Trump Is Involved in a Witch Hunt, But Is Not on Its Receiving End

Stuart K. Hayashi

When most people say the word monster, they usually do so as a synonym for “ugly” and “evil.” But if you have glanced upon the drawings I have put on the World Wide Web, you have probably noticed that I don’t share that perspective. I draw monsters because they are beautiful and good. And yet this time I did decide to draw a phenomenon I consider to be ugly and evil.

The specific image of “being burned at the stake” is metaphorical, but — in the greater abstract — government-inflicted violence toward undocumented immigrants is something happens literally. Governmental decree is ultimately enforced at gunpoint, and that applies to deportations. Deportations are carried out by armed federal agents; this is armed force just as when a mugger sticks you up.

Between 2010 and 2016 the U.S. Border Patrol agents fired bullets into 33 would-be immigrants, ending their lives. In 2014, James Tomsheck, the chief of internal affairs at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was fired by the agency for having investigated 28 of those deaths and ascertaining that at least seven of them were likely under circumstances where deadly force on the Border Patrol’a part was unjustified. That trend continued into the Trump administration. On May 23, 2018, Claudia Patricia Gómez González — a 19-year-old Guatemalan — got into an altercation with a border agent in Rio Bravo, Texas, and was shot dead as well.

And, once the immigrant has been deported, the violence does not end for him or her. In too many deportation cases, border agents are knowingly sending immigrants back to environments dominated by gang warfare and high murder rates. Steven Sacco writes,

One study found that between January 2014 and September 2015 eighty-three deportees who were sent back to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered after their return. They were people fleeing the killers who eventually took their lives. People like José Marvin Martínez, who fled violence in Honduras and made it to the U.S. when he was 16, but was deported and four months after his forcible return was shot to death. Or Juan Francisco Diaz, also deported back to Honduras, where he too was murdered a few months later. Or Giovanni Miranda, who, after spending most of his life in the U.S., was deported to El Salvador to be murdered in front of his wife and son in June 2015. Or Edgar Chocoy, 16, who ran away from a gang to the U.S. only to be murdered by that same gang seventeen days after he was deported back to Guatemala in 2004. Or an unnamed teenager who was shot to death hours after being deported back to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Moises, 19, was murdered after he was deported to El Salvador. And there are too many more names we’ll never know. 

What’s more, the number of deportees delivered directly to their killers does not include those who survive attempted murder or other violence because of their deportation — a number no one knows. Isais Sosa, who was 19 when the Los Angeles Times covered his story in 2014, survived being shot by a gang days after his deportation. The 19 year old daughter of Dora Lina Meza fled to the U.S. from the same gang that, after she was deported back home, raped her at gun point. After Juan Ines Alanis was deported he was kidnapped and held for ransom while his fingers were smashed with a hammer.

Governmental action, as it is backed by violent threats, is justified when it is in retaliation against some party having initiated the use of force against a person or her private property. But most undocumented immigrants are peaceful, having violated no laws unrelated to their having arrived into the USA without a license (and such licenses, visas, are ridiculously difficult to come by, involving even more red tape than what small businesses have to face). These undocumented immigrants are individuals who must be judged on an individual basis. As observed by the family of murder victim Mollie Tibbetts, to paint undocumented immigrants in general as violent is demagoguery and scapegoating; that is the witch hunt.

It is for this reason that I don’t say “Politicians are the real monsters.” That would be employing monster as a pejorative and a reproach, which I am not about to do. Monsters, such as the one created by Victor Frankenstein and the titular Beast from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, are weird outcasts — and that is how undocumented immigrants are still too often treated. Now, as before, someone must stand up for the weird outcast.

Our Immigration Laws Are Corrupt, and DREAMers' Parents Were Right to Break Them

Stuart K. Hayashi




He [the impoverished refugee seeking asylum from enslavement and violence] shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.

—Deuteronomy 23:16

Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).

The news over the past few weeks has been President Donald J. Trump’s decision to reverse Barack Obama’s implementation, controversially over executive order, of the program known as DACA — Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals.  This refers to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States with their guardians while under the age of sixteen.  Even many people who have supported clamping down on adults who came to the USA without a visa — and President Obama has been harsh on such people — concede that such childhood arrivals into the USA are innocent; it is not as if one could reasonably expect them to defy their parents’ decision to bring the families here.  There are at least 800,000 such childhood arrivals, including the members of the team of then-high-school-students who beat MIT in a national competition to construct a submersible robot.

These childhood arrivals are DREAMers — so named after proposed pieces of legislation called DREAM Acts, an acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, pieces initially opposed at the state level and soon to be introduced at the federal level.

The White House announced it would discontinue the Obama-instituted DACA program but has made it a point to add that it supports the idea of Congress introducing a federal DREAM Act to protect the Dreamers from deportation.  This recommendation, the White House adds, indicates that President Trump is actually not hostile toward the Dreamers; he merely objected to Obama arrogating so much power to himself through executive order, which is unconstitutional.  Allegedly, for the same program to be instituted by legislation is the proper and constitutional procedure for serving the same ends as DACA, ends to which Trump does not object per se.

There is substantial reason to doubt, however, the claim that the White House's alleged support for a federal DREAM Act indicates the administration is sympathetic toward immigrants after all.  Many anti-immigration activists who have aligned themselves with Trump, such as Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, announce they will encourage Congressional Republicans to support a federal DREAM Act provided that they can pressure Congressional Democrats to vote for the RAISE Act — a piece of legislation aiming to cut legal immigration by reducing significantly the number of the skilled work visas that can be issued.

That is, Krikorian would have it that the Dreamers be treated as hostages, being left unharmed on the condition that aspiring legal immigrants be harmed through being denied H-1B visas they would otherwise receive.  What Krikorian proposes — in places such as National Review Online — is an extortionate measure whereby Democrats must “choose” which set of immigrants are to be sacrificed at the point of the federal government’s guns. On account anti-immigration Trump allies such as Krikorian prioritizing passage of the RAISE Act above their calls to deport the Dreamers, there are rational grounds to suspect that the main priority of the anti-immigration movement was not to curb “illegal immigration,” as they frequently claimed, but to reduce legal immigration all along.

On Twitter, many enemies of immigration and supporters of Trump — far less shrewd and sophisticated than Krikorian — sound as if they do not even want that sort of Congressional compromise.  Nay, they sound perfectly happy with armed federal agents forcibly deporting the Dreamers.   Upon learning that among Apple’s personnel are Dreamers now under threat of deportation, Stefan Molyneux gloats, “Upcoming job openings at Apple.”

More representative of the Dreamers’ enemies, though, is Samantha Janney, better known as PolitiBunny, who tweets, “DACA is like a parent stealing a bike, giving it to their child[,] and then pretending they should keep the bike because they’ve ridden it.”

PolitiBunny’s conflation of peaceful migration with theft is vacuous.  I don’t have children, but let’s imagine that I do.  Suppose I stole your bicycle and handed it to my child, who then rode it around.  That theft was an initiation of the use of force — my arms employed physical force to abscond with the bike and deprive you, the rightful owner, of control over it. Hence, I employed force to create an immediate and direct victim, you.  Now suppose instead that I invite a Mexican family to lodge on a parcel of land that I own.  I invite a Mexican couple and their son.  They stay on my land, minding their own business.  And they do this without obtaining a visa first.  That is contrary to federal law, but there is no victim upon whom the use of force has been initiated.

In her denunciation of Dreamers, PolitiBunny cites the value of the law, and yet the very justification for law itself seems to escape her.  That has to be addressed.

I wish I could say that the alleged defenders of the Dreamers had a significantly better understanding than PolitiBunny.  Sadly, the Dreamers’ “defenders” on Twitter have usually said something along the lines of, Yes, the Dreamers’ parents were wrong to disobey federal immigration law, but the Dreamers, having been innocent children when their parents brought them to the USA, should not be punished for their parents’ misdeeds.

I will not endorse that viewpoint.  People who make that argument do so on the false premise that the Dreamers’ parents’ flouting of immigration law was something corrupt.  No.  The federal immigration laws that the Dreamers’ parents broke were what were truly corrupt, and, in trying to benefit their children in the flouting of such corrupt statutes, it is the Dreamers’ parents who rightfully claim the moral high ground.

