The Alibi of Tyrants

America's Trajectory Toward Statism

By: Andrew Deaton

With every general election seemingly since the dawn of time we have been given the ultimatum that this one – whatever quadrennial is at hand – is the most important election in decades, or our lifetime, or ever. When an incumbent is running for a second term, he will quietly imply that the new vote is the one that really matters (though he made the same claim four years prior). To be sure, most candidates at all levels of government use this tactic mainly as a rhetorical device to drum up support through intimidation and couldn’t care less whether they have any lasting impact past their term or not.

                                

However, it is in a very real way true that every upcoming general election is the most important one yet. The others are all on record; this is the one that is undecided. The past is safely known; the future is uncertain. It is important to understand, though, that the upcoming 2012 general election does in fact have its own historical bearing that is different not only in degree but also in quality from all prior elections taken as a whole. There are three primary reasons for this uniqueness:

The choices are about as far from one another as we’ve ever seen and are almost totally mutually exclusive. This election presents two fundamentally distinct alternative candidates which represent one of the greatest disparities in potential consequences our nation has ever faced in an election. Yes, Romney’s political platform is infected with the insidious undertones of statism, but his moral platform has a tone which is incongruous with Obama’s and which I think will to a great degree iron out many of the faults of his political platform.

To reelect Obama/Biden is to pass the point of no return while Romney/Ryan represents a golden opportunity for America that McCain/Palin and the like never hoped to match. The incumbent, if reelected, will push our nation past the tipping point in a tradition that most certainly did not begin with him, but which is perfectly embodied by him. In short, if Obama/Biden is reelected, the next primary election in 2016 might very well not be so important simply because we will have signed our own last will and testament by reelecting him now. His being barred from a third term is irrelevant; his reelection this year will set a tone that the next president in 2016 will find impossible or nearly so to unravel, even assuming that a future president is sincerely committed to doing so. The upside is that Romney/Ryan represents a dormant but still alive view of American greatness which I believe will represent the first steps in a revival of a positive political course for America, which we have not seen on the ascent in over a century. We have an actual choice for the first time since Reagan and Mondale faced off in 1984.

We can’t procrastinate about the decision any longer. Treading water is not an option. We either vote to seal our nation’s fate, or we vote to revive the faint echoes of the Founding Fathers’ vision which represent everything great about this nation, about Western civilization and about mankind.

Our current president’s overarching theme, his avowed raison d'être, is to equalize all individuals. After all, it is right there at the opening of the Declaration of Independence: All men have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This enumeration is based on the views of John Locke, an English philosopher of the 17^th century who was a massive inspiration for the Founding Fathers and might be seen as one of the philosophic pioneers who made the United States possible. Locke and the Founders, however, meant these rights to guarantee opportunity – i.e., leave individuals alone to succeed or to fail on their own merits – rather than guaranteeing success, which would contradict the “opportunity” interpretation reducing men to the status of wards of the state. Nowadays, we can see that the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to feel some sort of entitlement to the products of others, said entitlement to be brokered and enforced by the state. Barack Obama is merely the tip of the iceberg that is sinking the ship. It is important that American voters understand that his doctrine is not a fluke. There is a wealth of history to demonstrate the definite and powerful trend of statism’s increase in America and that it is directly causal of America’s decreasing greatness in the world, with Obama being the final nail in the coffin.

The political theme of Obama’s presidency traces back to a hairline fracture in the integrity of the Constitution itself, a fracture so seemingly innocuous as to go unnoticed by the Founders. That fracture is the commerce clause of the Constitution (article 1, section 8, paragraph 3). It gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”. The paragraph prior gives us no lead to this and the paragraph which follows changes the subject; in short, no clear context is given as to what exact means Congress is allowed to employ to this end – and statist politicians since have made damn sure that none has ever been given. The specific power used time and again to increase governmental purview is the phrase regarding power over commerce “among the several States.”

