Stefan Molyneux Whitewashes the Holocaust As an ‘Overreaction’ to ‘Jewish-Led Communism’

Stuart K. Hayashi



Stefan Molyneux is an alt-right podcaster whose YouTube account, as of this writing, boasts over 870,000 subscribers. I have previously written of how he copies and specifically cites, by name, Kevin MacDonald — co-host to David Duke’s white supremacist podcast — in propagating conspiracy theories about Jews in general, specifically that a Jewish cabal has a long history of trying to undermine the United States and the rest of the West, first by founding the communist movement, and later by debating in favor of liberalizing immigration into the West from Africa and Central America. (The latter phenomenon of which David Duke, Kevin MacDonald, and Stefan Molyneux have all publicly condemned as necessarily bad.) But Molyneux’s propagandizing for racism was and is even worse than I understood.

Stefan Molyneux: Even More Antisemitic Than You Knew
The journalist Cathy Young directed me to her September 6, 2018 twitter conversation with Brandon Bahret.  In that exchange, Bahret called attention to another aspect of Molyneux’s anti-Semitism in Molyneux’s video “Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants,” FreeDomain Radio podcast 3220 (given the alternate title, on the FDR website, “Migratory Patterns of Predatory Scientists”). For that episode, the caller into the show was a scientist from India taking residence in Germany. Because the caller initially thought of himself as sympathetic to Molyneux’s nationalism, he criticized Germans in general for fearing a resurgence of nationalism in their country, lest the horrors of the Nazi regime be repeated.

The caller says, “In Germany, it’s like the people . . .they . . . kind of . . . In Germany [ . . . ] people are kind of, like, after historically they had some bad kind of politics [Naziism], they always try to be good, so that they just never want to show them, like, [we] be proud Germany, [and say,] ‘We Germans are the highest in . . .’ blah blah blah and everything in this kind of...”

Molyneux then interrupts with a defense of antisemitism in 1920s and ‘30s Germany — a move that is shocking even for Molyneux.

At the 4 minute, 44 second mark, Molyneux tells the caller,

The [1920s and ‘30s] Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led communism. And Jewish-led communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia, and they [Germans] were afraid of the same thing, and there was this wild overreaction [the Holocaust], and all this kind of stuff. So I just ran over that briefly with that stuff. [*No pause between that, and this next thought:*] But with regards to immigration as a whole,  I mean there’s this interesting question to ask if you’re in someone else’s country — and I’d like to get your answer to this. There’s an interesting question to ask if you’re in someone else’s country, which is to say, “How would I sell me being in this country, to the natives?” [Boldface added. —S.H.]

For the remaining duration of the video, Molyneux berates the caller for being an immigrant and receiving taxpayer funding from a Western government.



Hear Molyneux Himself Say All This in This Video Montage

This video is 4 minutes, 17 seconds long.



From Stefan Molyneux’s Own Mouth: Molyneux Agreeing With the Nazis That They Were Only Defending Themselves From “Jewish-Led Communists” Who Started the Fight
Someone might want to be charitable and insist that Stefan Molyneux is merely talking about the Nazis’ delusion that Jews in general were communists, and that he does not agree with the Nazi delusion that Jews and communism deserve to be associated strongly with one another. But that’s not the case. In two other videos — uploaded months away from this one — Molyneux expresses agreement with the accusation.

In “The Truth About Immigration: What They Won’t Tell You,” at the 23 minute, 38 second mark, Molyneux proclaims,

Communism doesn’t particularly come from the Greek, Roman, Western, Enlightenment tradition; it generally comes from Jewish tradition. Certainly, of course, the founders of communism were Jews. Jews were less than two percent of the Russian population but were more than fifty percent of the leaders of the Communist Party, and, of course, a lot of them were in charge of concentration camps and so on, later on under the Soviet regime.

Molyneux’s claim that “more than fifty percent” of the leaders of the Communist Party in Russia were Jewish isn’t even accurate. A free-marketer named Jacob Levy pointed out to me that, out of the 19 members of the Central Committee elected by the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party from April 1920 to March 1921, only four were Jewish. That is less than a quarter of them. There is a whole Wikipedia entry on how this same insinuation that Molyneux propagates, which has been around for a century, amounts to an old “antisemitic canard.” University of Warsaw philosophy professor Stanislaw Krajewski points out,

Most Jews were never communist or pro-communist and most communists were never Jewish. Various minorities were over-represented among the communists. This was, by the way, a paradox because communists believed they represented the working masses, the national majority. 

Most Jews did not support communism. Even in post-war Poland when the choice for Jews was limited (this is also true of Hungary) the majority of Jews were not pro-communist and they mostly left Poland.

Whose Side Is Molyneux on, Regarding World War II? Not the Holocaust’s Victims, Apparently
Molyneux also spread the same antisemitic innuendo in an oral back-and-forth in the video “Criticism: Are Libertarians Wrong About Immigration?”  This time, the call comes from a self-described libertarian who, at the time of the video’s recording, sounded as if he was still overall a fan of Molyneux’s but who took exception with Molyneux’s preaching that there must be more armed federal agents obstructing, at gunpoint, immigration into the USA and the rest of the West from the poor countries. In defending immigration, the caller brings up the incident of Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis being denied safe harbor in the USA during the Holocaust. To the caller, that was a case study in the perils of denying entry to refugees in general.

This is how it plays out, starting at the 56 minute, 40 second mark:

* Molyneux: “If you shut down immigration, it would be a breather, and it would be far less taxes, and it might give white people more of an incentive to breed, rather than not have kids because they’re paying for everyone else’s.” 

* Caller: “I mean, like, during the Holocaust, you know for instance, the Jews who were fleeing Nazi Germany were on the boat to Ellis Island, and FDR [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] sent them back, where they were killed. I mean I think that was pretty horrific, you know. The consequence of not having that immigration was that these people died and got killed. Right? So—

* Molyneux: [*Shrugs; unmoved*.] “[*Blandly*.] Yeah, so it’s really bad what Hitler did.” 

* Caller: “Right.  But FDR could have helped by allowing the Jews to have a safe haven, right?” [ . . . ]

* Molyneux: [*To deny that, Molyneux rambles on*.] 

* Molyneux: [*This is now at the 58 minute, 40 second mark.*] “[Point] Number Two is that a lot of Jews in Europe in the 1930s were communist. Oh, by God, were there a lot of communists, and a lot of the communists were Jews. Maybe they [U.S. immigration authorities during World War II] couldn’t vet them [Jews on the MS St. Louis seeking refuge in the USA]. Maybe they [the Jews fleeing Hitler] didn’t have papers. Maybe they [U.S. immigration officials] were concerned that Hitler was fighting, right, it was Naziism versus Bolshevism, right? The communists and Nazis were fighting tooth and nail in the streets in Germany.