That is what I shall argue of the remainder of this essay, which is a revision of an older post, “Symbolater Syndrome, Part 3 of 4.”




Ask Yourself What Is the Proper Justification for Law in the First Place
Exactly because we need law and order, we should ask ourselves why we need them. They are not ends in themselves; they are intended to serve a greater value and, therefore, the enforcement of any law must be justified by the standard of whether it actually succeeds in serving that greater value. Insofar as the U.S. republic continues to be about freedom and the other ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the law is to serve the greater value that is the safeguarding of individual rights —   meaning that the law protects peaceful people from the initiation of the use of force and that it does not itself initiate the use of force upon peaceful people. After all, the Declaration of Independence does not say that the right not to be aggressed upon belongs to citizens alone; it says the right not to be aggressed upon belongs to “all men,” meaning all peaceful people.

Therefore, although suspected criminals are to be judged before courts of law, the law itself is still not the ultimate standard by which the respective moral statuses of people’s actions are to be judged. We must ask whether the ordinance or statute in question deserves to be kept on the books. As such, the law itself must be judged by the ultimate standard of whether it succeeds in protecting peaceful people against the initiation of the use of force and refrains from initiating the use of force itself. Nonviolent people do not exist for the purpose of obeying America law; American law exists to protect any and all nonviolent people within its jurisdiction. Accordingly, when statutes are not properly crafted — and when their errors go uncorrected — the statutes themselves become corrupt. “[...L]aw and order,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, “exist for the purpose of establishing justice[,] and...when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.” This is what has happened to federal U.S. immigration law.




Those Who Say “They Should Just Come Legally” Should Learn What It Takes for a Latin-American Aspiring Immigrant to Do So
Starting in the 1920s, federal immigration law was openly racist, imposing strict “caps” on the number of immigrants who could come in from Eastern Europe and from countries with majority nonwhite populations, while being less strict toward immigration from Northern and Western Europe. A reform in federal immigration law in 1965 genuinely corrected many of these injustices but, on account of some poor planning on the part of the reformers, the reform instituted a new injustice. I cannot fault the reformers much for the poor planning, as it would be difficult for me to anticipate all such negative consequences. Where I do find moral fault is that, in the subsequent decades, this problem has been pointed out many times and many people — mostly on the political Right — refuse to acknowledge the need to rectify this inequity, instead rationalizing the continuation and perpetuation of the injustice.

The issue is this: although the 1965 federal reform on immigration abolished what were the formal quotas on national origin based on race, they still require that to immigrate lawfully to the USA for a long-term period, you need a license from the U.S. federal government. That license is a piece of paper called a visa. There are three basic categories for visas: student visas, family reunification visas, and work visas. Student visas are for foreign nationals attending university in the United States — the sort of visa most familiar to my former classmates at Hawaii Pacific University, most of whom were from Northern and Western Europe. (Interestingly enough, it turns out that at least one Hawaii Pacific University alumnus who has resided in the USA for much of his life is among the Dreamers.) You can receive a family reunification visa if you already have family members in the United States. In some respects, the family reunification visas were part of a compromise with the anti-immigration, pro-racism lobby. Since whites still were the majority in the USA in 1965, they figured that most family reunification visas would still go to white people, or that at least nonwhites who did not have family members already in the USA would be at a disadvantage (and that is indeed the case).

The third type is a work visa. The most famous sort is the H-1B visa, which is for immigrants who can provide skilled labor. The H-1B visa is most famously associated with Silicon Valley information technology workers, but it goes to members of all sorts of skilled professions, such as doctors and university professors. H-1B visas seldom ever go to persons lacking a university degree; an exception is made for fashion models; a fashion model lacking in a university degree can still obtain an H-1B visa.

There are categories of visas for unskilled laborers; these are respectively H-2A visas and H-2B visas. These visas are for much shorter-term stays in the USA than are H-1B visas; an H-2B visa lets you stay in the USA for two years before renewal. Conspicuously, they are even less accessible to unskilled people in poor countries than are H-1B visas to skilled visa applicants.

A relatively new form of visa, introduced under the Obama administration, is the entrepreneurship visa. This is for established business owners wishing to immigrate to the USA to set up new business operations here. As you can imagine, this is not a visa applicable to most unskilled people in developing countries who do not have university degrees.

The problem with current federal immigration law is this: the 1965 reform placed a new “cap” on the number of visas that could be issued to particular countries annually. No more than 7 percent of all visas issued in a year can go to applicants from any one country of origin. This rule failed to anticipate that because Mexico is a poor country that is directly adjacent to the United States, it would make sense that a disproportionately large percentage of the people wishing to come to the United States would be from Mexico. Annually, 30 percent of all visa applications arrive from Mexico. You can see how this mismatch would bring forth a dilemma.

People from Bangladesh desire very much to come to the USA too, but they know that in any attempt to travel to the USA they would face geographic obstacles that a Mexican would not. The biggest obstacles for Mexicans in coming to the USA are not geographic but legal barriers imposed by the U.S. federal government.

The backlog for yet-to-be-approved visa applications is a nightmare. If the U.S. federal government received no new applications, it would still take over 19 years for it to clear its entire backlog of visa applications waiting to undergo full processing. On average, it takes a Mexican more than five years, from the start of the process to its end, to receive a family reunification visa. If you are in Mexico and are the spouse or minor child of a permanent U.S. resident (U.S. citizen or green card holder), you can expect to wait no fewer than six years. If, as a Mexican, you are the sibling of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, it is sixteen years.

This is from Stuart Anderson, “Family Immigration: The Long Wait to Immigrate,” National Foundation for American Policy Brief, (Arlington, VA: National Foundation for American Policy, May 2010), 1.

And if you are a thirty-year-old Mexican with a high school diploma and you have a sister who is already a U.S. citizen, the average length of time you must wait to become a noncitizen U.S. permanent resident — one of those green card holders — yourself is . . . 131 years.

This is from Philippe Le Grain, “Let Them In,” Forbes, June 10, 2010.

For a flow chart on what it takes to immigrate to the USA legally, see the one from Reason magazine over here.




How Laws Restricting Immigration Threaten Immigrants With Violence and Death
Most poor countries are poor exactly because their governments are kleptocracies. This means that the government usually refrains from protecting its citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and private property but, more often than not, violates them, and can actually violate them on the whim of the governments’ officials. People cannot count on building up productive businesses without all their wealth soon being confiscated, and that is why poverty is rampant. Only those who are well-connected with the government can operate any business securely at all. Under this system, with most people unable to count on the government for protection, many of them turn to gangs instead. For this reason, rates of starvation and murder are disproportionately high in comparison to what goes on in the First World. When someone in a kleptocracy that is south of the USA tries to migrate to the USA, it’s not a matter of someone greedily wishing to come to the USA to go on welfare; it’s a matter of someone trying to avoid dying from starvation and murder.

As Steven Sacco informs us,

One study found that between January 2014 and September 2015 eighty-three deportees who were sent back to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered after their return. They were people fleeing the killers who eventually took their lives. People like José Marvin Martínez, who fled violence in Honduras and made it to the U.S. when he was 16, but was deported and four months after his forcible return was shot to death. Or Juan Francisco Diaz, also deported back to Honduras, where he too was murdered a few months later. Or Giovanni Miranda, who, after spending most of his life in the U.S., was deported to El Salvador to be murdered in front of his wife and son in June 2015. Or Edgar Chocoy, 16, who ran away from a gang to the U.S. only to be murdered by that same gang seventeen days after he was deported back to Guatemala in 2004. Or an unnamed teenager who was shot to death hours after being deported back to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Moises, 19, was murdered after he was deported to El Salvador. And there are too many more names we’ll never know. 

What’s more, the number of deportees delivered directly to their killers does not include those who survive attempted murder or other violence because of their deportation — a number no one knows. Isais Sosa, who was 19 when the Los Angeles Times covered his story in 2014, survived being shot by a gang days after his deportation. The 19 year old daughter of Dora Lina Meza fled to the U.S. from the same gang that, after she was deported back home, raped her at gun point. After Juan Ines Alanis was deported he was kidnapped and held for ransom while his fingers were smashed with a hammer.

Many apologists for these coercive deportations claim to admire the well-known immigrant and political refugee Ayn Rand.  Note that if Ayn Rand had been deported back to the Soviet Union — and the legality of her immigration status was “iffy”  — she likely would have suffered the same fate as the aforementioned deportees.

