What is Wrong with Us?

Part 2

By Roberto Diego

Copyright 2008 Roberto Diego.  No part of this article can be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author.  You are free to distribute links to this page of quote it briefly.  Publisher interest is welcomed.  robdiego@aol.com

I think I could start every essay that I write with the observation that we are a nation committing suicide.  Though our nation was so carefully constituted and the result was a nation of success, affluence and open expression, it is also true that the secular nature of our society is under attack by religionists on the right and environmentalists on the left.  One political party uses entitlement programs to build a framework for a welfare state while the other would like to enshrine God as the source of our laws.  Most people are on the edge, not knowing where to stand on major issues and preferring instead to compromise with people who have no love for this country.  Everywhere we have dueling forces and nothing is getting done.  What is wrong with us?

I have identified four important principles that explain what is wrong with us:

·          We don’t understand that we are a fascist state

·          We don’t understand individual rights

·          We don’t understand that altruism is not good

·          We don’t understand the philosophy that creates doubt

Individual Rights

Since environmentalism seeks to regulate man’s progress and eventually to wipe it out, its leaders must take a collectivist approach to all political issues.  This approach has been fairly common through out history.  In the past, tribal witch doctors convinced their tribesmen that in order for the group to survive, they had to work together, each member had to give up his time, his possessions; he even had to worship the group above himself in order for the group to survive.  Dissent, of course, meant death or ostracism.  Today, this method continues in the pronouncements of progressives and environmentalists alike.  Both groups proclaim that men don’t have the individual rights that the Constitution proclaimed because our situation is new; the only way to save the planet is for men to join in a collective effort to ensure that we do not produce more hydrocarbons; that the individual is the problem because he does what he wants and this threatens the planet.  Someone who disagrees with this approach is a “denier” and should be punished by Nuremburg trials.  They even say it is not a political issue any more but a foregone conclusion that the time of capitalism is past; we must move forward to collective action.  Once the American public buys this tripe, environmentalists and progressives intend to regulate all aspects of our society ostinsibly to ensure that the environment is protected. 

Collectivism is the philosophy of fascism, Nazism, welfare statism.  It is a failed philosophy because it is based upon the individual becoming one with the group.  It demands that the individual join in common action and thought with those who claim to be the leaders of the collective.  Individuality, dissent and disagreement are terrible enemies that must be drummed out of individuals through education.  Group meetings where non-attendance is not allowed, where everyone must think, sing and act in unison, where the collective must be praised and where the one who disagrees is deprived of his livelihood are what collectivism demands.  The reason it doesn’t work is that it destroys individual thinking and self-interested action.  The result is that the slaves who belong to the collective are mere automatons doing what they are told and only what they are told.  This is the world that today’s environmentalists and progressives want to make.  It is the world of the Soviet commune and a whole host of other failed “experiments” in a bold “new” idea.  It is the world of slavery.  I would even say that it is a dirtier world than the capitalist world because it breeds poverty, poor hygiene, lower life expectancy, unhappiness and even disease.  There is a history that proves this.  It is a world held together by the sword, the spear or the gun.

Needless to say, the collectivist theory of society denies the idea that individuals should be free to make whatever decisions they choose and take any actions they deem appropriate.  For the environmentalist the individual is a scourge and we must do all we can to ensure that he is not allowed to flourish because that flourishing means creating greenhouse gases and that would destroy the planet (they say). 

There are essentially two levels of argument regarding global warming.  One is the question of whether the environmentalists are correct in their views of the consequences of human action and the other is whether man has rights.  On the first level, proving that the environmentalists are wrong accomplishes only that their methods of scientific evaluation are incorrect; that they use selective data to come to a collective conclusion that man is responsible for temperature warming; the other is whether they even have the authority or right to impose their views on others.  In other words, is collectivism correct?  We will leave the first level of argument for another time because there is much more discussion on this point and I believe it has been settled that the environmentalists are wrong in their so-called scientific conclusions.  On the second question of rights, we have had very little discussion; this is the question we will discuss in this part of the argument.

We must understand that the U.S. Constitution established individual rights through the creation of the Bill of Rights.  This document instituted a mandate where the government was only allowed the function of protecting the rights enumerated in the document.  The result was a society where people could live in peace, where they were free to pursue their own moral and economic actions without the fear of coercion. 

Here’s what the environmental movement thinks about the individual and his role in society:

"People are the cause of all the problems; we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them, and this (ban of DDT) is as good a way as any." Charles Wurster, Environmental Defense Fund[1]

"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal[2]

So what is wrong with this view?  We currently have restrictions in our economy (July 2008) about the extraction of oil products, the use of nuclear power, coal power and any resource that comes from the earth.  Everyone of these restrictions is a violation of individual rights; not only the rights of the business people who bring us energy products but of the rights of the individual consumers to decide which products meet their needs.  While we restrict the production of these products, the government subsidizes and provides mega-grants for the development of “alternative” fuels, most of which are inefficient and will never be able to provide more than a small percentage of our needed energy.  Your money is being spent without your consent in order to force you to use products you do not now want to use.  By restricting the production of the products you do want to use, they are forcing you to suffer economically (in your production and liesure) while you wait for less efficient energy products.  And while these products are being developed, there is no assurance that they will come online any time soon or that you will even choose to use them through your own voluntary choice.  Since you are now upset about being made to suffer high energy products, they assure you that they feel your pain by rushing through Congress even more massive expenditures on energy alternatives in the false hope that huge infusions of your money into these boondoggles will somehow make new energy products magically appear tomorrow (so they can keep their jobs).  Imagine the massive amount of waste that there must be in this grant system.  Will we ever know how much of your money is being wasted?  This is another violation of your individual rights, but it is also pie in the sky.  It makes politicians into investors with your money and without your consent. 