“And, of course, a lot of Jews, as I’ve talked about before, a lot of Jews were instrumental in the founding of communism, in the spread of communism. Jews were — what? — two percent of the Russian population but forty percent of the communists, and so on. And so, there were a lot of Jews who were instrumental in the founding of communism. [Italics are emphases from Molyneux; emphases by me are in boldface.  —S.H.]

“This was a very strong anticommunist time in America, and communists were infiltrating the U.S. government considerably. I mean, this ‘McCarthyism’ hysteria, and so on? There was real foundation for it [widespread fear of immigrant communists infiltrating the USA]. There were hundreds of Soviet spies all riddled throughout the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, particularly in the embassies out in China, which is one of the reasons why massive segments of the world population were lost to communism in China, ‘cause there were huge riddles of communists throughout the place.

“So I don’t know the history, but I think that would be a bit of a security concern [*sarcasm in Molyneux’s tone, implying that the words are an understatement of the dangers from Jewish immigrants*]. So [*shrugs*] you’d have to ask FDR if you could, but I don’t know [*smug smile*], maybe the factors exist [justifying denial of the Jews aboard the MS St. Louis into the USA] and maybe they don’t, but there were some [valid national] security concerns about [Jewish] intellectuals fleeing Germany, because a lot of them weren’t, like, freedom fighters who didn’t like Naziism. A lot of them were like, ‘Damn, we didn’t win with communism. We communists didn’t win, so let’s go flee to America.’ [*Sarcastic again*:] Well, I don’t know that you want a bunch of communists coming into America. You know, it didn’t do America a lot of good during the Cold War.” [Italics are emphases from Molyneux; emphases by me are in boldface.
—S.H.]

Conclusion
When Stefan Molyneux said that Nazis thought that Jews in general were communist, it is the case that he has publicly voiced agreement with that belief on other occasions in relatively close proximity, time-wise. He proclaims that Germans in the 1920s and ‘30s were correct to be afraid of Jews in general for this reason, and that the Nazis were merely retaliating, in self-defense, against the “Jewish-led” communists whom Molyneux presumes to be the party that incited the mutual hostilities between Nazis and Jews. As for the brutalization and extermination of six million Jews in concentration camps, all that Molyneux could say of it was that it was an “overreaction” on the Nazis’ part. With that out of the way, Molyneux quickly moved on to his routine derogation against nonwhites from the developing countries.




UPDATE from October 29, 2018
The day before I first uploaded this blog post, an assailant went on a shooting rampage at a Pittsburgh synagogue. It was horrible, but that is not what initially motivated me to write out this blog post; I planned the blog post independently of that. On October 28, 2018, the same day I uploaded this blog post, Stefan Molyneux uploaded onto YouTube a video he titled “The Truth About the Pittsburgh Massacre,” where, after everything he has said over the past decade, he feigns sympathy for Jews. He spends time in the video’s first half on a tirade where he laments that when Jews marry gentiles, that is a “dilution” of purity and a “silent Holocaust.” From the 25:00 to 28:00 mark, he says he was influenced by Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Walter Block — all Jewish — so he doesn’t spread bigoted attitudes about Jews. He hasn’t retracted his comments from 2016 where he said blocking immigration from Jews 79 years ago was a morally proper measure to counter “Jewish-led communism.” In this video, he talks as if he never said any of that.

At the end, he says something interesting: that he absolutely condemns the thought of anyone using violence against other people for disagreeing with his opinions on politics or religion. I find that interesting as, for the past couple of years, Molyneux has argued publicly that violent force should be used against particular ethnic groups for the reason that most people from those ethnic groups disagree with Molyneux about politics and religion. That Molyneux has indeed publicly advocated violent force against such people, and for such reasons, is something for which I provide evidence in this follow-up blog post.

Bound to the ‘Social Contract’ Under Duress

Stuart K. Hayashi

Every time you point out that an ordinance or statute in the West is unjust, someone counters by invoking the theory of the Social Contract as posited by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In this fable, the default for human beings was a perfect freedom that proved untenable.  It was a lawlessness where everyone was a wandering recluse free to murder others but also at risk of being murdered oneself. According to this fable, this problem was solved when people came together to form the first-ever government.  In this agreement, people relinquished their perfect anarchic freedom for the sake of gaining much-needed security.

To Thomas Hobbes, you “renounceth” your absolute lawless freedom in exchange for the “security” the States provides. Immanuel Kant writes that it was a praiseworthy event in history when people agreed on “giving up their savage lawless freedom...and yielding to the coercion of public laws.” Then the Hobbesian Social Contract Theory proclaims that simply by being born and participating in this Society, you implicitly sign a Social Contract promising you will pay taxes at gunpoint and obey every single foolish ordinance or statute.  This agreement justifies the State in overriding one’s personal liberty and private property rights.

The implicit signing of the Social Contract, says Rousseau, amounts to “the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community...” Yes, this allegedly consensual “alienation” of perfect liberty is “without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be...” That is because the “constant will of all the members of the State is the general will...” And thus he summarizes, “The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them.”

To translate, if you engage in any sort of civil disobedience, you initiated the breach of the Social Contract. As with any initiation of a contract breach, this breach in the Social Contract is an initiation of the use of force. Hence, concludes this rationalization, when the State sends armed men to punish you, the State is not initiating the use of force upon you.  Nay, the State is merely exercising retaliatory force against the true instigator of the contract breach.

In this vein, Immanuel Kant propounds, “Resistance on the part of the people to the supreme legislative power of the state is in no case legitimate. . . . There is no right of sedition and still less of rebellion belonging to the people. . . . It is the duty of the people to bear any abuse of the supreme power, even though it should be considered unbearable.”

 That is far from a new idea. It is in the Bible:

...The [governmental] authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the [governmental] authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. ...rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the [governmental] authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor. [Romans 13. 1–7.]

This idea is given a special interpretation by the nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte.  This is the same man who coined the word altruism to characterize “Positivism” — his name for the socially collectivist political system he wished to impose.  In this context, Comte invokes an especially severe variant of the Hobbesian/Rousseauian Social Contract in advocating his vision for every community. In his interpretation, since birth you benefit from the actions of other people, which therefore indentures you to pay back “Society” as a collective whole forever.  On this basis, your submission to the State on everything is simply payback for the benefits you reaped since vacating your mother’s womb.