Remember that national borders are enforced at gunpoint. From 2010 to 2016 — under the Obama administration that is falsely accused of being too lax toward undocumented immigrants — the Border Patrol shot dead Sergio Hernandez Guereca and thirty-two other aspiring immigrants. In 2014, the Obama administration fired James Tomsheck, its chief of internal affairs at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claiming that it was because Tomsheck failed to investigate those deaths. Tomsheck informed NPR that the opposite was the case: that he was fired as punishment for his having investigated the first twenty-eight slayings in that duration and discovering that at least seven of them were under suspicious circumstances. On May 23, 2018, a 19-year-old Guatemalan named Claudia Patricia Gómez González was shot dead in Rio Bravo, Texas, by a border agent because she was in a crowd of undocumented border-crossers defending themselves against the agent with blunt objects (here and here).

Likewise, when someone is being deported, he is being supervised by federal agents who have guns at the ready. They point guns at the immigrant to coerce her to return to a place where there is a high murder rate. As far as I am concerned, those who condoned the repatriation of the aforementioned people to their nations of origin at gunpoint are, morally, accessories to what happened to the deportees upon return to their countries of origin.

When most people in a country are poor, very few of them can afford university educations. Therefore, except for the fashion models, H-1B visas are seldom an option for them. And the work visas for the unskilled are even less accessible. This means that if you are poor and unskilled, with no university education and no relatives in the USA, you don’t have many options available to you if you wish to migrate to the USA legally. And it’s not realistic for anyone to expect you to wait over five years for any sort of application to be approved; the threats of starvation and murder are immediate concerns. This is why so many poor people come to the USA without any visas. It is not an accident that {SPOILER ALERT} a virtuous character in We the Living tries to cross a national border illegally.

Well-Deserved Sympathy for the  “Third-World Migrants”
The deportations are anti-life for other reasons. As I wrote of it months after the incident, on September 12, 2015 — as the Syrian refugee crisis was beginning to make headlines — when I was reading Rebecca Stott’s book Darwin’s Ghosts, about thinkers who had laid the intellectual groundwork for the theory of natural selection. Near the beginning, Professor Stott points out that because so many Athenians feared Aristotle as some sleeper agent for their military enemies, Aristotle had to flee Athens as a “political refugee.” This struck me because, although I had previously read of Aristotle leaving Athens for this reason, it didn’t dawn on me that the term “political refugee” applied to Aristotle, and yet, upon reflection, it fit. Not thinking that it necessarily had any implications for the Syrian refugee controversy, I tweeted out that there was a point in Aristotle’s life when he was a political refugee.

When Aristotle migrated to Lesbos, he was a foreigner/immigrant and political refugee. @JonathanHoenig @AbstractLogik @asherwolfstein

— ((($tuart K. Hayashi🌎💱))) (@legendre007) September 12, 2015

Evidently finding the idea interesting himself, Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, “The Instapundit,” retweeted me, himself adding, in words that can easily and understandably be interpreted as sarcastic, “Any Aristotles in this crowd?”

 I was then barraged by a number of belligerent tweets from generally right-wing people who presumed that my tweet was some thinly-veiled defense of the Syrian refugees. The belligerent tweets were along the lines of, But Aristotle was a civilized man; Syrians are unreconstructed savages, and there is not one scientist among the Syrian refugees, is there? As one anti-immigrationist put it to Professor Reynolds, “find one illegal like Aristotle.”

It had not occurred to me that my tweet could be misconstrued as me sticking up for them, but, after reading the bigoted derision of them that was directed toward me, it ironically became easier for me to sympathize with the Syrian refugees. Incidentally, there are scholars among the Syrian refugees. Rolling Stone magazine chronicles the travails of one of them, a former agricultural engineering major trying to finish his education. One Syrian refugee who did complete his education is Nedal Said, now a microbiologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. Frankly, though, if there were zero scholars among them, the Syrian refugees would still be deserving of our sympathy. If a group of people are to be kept out of the USA on the basis that the USA is presently at war against their country, that is one matter. Even in that case, though, it would not be just to attempt to write off everyone from that country and of that ethnicity, with a broad brush, as inhuman. After all, there was a moment in history when the wartime enemies of the United States looked a lot like me.

Nedal Said’s story reminds me of another. Decades ago, an impoverished boy in Mexico named Alfredo illegally climbed over a fence to get into the USA. Consistent with the stereotypes, he started out as a migrant farm worker. He saved his money and sent himself to medical school. This was Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, and he is presently one of the world’s foremost brain surgeons. Prolific in the number of operations he has performed, he has saved the lives of native-born Americans. These are native-born Americans who might have died had it not been for Alfredo illegally entering our country years ago. Coercive deportations of nonviolent immigrants may not only result in the deaths of more immigrants, but also of more native-born Americans. Incidentally, Dr. Quinones-Hinojosa was the answer I gave to the anti-immigrationist who challenged me to “find one illegal like Aristotle.”

Many people who come to the USA without visas have committed no felony other than the ones directly concerning their having come to the USA without a visa.  For instance, Andres Magana Ortiz — who owned and ran successful coffee farms in Hawaii — is under threat of deportation when, aside from having arrived in the USA without a visa, his only brushes with the law involve two charges of having driven under the influence. Similar to this is the case of Joel Colindres, who faces deportation when his only instances of lawbreaking were (1) migrating from Guatemala to the USA without a visa and (2) missing a court date. And even before Donald Trump made his decision on DACA, the Savaria brothers — both Dreamers — were repatriated to El Salvadaor. Contrary to hysterical right-wing scare stories, you are statistically likelier to be killed by a native-born American than you are by an undocumented immigrant to the USA. Therefore, a legal system committed to freedom and justice — one that serves its original purpose of protecting the peaceful from the violent — would refrain from sending armed men to detain and deport peaceful persons whose acts of lawbreaking all pertained to the mere act of coming to the USA peacefully without a visa.




“The Law,” As This Rationalization for Rights Violation, Must Be Repealed
Yet I frequently come across anti-immigrationists on the political Right — Rush Limbaugh is one of them (I take him to task for it here and here) — who insist that simply coming to the USA without a visa is an act of evil that warrants condemnation and violent retribution on the part of the U.S. federal government. Apologists for that viewpoint shout, “Do you think people should be able to break the law with impunity? The Law is The Law and we gotsta follow The Law!” I remind such people that deportations are backed by armed force. Remember my reply to PolitiBunny at the start of this essay. When they transport Mexican immigrants back to Mexico, federal agents have their guns in case the immigrants to flee their custody and return to my private plot. Again, the anti-immigrationists merely chant that The Law is The Law and we gotsta follow The Law!

People who preach that someone coming to the USA long-term without a visa is sufficient grounds for sending armed men to detain and deport him are practicing their own symbolic ritual. They shout about the need to respect and enforce the law because this ritual of chanting about it has symbolic significance for them. They say that it is their way of reminding everyone of the importance of the law — that if people can flagrantly disregard the statutes, then all order and society breaks down. But that assertion is disingenuous; those who keep chanting about the need to crack down on illegal aliens are not primarily reminding other people about anything. Rather, these people partake in this symbolic ritual — the ritual of reciting their platitudes about the sacredness of federal law — to convince themselves that they passionately care about the law and everything the law represents.

And yet they don’t. The law is not the end but the means to a greater end that the law is to serve. That greater end is the principle that no peaceful person is to be subjected to the initiation of the use of force by any party, least of all by the federal government. In proclaiming their love for American law, many people are asking that American law violate the moral principle that American law was initially established to uphold. Those who demand a government crackdown on undocumented immigrants qua their lack of documentation, are those calling for violence against peaceful human beings for the proclaimed purpose of defending an institution whose only justification was to prevent violence against peaceful human beings. If you do not value the greater end that U.S. law was first established to serve, then you do not understand what U.S. law is about.  And by disrespecting the one valid purpose in establishing law, such people disrespect the very concept of law itself.

Having Been Deprived of the Go-To Rationalization of “The Law,” Many Fall Back on These Other Rationalizations... 
Of course, anti-immigrationism has its arsenal of rationalizations for this. Stefan Molyneux rationalizes that people from Africa and South America are just programmed to go on welfare, and, by collecting welfare, such immigrants are the ones initiating the use of force against native-born whites. This is just another instance of Molyneux’s ignorance and presumptuousness (a more polite way of referring to Molyneux’s prejudice).