For the most part, the cancerous clause remained in remission until 1890 when Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which in a nutshell made the federal government the ultimate intercessor over the entire American economy. The first, but neither last nor most deft, champion of Representative Sherman’s cause was Teddy Roosevelt (served 1901-1909), who used as scapegoats the great tycoons of that period to corral votes through his infamous campaign of “trust busting”. His campaign rested on the complete lie that “robber barons”, the industrialists, were expropriating the wealth of citizens. The most famous of those persecuted tycoons, John D. Rockefeller, was once summed up by a contemporary as seemingly the only person on Earth unaware he had come to dominate the petroleum industry since he kept his prices so low and his products so accessible. Teddy Roosevelt’s successor and protégé, William Taft, continued his mentor’s crusade and busted even more trusts than the master of the bully pulpit.

T. Roosevelt passes on his policies to successor William Taft.

When Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (served 1933-1945), took the helm, he had a brazenness regarding economic regulation that T. Roosevelt would not have been able to imagine. While the Sherman Act had been seen by prior administrations as a basis for reactive measures against trusts, FDR changed the government’s power over the economy to be direct and proactive. “Central planning” was the theme of FDR’s administration, blaming unchecked competition as having been the cause of the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, stated in 2009 after having already assumed his office that he had found the Federal Reserve – his own institution, which holds a monopoly on monetary policy – to have been responsible for the Great Depression. So much for central planning.

FDR’s snake oil remedy was to consolidate the entire American economy under myriad three-letter acronyms which were to be ultimately headed by him. Essentially, no distinction can be made between FDR’s economic policy and Benito Mussolini’s fascist corporatism, wherein all economic sectors are organized into “corporations” (basically, political constituencies) to better serve as apparatuses of the state. Harry S Truman, upon succeeding FDR, continued his late superior’s campaign to nationalize the economy.

A decade later, Lyndon B. Johnson (s. 1963-1969) attempted to assimilate FDR’s “New Deal” into his own “Great Society”, as he called it. Already America was going broke from the unprecedented bloating of the American government, and LBJ’s “Great Society” was at least largely a failure even in the most optimistic (read: naïve or dishonest) circles. Meanwhile, LBJ and then Nixon (s. 1969-1974) let America suffer her first ever defeat abroad in Vietnam. It was a self-defeat caused solely by the fact that our successive commanders-in-chief wanted to avoid agitating the Soviets who sponsored our enemies in Vietnam and saw the waging of a “low-intensity” conflict as the way to go. This conflict was not legally a war since it was never declared by Congress and was ultimately just a deadly, farcical political tool for which American men and women gave their lives. However, for those servicemen, that “conflict” seemed a hell of a lot like war without the tickertape parade upon arriving home.

America was quickly losing her moral fortitude at home and abroad, and men looked more toward the government to fix the problem, not seeing the blatant fact that it was bloated government that led to this loss of nerve, the same quality that anticipated the fall of ancient Athens. When Jimmy Carter (served 1977-1981) took office, he appeared to be America’s attempt to punish herself for her newly adopted senseless guilt. He was the epitome of it. He felt the need to confess to Playboy that he had lusted after many women and then proceeded to chide the nation in his infamous malaise speech which meant nothing and went nowhere. He backed his words with action in that he decided during the Iranian hostage crisis to castigate Americans for the Islamic Revolutionaries' crimes by placing an embargo on importing Iranian oil which had actually been expropriated - "nationalized" - from the West. When he finally decided to “respond” to the Iranian hostage crisis by attempting a rescue operation, it was perfunctory, poorly planned, poorly executed and resulted in needless American deaths. In short, it was a repeat of Vietnam in microcosm.

George W. Bush (served 2001-2008) was essentially Carter’s protégé from across the ages. The attacks of September 11, 2001 – for me, yesterday – was the defining moment of his presidency, but in the worst and most senseless way imaginable. While it should have been the moment when he asked for and received a Congressional declaration of war – unlike the apologetic Vietnam nation-building debacle – on Afghanistan and followed his “Axis of Evil” speech with strikes on all other terror-sponsoring states, he instead characterized our enemy as “terrorism”. The enemy is, of course, not terrorism, which is a method of warfare, not an ideology and certainly not the set of adherents to an ideology. The enemy is Islamism, the followers of a doctrine that seek the conquest of Western civilization and its replacement with religious theocracy.