Positivism only recognizes duties, duties of all to all. . . . We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. . . . However great our efforts, the longest life, well employed, will never enable us to pay back more than a scarcely perceptible part of what we received. And yet only to our condition of complete payment could we be authorized to require reciprocity of services. Rights, then, in the case of man, are as absurd as they are immoral.

Comte’s writing on this topic are illuminating in that Comte makes explicit a premise that most Hobbesians only leave implied.  It is the implicit belief that you sign the Hobbesian Social Contract in the very act of being born.

Disturbingly, Rousseau goes as far as citing this Social Contract doctrine to advocate governmental suppression of the freedom of thought and expression: “As the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship is the declaration of the public judgment: public opinion is the form of law which the censor administers... This judgment, therefore, is what must be regulated. . . .  The censorship upholds morality by preventing opinion from growing corrupt, by preserving its rectitude by means of wise applications, and sometimes even by fixing it when it is still uncertain.” This example demonstrates that invocations of the Social Contract, being nebulous and nonobjective, can easily be employed to rationalize just about any violent encroachment by the State.

Finally, Hobbesians proclaim that this is indeed a consensual arrangement.  If you do not like it, they purport, you can easily leave the USA or any other First-World country and relinquish citizenship.  And, they would have you believe, you can do this with impunity. That you remain in the United States, they conclude, demonstrates your implicit offering of consent to governmental regulations in the USA over your peaceful personal conduct and your nonviolent business dealings. To wit, simply by not leaving the USA, you sign the Social Contract authorizing U.S. governmental regulations over what you may or may not do peaceably. As Rousseau put it, “When the State is instituted, residence constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign.”

As the philosopher Susan Dawn Wake has informed me, Plato attributes the “If you don’t like it, you can just leave” retort to Socrates himself in an well-known dialogue. Near the end of this essay, we will revisit this.  

Such invocations of the Social Contract are a favorite philosophic basis whereby apologists for expansive government power rationalize governmental encroachments on peaceful activities. It is such rhetoric that inspires Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.  He denounces laissez-faire individualists for “selling the delusional notion that taxation and regulation represent the evisceration of some essential American principle. They wax eloquent about what great things the free market and the free American could do if government would just get off their backs.” Instead, Pitts preaches, such laissez-faire individualists should concede that “government is not our enemy. Government is the imperfect embodiment of our common will.” Note that the “common will” to which Pitts alludes is the same as Rousseau’s “general will.”

This sort of thinking is also expressed by political filmmaker Michael Moore.  The reporter John Stossel pointed out to him that the State collects taxes at gunpoint. Moore then replied, “No, it doesn’t, actually. The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they’ll allow the government to collect taxes from them.”

I shall explain how this Social Contract narrative is wrong, point by point.  I shall try to make each point — compared to my usual lengthiness — relatively brief.




1 of 8. No, Man’s Natural State Wasn’t Statelessness
The essential trait of “government” is that it is a party within a society that exercises a near-monopoly on the use of force, wielding such force to enforce its will or its rules.  That is the meaning as defined by Max Weber.  On that interpretation, a primitive version of “government” is older than our species Homo sapiens sapiens.

This arrangement manifests itself in great apes living today.  Bonobos are not as fanatical about it as chimps are, but it is visible even in groups of bonobos living together. A smaller party within the larger social group of great apes has dominance. One alpha male and some trusted associates are able to impose their will on the other apes in that grouping.  They have the first pick over sexual partners.  The dominant male can even determine how much meat other apes receive after a hunt.  That can plausibly be seen as a primitive form of political patronage. It is plausible that our ancestors, preceding Homo sapiens sapiens, had a similar social hierarchy. If “government” is a smaller party within the society exercising a near-monopoly on violence to impose its will and rules, then the ancestors of Homo sapiens sapiens had at least a makeshift form of government.

It was never the case that anarchy was the default.  The most primitive form of “government” did not come about as a consciously organized contrivance to remedy that anarchy. Nor was solitude the default for humans.

And the first-ever formalized governments for our species maintained their power by imposing themselves upon their subjects against the subjects’ consent. Herbert Spencer observes that people surrendered to rule by the first formalized governments “unconditionally; and...when the ruler afforded protection” to any subject of his “it was because he resented the attempt” by rival governments “to exercise over one of his subjects a power similar to his own...”

The default for Homo sapiens sapiens was to have a society and a government.  Our choice is not whether or not to have a government, but what sort of model of government we shall adopt or maintain. Moreover, the presence of social interaction and governmental action were always prerequisites to the institution of any and every contract. Hence, society and government themselves could not have been the consequence of some grand, primary contract.




2 of 8. War-of-All-Against-All As the Opposite of Freedom: There Is No Liberty/Security Trade-Off
As John Locke and Thomas Jefferson pointed out, a condition of lawlessness in which everyone can murder anyone else is not perfect freedom, but the perfect absence of freedom. A constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State, by contrast, makes for a society in which anyone can do anything that is peaceful, and in which the State takes action only against the initiation of the use of force.  A constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State, then, is the condition that maximizes liberty. Indeed, it is Perfect Liberty.

As Locke explicates, to replace a lawless War-of-All-Against-All with a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State would be “to preserve and enlarge freedom... ...where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law:...freedom is...a liberty for every man...to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property,...not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.”

After all, how could anyone be free if any random person could come and “domineer over him?” And contrary to those who invoke Hobbesian Social Contract Theory, there is no dichotomy between liberty and security. Liberty happens to be the most important form of security: security against the initiation of the use of force. Hence, Jefferson reminds us, “...the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.”




3 of 8. The Purpose of Real Contracts Is to Protect Private Property Rights, But Hobbesians Invoke Their Fake Contract to Rationalize the Violation of Those Same Private Property Rights
Still, there are many who who cite Hobbes and Rousseau.  They say that living in society means you signed a Social Contract ceding authority over your private property and contracts to the State. As Rousseau himself articulates it,

Each member of the community gives himself to it, at the moment of its foundation, just as he is, with all the resources at his command, including the goods he possesses. ...as the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public possession is also, in fact, stronger and more irrevocable, without being any more legitimate... For the State, in relation to its members, is master of all their goods by the social contract, which, within the State, is the basis of all rights...  ...the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all... [Emphasis added.]

That argument is self-contradictory. The purpose of legitimate contracts is to protect your private property rights. Suppose you say you will give me object X in exchange for me paying you $10,000 a month later. You give me object X and, a month later, I skip out on paying you. You would consent to parting with object X only under the condition I pay you the $10,000 eventually.  Therefore, I obtained object X from you against your consent. That is why for me to renege on my agreement with you is, in practice, to steal from you.