When you say “welfare” in the United States, the first program that normally comes to mind is federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and, since 1996, an immigrant needs to be a U.S. resident for five years before so much as applying for this.

Moreover, the biggest entitlement programs in the USA is, by far, are Medicare and Social Security. At $800 billion per year, they are the only programs that rival the U.S. military in annual cost. Because undocumented immigrants use fake Social Security numbers, the farms and other businesses employing undocumented immigrants take money out of their pay and put it into the Social Security system. Indeed, a report from 2013 finds “more than half of undocumented immigrants have federal and state income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from their paychecks.” (If you object to how an impoverished immigrant fleeing the high murder rate of his country of origin is using a fake Social Security number to obtain employment, remove the legal barriers that drove him to this desperate resort in the first place.) And this is Social Security that the undocumented immigrants will not collect — the recipients of the undocumented immigrants’ money are retired native-born Americans and retired naturalized citizens, the native-borns greatly outnumbering the naturalized. It is therefore, on a net balance, the undocumented immigrants who are paying taxes to support welfare that goes to native-born Americans. (As for both legal and illegal immigrants, they make a net contribution of 85 billion U.S. dollars to government coffers each year.)

Among the recipients of taxpayer money, native-born citizens outnumber immigrants by far; it is therefore disingenuous to single out undocumented immigrants as being the major contributor to the rising costs of the welfare state. If collecting taxpayer money is an initiation of the use of force, then repelling it would mean cutting taxpayer funding for all private parties. To target immigrants, on the pretext that they are primarily what drive up government spending, is to prioritize one’s hostility toward immigrants over any lightening of the tax burden.

Nor is there a long-term threat of mass migrations causing overcrowding throughout the country; people underestimate the quantity of land available in the United States. If there were eight billion people on Earth and they all relocated to Texas, Texas’s population density (27,923 people per square mile) would be less than the present population density of the city of Paris, France (55,673 people per square mile). At present, no more than twelve percent of the land in England is developed for urban use and no more than nine percent of the land of the United Kingdom is.




Conclusion
To demand that an immigrant having arrived in the USA without a visa is sufficient grounds to send armed agents after her, out of a purported respect for American law and order, is therefore a symbolic ritual paid to American law and order that, in practice, desecrates the greater value that American law and order were designed to safeguard. It is a symbolic gesture that pretends to pay heed to American law and order as it sullies the basis of that American law and order. To do this, one must love the symbol of a particular value more than one loves the concrete existence of that very same value.

By supporting governmental initiations of the use of force against undocumented, nonviolent immigrants, these right-wingers have relinquished any rightful claim to the concept and value of “American law and the very basis of American law.” Yet, as they do this, they try to claim custody over the concept and value of “American law and the very basis of American law.” As Rush Limbaugh has done this in various tirades against undocumented immigrants, Rush himself is not innocent of the very charge he lays at the feet of left-wingers, of putting symbolism over substance.

When I point out that undocumented immigrants are fleeing starvation and murder and couldn’t wait over six years to “do it legally,” the anti-immigrationist sneer that what I have said is but a rationalization for lawbreaking. It is actually those who cite “The Law” — as if it is God — who are delivering a rationalization. Law deserves respect only insofar as it protects the peaceful, and these anti-immigrationists cite the prestige of The Law to justify sending armed men to manhandle peaceful people. It is the anti-immigrationists’ thumping of “The Law” that is the rationalization for unethical behavior.

Yes, the Dreamers are innocent and do not deserve to be deported at the point of the government’s guns.  But we must go further and acknowledge that the Dreamers’ parents did nothing wrong when they violated the corrupt statutes that have been obstructing such peaceful people from peaceably making a better life for their children. Not only were the  Dreamers’ parents not wrong, but they deserve to be commended. Had I been in the their situation, I would hope I would have the courage to do what the Dreamers’ parents did — peaceably take my children to greater freedom and safety, corrupt federal statutes to the contrary be damned.

On January 15, 2018, I added the quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr.; I added the point that more than half of undocumented immigrants have money withheld from their pay checks as taxes paying for Medicare and Social Security; and I added the point that both legal and illegal immigrants make a net contribution of $85 billion to U.S. government coffers annually. On February 21, 2018, I added the paragraph about the Border Patrol killing 33 immigrants from 2010 to 2016.  On May 25, 2018, I added the sentence about the 19-year-old would-be migrant woman being shot dead in Rio Bravo, Texas, by a border agent. On June 6, 2018, I added that her name was Claudia Patricia Gómez González. Consistent with the news reports on May 25, I misidentified her age as 20; on June 6 I changed that to 19. On November 15, 2018, I embedded my tweet about Aristotle being an immigrant and political refugee. That was the first time I ever embedded a tweet into any other page. On April 11, 2019, I deleted my criticism of the use of the singular “they”. On Monday, January 12, 2026, I added the quotation from Deuteronomy.

Symbolater Syndrome, Pt. 4 of 4

or, Those Who Destroy a Great Value As They Perform Gestures That Symbolize Preservation of That Very Same Value


Stuart K. Hayashi


Due to the length of the original “Symbolater Syndrome” article, I am serializing it into four parts. This is Part Four of Four. 


Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Entire Essay on One Page

On the very day that Anders Breivik murdered other Norwegians, alt-right propagandist Onar Åm made this remark
visible to several hundred people, most of them in the same clique that was reinforcing the suicidal
and self-mutilating gestures of my friend. The context behind all this shall be elaborated upon below.

Objectivism Versus Symbolaters Who Call Themselves Objectivists
I’m much less conspicuous and loud about announcing my interest in Objectivism today than I was when I was sixteen . . . exactly because I’m more fanatical about it today than I was back then. To me, studying Objectivism is selfish — it’s about what I get out of it, and therefore I put more priority on learning about it on my own private time than I do on proselytizing about it to others. To the degree that I have ever enjoyed trying to explain it to someone else, it mostly came from the challenge of trying to phrase the arguments in my own way. My trying to put it in my own words was often a test that helped me gauge which aspects I did and did not understand, and it also helped bring to my attention which points I was unclear on.

Unfortunately, too many people on social media who call themselves Objectivists are more interested in something else. It seems that too many of them are pathologically grouchy men (there are pathologically grouchy women too, but mostly men) who are at levels of accomplishment no better than mediocre, but who seem to believe they are promoting Objectivism by posting an endless stream of right-wing propaganda that they tout as confirming their perpetual fear that Western Civilization, having been corrupted from within, is on the verge of collapse. Usually these so-called Objectivists stress that the coup de grace to the West will be delivered by undocumented Hispanic immigrants or by Arabs. Oh, yes, there are the tiresome postings that go on all day long about one’s hatred for Arabs and Muslims — yes, I understood your hatred for self-described Muslims in general the first thousand times you said it.

Often these grumps focus on everything they think is wrong, and when an accomplished Objectivist focuses on something positive, the grumps will try to put a damper on it. When Yaron Brook speaks of his admiration for the great feats performed in Silicon Valley, the grumps denigrate it by saying that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are all wrong in politics, as if this diminishes their discoveries in science and engineering. Another example is that when some Objectivist girl in university would praise the fiction of J. K. Rowling, the grumps would come along and denigrate J. K. Rowling for her politics. Upon seeing this, I thought, What? The girl wasn’t even defending J. K. Rowling’s politics; she was praising J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Indeed, many of the grumps patrol social media and, when they catch someone phrasing some idea in a way that Ayn Rand would not have phrased it, they pick a fight and “correct” that person. One of them, a ungentleman named Anders, spent hours and hours — then stretching into days and days — on the same thread, going back and forth in a futile “flame war.”