Former President G.W. Bush meets with current President Obama in the Oval Office in Nov. 2008.

However, channeling Johnson and Nixon from Vietnam, and most symbolically Carter’s entire presidency, Bush adopted the American crown of thorns, which we wove for ourselves, and evaded the fact that Islamism had initiated the use of force against us. Instead, he turned our airports into prisons for Americans and signed the PATRIOT Act which turned all of America into the prison yard. In the domestic realm, when the 2008 economic meltdown occurred, he saw it necessary to tap into the FDR-Truman doctrine and strap the American auto and banking industries with his own crown of thorns.

Now, what relevance does all of the above have to the election of 2012? The point is that Barack Obama has over a full century of momentum behind his doctrine. He is the culmination and executor of the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ, and most of all FDR. He is going to finish the self-flagellation of America that Carter and Bush lacked the stomach and cunning to finish. In the domestic realm, he has bound hand-and-foot the automotive, insurance, banking, medical, and energy industries – which in turn binds the rest of the American economy to him. In the foreign realm, he has time and again genuflected America toward Mecca for the sake of the Islamists who daily hurl threats, bombs and bullets at America and have made it clear that we can sate them only by our being annihilated. What is his plan if not the good of the people that he so commonly invokes? The hint is given to us by Albert Camus: “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” Read Patrick’s “Letter from the Editor” below to know the details, the motivation and the final goal of Obama's plan and why Romney, while flawed, is still a better candidate.

Letter from the Editor

Presidential Election 2012

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

Royal Decree

Why Obama’s Granting Amnesty Is the Worst Move for Freedom

By: Andrew Deaton

Last month, President Obama announced a limited amnesty for illegal immigrants who were brought to this country at a young age without their own consent. The ostensible goal: to allow those young immigrants, particularly Latinos, the time necessary to obtain citizenship in this country where they have grown up and established roots. “We are a better nation than one that expels young kids,” he explained. Many illegal immigrants and their supporters were overjoyed at the news, hailing it as progress for freedom.

The hidden truth: nothing could be more of a step back for freedom than Obama’s decree. As Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said in his opinion following the court’s ruling in Arizona v. United States, “To say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing immigration law that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.” The key issue here is deceptive; it is not about immigration, but about the rule of law versus the rule of a single individual’s arbitrary opinion. It is not in the purview of President Obama’s executive branch to decide which laws to enforce or not. Those illegal immigrants remain illegal, but the Administration has decided to wash its hands of the matter by opting-out of enforcing a policy passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States – the President’s peers in the scheme of checks and balances. That is precisely the behavior of the demagogic tyrant which the Framer’s wished to prevent at all costs.

Historically, our nation’s form of government is itself unprecedented while simultaneously becoming the precedent in some way or another for every free or semi-free nation on earth. The Framers of the Constitution were treading uncharted ground in establishing the tripartite system of checks and balances. The British Empire from whom they were seceding had one single source of power: the Crown, the holder of such power being the monarch. There was no constitution, no checks and balances, no binding elections in the Empire. There was Parliament, but it was an organ which was by no means equal to the monarch – it governed the Empire for the monarch, to be overridden and dismissed by royal prerogative at the monarch’s leisure. The three branches were established by the Framers of the United States Constitution to remove the threat that any individual or group of individuals (even if they formed a majority) might frustrate the rights of any other individuals, with the impartial Constitution replacing the arbitrary Crown as the centerpiece of the great experiment.

When the President of the United States refuses to uphold a law, he is refusing to abide by the Constitution, the source of his legitimacy. His is the office expressly tasked with protecting, preserving, and upholding the Constitution of the United States. What the issue boils down to is the fact that President Obama is not only shirking the fundamental responsibility of his job description, but he is by the same motion violating that very document which defines which powers he has – and which ones he does not have.