Hence, the purpose of a written contract is protect private property rights.  Yet the invokers of the Hobbesian Social Contract proclaim that there is this supreme contract which is more important than your private property rights — and which properly overrides them.  This overriding of your private property rights authorizes governmental confiscation of your belongings in the form of compulsory taxation. It likewise authorizes government regulation to veto and overrule what you may peaceably do with your own private property.

Rousseau anticipates my reply from above. He thereupon offers this illogical counterargument: “...the possessors, being regarded as depositaries of the public good...have, by a cession which benefits both the public and still more themselves, acquired, so to speak, all that they gave up.” Rousseau’s argument is that by transferring final authority over their belongings to the State, peaceful individuals are having their belongings protected from extortionists.  Therefore, goes this argument, the property owners have lost nothing:  they are merely giving their own property back to themselves.

If Rousseau were correct, then the transaction would be superfluous.  The property owners would retain their private property just as much by not relinquishing any control over it to the State. Moreover, if this were purely beneficial to property owners and voluntary, then the State would not exercise any violence-backed laws to compel its own control over — or seizure of — private citizens’ belongings.  The citizens would turn over this control to the State without being motivated to avoid the threat of any statutory penalties upon those who decline to relinquish that control. Yet Rousseau preposterously asserts that you gain control over your private property by relenting control over that same private property at the point of the government’s guns.

U.S. Sen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advances an assertion similar to Rousseau’s. “[..I]n a democracy,” she pronounces, “the government is us. ...the government is The Public, and The Public decides what is good for itself.”

In my essay “Exposing the Fallacy of the Presumed Collective,” I examine the rhetorical tactic that Sen. Ocasio-Cortez here deploys. An individual makes choices for herself, but a collective “public” does not. Sen. Ocasio-Cortez conflates an individuals’ decision-making with “the public” in order to conceal what is going on. When “The Public decides for itself” in this context, it amounts the use of the government’s guns by a voting majority to impose its own “decision” on a civic minority that has not consented to such a “decision.”

An outlook far more rational than that of Hobbes and Rousseau comes from George Mason, a U.S. Founding Father. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, after which the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights modeled itself, acknowledges “all men...have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact [‘compact’ meaning contract], deprive or divest their...enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” (emphasis added). As I stated earlier, the extent to which you are in a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State is the extent to which you have relinquished no liberty or rights at all.




4 of 8. By Becoming Something Other Than a Night Watchman State, the Government Instigates the Breach in the Supposed Social Contract?
John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence are often considered to be in the tradition of Social Contract Theory. Thomas Paine argues in that tradition when, in Common Sense, he writes that every man “finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property” to the State “to furnish means for the protection of the rest,” and resulting in most people “consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number” of representatives. “Here then is the origin and rise of government...” James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution, is also in that tradition when he avows that “all power in just [and; it was an ampersand] free Govts is derived from compact,” a compact here meaning a contract. John Jay, who would later become the USA’s first Chief Justice, writes in The Federalist No. 2 that “whenever and however” a government “is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers.”

Another writer said to be in this tradition — one preceding Locke and Paine and Jefferson — is John Milton, more famous for Paradise Lost, with his work from 1660 A.D., The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. Even W. Rhys Roberts’s English translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric states “the law itself as a whole is a contract...” Despite their being placed in the category of “Social Contract theorists” with Hobbes and Rousseau, there is an important aspect of the arguments from Milton, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, and Madison that actually subverts the message of Hobbesian Social Contract Theory.

Again, Hobbesian Social Contract Theory states that simply by being born and participating in Society, you consent to an implicit contract relenting to obey every ordinance and statute, no matter how asinine any of them are. This means that if you engage in any civil disobedience, you are the troublemaker who initiated the use of force that is contract breach.  Thus, by sending armed men after you, the oppressive State is merely retaliating. As we saw earlier, Immanuel Kant delivered this same argument.

Whatever praise they may have had for Hobbes, it is the case that Milton, Locke, and Jefferson contradict the Hobbesian argument. They say that they only entered the Social Contract under specific terms.  Those terms were that the government ruling them would be a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State that allowed for anything that is peaceful and which punished only the initiation of the use of force. Thomas Jefferson expresses that the one proper model of government understands, “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him...” (emphasis Jefferson’s). 

According to the Milton-Locke-Jefferson interpretation, it is the case that when the State goes beyond the function of a Night Watchman State and then micromanages the private property and private dealings of peaceful people, it is the State itself that instigated the breach in the Social Contract. On that interpretation, it is rebellion against the State that is justified retaliation.

Preceding these thinkers, Aristotle observes, “We do not regard ourselves as bound to observe a bad law which it was a mistake ever to pass...” John Milton cites this same Aristotle’s Politics in proclaiming that as State officials have historically “abus’d thir power, and governments grew larger,” the civilians were correct in “deposing thir tyrants...”

John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government makes plain that when the government becomes something other than a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State, taxing civilians severely and micromanaging their private property, the officials in charge have “put themselves into a state of war with the people...” And Locke’s argument continues that by reneging on their contractual commitment to liberty, these officials “forfeit the power people had put into their hands...” On those grounds, civilians are “thereupon absolved from any farther obedience” to the government. And we know the argument of the Declaration of Independence.

But, of course, it is silly to try to determine if the Milton-Locke-Jefferson side is more correct than the Hobbes-Rousseau side. Ultimately they are arguing over a document that does not exist and never existed.  The U.S. Constitution itself does not meet the criteria for a contract.  Its being a terribly important legal document does not make it a contract. These philosophers, therefore, are arguing over the attributes of a figment of the imagination — and a vaguely described one at that. Herbert Spencer is blunter than the rest: “Before submitting to legislative control on the strength of an agreement alleged to have been made by our forefathers, we ought surely to have some proof that such agreement was made. But no proof is given. ...there never was such a contract.”




5 of 8. The Social Contract As Void, Not Because There Is No Written Copy of It, But Because You Are Bound to It Before Its Terms Are Made Clear to You
This brings me to a common libertarian rebuttal against Hobbesian Social Contract Theory, a rebuttal I find inadequate. Citing nineteenth-century anarchist Lysander Spooner, many libertarians quip that they dare the Hobbesians to show them their signature on a copy of the Social Contract.

As Julie Borowski sarcastically puts it, “I would like a copy of the social contract that I supposedly signed for my records. Anyone know where I can find it?”

I would like a copy of the social contract that I supposedly signed for my records. Anyone know where I can find it?