Anders is typical of a symbolater — in his philosophic postings, he has introduced no new ideas; what he says is pretty much repeating stuff Ayn Rand said . . . when he isn’t promoting stuff from right-wing websites that are often inconsistent with Objectivism. In the case of symbolaters, even the phrasing is unoriginal. Someone who has internalized Objectivist ideas and retains such ideas because, upon much reflection, he judges them to be correct, is able to phrase those ideas in his own words; even as he explains or paraphrases someone else’s ideas, he is able to do so in his own unique voice. By contrast, because symbolaters are simply reciting what they have memorized, a symbolater is quite conspicuous when he tries to proselytize Objectivist ideas. As soon he starts saying what Objectivism’s message is, the symbolater’s writing no longer reads as if it’s in his own voice; the phrasing, word choices, and “voice” come off as a knockoff of Ayn Rand. I’m not so worried about that among teenagers who recently learned about Ayn Rand, many of the same phrases and expressions that are idiosyncratic to Ayn Rand’s writings (such as “whim-worship” and “the death premise”) frequently pop up; it is understandable that such adolescents are still trying to find their own voice. But when an old man suddenly starts proselytizing and he sounds as if he’s just repeating Ayn Rand’s favorite phrases, that’s another story.

In multiple postings each day where they tout the impending apocalypse brought on by North African immigrants and refugees, the grumps appear to be engaging in their own symbolic ritual. The endless hysterical postings are actually purported to convey the grouchy posters’ loyalty to Objectivism; they claim this is their method of promoting Objectivism. But it often looks more like another highly negative and self-destructive habitual ritual: the habitual ritual of some adolescent girls to use a blade to inflict cuts on their own wrists.

When adolescent girls cut themselves regularly, that is often a ritual, though, as with most of the case studies I have mentioned, the symbolic meaning is usually not in their conscious minds. The implicit purpose of the self-cutting is to perform some gesture indicating that one can still exercise some control over her life. The self-cutter inflicts pain and physical damage upon herself, but she rationalizes that at least it is pain and physical damage she controls, in contrast to most of the pain she previously experienced, which was imposed by other people and was therefore outside of her control. Of course, whatever control these people claim from the self-cutting is fleeting. In the long run, they ultimately cede control and autonomy because they let the morbid gestures take over — they feel that they must continue the ritualistic morbid gestures regularly to feel “functional” and “all right.” This is a ritual that symbolizes a short-term reclaiming of control when, in the long term, control over oneself is sacrificed.

I fear that the regular pessimistic postings of many people who call themselves Objectivists serves a similar function. The regular pessimistic and apocalyptic postings help those people feel that, for a while, they can exercise some control — while they cannot control all of the insanity that goes on in the rest of the big bad world, at least they can control what they say about it on social media. But the habitual expressions of pessimism and paranoia take over, and, in this respect, an actual long-term recognition of one’s control and responsibility for one’s life ends up being sacrificed.

As Aristotle pointed out, the basis of learning is observation. In effect, going around social media and picking fights is not a winning strategy for creating a more rational society.

I knew a very eccentric woman who was a student in the classes of a rather unusual free-market theorist, a rocket scientist-turned-lecturer on capitalism. She was misguided in many respects, but she told me something that has always stuck with me. One day I asked her why she didn’t talk much about what that rocket scientist’s ideas on free markets were. She said,

The most effective method of teaching the importance of having a live-and-let-live society isn’t going around starting arguments. You demonstrate your principles primarily by living them. Converse and write about these topics if you want, but that is secondary at best. Most vital is living by these principles consistently in your normal daily life. I was once with a group of people who knew of my disapproval toward what one of my neighbors was doing. My neighbor was defying a particular ordinance, and I easily could have gone to the authorities and snitched on him. My friends then wanted to know why I didn’t do so. I replied that while I didn’t approve of my neighbor’s behavior, I approved even less of using government force to punish an action that, while very annoying, was still nonviolent and not severe enough to be considered an encroachment upon my property. They asked me, “How did you come to such an odd conclusion?” That was my opportunity to explain it to them. 

Stuart, when other people see you very consistently living by your principles, the honest and curious among them will be impressed and will ask you what’s your secret. And when that happens, they will be much more receptive to what you have to say.

That story can be summarized in five words, five words consistent with Aristotle and scientific experimentation: Demonstration is the strongest argumentation.

That is where the quotation from Bruce Wayne, with which we opened this essay, is correct: “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy.”

If you want to talk about the importance of pursuing your own values freely and peaceably and selfishly, do so. But more than that: actually do it. That is of greater educational value than are a hundred seven-hour flame wars on social media.



Not All Trump Sycophants Work For Him
One of the more severe manifestations of this is the manner in which some self-proclaimed Objectivists have made themselves apologists for Donald Trump. Here is one guy’s explanation for Facebook-unfriending me:

I have great respect for the objectivist community and the individuals in it, but I have to say... I can pretty much tell who is a mindless drone by how much they [sic; this is using a singular they] hate Trump, and who is an independent and integrated thinker by who recognizes Trump’s essential goodness, achievement, integrity, and love for his country. And who can see through the left’s dishonest smear campaign to the truth.

😶

Not all self-described Objectivists who voted for Trump are this sycophantic toward him, naturally. Some of them admit that Trump is unprincipled and that their vote for him was cynical, mostly on account of their holding a bigger grudge against Hillary Clinton. Too many self-described Objectivists, though, did praise Donald Trump as some free-enterpriser and, even more worrisome, climbed onto the bandwagon on account of their sympathy for the sleazes of the alt-right and alt-lite.

But, really, this?: “Trump’s essential goodness, achievement, integrity, and love for his country”? What is going on here?

What is going on is that since 1987 with the publication of The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump has convinced many people that he is a symbol for American free enterprise and success. Too many people who call themselves Objectivists have latched onto that superficiality, and their devotion to Trump comes from this syllogism that is based on a faulty premise.

1. Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy appreciates American free enterprise and success.
2. Donald Trump is regarded by many people to be the symbol for American free enterprise and success.
3. Applying Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy means that Donald Trump should be celebrated for embodying American free enterprise and success.

Of dispute is 2. People should examine whether the evidence indicates that Donald Trump is worthy of being associated with American free enterprise and success.

I wish I could tell you that I was never taken in by Trump’s myth-making about himself, but that is not the case. When I was seventeen years old, I said to myself, “I want to be a successful entrepreneur. Therefore, I should learn from the masters. I will read up on Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Donald Trump.” Whenever I spotted a newspaper article about any of them, I clipped it out. In the few years that followed, I read various biographies on the three of them. (At the time, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made the news headlines much more frequently than Trump did, even as The Apprentice was on the air.) None of those three men are perfect, of course, and now my favorite great inventor-entrepreneur in history is probably George Westinghouse (but that is another beautiful story for another time 😄). But even after learning about the faults of Gates and Jobs, I could still consider them helpful models for what they have done in a professional capacity. I cannot say the same of Mr. Trump — the more I learned about him, the less I could respect him overall, even as far as his business decisions went. It was his habit to over-leverage himself and then stiff his creditors; as a businessman, that was his greatest commonality with the U.S. federal government and, in that respect, he did have authentic training for what it took to become a run-of-the-mill U.S. President — that and that he already had no compunction about exercising government power to confiscate other people’s private property. The evidence pointed to Donald Trump not being John Galt but James Taggart.

There is no shame in being fooled initially by someone’s deceptions — Cherryl Brooks, too, initially fell for the false pretense that James Taggart was a productive businessman. But there is shame when more and more facts come in that disproves one’s initial positive impression and yet, contrary to the facts, one clings to one’s initial impression. That is the faking of reality. We have more and more information coming in that exposes Donald Trump as consistently dishonest — as is common for a pathologically dishonest man, there are examples of him telling lies that are small (the fake Time magazine cover depicting him, which he put in his golf clubs, and also bizarrely posing as someone named “John Miller” who talked up Trump) and telling lies that are big (the denials about collusion with Russian officials).

The most consistent trait of the Trump presidency is Mr. Trump’s pathology. I cannot fault anyone for initially becoming interested in Donald Trump in 2015 — many old people remembered him from the 1980s, when he had a much more glamorous reputation on account of much less being known about him publicly — though the very speech in which he announced his candidacy already indicated something was wrong with him, what with the bigoted stereotypes about Mexican immigrants (stereotypes that are not unlike what was commonly said about Chinese immigrants a hundred years ago). But what I do find disturbing is that even after so many facts about Trump are uncovered, too many people who call themselves Objectivists clutch their initial and false conclusion that Donald Trump embodies such Objectivist principles as candor, a respect for private property rights, and the freedom to trade peaceably with any other peaceable party regardless of that other peaceable party’s nation of origin. To go on hailing Trump as the symbol of free enterprise, against all facts, is not an exercise in rationality or indication of adherence to Objectivism; it is to act in the capacity of a symbolater.

