To whom it may concern:
This presidential election is not about voting for
heroes – sadly, they rarely are. Some of us may personally know some heroes,
but American political culture is such that these great men and women cannot
make it into office, nor do they seem to want to. Why is that?
Our heroes have come to be such because of their
unfaltering, principled stand against those who unjustly appropriate and
embezzle the achievements of others for their own purposes. But these great
heroes, both sung and unsung, cannot make it into positions of power in this
country. It is not because of their faults that this is true – it is their
goodness. For some reason, a principled stand against tyranny has come to mean
extremism. Why?
The United States of America has long suffered an
epochal stage of moral ambivalence, where we honor compromise over integrity
just to “move forward”. But compromise doesn’t mean the things it is said to
mean: Unity, brotherhood, progress. It means cutting short a tiresome argument
and putting on a dishonest smile and a pretense of “cooperation”. These
ostensibly noble things mean nothing, as everyone has their own idea of what
the compromise should be, ending in the same polarization that we began with.
The practice of compromise is the negation of principle. It is the avoidance of
using our intellects to reach rational, moral solutions to real problems that
are daily enslaving and eroding the real lives of real human beings.
Acting on principle means taking calculated risks,
but we have become a culture that is terrified at the prospect of risks, of the
prospect of failure, instead of committing ourselves to the pursuit of true
happiness and success. To circumvent these risks, we have been promised for so
long a fabled security in health, prosperity, and old age, from both
Republicans and Democrats alike, and yet this country does not feel that
security. Because this country has accepted these promises, we have come to
accept these programs of “security,” like Social Security and universal access
to healthcare, as the metaphysical norm. They are even tailored with names that
sound so noble that how can we possibly reject them, even if it means attaining
it on the backs of other hardworking, struggling men and women? This used to be
called slavery in a former era. However, any opposition, even if
logically and morally consistent, is doomed to failure because it is rejected
as extreme and uncompassionate for not jumping on the bandwagon. But this is
how tyranny has sold itself throughout history. Otherwise, it would have an
ineffective PR program. It proselytizes with the fundamentalist worship of its
deity, the Almighty Society.
The opposition is told it is “greedy” for not dutifully
accepting these social programs in lieu of the product of its own creativity.
It is claimed that these creators have wrongfully taken money and assets away
from this Almighty Society, even if by voluntary association. For some reason,
though, it is no longer greed if these same monies and assets are confiscated
by the monopolistic force of government – because it’s in the name of
disembodied anti-concepts like “The Greater Good”. Are the beneficiaries of
this wealth not themselves “greedy”? That’s not the point. The point is the
destruction of the good for the sake of being good and extolling suffering as a
natural, unavoidable state. As Alfred poignantly states in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
The truth is that all positive things have been
created by self-interest, by men following their benevolent passions, hoping
for a prosperous life made on their own terms without sacrificing and snapping
the spines of other men along the way. They did so not because of compulsion
and guilt, but because of an admirable love of life and beauty and truth. But even
these qualities can be maimed to ugliness if they are labeled with such a
slimy-sounding modifier like “greed”.
One of the rejections of the tyrant is that
liberty is indifferent, that the weak will be left in the gutter and thrown to
the wolves. What does this rejection betray about their metaphysical view of
humans? They don’t believe in our willingness to be benevolent on our terms.
Their view is cynical: We are cursed to an innate, inescapable apathy, and
therefore we must be forced – that a power elite is a necessary robotic agent
of good will and generosity. If man is innately malevolent, then there can be
no such thing as a good government. But this is not the case: Evil is not a
natural state; it is a choice among others. What they are presenting to us is a
despicable smear campaign against humankind.
The good, creative men and women have been
intimidated so that they are terrified of defending such qualities lest they be
called extremists. But extremism is a relative term. Once upon a time,
abolitionists, men who fought against the enslavement of other human beings,
were considered extremists by those who were comfortable with explicit,
unapologetic evil. Extremism qua extremism isn’t the problem. Martin Luther
King Jr. wrote in a letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “The question is not
whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremist will we be.”
And look back to what it took for Martin Luther
King Jr. to accomplish the great things he did: Extremism. His accomplishments
required tenacity against imprisonment, ridicule, and persecution. Those who
supported his goals, or those who simply treated blacks and whites impartially,
were disparaged as “nigger lovers”. Then look historically at how our country
arrived at this terrible place where US citizens can be detained without
charges; taxed ad infinitum; felt up and molested at our airports; forced to
purchase health insurance; sent to slaughter in wars for the welfare of other
nations, with no regard for our own; told by both the secular (the left) and
the religious (the right) that we do not have a right to our bodies – the list
of infractions goes on. It has been a gradual process of entrenching more and
more concessions to totalitarian brutes.
If this is extremist rhetoric – thinking conceptually
– then so be it. But it is not exaggeration. It is not hyperbole. It is one of
philosophy’s most important branches at work. It is called epistemology, a
science which describes the nature of man’s knowledge and logic and how to
implement them. It is a science that says man has no other means to understand
his universe but to think conceptually. This is what it means to be human. Man
can no more live by the mystic revelations of oracles and witch doctors than he
can by the dictates of the mob and the state.