If President Obama is allowed to get away with deciding not to enforce a law on 800,000 or so illegal immigrants, what grounds could he possibly have for enforcing analogous laws on those who are here legally, let alone actual citizens? If the Constitution is no longer his point of reference, what other than his own unaccountable whim will be his touchstone for deciding how, when, and on whom to mete out the execution of the law? Remember that the internment of persons of Japanese – and, to a lesser extent, German and Italian – descent during World War II was the result of F.D.R.’s Executive Order 9066. If President Obama is allowed to arbitrarily decide to grant grace for the sake of a few votes in the upcoming election, how could anyone invoke the Constitution in protest when the next President decides to pander to nativists' fears by rescinding naturalized citizens’ hard-earned status and then deporting them back to the countries from which they originally sought refuge?

There is no moral justification for barring peaceable, productive, patriotic immigrants from this nation any more than a man should starve himself rather than eating when hungry. Both morally and practically, the only long-term solution is to open our borders to any and all individuals who wish to enter this country with peaceful designs. In the meantime, though, the law says otherwise. We are a constitutional republic where law reigns supreme. No matter how expedient it may seem, President Obama’s unilateral nullification of Congressional law and ignoring the Supreme Court’s upholding of that law does only long-term damage that will get worse in exchange for a mere handful of years of seeming “freedom” for immigrants. Ultimately, this is yet another move toward tyranny, toward establishing the same sort of nation from which those very immigrants wish to flee. The ultimate issue is one of mutually exclusive values: a short–term, superficial, pseudo-“fix” that results in permanent damage to the Constitution; or upholding the rule of law for the sake of freedom on principle.

May the Capitol Be Ever in Your Favor

Ethical and Political Philosophy in The Hunger Games

By: Patrick T. Adams

I was 16 years old the first time I picked up a dystopian thriller: George Orwell’s haunting vision of a zero-privacy future, 1984. It was unlike anything I had read previously because its content struck me as something that was possible and to some degree already realized, especially since the Patriot Act had recently been signed into law. At the time, my hormonal teenage mind was easily overcome with paranoia that the government was keeping tabs on me, as if my school cafeteria fart jokes and awkward flirtation with girls were enough to pique the interest of U.S. government bigwigs.

Still, teenage melodrama aside, there is some credibility to the genre of dystopian fiction. It brings the abstract concepts of a decaying culture and/or the political state (really, the relationship between the two is reciprocal) to the perceptual level, showing the depravity possible to human beings in the absence of rational values. The genre’s latest popular incarnation is Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, and it is a great example of many philosophical subjects ranging from ethics to politics.

Set in a future North America is the powerful nation of Panem, where its regime, the Capitol, exercises hegemonic dominance over its surrounding districts, 12 in all. As a way of reminding its citizens who is in control, the Capitol annually subjects Panem’s youth to a lottery in which 24 individuals between the ages of 12 and 18 are chosen at random, one male and one female from each district, to compete in the Hunger Games, a brutal gladiator style death match. The Games are broadcasted nationwide, like a violent version of Survivor or American Idol, and watching is mandatory for Panem’s citizens.

When Katniss Everdeen’s younger sister is selected as one of the “tributes” from District 12 to participate in the Games, Katniss volunteers to take her place knowing that her sister is far too weak to survive. As Katniss and the other tributes enter the Hunger Games arena, moral questions begin to surface, especially between Katniss and her fellow District 12 tribute, Peeta, whose romantic affections for Katniss add a further layer of moral complexity.

Since the rules of the game dictate that there be only one winner – or more aptly put, one survivor – the tributes face a contrived (this is important) moral dichotomy between pragmatism (dispense with ethics in favor of what “works”) and death. Some of the stronger district tributes, called the “Careers”, have no problem with taking the pragmatic route, ruthlessly slaughtering the other tributes, and even seem to sadistically relish in doing so. As for the other tributes, some choose to be evasive and non-confrontational, hiding in the woods hoping to simply outlast the others, while Katniss tries to remain resourceful and tactical in her survival.