As I said in the beginning, a symbol is worthy of the symbolic meaning invested in it insofar as there is substance — that is, factual evidence — to support it. Despite his many faults, Steve Jobs still deserves to be considered an icon, an idol, a symbol representing entrepreneurial productivity. Steve Jobs has himself made some very stupid remarks, the most egregious being “Good artists copy; great artists steal” (for an explanation of why that cliché is so heinous, see my blog post on it here). But Jobs’s achievements as an entrepreneur are real. Unlike Donald Trump, Steve Jobs didn’t run up huge debts and then take advantage of bankruptcy-law loopholes to cheat his creditors. Unlike Donald Trump, Steve Jobs didn’t lean on Atlantic City officials to attempt to steal a woman’s house or issue a thinly-veiled threat to “destroy” a state lawmaker for defending private property rights against the civil asset forfeiture racket.  Those are not minor nitpicks; they are not behaviors that right-wingers or so-called Objectivists would tolerate in a Democratic politician or self-described socialist.

If a man is going to be held up as being representative of the virtues that made America great —virtues such as financial responsibility, respect for private property rights, and honesty toward both oneself and others — then that man should have a record of exercising those virtues. To hold up that man as a representative of those virtues after the facts demonstrate otherwise is to demean those virtues and instead prioritize a false image of those virtues. This makes as much sense as talking up Bernie Madoff as a pillar of wise investing even after his Ponzi scheme came crashing down and was exposed.

One symbolic association with Donald Trump that does demonstrate merit is the comparison of him with the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus — a metaphor always implied in the accurate pronouncement that Trump publicly exhibits narcissistic traits. It is often said that Narcissus only cared about himself, but that is misleading. Narcissus’s top concern was his reflection — that is, not himself but an image that supposedly represented him. Narcissus gave priority to that image — an image that was far too inadequate in representing his character fully — as he allowed his actual, concrete self to waste away and perish. That is the same sin committed by those who falsely uphold Trump as the image of free enterprise and candor — uphold it as the Trump administration makes mockeries of both free enterprise and candor. The stolen concepts and stolen values are American free enterprise and candor. As with Narcissus and Trump apologists, the reality is being sacrificed for the sake of an image, a symbol.

Those who admitted to supporting Trump for cynical reasons are not much better off than the Trump sycophants. The cynics stated that although they winced at Trump’s incredible distastefulness, it was most important for them to “stick it to the political Left,” especially the Left’s politically-correct “Social Justice Warriors” who were so offended by Donald Trump’s sexism (sexism on Trump’s part that is, all too obviously, real and not imagined). The cynics developed such a grudge against the Left in the first place because of the Left’s consistent attacks on liberty. I cannot deny that the Left has been hostile to liberty. Thus, the cynics let their hatred for the Left metastasize into a pathology that overrides every other consideration, including the love for life and liberty. When the cynics “supported Trump” mostly as a figurative middle finger to the Left, it was an appallingly puerile gesture symbolizing a last desperate defense of liberty. In reality, this support contributed to Donald Trump coming to power so that he could deprive immigrants, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and free traders of liberty. This includes Trump’s imposition of a delay on “entrepreneurship visas.” The cynics’ gesture was a symbolic salute to liberty and an obscenity against actual liberty.




So-Called Objectivists in Norway Reinforcing the Suicidal Gestures of My Friend
As I said earlier, a principle or rule of conduct is also a symbol — the rule is an easy way to remember what specific course of action to take when a particular sort of situation arises. As we see in the case of anti-immigrationists, there is a hazard in trying to apply the same rule in every instance regardless of context — of trying to apply a rule when the context does not warrant it.

The most infamous example of this comes from Immanuel Kant. In a normal everyday situation where you are dealing with nonviolent people, “You should tell the truth” is a good rule. Kant then raises a hypothetical situation previously brought up by French classical liberal Benjamin Constant. In this scenario, a girl named Margaret is being chased by an assailant who wants to kill her. Margaret knocks on your door and asks you if she may hide in your home. You agree. Then the assailant knocks on your door politely(!), and says, “Excuse me, good sir, but there is a girl named Margaret whom I want to kill, and whom I think might be hiding in your home. Please tell me: is Margaret in your home?” Kant actually tells his readers that if you truly believe in the principle of honesty, then you should tell the truth to the would-be murderer: yes, Margaret is in my home.

This is enormous concept-theft and value-theft on Kant’s part. We have to examine why honesty is important. Honesty is important in normal everyday situations because it protects innocent human life. If innocent, nonviolent people are relying on you to be honest, and then you tell lies to them — as Mr. Trump does — that will hurt those people. Hence, the preservation and furtherance of innocent human life entails being honest with innocent, nonviolent people.  Conversely, if you tell the truth to a would-be murderer who will use that true information to commit murder, that will hurt innocent human life, not protect it. That is why the rule of “You should tell the truth” is applicable when interacting with innocent, nonviolent people and inapplicable when interacting with a would-be murderer. For you to do as Kant demanded is for you to engage in a gesture symbolizing a respect for honesty when, in fact, doing as Kant demands in this situation would destroy the very justification for honesty.  And by disrespecting the very justification for honesty, one disrespects honesty itself.

Kant’s writing of this inanity seems to have been a symbolic gesture on his part as well — a gesture symbolizing his own consistency on principle.  This same gesture actually amounted to a self-contradiction on his part — what was to be interpreted as consistency on the matter of honesty revealed an inconsistency in  Kant’s claim to be concerned about the life of the individual.  This, too, is symbolatry.

For me, this is not merely theoretical, as it came into play with a clique of people in Norway who call themselves Objectivists. When you’re interacting with people who are not suicidal and not expressing homicidal ideation, “don’t go blabbing to other people about your friends’ insecurities” is a good rule. Insofar as your friends aren’t suicidal or homicidal, to refrain from telling others about your friends’ insecurities is to respect their well-being and autonomy. However, that rule is not applicable if your friend later shows herself to be severely mentally ill, severe to the point where she has resumed exhibiting a continued fixation on suicide, self-mutilation, and even homicide.

Years ago I became very emotionally close at Hawaii Pacific University with a girl from Norway, to whom I introduced Objectivist ideas. She informed me about her having a long history of threatening seriously to commit suicide, and also of her body dysmorphic disorder: of her hating her face and wanting to find some way to disfigure it to punish herself. She even showed me her old blog where she stated all of this explicitly, in English. “[I] wish i could get hold of a knife so i could cut up that ‘little pretty’ face of mine," she posted publicly years earlier. “Cut it up and make it ugly, just as ugly as I feel..[.] i wanna fuck my face up so no1 [no one] will ever recognize me.” As this was a lot of material, I read it bit by bit over a period of months. My Norwegian friend assured me that she was finally in recovery, and I believed her at the time. When she returned to Norway for a summer, she told me that without me around, she wished there were people with whom she could have face-to-face conversations about free markets and Objectivism. On Facebook I came across a circle of Norwegians claiming to be Objectivist; at the first few glances I took, everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, and I introduced my friend to the group. Later the circle convened around a Facebook page it made called “Libertinius”; Libertinius being the name of a cartoon character who wears the Statue of Liberty’s coronet. That the coronet is supposed to be the Statue of Liberty’s is far from obvious, though, since the Libertinius character is purple all over (not a very well thought-out combination of symbols).

Unfortunately, my friend started to resume the suicidal, self-defacing, and even homicidal gestures. At the encouragement of several members of the clique, she uploaded grisly images in which she was photoshopped as a corpse with a chalky white face — the pallor mortis stage where the blood has stopped circulating. Now this was a case of someone using symbolism and actually having a record to back up the symbolism — the corpse imagery coming after a series of blog posts where my friend repeatedly announced a desire to be dead literally.  I was and am relieved that my friend did not use a knife to slash up her face, but the corpse imagery demonstrated that she found another way to “fuck my face up so no1 [no one] will ever recognize me.”  If that wasn’t already bad enough, one of the more famous members of the Norwegian Objectivist(?) clique — an internationally known artist who photoshops himself as a corpse — uploaded a very disturbing video onto YouTube of my friend delivering a monologue in which she characterizes herself as a neo-fascist “of the Fourth Reich,” alluding to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Some people tried to rationalize that my friend was “just being a Goth.” But I have known Goths, and not once did they give me the impression that they wanted to be dead literally. (Now there is a case where I can be grateful about some people’s favorite symbols — symbols of death — not being translated into concrete action.) By contrast, my friend didn’t just depict herself as a symbol of death — this was consistent with her having publicly documented her own suicidal ideation for years. This was something that was necessary for me to take seriously.

