Ray Bradbury said, ""

The First Lesson and "Pre-Futurism"

(Remember: this is a repost from my other blog)

Pastorius at Cuanas responded to my First Lesson in Pooklekufr Constitutionalism. I will here respond to his response.

Pastorius, you must remember that all action beyond throwing feces and masturbating is based on thought. There is no freedom to act if there is no freedom to think- they cannot be separated.


The whole of human history is a record of people trying to deny this lesson. All of human history is a record of the fight to acknowledge that man's nature is not such that he can live under threat of force.


Toward the end of the 19th century, a change in political and philosophical terms began to occur. The word "liberty," once used to describe the state in which a man was not being coerced, grew to mean "free from want" or "power to do something." The word "brotherhood," once used to describe men acting in voluntary relationships, grew to encompass a system of society regulated by force.

 In the 1920's, this process was particularly apparent in Germany, as documented by writers such as Hayek and Mises who had lived through the Linguistic Perversion. They witnessed the ability to think erode under the influence of words perverted to mean their antonyms. You cannot argue for freedom with Hitler if you use the word in the same sense he did; the perversion of words about the nature of man benefits only the evil.

Under this assault on the very language of freedom itself, opposition to fascist programs such as the National Socialist agenda and the New Deal was rendered impotent. When freedom is perverted to mean only a man who is well-fed, relaxed, and happy, having gained these luxuries at the expense of another undernourished and weary man, no opposition is possible unless the word is wrestled away from this false meaning to its proper meaning.

Post-Modernism was the result of this shift. When language was assaulted in one area of thought, all areas of thought were assaulted. What had started out as an attack on the need for freedom, encompassed all areas of knowledge. Denial of Man's need for freedom led to a denial of his nature as an individual, which led to adoptations of collectivist biological theories, which led to the "atheist physics" of Soviet Russia and the medical experiments of Mengele. All knowledge came under the attack of the dissolution of meaning. Post-modernists embraced this attack, and embedded in academia, spread ripples of meaninglessness throughout all branches of knowledge. The 1960's mark the high-point of this movement: no political principles, no moral principles, and no artistic principles. The mistakes of the 1960's and 70's tempered this movement slightly, as is natural when men realize their path must lead to death.

The "End of Irony" marked a new shift in the language of freedom. No longer could the false, pro-coercion definitions of liberty be so convincingly accepted. Roosevelt might convince a nation that there existed a "right" to recreation (one of the points in his Economic Bill of Rights), yet such a fantasy is destroyed by acquaintance with societies that embody such perversions. 9/11 provided the refutation of meaningless discourse. What the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of fellow rational beings could not do, the threat of moral and physical destruction at the hands of irrational savages partially accomplished.

At what time were humans not laden with decisions about their future? As I pointed out above, the nature of our decisions is the same as it has always been: life or death, freedom or slavery. Now the question has merely been reposed in a different formulation. Instead of Mercantilism versus Economics, Communism versus Capitalism, moral relativism versus deductive morality, we have in essence sanity versus the insanity of Islam.


 You understate your case. 170 million humans were killed by their governments in the last century in an assault on the freedom to think. Perhaps billions have been killed by Islam in the 1400 years of its existence. Compared to the inestimable suffering and misery imposed throughout all of human history by the denial of this principle, a rise in traffic accidents is insignificant.


This is the principle called the extension of lethality. In the stone ages, a man could perhaps kill one or two others before being clubbed to death himself. With the invention of the bow and arrow, he could kill a dozen or so. With the invention of the gun, he could kill hundreds before being killed himself. With the invention of the nuclear bomb, one man could exterminate the whole human race.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at March 30, 2005 15:25 EST | Permalink | comments |
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