— Julie Borowski (@JulieBorowski) May 8, 2012

The implication is that since these libertarians did not put their pen to the bottom line of any such formal document, they cannot legitimately be committed to it. This argument is premised on the notion that a contract must be written out to be a valid contract to which participants must be bound.  Such a retort is insufficient.  Common law properly recognizes that a contract does not have to be written out to be a valid contract that courts can rightfully enforce. There are oral contracts.  They are rightfully binding even if the parties rely merely on their memories as they argue over it in small-claims court. There are common-law marriages and other estoppel contracts in which a contractual arrangement is implied by participants’ reciprocal actions, not verbalized promises.  A contract being notarized strongly improves its chances of being enforced in court, but notarization is not always needed in every instance.

However, these unwritten contracts still possess an important attribute lacking in the supposed Hobbesian Social Contract.  It is that a valid contract — even an implied one — must make its terms clearly accessible to a participant prior to the deal being sealed. Moreover, once these terms were presented, every participant of the contract had the opportunity to reject the arrangement prior to the arrangement's execution. And yet any and every government will enforce its laws upon you absent of your being informed of any of the provisions of a Social Contract from which the government ostensibly derives its legitimacy. Hence, if your government derives its powers from a Social Contract, then that contract is forced upon you under duress. And that actually voids and invalidates that contract as rightfully enforceable.

Note that your ostensible signing of the Social Contract is often invoked by Hobbesians when they proclaim that the Social Contract rightfully authorizes the government to micromanage and overrule the contractual terms you have negotiated with your employees concerning financial compensation and working conditions. That is, Hobbesians cite an imaginary and fake contract as superseding and legitimately vetoing the enforceability of actual contracts you have negotiated.




6 of 8. If a Man Would Have the State Violently Enforce His “Social Contract” As It Would a Real Contract, His “Social Contract” Should First Have to Meet the Criteria Required of a Real Contract
At this point, the Hobbesians can reply,

You misunderstand. It is true that a normal business contract must meet particular criteria to be valid and enforceable.  But the Social Contract need not meet those requirements.  The reason is that we never said it was a literal contract. We simply call it a contract as a metaphor or analogy to help people understand the reciprocal relationship between a government and its citizens. The Social Contract is still what legitimizes our government regulations over your body and belongings, though.

The proper rejoinder to that is this. You say that if I violate your Hobbesian Social Contract, the State is right to send armed men after me, just as a State would properly do if a court found that I had breached an actual contract. If you admit that your Social Contract is not a real contract, then you should likewise admit that it’s not as legitimate to try to enforce it with armed government agents as a real contract is.




7 of 8. Mere “Residence" in a Country "Constitutes Consent” to Its Alleged Social Contract?  
A final point must be made about this fake contract. Again, Rousseau asserts that mere “residence” in a region “constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit” contractually to every new ordinance or statute it may impose in the future. Following from that premise, Hobbesians assert,

The Social Contract is not imposed on you under duress.  This is because, through your actions, you do demonstrate that you implicitly consent to it. That action is: remaining in the country. You could leave this country and relinquish citizenship easily — and with impunity — and yet you do not. From this, we can only conclude that your remaining in this country is your implicit signing of the unwritten Social Contract.

As noted above, that argument is at least as old as Plato’s accounts of dialogues between Socrates and other Athenians.  Plato quotes Socrates putting it to his conversation partner Crito,

...let us suppose that the laws...say to me, “...Since you were born because of us and were raised and educated because of us, you could say that you are ours, our son and our servant. . ...if you do not like us, you have the right to pick up your goods and leave and go wherever you wish. ...  And so, if any of you remain here,...then we take it that you have in effect, accepted your responsibilities towards us and that you will execute whatever order we give you and if you do not, then we say that you has wronged us...” . . . What would I say to that, Crito? Could I possibly disagree?

Socrates and Crito both take that argument to be unassailable.  But that argument is entirely false — and manipulative. It is not true that you can easily abandon your citizenship and leave the country with impunity. Most countries require that if you renounce your citizenship, you must pay an exit fee. And, if you do not, you remain legally liable for future taxes that country’s government wishes to claim from you. For many First-World countries, the exit fee is equivalent to hundreds of dollars — in the case of the United Kingdom, it is the equivalent of over 340 U.S. dollars. For the United States, it is $2,350, and you must show that you were in compliance with the IRS during your final five years as a U.S. citizen. To leave and renounce citizenship — thereby avoiding future tax liabilities — you still have to pay that final ransom under duress.

You do not have the option to leave the country and renounce citizenship freely.  You still have a gun pointed at you if you do not cough up the final ransom. Hence, it is the case that if your government’s authority relies upon the existence of a contract, that contract was imposed on you under duress after all. And that, again, would nullify the legitimacy of that contract.

Incidentally, it is theoretically possible for you to be “stateless” — to renounce your citizenship with one country and not gain citizenship from another. In that circumstance, you will need a visa — a permission slip from the State to remain in the country where you dwell. Should you refrain from obtaining either citizenship or a visa, the country shall deport you at gunpoint to another country.  This second country, in turn, shall deport you at gunpoint as well to yet another nation, and on and on. Hence, to be “stateless” is still to have governments exacting their violence-backed authority upon you.




8 of 8. You Cannot, in a Vacuum, Consent Before-the-Fact to a Night Watchman State; The Night Watchman State Is the One Model for Society That Cares in the First Place Whether You Offer Consent to, or Withhold Consent From, Anything at All
I am not an anarchist. I do not agree with Lysander Spooner that you must consent, before-the-fact, to the existence of a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State for it to be justified in using retaliatory force against you after you mug someone. No, Spooner’s notion is just another spin on Social Contract Theory. As I said before, a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State’s rightful authority does not hinge on the existence of any Social Contract.

Anarchy is not even an option.  If all the world’s government’s collapsed tomorrow, then some party would rise up to attempt to monopolize force over a region.  That party would become a makeshift government. Thus, the choice is not whether to have a government, but what sort of government we shall have. And the sort of government conducive to human flourishing is the constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State.

To say a government derives just powers from “the consent of the governed” makes sense in but one context.  The most rational interpretation is that a just government cares about the consent of those it governs, meaning that in your everyday affairs it properly distinguishes consensual action from coercive initiations of the use of force.  As a corollary, that just government would use its violent authority only against parties that initiated the violent coercion.