I tried to talk to my friend about this by myself. She responded by feigning memory loss; she pretended not to remember having informed me of her history of suicidal and body dysmorphic gestures. Even more disturbing, she actually expected me to play along and help her pretend that she had never mentioned any of this. After this, though, I was not willing to give up on an intervention.

Many people in Hawaii noticed my friend’s morbid gestures but very defensively told me they would never participate in any sort of confrontation with her because they were too intimidated by confrontation in general and by my friend in particular.

I then came across a blog entry that my friend had written earlier: a blog entry that my friend wrote that is a serious murder threat for her mother. She does not say she has a long-range plan to kill her mother. What she does say is that she imagines that one day her mother’s nagging and scolding will anger her so much that she will finally lose control, grabbing a knife and stabbing her mother with it. How she imagines this will play out, my friend describes in graphic detail.  The danger is not merely to my friend’s mother; I have seen that she is capable of developing that level of rage toward anyone to whom she has ever felt strong emotional attachment.

I let members of the Norwegian clique know of the context behind my friend’s morbid gestures — that this was not a matter of her liking symbols of death and darkness for aesthetic reasons, but that she has a history of wanting to be dead literally. I asked that no one would go along acting as if the morbid gestures are safe and acceptable, as refraining from bringing it up is a tacit form of reinforcement. The Norwegian clique’s members responded not with compassion and understanding for my friend, but with hostility toward me. They said it was evil and that I had broken the cardinal rule — not to talk about my friends’ insecurities. They said that my telling anyone else of my friend’s psychiatric condition was an assault on her well-being and on her autonomy. They blackballed me and some of them, such as Tore Rasmussen, went around announcing that I am all about harassing my friend.

Here is what is really going on: by proclaiming that I was evil for having broken this rule not to talk about my friend’s mental illness, the Norwegian clique of pseudo-Objectivists was evading the basis for any rules of social conduct: life as the standard. “Don’t talk about your friends’ insecurities” is a rule that remains in effect on the condition that your friend is not presenting herself as a violent threat to herself and others. That rule is not applicable when your friend is exhibiting indications of being a violent threat to herself and others.

Prioritizing a symbol over the actual value, the Norwegian clique obstructed my intervention in a symbolic show of solidarity with my friend — a gesture to convey respect for my friend’s well-being and autonomy. And as the clique’s members did this, they reinforced my friend’s pathology — the actual, pressing, and obvious threat to my friend’s well-being and autonomy. These enablers to pathology were “protecting” my friend in the same way that Galileo’s persecutors were “protecting” Aristotle. The clique was too myopic and, frankly, insipid, to notice that a right to privacy does not apply to violent threats; nor is one wrong to ask that compassionate attention be directed toward someone who is making suicidal and even homicidal gestures very visibly. The concept and value that the clique has tried to steal is that of concern for my friend; by prioritizing symbolic support for her over a genuine addressing of her self-endangerment, the clique’s members have abdicated any rightful claim to be concerned about my friend’s well-being and autonomy, and yet in their hostility toward me they expected me to believe they were claiming to possess concern for my friend’s well-being and autonomy.

That was just the first of many indications, though, that this clique, which revolves around the “Libertinius” page, is about making symbolic shows of support for Objectivism even as the clique, in its behavior, defiles the very principles that Objectivism espouses. I was wrong in my initial and superficial evaluation of the Norwegian “Libertinius” clique as being a safe to associate with. From 2011 to 2015, the “Libertinius” page denounced Norwegian politicians for disrespecting private ownership rights as the Libertinius page itself repeatedly and regularly plagiarized other people’s explicitly copyrighted political cartoons and, bizarrely, even claimed credit for memes that other people had created (just because someone doesn’t sign a meme he made, that doesn’t give someone else permission to put his logo on it and pretend that it came from him). During the 2016 presidential race, this allegedly nonconformist clique road on the Trump bandwagon and, holding itself as the defender of private property rights, approvingly shared propaganda announcing that Donald Trump had done nothing worse than having “said mean things” — was Donald Trump’s attempt to confiscate a woman’s house by force nothing more than him saying “mean things”?

Libertinius's upload of the meme that dishonestly says Trump's only misdeed was that he "said mean things." This is double propaganda on the Libertnius page's part, as the Libertnius page posted, in the comments section, one of Ben Garrison's many adulatory cartoons glorifying Donald Trump and Stefan Molyneux. When the Libertinius page posted that, Stefan Molyneux was already well-known for touting the inflammatory and scientifically dubious claim that blacks are biologically programmed to be violent whereas whites are not. Clicking on this link will take you to the Archive[Dot]Is archive of the Libertinius Facebook-posting.

In case anyone is interested, here is a correction of the mendacious meme.  The final accusation against Hillary Clinton on the very bottom is particularly baseless.

What was left out by the original meme insisting Trump merely "said mean things" and nothing worse.

 Throughout 2016, the Libertinius page touted itself as the promoter of individualism as it also promulgated the demagoguery and xenophobia (1, 2, 3) of Stefan Molyneux (and Stefan Molyneux mostly parrots the racism and eugenics of J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn of the Pioneer Fund, the latter of whom Molyneux gave an adulatory interview). When I first glanced at the clique’s websites and pages and introduced it to my friend, most of the clique was not promoting the foaming-at-the-mouth xenophobia that would emerge from 2013 onward. One prominent writer in the clique, though — Onar Åm — was already pushing and citing the eugenics of J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn, though this was typed out in Norwegian and I hadn’t bothered to read translations of his pro-eugenicist writings at the time.

The date on which I upload this Part 4 of 4 — July 22 — is a sad anniversary of sorts. It is the anniversary of the day on which Anders Breivik murdered other Norwegians. On that very day, 22 July 2011, soon after hearing about Anders Breivik bombing a government building but before he heard of Breivik shooting adolescents in the socialist party, Onar Åm made these words visible to several hundred people: “News flash:  Terror attack in Oslo, near the government.  8 people are reported injured.  Let’s hope they were tax bureaucrats and not innocent people.”

Fourteen people — including the aforementioned “Objectivist” Anders —  clicked “like” on Onar Åm’s malicious sentiment.  Only two people — a Norwegian libertarian and me — gave any push-back to Onar Åm’s malicious comment.  After the Breivik’s shooting and killing of Norwegian adolescents in the socialist party was reported, that Norwegian libertarian pointedly asked Onar Åm if he condoned that as well.  Onar replied no, he could not condone that, as those particular murder victims were minors.  Then Onar Åm added sharply that government employees are adults and therefore responsible for their own choices, and therefore they are not innocent and if they are killed violently, Onar Åm believes they just got what was coming to them.  Perversely, it was that Norwegian libertarian who ended up apologizing to Onar Åm rather than the other way around.

In the years that followed, Onar Åm has not eased up on the callous and dehumanizing attitude toward those who disagree with him.  In late 2016, he expressed this dehumanizing attitude both toward (1) single mothers and (2) women who choose not to marry and have children (for him, the only women who implicitly escape his contempt are women who marry, have children, and not divorce for any reason).

As you can see, Onar Åm does not bother to change his profile pic
over the years. If only that were his biggest fault here...

Quite apart from it having been in poor taste to begin with, my friend publicly “joking” about being a neo-Nazi “of the Fourth Reich” — again, facilitated by that well-known artist in the Libertinius clique — was especially unwise in light of the Libertinius clique’s consistent xenophobia and support for the alt-right. If you don’t want people to think you’re a neo-Nazi, then (1) you shouldn’t upload videos saying you’re from “the Fourth Reich” and (2) you shouldn’t be around people who recommend the propaganda of Stefan Molyneux, a known “Race Realist” (“race realist” being a euphemism for racist), nor a clique that recommends the propaganda of the Onar Åm who publicly wishes violent death on other Norwegians for disagreeing with him. (Here is an instance of the Norwegian media calling out the Libertinius clique, very properly, on the clique’s demagogish falsehoods.)

