it's just "good business" to pay the government to protect your position there. You disseminate propaganda to the effect that the upstarts and alternatives are a danger to consumers, and must be regulated out of existence, or kept in a very small pen. Then the government will come to the consumers' "rescue" by limiting their freedom of choice.

For many decades, the AMA and the government have been "protecting" us from black, Jewish, and female doctors; "protecting" us from being served by other professionals such as midwives, osteopaths, homeopaths, pharmacists, and chiropractors; "protecting" us from cooperative medical plans; and so on. In general, for more than a century they've been "protecting" us from less expensive alternatives, and from our own freedom of choice.

It doesn't take too many brain cells to realize that when cheaper alternatives are outlawed, the prices of the restricted supply of the approved good will rise. Thus for a long time, doctors and drugs have become increasingly expensive relative to other goods, over and above the effect of the government's currency inflation, which affects all goods in the market.

With no alternate universe available, it's impossible to say what would have happened over the same period of time in a voluntary market. The government and the medical establishment can claim credit for everything good that has happened in medicine for the last 150 years, and blame all problems on the tattered vestiges of freedom that still remain, and there is no way we can prove them wrong. All we can do is point to economic theories that the average person does not understand.

Mid-20th century, the government interfered in the market with wage and price controls, and employers began offering hospital insurance to employees in lieu of higher wages. Over a decade or two, hospital insurance and then general outpatient health care insurance became the norm. As people got used to third-party payment, they lost touch with the actual price of medical care. And with employers providing insurance, they were shielded from the price of their insurance premiums also. Thus patients were left on the demand side of medical transactions, with very little awareness of the cost of what they were demanding.

This situation was a perfect opportunity for the established medical profession to push their prices up and up, and to sell more and more procedures, office visits, or drugs. When insurance is paying, patients will generally do whatever their doctors suggest, and price is no object. People want to get as much out of their insurance as they can. Thus insurance increases demand and causes prices to skyrocket.

This effect was exacerbated by the policies of Blue Cross/Blue Shield. These major insurers paid "cost-plus," which created an incentive for hospitals and doctors to increase costs, while The Blues generally paid the claims with no questions asked.

The system happily relieved doctors of any concern about their patients' pocketbooks. They could bill insurance companies for much more than they would demand from their patients face tofface. With hospitals, doctors, and drug companies all on the insurance bandwagon, the costs of healthcare rose dramatically; the incomes of doctors, hospitals, and drug companies rose dramatically; and the insurance premiums paid by employers rose dramatically along with them.

When insurance premiums began to rise beyond the means of small businesses and individuals, people began talking about cost control. This took the form of HMOs that attempted to control demand by restricting patients' choices. But the time was also ripe for government to step in and save the day by becoming the insurance company of last resort, first just for the poor and elderly, and later on for everyone.

The government is the ultimate insurance company, because they can extort all the money they want from helpless taxpayers with the help of their gun-toting thugs, and when they don't feel like doing that, they can just create money. Inflationary monetary policy is more palatable to people than gun-toting thugs, because people don't understand that value is being stolen from the money that's still in their hands.

Once the government becomes the insurer of last resort, prices can go through the roof with no visible effect on the average medical consumer. But this game can't go on forever. Eventually the economy begins to show the strain as the demands of 300 million medical consumers are met with more and more expensive products and services. There is really no escape from the laws of economics; rising taxes and rising inflation will eventually wreck the economy.

People become accustomed to the idea that medical care is something you can't possibly pay for without help. What they don't understand is that they are paying for it in many, many indirect ways, but they don't make the connection between economic malaise and the impossibly high cost of the medical care to which everyone has a "right." In fact, we're paying much, much more for it in all these indirect ways than we would if each of us just paid for it directly.

When the economy begins to crumble and crash, politicians must scramble to get the whole mess under control before disaster makes them politically vulnerable. By now, people are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that they have a "right" to all the health care they want. And since they've been trained to believe that more government is the answer to every problem, there is nothing for the politicians to do but engineer a government takeover of the entire medical economy.

Now that people are getting desperate about cutting medical costs, it's funny how they're suggesting many of the very things that were outlawed and restricted--by the government, at the AMA's request--so long ago. All through the 20th century, M.D.s were marking out the territory they wanted, and paying people in government to protect the territory of their restricted cartel. They made sure that only M.D.s would be legally allowed to do many procedures and services that could easily have been done by less educated, less expensive professionals. The purpose of the AMA was always to raise the incomes of the doctors that belonged to it. And they succeeded in doing this at the expense of all the people who would have been doctors, all the patients those doctors would have served, all the patients who would have been served by other professionals, as well as those who would have been served by alternative therapies that were suppressed or not allowed to develop.

A friend of mine recently opined that we need a nationalized medical system because (for one thing) nobody can afford the cost of cancer treatment on their own. I did a little research on cancer treatment specifically. The cost of cancer treatment has risen astronomically, mostly due to the almost unbelievable prices of new anti-cancer drugs. It's gotten so bad that people are being bankrupted just by the small slice of the total cost that their insurance companies require them to pay.

Why do these drugs cost so much? I've talked here about the AMA, the insurance effect, and the government, but the Federal Drug Administration is also an important part of the cost picture. The FDA makes it tremendously expensive to get a drug approved, and the patent only lasts for a few years, so the drug companies have to recoup huge expenses and make all the money they want to make on that drug in just a few years' time.

In addition to this reality, they price the drugs high because they can - because insurance companies and/or government will pay for it. And also because the demand for life-saving drugs is pretty inflexible, as evidenced by people going bankrupt to pay for them.

Now imagine that we took insurance and government out of this picture. All that's left is the companies who make the drugs and the patients who need them. Who thinks that the drug companies would price their products so high that nobody could pay for them? Even when people are willing to impoverish themselves and their children to pay for life-saving drugs, there is ultimately a limit to their resources. Another lesson of basic economics is that you can't make money by pricing your product so high that nobody can buy it.

In a voluntary market, medical goods and services would be forced to compete for people's dollars with all the other things that people need and want. People would control their own demand, and spend their own money as judiciously as possible. The medical industry would have to bring its prices within the reach of ordinary people's budgets. And of course, more reasonable forms of insurance, as well as charity, would fill in the gaps between personal budgets and medical costs.

This freedom of choice, this personal autonomy, is what we have a right to. The freedom to take care of our own bodies the way we think best. The freedom to choose our own practitioners, our own medical philosophies, and pay for our own care in a voluntary market.

As yet, I haven't touched on the issue of controlled substances. Throughout most of the 20th century, the government has assumed the power to prohibit or allow citizens to use various chemical substances for medical or recreational purposes. If we grant the government the power to allow or prohibit what drugs and medicines we take, we have surrendered our sovereignty over our own bodies. How anyone can still believe he is free after surrendering control of his own body is beyond me.

If we grant the government the power to control what we're allowed and not allowed to ingest, then this power is up for grabs to the highest bidder. The law enforcement/prison industry wants more drugs in the criminal category, and wants the power to draw the line between recreational and medical uses. Doctors want drugs in the prescription category, so that people have to pay for office visits in order to get drugs. Governments want to declare substances unhealthy so that they can collect "sin taxes" on them.

We have a right to freedom in health care as much as we have a right to freedom in everything else. We have a right to choose our own foods, poisons, and medicines without the interference of busybodies and gun-toting thugs. Our need for health care is being used against us by opportunistic politicians and rapacious business interests. It's being used to impoverish and control us. The problem is not that we can't afford decent health care; it's that we can't afford this lack of freedom.