However, there is a much deeper and more pivotal ethical issue involved with the Games, and that is the principle of the initiation of force (i.e. attempting to gain a value by using physical force or fraudulent means rather than productive or honest means). While the specifics are unclear, the reader can infer that the districts’ widespread economic indigence and social depravity is caused by the Capitol’s brand of rule. What is clear is that the economy is centrally planned, where each of the 12 districts is designated for a particular economic activity. For example, District 12 is coal mining and District 11 is agriculture. Since the means of production seem to be owned by the Capitol, this would suggest some variation of socialism, although it doesn’t appear there is a complete abolition of private ownership.

Such is the case with the Capitol’s totalitarian rule of the Districts: mass starvation and subsistence living. In an abstract sense, the Capitol severs the tie between mind and action, and Collins smoothly ties this to perceptual concretes. Since the Capitol views its citizenry as chattel, it’s not hard to see the culture’s fascination with murderotica, forcibly throwing teenagers into a bloodbath for the vicarious entertainment of Panem. This is what is meant by a contrived ethical scenario. The tributes are coerced into abandoning any rational convictions they might hold about respecting other human life.

As far as human will is concerned, it is divided into two conceptual categories, the latter causally dependent upon the former: thought and physical action. To establish a disconnect between the two categories, by reversing the cause-effect relationship, is anti-reality, but this is precisely what the Capitol’s initiation of force represents. Since reality is absolute, individuals must actively observe the facts of reality and then integrate them into knowledge in order to act according to their needs. When force is initiated against an individual, the mind can no longer carry out this function of translating thought into action as needed. The aggressors also have to abandon the principle that the mind must sustain itself epistemically, thereby burning the bridge between their own minds and reality. When concretized in real life applications, the consequences are disastrous, as depicted in Panem where individuals are in a perpetual do-or-die mode of existence, especially within the Games.

This leads to another theme of the novel: Do the tributes have an alternative to the barbarism of the Games? Collins answers yes, and rightly so. Katniss defies the Capitol in small ways, which appear to be the developmental stages of a rebelliousness to mature later in the sequels. In the Capitol Training Center before the Games begin, Katniss fires an arrow amidst the Gamemakers, a powerful committee of game officials, just to grab their attention. And in the novel’s most poignant scene, Katniss uniquely honors a fallen fellow tribute – just 12 years old – that helped her to survive.

Since I have not yet read the sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, I don’t know exactly how rebellion against the Capitol plays out, but with the regime’s advanced technology described in the series’ first installment, it’s probably a very onerous task. If there’s a mark against the novel, though, it’s the unlikely technology, from agile hovercrafts to genetically engineered wasps. It’s not that these sorts of things are impossible to human ingenuity, but that they would materialize in Panem where the districts aren’t even free to grow their own food. An application as narrow and complex as genetic engineering takes years of condensing a broad range of scientific concepts. The human mind functions through principles, needing to think long-range, translating thought into action as needed, but this process is substituted and bridled with the immediate dictates of the Capitol.

When I’m reading a novel, I like to become so engaged in the story that I forget I’m reading, but the unconvincing technology served as an occasional reminder that I was just reading a book. Many dystopian novels tend toward this same technological exaggeration, the most notable of which are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Some exceptions that fully show how irrationality disintegrates society include Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, also demonstrating the happiness possible to individuals, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a literary case study in mob rule.

Making the intellectual concession of “practicality” to totalitarianism only strengthens the false dichotomy between what is moral and what is practical. While the Capitol regime is patently evil, they still seem to make incredible innovations. Metaphysically, this creates a false dilemma between unprosperous, highbrow idealism and amoral, but wealthy pragmatism. Faced with the guns of the Capitol, I’m sure the Districts are left to ask, “But what are we to do?”