And after all this, some of the younger members of the “Libertinius” clique in Norway, apparently having surmised that in the years after the clique had blackballed me I had gained new clout among prominent Objectivists, actually now want me to endorse and approve the “Libertinius” page and the clique’s various other front groups (such as “the Capitalist Party of Norway”). Hell, no; I don’t appreciate the phoniness of the “Libertinius” clique. Starting in 2017 the “Libertinius” page apparently stopped with the plagiarism and stopped promoting Stefan Molyneux’s racism. But it’s too late; here’s an example of a symbol already being too corrupted. Getting the stink off would involve disavowing Kjetil Knausgård, Emil Christopher Solli Melar, Tore Rasmussen, Carlo Nerberg, and the rest of their bigot brigade. It would mean liquidating the “Libertinius” character altogether and not trying to start over again with some other symbol or project.

In more recent years, it appears my friend lost interest in the “Libertinius” clique and that she stopped uploading images of herself photoshopped as a corpse; she looks alive and human again. However, she legally changed her last name to that of a relative whom she had repeatedly hinted had facilitated severe abuse toward her. And, based on what some of her other relatives have said — including what one relative recounted to American newspapers and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s very left-wing book — there is a strong basis for suspecting that the hints point to something that really did happen. The name change, too, is a gesture symbolizing that everything is OK now. Yet knowing the context behind it casts doubt on what that symbolic gesture is attempting to convey. Knowing the context, the name change looks like another, albeit subtler, morbid gesture. Hence, there is reason to ascertain that my friend is not in recovery and the situation with her still isn’t safe.



See? She Told Ya So
Now here is one case study in symbolatry that is not as obviously tragic. On social media, it seems to have become fashionable for people to tout themselves as “investor” or “entrepreneur” when they have no promising or established enterprise to show for it. I wish I could tell you I have never taken part in such silliness, but I can’t. When I was seventeen and going through my Donald Trump fandom phase, I went around announcing, “I’m an entrepreneur!” Then someone would ask me, “What is it you sell?” To that, I could only reply, “I . . . don’t . . . know . . .” It was quite reminiscent of that scene in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow keep announcing in a diner “We’re businesswomen!” and then a waitress asks them, “What business are you in?”

Later I noticed that when successful and innovative entrepreneurs are asked to describe themselves, entrepreneur is seldom the first word that comes to their minds. They do not start off saying, “I have decided to be an entrepreneur! Now I have to decide what it is that I sell...” Nay, they tended to follow a different path. Usually what happened is that someone started out as just some weirdo who was really obsessed with something and later found a method for monetizing that obsession. There was once a boy named William who was obsessed with feet. Whenever his parents introduced him to adults, he insisted on inspecting the adults’ feet. He even carried around the skeletal remains of a human foot wherever he went with him. Eventually William grew up to be a podiatrist. Inspecting feet for a living, he noticed that many of the sores and bunions on his patients were the result of their having worn impractical shoes. William resolved to design a much more ergonomic, comfortable model. He did exactly this and patented it, and built a whole business around it. That is how Dr. William Scholl started the company that bears his name, Dr. Scholl’s.

Learning this, I remembered what that eccentric woman told me about how being a good example in your normal everyday activities is the greatest demonstration of any principle. Nowadays I try not to go around announcing that I like to think of myself as entrepreneurial. It’s not even good for me to announce that I am a writer. What matters is that I work on the creative pursuits that hold my interest, and that is what I will have to show for myself — not some title I have tried to bestow upon myself prematurely. “Fake it until you make it” is foolish advice. Regardless of what anyone else thinks, just try to make it — and never fake anything.

This is the point where a hater might say, “If Ayn Rand and Objectivism are so great, why didn’t Ayn Rand anticipate that there would be really silly people who recite her principles but do not live by them?”

Well, not even Ayn Rand could anticipate everything. I just appreciate the writing that she did leave behind. If there is something she did not explain and which I need to figure out for myself, that is no failing on her part; she has already done a lot.

However, it turns out that there are two works in which Ayn Rand did anticipate this phenomenon. In a number of respects, it is described well in her novella and play Ideal. Ideal is — it should not surprise you at this point — a work I consider to be heavy on symbolism. Throughout the story, people from various walks of life tell the glamorous actress Kay Gonda that they value her so highly that they would risk their reputations and social standing for her. They are then presented with the opportunity to act on that very promise — and all but one of them refuses. Therefore, all those phonies’ professing their veneration of Kay Gonda was meaningless at best; their letters, full of accolades, are gestures and rituals that symbolize their placing value on Kay Gonda. But in their actions, they demonstrate they do not value Kay Gonda.

{SPOILERS} Upon meeting the one man who acts upon his professed ideals, Kay Gonda discusses with him the reasons why society has gone so wrong. Initially, she thinks of the false fans who betrayed her as “Those who cannot dream.” To this, the true idealist corrects her — the false fans are “Those who can only dream” (emphasis Rand’s) — meaning that the phoniness comes from people who talk big about philosophic ideals but, when presented with opportunities to act on such ideals, default instead.

This is Ayn Rand’s anticipation of people who claim to value Ayn Rand and Objectivism and yet, through their actions — whitewashing Trump’s authoritarianism, promoting Stefan Molyneux’s bigoted rationalizations, ostracizing the one person who tried to intervene on behalf of a friend publicly exhibiting her suicidal and homicidal ideations — demonstrate hostility to the integrity and individualism and freedom and commitment to love and values that Ayn Rand championed.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand also had some choice words for people tout themselves as being serious investors, serious entrepreneurs, or just plain committed to philosophic ideals when, in practice, they have nothing to show for it. In Francisco d’Anconia’s words, such people “seek to reverse the law of cause and effect.” When Cherryl Brooks saw James Taggart’s commercial success — success that was actually James’s piggybacking off of Dagny’s work — Cherryl attributed that success to be the effect of a particular cause: that cause being productiveness. Cherryl was right, of course, that productiveness is the cause of the effect that is commercial success, but she didn’t consider that maybe James Taggart was mooching off the of the productiveness of others, just as in his shady dealings, Donald Trump has piggybacked off the productivity of other people. To be a serious investor or serious entrepreneur is an effect — the effect of productiveness. When people go around announcing themselves to be serious investors or serious entrepreneurs, they do so because they wish to be seen as productive, as if that will give them the cause (productiveness).

However, when they do not have much to show for it, such people are trying to gain the cause (productiveness) by being associated with the effect (being seen as a serious investor or serious entrepreneur). The same goes for the grumps and phonies of the “Libertinius” circle trying to gain a reputation for being serious about philosophy. A reputation for being serious about philosophy is the effect. The cause of it is consistently acting in accordance with one’s professed philosophy. That means not practicing plagiarism, not immediately doubling down when caught in the plagiarism, not promoting Stefan Molyneux’s racism, and not conveniently scrubbing all that in some effort to hide the wrongdoing.

As I said earlier, symbols will always be important to us — at their best, they are cognitive tools whereby we expand our understanding of what goes on in the concrete, literal context — but they must not be prioritized to the point where the symbol of a value takes precedence over the value itself. A gesture symbolizing someone’s defense of some value has genuine meaning, and deserves all of the positive emotion invested into it, no more than the extent to which that gesture preserves and upholds that value in concrete practice.

 To the degree that freedom of speech is upheld in the United States, people are right to venerate the American flag as a beautiful symbol of the freedom of speech. But when politicians propose a law to penalize burning of the American flag — that is, a law to censor disparagement of the flag — it is those politicians, far more than the flag-burners, who devalue and undermine the American flag’s stature as a symbol of the freedom of speech. If you make a Facebook page to praise Ayn Rand and denigrate her detractors — all the while plagiarizing other people’s copyrighted political cartoons — you insult and dishonor Ayn Rand far worse than her detractors ever have.

Yes, cherish your favorite symbols, your favorite symbols representing your professed values. But more than that, the symbols representing your professed values shall retain their glory no more than the extent to which you abide by those same professed values in your literal, concrete actions.

This is full of some of my favorite symbolism --
symbolism that retains meaning insofar as it is backed up by concrete action.

____

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Entire Essay on One Page