On Tuesday, November 27, 2018, I added the section about Auguste Comte and the quotation from him. On Thursday, July 16, 2020, I added the quotation from Julie Borowski.  I had already known about the quotation before writing this essay, but I was not able to find the quotation again for reference until this date.  On this date, I also shortened the sentences, added the quotation from John Jay, and added the point about notarization. On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, I added the tweet from Maus Merryjest and the section about Socrates. On Thursday, January 20, 2022, I added the section about U.S. Sen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

America, The Independent Republic

Stuart K. Hayashi

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

—Thomas Paine on the American Revolution

“CapitalistPig” Jonathan Hoenig edited and published the anthology A New Textbook of Americanism. It features the original Textbook of Americanism, a series of essays in question-and-answer format that Ayn Rand wrote to explain the individualist principles upon which the republic was founded. Ayn Rand was not able to complete the entire series, but she wrote out a list of the remaining philosophic questions she had intended to answer. For the remainder of A New Textbook, Jonathan and other Objectivist scholars have taken it upon themselves to answer those remaining questions, both according to their own knowledge of the subjects and also according to how they think Ayn Rand might have answered. I have assisted Jonathan in the editing and contributed an answer to the question “How to identify a Nazi?”

The online conservative periodical The Resurgent has published an op-ed from me on this topic that is adapted from the book, “What’s the True Meaning of Americanism?”

Previously I have written that, on account of it being founded on principles of openness and on rewarding individual businesses for their merit, regardless of their country of headquarters — prioritizing such individual merit above collectivist nationalist and ethnic considerations — America is and always has been “the globalist republic,” in the best possible meaning of globalist. I stand by that, and in the op-ed, I add another layer: America was founded as the Independent Republic. I say,

In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal and independent...” In keeping with the burgeoning philosophy of its time, the Age of Enlightenment, this draft declared independence in a respect even more significant than independence from Britain: that each peaceful adult is independent in how he is to navigate his life. In more context than one, then, America was always to be the Independent Republic. This idea came to be known in the late nineteenth century as the spirit of Horatio Alger, and what twentieth-century historian James Truslow Adams later dubbed “the American dream.”

Not only is it possible to be both an independent individualist and an economic globalist, but to describe oneself as both is to be redundant.

A parochial collectivist — an economic nationalist — will demand that his fellow countrymen purchase goods or services primarily according to whether it benefits other members of their ethnicity or some other group designation in which they had no choice in joining. The parochial collectivist and economic nationalist expects that his countrymen prioritize this over their individualistic freedom to purchase peaceably whatever good or service best serves their individual needs.

By contrast, the independent individualist prioritizes the satisfaction of her own individual needs, and knows that maximizing the opportunity of completing this task requires that she have the freedom to purchase such goods or services from any peaceable vendor from anywhere, including vendors who are not of her race, sex, or cultural background.

I thank Katherine Revello, who maintains the Politics of Discretion weblog, for pointing out to me that Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence said that “all men are created equal and independent.” The Declaration remains beautiful and important, but its meaning would have been even clearer if that independent had been kept in the final version.

Yes, America is the Independent Republic — not only independent from a colonial master, but the republic wherein the independent individual has the freedom to thrive, doing business with other independent individuals throughout the world.

Progress Hindered Not By ‘Slave Morality’ But By ‘Caveman Ethics’

Some Emotional Biases That Might Have Helped Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Procreate Are Not So Helpful to Us — But This Can Be Overcome



Stuart K. Hayashi




A major problem in the world is not what Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed a “slave morality,” but what I call “caveman morality” or “caveman ethics.” Before I address these matters more fully, I must issue some caveats.

First, slave morality was always a creepy expression, as it has been used to denigrate slaves much more than their masters. The idea is that because the master dominates the slave, that means the master is strong and the slave is weak. And no one wants to be weak. When someone says you follow a “slave morality,” it is to demean you as weak, just as a slave is presumed to be. But the slave’s efforts feed both the slave and the master; the master here functions as a dependent on the slave. Qua this arrangement, it is the slave who is stronger and more admirable, and it is the master, not the slave, who should feel abased. A code of ethics that condones coercive domination over others is much more shameful than a “slave morality.”

The real scourge is “caveman ethics,” but I must provide a disclaimer about the extent to which caveman can be taken as a pejorative in this context. There is nothing inherently bad about cavemen. We owe much to them, insofar as they practiced ingenuity that later generations built upon, and which continues to benefit us to this day. As I shall explain below, though, we benefit today not by the extent to which cavemen acted upon their collectivist cognitive biases, but by the extent to which some relatively psychologically independent cavemen and -women advanced technological progress by defying the social collectivist norms of the very clans and tribes from whence they came.



Life During Over 89 Percent of Our Species’ History
This is the situation. Compared to the span of most of human history, our life in industrial civilization — in republics bound to constitutions enshrining the rights of the individual — is very new. That is the past 300 years, compared to humankind’s lifespan that exceeds one million years. Even our living in cities and practicing agriculture as our main source of food is a relative blip. Life as hunter-gatherers constitutes over 99.5 percent of the history of members of the genus Homo, and constitutes over 89 percent of the history of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens. The extent to which industrialization and liberal republican politics have changed the human habitat both geographically and socially is enormous, whereas the extent to which human physiology has changed is comparatively minuscule. And included in that “human physiology” is brain chemistry.

We do not dress like cavemen; we have technologies that were not at their disposal. But, to a large extent, we have inherited cavemen’s cognitive biases, which were often socially collectivist. This is because, over the course of 89 percent of the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, environmental pressures “selected” for the human clans’ possession of emotional tendencies toward social collectivism, usually weeding out independence and rendering independent-minded persons a rarity.

By contrast, whereas psychological independence is very important for modern life in an industrialized, more-liberal republic — the most successful entrepreneurs succeeded largely as a consequence of their psychological independence — the modern environment has not weeded out any genes within individuals that might have imbued them with psychological biases toward social collectivism. This is for several reasons. First is that this new environment is fewer than 500 years old, which is much less time than the million years it took for the propagation and establishment of genes that might have imbued our ancestors with emotional biases in favor of social collectivism.

Secondly, as a very consequence of the innovations sired by individualists such as George Westinghouse, the mortality rate overall has declined, across the board, for people in the industrialized, more-liberal republics. If a man is born with an emotional predisposition toward social collectivism, and, more importantly, chooses to act on those predispositions, the more-liberal republican, industrialized environment has still made it unlikely that such a man will die before he has had his own children and reared them to adulthood. And since that collectivist man’s children have inherited his genes, they have likely inherited whatever genes might have encouraged their father to have an emotionalistic, cognitive bias in favor of social collectivism.

Of course, as natural selection has also imbued every member of our species with volition (that is, free will), it does not follow that this man’s children are programmed to let such emotionalistic, pro-collectivism cognitive biases control them; they can choose to think over matters and override any such emotionalistic, pro-collectivism cognitive biases. But anyway, this is the set of circumstances that we have been dealt: as a default, people often fall back on the emotionalistic, pro-collectivism, cognitive biases of their ancestors.