Fortunately, Katniss is the answer to this question. Her character coupled with Collins’ suspenseful plot pacing lends The Hunger Games its distinctive ferocity, an embattled retaliation against statism and a declaration of free will. With the context of rising government intervention in the real world, it’s not hard to see why these themes resonate with such a large audience. On that note, may your will be ever in your favor.

Philosophy: Life’s Sober Hand

By: Andrew Deaton

All the time, I’m approached by individuals who ask me, “Why did you major in philosophy?” When I answer, “Because I needed to discover the right way to live,” they often follow up innocently with, “But I thought that philosophy had neither right nor wrong answers? Also, isn’t philosophy supposed to stay above the lowly concerns of real-life applications?” That detached view that modern academics have fully earned for themselves is what is wrong with our culture at large. While I personally invest myself in all of my writing, this piece is going to be more autobiographical than usual, but I take that tone only insofar as is necessary to help shed some firsthand light on principles which you can and, I think, should apply to your own life. Patrick has expressed the same concerns and experiences, so this is also meant to be something like an unofficial manifesto of why exactly Patrick and I do what we do on DEFENESTRATION and just why exactly you should even care.

So much for the appetizer; now for the meat and potatoes.

While walking through downtown Athens, Ga., this past week, I saw two peculiar sights and decided to document them:

The top photo is of a car window decal which displays a stylized “SS”. This is actually the runic insignia of Hitler’s infamous SS, the cadre of elite Nazi servicemen entrusted with the most critical tasks, including the actual execution of concentration camp prisoners. The bottom photo is of a sign outside of the local Ben & Jerry’s shop advertising their belief in “Fair Trade”, as espoused by the organized Fair Trade social movement. There was a line of what I would guess to be a hundred people and counting to take part in the fundraiser to promote that policy.

What is the commonality between these photos? They both represent manifest, deliberate, intricate philosophies whose respective inspirations and implications are kept hidden, yet they impact all of our lives on an everyday basis.
Those instances are not at all exhaustive of just when philosophy has bearing on everyday life. When does philosophy matter? The answer: Every waking moment of your life, from cradle to grave. As Ayn Rand puts it:

You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions – or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.*

Now, what does all of that mean? It means that every single action you take is necessarily guided by principles, i.e. by your philosophy. Whether it’s deciding to make yourself a meal when hungry, what you want to pursue as a career, or whom you want to date or marry – philosophy is your all-purpose manual. When I say must be guided by principles, I don’t mean it simply in the normative sense that you just should be guided by principles, though that meaning is included. I mean that you must be guided by principles, as in, so long as you are conscious, you are living by some set of principles. Right now, as you are reading this, you are living by principles that you may or may not have chosen, such as: I should increase my knowledge; this is a better use of my time than checking Facebook (I’m flattered if you think that); I have a right to freedom of speech and to choose what speech to hear. All of those are just tiny samplings of all of the principles that you are living by right now. The only way to remove the rule of principles is by literal suicide. We don’t live by instincts like other animals; we live by the use of the mind, our rational faculty.

The analogy that helps bring it home for me is that of driving a car. You are the driver, your life is the car, and reality is the road. You can choose either to be aware of what you are doing by choosing to be ruthlessly sober, or you can drift and risk your life by choosing to be drunk. So long as you are behind the wheel – i.e. alive – you must either be sober or drunk; there is no third alternative. To live by a philosophy which you never question nor choose is to be drunk. To live by a philosophy which you choose based on the requirements of life is to be sober.

Contrary to popular belief, there are absolutes in philosophy. Just as a sober driver has to use his sobriety to conform to the lay of the road if he is to avoid disaster, so too must you choose your philosophy in accord with the nature of life, the dictates of reality. You can choose to defy reality in any given concrete instance, but you have absolutely no choice regarding what the consequences of that defiance will be. You can choose to drive headlong into a brick wall; you cannot change the fact that great pain or death will follow. Principles in and of themselves are not enough to achieve happiness; you must live by the right principles.