Why do we do this to ourselves?  From George Soros to the politicians who receive money from him, from the environmentalists to the politicians they influence, the master plan is to restrict all of the energy production that would come from the free market and create a new regulated energy market that uses only the forms of energy that the environmentalist movement desires.  The result will be less energy.  This is a collectivist approarch that sees individuals as pariahs.

What does the idea of individual rights mean and why is it important to our nation?  

“America's founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more—and nothing less. The rest—everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything "noble and just," and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e., an individual's freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of political freedom: the system of capitalism.”[3]

Why is this so?  First of all, Ayn Rand understood the unique status that the concept of individual rights gave to man and how it worked in practice, a perspective that many Americans have lost.  In fact, Rand knew then in 1972 that the collectivists were using such terms as “socially desirable purposes” to hide their intention of taking freedom away, of keeping people from exerting their individual rights and stopping the spread of capitalism.  She knew that sacrifice to the collective was the enemy of individual rights.

“The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully—and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives—the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.

This is the key—and the only key—to the problem of national unity. If men seek peaceful coexistence, they must accept the principle that every man has rights which other men may not infringe—that he has the right to exist for his own sake and to pursue his own happiness—that he is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, not of any others, big or small, strong or weak, neither as cannon fodder nor as unrewarded drone toiling to support the Feudal Lord, or the King, or the Emperor, or the children of welfare recipients.”[4]

Individual rights cannot lead to a dirty environment.  It is specific to individuals not collectives.  In fact, a free society will be a cleaner society, where free choice determines what values people will pursue and what product improvements they will demand.  A society operating on the principle of individual rights will enable people to demand the best and cleanest products.  But equally as important, a free society will not allow government representatives to dictate to the public the “social goals” they must pursue.  It operates on the basis of consent in the marketplace rather than consensus in the public square.  The Constitution operates on the premise that people operating for their own benefit make the right decisions; as opposed to the environmentalists and the progressives who believe that such people inevitably harm the “collective.”  The Constitution’s is a positive view of man while the environmentalists consider man a worm.  This is one reasons that the Constitution has operated so long and so successfully and why it is one of the greatest documents in history.

In fact, man is a clean animal.  Capitalism has enabled man to have cleaner societies, paved streets, lighted neighborhoods, air conditioned buildings, running water (both hot and cold which means cleaner bodies), deodorants and sweet smelling soaps, environmentally safe emissions of production wastes, automobiles that save time, energy and even enable higher production, household appliances that save energy and time and yield cleaner, tastier food, schools that teach about hygiene, germs and how to run a clean household with healthy, safe and happy families.  None of this would have been possible without individual rights.  Yet, while capitalism has brought us so much that is clean and good, the environmentalists chose to ignore the accomplishments of free people and spend their time in a selective focus based upon a false premise.  They employ themselves through government grants that are paid for with the money that these clean people earn and selectively accumulate tons of inconclusive data about the weather – and they have the audacity to proclaim that man is the only germ on the planet.

The ability of the government to regulate the economy in violation of individual rights has created one of the most corrupt situations in the history of our country.  Today, politicians assume the power to tell us how to live our lives and run our businesses.  This is fascism.  The truth is that politics today is a game of shakedown, of gaining campaign contributions in return for favors, of bridges going no where and factories doing nothing but taking in government money.  Today, because of the government’s violation of individual rights, we are in a situation where citizens must buy the right to exist.  They can only survive if government allows them.  This is not the original intent.

What is wrong with us is that we even listen to politicians when they proclaim that they are looking out for us.  We seek to compromise and make accommodation with them while their only goal is to enslave us.  We think that politicians are merely other Americans with their own opinion and that we must compromise with them.  Instead, we should deny them the consensus that they need in order to enslave us.

We have lost the understanding of what freedom is.  We have lost the knowledge that we are on the verge of losing our freedoms for the sake of the planet, the poor, the downtrodden and the victims of one thing or another.  We should recognize that the modern practitioners of the old philosophy of collective goals have become more brazen, more hateful and more convinced that all they have to do is push us over the edge onto the stage of disregarding our Constitution.  Is that a compromise that you can live with?  I submit that once we begin to see the actual meaning of that compromise we will begin to see the nature of the kind of lives they want us to live.  The collectivist world will not be a pretty or a clean world.  Ask the citizens of the former Eastern block.

 – Roberto Diego

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