Not “The Reptilian Brain” But “The Caveman Brain” 
We can think of it this way. Pop psychology writers often say that if you act on impulse, you are succumbing to “the reptilian brain.” The idea is that our reptilian ancestors always sought immediate gratification, and therefore, when we do the same, we are falling back on a default we inherited from our reptilian ancestors. That expression is quite misleading, as the ability of lizards to learn and process their percepts is more complex than that. Bearded dragons experience deep sleep, which suggests they might dream — just as mice and cats do — and they learn new skills through observation. But here I will employ a concept similar to “the reptilian brain.” When people go with socially collectivist “tribal loyalties” mindlessly, rather than examine a matter, and when they immediately come to some fallacious conclusion that seems obvious but which is refuted by empirical evidence and economic science, such people are falling back on a default they inherited from their collectivist hunter-gatherer ancestors. That is not “the reptilian brain” but “the caveman brain” or “caveman psychology.”

For a person to be guided by his “caveman brain” in matters of social ethics and political economy is highly problematic for two reasons:   1) it is mismatched with the modern environment, which is more psychologically individualistic, laissez-faire liberal, and industrialized, and 2) all the progress and advances of the modern world — the aforementioned psychological individualism, laissez-faire liberal republicanism, and industrialization — were themselves the result of our bravest forebears triumphing in psychological independence as they overrode “the caveman brain” both within themselves and the people around them.



What Environmental Circumstances Encouraged Social Collectivism Among Our Ancestors?
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived through a process that William Donald Hamilton dubbed “kin selection.” This means that an intra-species competition for food and other resources does not pit one individual against other individuals, but a family unit against other family units. Charles Darwin gave the example of insect colonies and hives. An ant colony is a single family unit. Worker ants and soldier ants are sterile throughout their lives, but insofar as they contribute to the physical well-being of the queen and the males with which the queen mates, those worker ants and soldier ants will contribute to the hatching and proliferation of family members who share their genes. Hence, although a worker ant does not itself lay any eggs, a worker ant acting in accordance with its assigned role shall help that worker ant propagate its own genes indirectly.

Hunter-gatherer clans were not so regimented, but a similar phenomenon was at work. Human beings lived in clans in which most of the clan’s members were genetically related; there was no distinction, at that time, between “family” and “village”; “family” and “community” were the same. Even if a man died before ever having sex, if he did something that contributed to the continued existence of the clan as a whole — if he helped save other clan members in battle — then, as long as other members of his clan survived and reared their own children into adulthood, that man would still be propagating his own genes via an indirect means.

Rev. T. Robert Malthus’s theories about population pressures did apply to nomadic hunter-gatherer clans. They traveled around a continent consuming resources and did not replenish those resources. If the number of nomadic hunter-gatherers got too large, they would reach a point where there was not enough food or other resources per capita, and there would be mass starvation. Hence, clans (and, later, tribes) would go to war against one another for land and other resources. These environmental pressures encouraged an “us-versus-them” mentality in possibly two ways. As this process went on for over a million years, it is conceivable that the family units/clans that survived and propagated themselves were the ones possessing genes that emotionally predisposed the genes’ carriers toward having, as their psychological default, a socially collectivist, “culturally chauvinistic,” us-versus-them mindset.

Moreover, this mindset would also be transmitted and enforced culturally — if this bias was not the default, the clans that survived and perpetuated themselves would still be the ones that chose to inculcate such social collectivism among its children; any such children who grew into adults and survived various wars would transmit those ideas to their own children. For such reasons, for most of human history, “us-versus-them” was the default and norm, and almost all people considered it obvious that economics and wealth were a zero-sum game, in which one person having more wealth and resources necessarily meant there was less wealth and fewer resources available for everyone else. The psychological tendency to believe, as a default, that survival and eating and resource-accumulation are a zero-sum game is a tendency that modern human beings might have inherited biologically. And this belief was definitely taught and transmitted culturally for over 89 percent of our species’ existence. Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute dubs this mindset “parochial altruism, a predisposition to be co-operative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders.”

Also note that such clans were small. Robin Dunbar points out that such clans seldom had over 250 people in them. Because the clans were so small, it was common for someone to have regular, personal, face-to-face interactions with other members of one’s own community. The idea of treated someone from one’s own community “impersonally” was still alien to human beings. A human being could only be “impersonal” toward someone from outside of his clan. The impersonality was not always confined to enemies in wartime. In times of relative plenty, separate clans would trade with one another rather than battle, though the modicum of trust between these clans were fragile. In such a case, a trading partner from a separate clan would not be condemned as an outright enemy, but instead regarded impersonally as someone neutral. Temporary allies and trading partners were still regarded as being from the outgroup, not the in-group.



The Newer, More Individualistic, Positive-Sum Environment
Of course, the human species was not always doomed to a life of inter-clan warfare over food resources. What changed matters was the invention of agriculture and then the adoption of farming grains as the main source of food. Crops were the first natural resource that human beings learned was renewable. As noted by Jean-Baptiste Say and Julian L. Simon and Ronald Bailey, it is not the case in a free-market economy that human beings are doomed only to deplete natural resources until nothing is left.

In the process of producing units of output to sell, an entrepreneur needs inputs — natural resources, human labor to convert those natural resources into units of output, and tools for the laborers to use in that conversion. And the tools themselves were crated from prior exercises of entrepreneurship in which the entrepreneur managed and instructed laborers in converting natural resources into those tools. The entrepreneur must trade away some of her own wealth to acquire those inputs of labor and natural resources; using up many inputs imposes a cost on the entrepreneur that eats into her profits. Hence, the entrepreneur can downsize her costs — and thereby upsize her profits — by devising ingenious methods of producing more economic value in her units of output even as she uses up ever-fewer and ever-smaller inputs of labor and natural resources to do so. As an example, in the year 1900, to took ten pounds of coal to light a 100-watt light bulb for an hour; by 2002, it took only one pound of coal to perform the same task. Ronald Bailey gives other examples.

Since the 1970s, the weight of the average car has fallen by 25 percent. Food cans are 50 percent lighter than they were 50 years ago. A flexible plastic pouch that replaces a steel can reduces the packaging weight by 93 percent. Plastic soda bottles are 30 percent lighter than they were in the 1970s — which were already much lighter than the glass ones that preceded them. Similarly, plastic grocery bags are 50 percent thinner than they were 20 years ago and lighter than the paper bags they replaced. 

The empirical data evince that trading under freedom is a positive-sum game. But when people do not bother to think about this, they default to the emotionalism of “the caveman brain,” which presumes that one person getting richer inexorably spells that everyone else is getting poorer.