To repeat, so long as you are alive, you are behind the wheel. That means that no matter what you do, ultimately only you can control what you believe. You have free will, but free will – as with everything else – has a particular identity. It’s not whatever you want it to be when it’s convenient. Free will does not allow you to absolve yourself of its awesome responsibility or its correspondingly awesome power. You can’t hand your free will over to someone else and say, “Here, you make my decisions for me for a while.”

That means that you have to think for yourself. Again, here we have a double entendre. You have to think for yourself in the obvious sense that no one else can think for you. But, you also have to think for yourself in the sense that you have to think for your own sake. There is a rampant misconception that it is possible to think on your own while living for the sake of everyone and everything other than yourself. To ask someone to develop his own convictions while ordering him to follow everyone else’s is hypocrisy and, ultimately, is impossible. The ethics that says that you must think for yourself in order to live for your own sake is rational egoism, the ethics developed by Ayn Rand (and since rationality is necessary for egoism, I will henceforth dispense with the adjective “rational” and just say “egoism”).

Egoism is a moral or ethical concept, and it is in the field of ethics where rubber meets road. Ethics is the central focus of philosophy: there is no point to philosophy without ethics. If there is nothing else that you take away from this piece, at least get rid of the notion that there is anything noble about a morality that tells you that you must choose between being moral and being happy; the one leads to the other. You cannot dispense with morality for the sake of “convenience” any more than it is “convenient” for the drunk driver to decide that just this one time he should be fine behind the wheel. In principle, it is the same situation. No matter how tempting it may seem to abandon your principles for the sake of an immediate whim, the sober, safe driver keeps his eyes on the road because he will let nothing stop him from reaching his destination safe and sound. The drunk driver lets up “just this once” – and that is the last decision he makes. The sober driver also does not let himself be distracted from focusing on his path – not distracted by God, not by society, not by the state, not by Mother Earth, not by Nirvana – none of that. On the road of life, your destination is your own happiness. If you focus on anything but your route, you’ll crash. Don’t let your life pass you by because others have convinced you that you’ll get a do-over in some mythical hereafter or that your life doesn’t matter anyway because you are just an irrelevant member of Society.

For all of my own and Patrick’s talk of philosophy, you might be interested to know that neither of us digs into this stuff as our primary pursuit. My overriding passion is the study of and an eventual professorship in military history; Patrick’s love is the printed word. You might also be a bit surprised to know that we are both Objectivists (for those who are unaware, Objectivism is the philosophy founded and developed by Ayn Rand). If you are confused as to why two semi-starved college grads would spend so much time on something that they don’t intend to pursue as a profession, or why you may have never heard either of us mention Objectivism or Ayn Rand – don’t be confused. We are cases in point that living by principles means living by principles. We don’t need to tell everyone we meet that we are Objectivists if it doesn’t come up in conversation. If you know us face-to-face, then I dare say that neither of us gives a first impression of “philosophical” or even “academic” (I once almost got in trouble because a superior at my job thought I was going to lose it when in an early encounter he told me that he didn’t like Arrested Development – true story). Talking about philosophy doesn’t mean a damn thing if you aren’t going to put your money where your mouth is, and that “cash-value” – to borrow the pragmatists’ term (in a very different sense) – is exactly what we’re in it for. Really, that’s the only thing which gives philosophy any value, and I encourage you to cash in.

This happens to be a time when mentioning Objectivism is entirely relevant and proper, and it is here where I recommend that, if your appetite for applying philosophy to life is whetted, then you should read Ayn Rand’s many works, the most encompassing and most famous of which is her novel Atlas Shrugged, though I recommend that you begin with The Fountainhead. Whether you are an Objectivist or not, whether you ever decide to become an Objectivist or not – that is not the primary goal of this piece, though I most certainly do hope that DEFENESTRATION will help set you on the course to becoming an Objectivist. The point is that philosophy by its nature is what provides the sober hand needed for you to reach your waypoints and ultimate destination in life. Just keep your eyes on the road, your hand on the wheel, and don’t let anything slow you down.