This November, America is put to a pivotal test of
defining its soul. Will we choose the sacrifice of millions of Americans to
this god called Society and the Greater Good? Or will we choose something
different? Something that doesn’t require the sacrifice of anyone, rich, poor
or middle class. Something that rejoices in the beneficent, voluntary
associations of men and women.
Let us choose the latter. The only system that is
commensurate with these values is capitalism. Historically and to the extent
that it existed, capitalism was the system that delivered us into the modern
age where disease and starvation aren’t nearly the anxiety that they used to
be. It united the world through prosperous trade rather than the brutal
colonization of our mercantilist ancestors. It raised the standard of living
and decreased infant mortality rates exponentially.
Now our nation must ask: Which presidential
candidate represents these life-affirming values? Does incumbent Barack Obama?
Does challenger Mitt Romney? Or does a third-party candidate?
Sadly, none of these choices is ideal. It is the
sad state of our political culture, but it is nonetheless a reality we have to approach
directly. The question is not which man is our ideal candidate, but who will
buy our nation time so that we can begin again its rectification. That
candidate is Mitt Romney.
He is not a consistent man. As the governor of
Massachusetts, he has overseen the shackling of the healthcare industry in his
state, and it is clear that he sees a place for the mystic dictates of religion
in politics. Yet he also claims to support decelerating the growth of our
government, to slow it from moving closer and closer to totalitarianism with
every passing day. No, he is not consistent. But he still retains some
semblance of the American spirit of love – not hate – for prosperity and the
pursuit of happiness. His work as a private equity capitalist corroborates a fundamental
admiration for America’s sense of life.
Among his opponents are candidates who either
bastardize America’s fundamental love of liberty or seek to destroy it
outright. The former are primarily rooted with the likes of Ron Paul and the
Libertarian Party, who assume liberty as an ethical primary without
acknowledgement of all the proper intellectual elements that make liberty
possible (see Andrew Deaton’s characterization of their principles in his essay
on anarchism). The latter is the current man in power, President Barack Obama.
He is a man who has disparaged the American
businessman and workingman, claiming that human creativity is a product not of
individual thought and action, but of Almighty Society whose clergy are the
bureaucrats who enslave man. And not only that – he requires the subjugation of
the American to that vengeful god and its clergy, claiming that each of us is
our brother’s keeper, counting on us to buy into his morality of slavery
masquerading as nobility.
His ideas have materialized over the past four
years, and like all tyrants, he is squirming to convince our desperate nation
that its strife and his inefficacious policies are “inherited,” contemptibly
appealing to fatalism rather than the responsibility of free will. If all presidents
merely inherit their problems, then politics is dead. No president or leader can
be charged with responsibility of leadership because whatever policies are to
be inherited will be realized regardless of who is in power. But his
inheritance defense is not an appeal to responsible leadership; it is an appeal
to mediocrity and its corollary: blame. In the context of history and its great
leaders, his excuse is objectively invalid and disdainful. It is no wonder that
he championed the unpopular bailouts that followed the financial collapse in
2008 – a corporatism eerily reminiscent of the fascism of Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini.
President Obama’s advocates defend his policy saying that he
couldn’t help it; President George W. Bush did it; the capitalists did it. Not
only is it historically untrue that the financial crisis is a failure of
capitalism or entirely Bush’s fault (it extends much farther than that, through
years of government intervention via the Federal Reserve and a barrage of
congressional legislation dating back to President Jimmy Carter), but it is
blatant political opportunism herding America under the growing purview of an
all-encompassing government. And if the policies fail, and they have, who gets
the blame? Not those in power; we do. And it’s so easy because the suffering of
good people never happens inside the White House or in the Capitol Building. It
happens in the household and the street and the marketplace and the hospital and the bank and
the courtroom. That makes it easy for them to place the blame and ask us to
wait just a little longer and sacrifice ourselves just a little more. This has
been the essence of Barack Obama’s leadership, and it must come to an end.
Preceding the presidential election of 1972
between Richard Nixon and Democratic challenger George McGovern, philosopher
Ayn Rand characterized how to approach an election like this: “If there were
some campaign organization called ‘Anti-Nixonites for Nixon,’ it would name my
position. The worst thing said about Nixon is that he cannot be trusted, which
is true: he cannot be trusted to save this country. But one thing is certain:
McGovern can destroy it.” Simply
substitute Romney for Nixon and Obama for McGovern and our present is put into
perspective.
It is absolutely imperative that we elect Mitt
Romney, and once we do, we cannot dispense with our vigilance. There will still
be much to be done, but it is important to remember that we are not pawns in
Obama’s fatalistic universe. We are thoughtful, rational human beings who do not
want to conquer or enslave, but instead live for our happiness and prosperity.
We are free to do so, and no man or group of men has the right to stand in our
way.
Sincerely,
Patrick T. Adams
Editor-in-Chief
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