In New Scientist magazine, Graham Lawton elaborates on how Donald Trump’s demagoguery against free trade and immigrant laborers gets such a strong gut reaction from so many people:

Zero-sum thinking was an evolutionary adaptation to a time when we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, says neuroscientist Dan Meegan at the University of Guelph in Canada. Under those circumstances, resources such as food and mates were finite and often scarce, so more for one person meant less for another. Today, however, things are different. 

A good example is international trade.... People find it hard to believe that a trading “win” for a foreign partner doesn’t lead to a loss for them. This is one reason why free trade is politically unpopular among people it would benefit.

It was when human beings switched to farming grains as their main food source that they also began to form large cities. This was when people began to live in relatively small households within such a city. On a cognitive level, they began to make a distinction between “family” and “community,” and also a distinction between “member of my family” versus “member of my community.” However, because of the emotional predispositions that these city-dwellers had inherited from their nomadic hunter ancestors — and remember that the nomadic hunter lifestyle comprised over 89 percent of humanity’s history — these city-dwellers still did not always distinguish “member of my family” from “member of my community” on an  emotional level. This is why, although city-dwellers have come to view strangers in their community much more impersonally, they can develop an emotional bond with someone from their community who is not closely related to them genetically. It is also why sometimes someone can develop a stronger emotional attachment to a friend or coworker than to an uncle or cousin.

Because so many emotional predispositions remained the same, the hunter-gatherer’s emotional bias toward the sentiment of “sacrifice for the family/clan” became the city-dweller’s bias toward the notion that the moral ideal is for the individual’s well-being to be sacrificed for the ostensive well-being of the community as a whole. The idea that the individual’s rights are less important than the purported welfare of “the larger community” is something inherited from “the caveman brain,” and it is the modern manifestation of “caveman ethics.”

“Gorilla Kidnaps a Woman,” 1887,
by Emmanuel Frémiet.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
As long we retain our 
hunter-gatherer ancestors’ rudi- 
mentary  interpretation of ethics, 
we are  held  captive  by 
ancient  hominids.

How the Caveman Brain Remains — And How Some Want Us to Be Held Captive By It
As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, it is the peaceable egoism of entrepreneurs — acting under the relative freedom of a more-liberal republic founded on the principles of individual rights — that should be thanked for reducing the mortality rate, lengthening and improving human lives. But again, this is mismatched against the notion of warring nomadic hunter-gatherers that some peaceable self-interest is morally neutral at best, and that what deserves most esteem is sacrifice of the individual for the clan.

As I have written here before, many evolutionary-psychology promoters such as Eric Michael Johnson proclaim that just because our warring nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors considered that the ethical norm, it follows we that we modern industrial republicans should as well. This assumption on the part of Eric Michael Johnson and his ilk is ironic in that, exactly because psychological individualism and liberal republicanism and industrialization have advanced us so far, the same population pressures that influenced our hunter-gatherer ancestors to regard collectivist self-sacrifice as the ethical norm are circumstances do not even apply to us. This insistence on clinging to collectivist self-sacrifice as the ethical ideal is itself a default to “the caveman brain,” and a clinging to “caveman ethics” that are, at best, obsolete.

That human beings are still influenced by “the caveman brain” helps explain the following:

• Why many people regard their favorite TV celebrities — no matter those celebrities’ ignorance about health science — as more trustworthy experts on human health than actual scientists are.
• Why many people find it easier to believe, fallaciously, that the summer 2007 financial crisis was deliberately caused by a tiny cabal of “globalist” billionaire bankers who conspiratorially control everything, rather than accept what actually happened: the crisis was the mostly accidental result of large, bureaucratic, impersonal institutions having difficulty in communicating data accurately to one another.

Conclusion
I won’t go over all those explanations in a single blog post. But suffice it to say that human beings still defaulting on their “caveman brain” will lead them to cling to the sort of primitive interpretation of ethics that their caveman ancestors held. And this is a dilemma because those outmoded interpretations about ethics give people a very misleading impression about what happens in modern life; this is what leads them to misinterpret the very same peaceable global trade that has lengthened and sustained their lives and their family members’ lives as some evil that has harmed them.

Again, this is not a discounting of free will. One can refrain from being misled by the cognitive biases of “the caveman brain” by being aware of them and, when coming to a decision, rationally considering whether the emotion-driven biases from “the caveman brain” match up with the data and the principles of nature, including the principles of economics. Through our own free will, it is thus our task to educate our fellows about the perils of being controlled by “the caveman brain” and unthinkingly following “caveman ethics.”

In Remembrance of Corey Baum

Stuart K. Hayashi

We missed Corey at OCON 2018, and we will continue to miss him, always.

Corey Baum started the In-the-Closet Objectivists podcast with Dr. Meghann Ribbens. The admittedly strange title came from the place from which they first broadcast the show: it was a space so enclosed that it was if they were in a closet. Over time, they came to joke about the irony of the title, as they made no secret of their philosophic convictions. Months later, I was honored when they invited me to join them as a co-host.

Corey passed away last night. He was a highly spirited, good-humored man; he loved to debate, and he debated with passion. In the relatively short duration through which we got to know each other over BlogTalkRadio, we had laughs and discussed our favorite movies. He encouraged me to talk matters out, many times having more confidence in me than I did. My heart goes out to his wife and daughters; his family lost someone great. His wit and wisdom will be long remembered and cherished.


______________



ADDITION on Friday, September 28, 2018: On Thursday, September 27, 2018, Meghann and I recorded the final episode of In-the-Closet Objectivists, a retrospective on Corey.

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.

Zuckerberg Built That

Stuart K. Hayashi

Philip Rearden: “They pursue a ruthless, grabbing, grasping, antisocial policy, based on nothing but plain, selfish greed. [...]” [...]  

Hank Rearden: “Philip, say any of that again, and you will find yourself out in the street, right now, with the suit you've got on your back, with whatever change you've got in your pocket, and nothing else.” [ . . . ] 

Philip: “But don’t I have any freedom of speech?” 

Hank: “In your house. Not mine.”

—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, “The Concerto of Deliverance”



 Hank Rearden’s words need to be repeated to every person who, feeling aggrieved that Facebook doesn’t want to publish his diatribes against Mexicans, pouts that Mark Zuckerberg just owes it to him that Zuckerberg provide him a platform for his diatribes against Mexicans, and demands that the government overrule Zuckerberg’s control over what Zuckerberg peaceably created. The house that is Facebook was built by Zuckerberg; it was not built by the man who wants to use Facebook just to air his endless diatribes against Mexicans.

Photo taken by Jonathan Hoenig.