---

       * Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, ed. Ayn Rand (New York: Signet, 1984), 5.

The Anti-Conceptual Basis of Anarchism

By: Andrew K. Deaton

Anarchism is often upheld as the pinnacle of freedom, even by those who add the disclaimer that it is “too much” freedom.  There are many supposed variants of anarchism: anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-capitalism, etc.  Their underlying theme has no positive platform, but only a single negative: the dissolution of the state, or anarchy.  (Note that anarchism is that ideology which wishes to bring about anarchy.  The terms are often erroneously used interchangeably.)  Since its platform is essentially negative, libertarianism should properly be identified as a more mainstream, less confrontational presentation of what is really anarchism.  For purposes of this essay, the term “anarchism” will refer to a spectrum of ideologies in which libertarianism is but the logical antecedent to outright anarchism in much the same way that socialism is but a waypoint to communism.  Thus, all criticisms henceforth applying to anarchism are to be taken univocally against libertarianism in equal measure.  (I will not try to explain just yet the supposed points of disagreement between the different “types” of anarchist thought, as I will explain below why there can be no such thing as different forms of anarchy.)  Ultimately, anarchism – remember, this includes libertarianism – is characterized solely by a rejection of concepts as such, and it is only by first positively advocating conceptualization that anarchism might be rejected and that a truly free society might be brought forth.

At its root, anarchism upholds the metaphysics of determinism.  Determinism is the doctrine which states that man has no more free will than does a lump of coal.  With this as its footing, anarchism proclaims that individuals can be corralled under the proper social circumstances to act in perfect harmony with one another.  Once those circumstances are achieved – beginning with the abolition of the state – anarchism claims that we will have achieved a social system which will be in such perfect working order that it needs not the maintenance of the thought of the individual, that it will inexorably maintain itself.  Even if there are the occasional hiccoughs from certain rogue anomalies who cause some trouble here and there, they will be immediately quashed by the dialectical power of anarchy and society will bounce right back to tranquility.

Since it is the whole of anarchy’s workings – the anarchic Geist, so to speak – which will resolve all societal ills and since man cannot be held responsible for anything against the background of determinism, anarchism necessarily espouses agnosticism, first in epistemology and as a consequence also in the arena of ethics.

Epistemology is the field that asks if we can know anything, what we can know, and how we can know.  For anarchism, epistemology is a dead end.  It is only through free will that man might have knowledge, and it is by determinism that he is barred from the slightest mote of certainty.  Knowledge is power, and power is knowledge.  Since determinism reduces man to the agency of a lump of coal, it also reduces him to the cognitive efficacy of that same inanimate lump.  Anarchism is the manifestation of the epistemology of Immanuel Kant.  For anarchism, all beliefs are either analytic or synthetic; that is, they are all either idle fantasies or they are unverifiable postulates.  Since thought is thereby rendered irrelevant to reality, there is only room for impulsive action on the anarchist scheme.  Thus, anarchists say, the only way to achieve the perfection of an anarchic society is to dissolve the “artificial” and “unnatural” illusion put forth by the concept-born state and instead to return to the rule of concrete-bound instincts – spontaneous, randomized action inspired by whim and answering only to whim.  (How it is that anything could be “unnatural” in a deterministic universe is something for which anarchists will not even begin to account.)

Since man has no choice under determinism, moral judgment is thereby rendered non-applicable according to anarchism.  When speaking of determinism, a killer has no more moral culpability in murder than does a house which collapses on its occupants.  Thus, according to anarchism there are no such things as political rights as rights are nothing more than the implementation of ethics (or morality) in a societal context.  Anarchism opposes the state because it sees the state as imposing upon individuals a moral structure, i.e. the moral structure which dictates that it is wrong to initiate the use of force.  Anarchism forbids that any man should be forbidden from anything whatsoever and that his natural instincts be his only motive power.  (In ethics, too, anarchists refuse to acknowledge the fact that they are inherently assuming a contradiction: their “right” to violate the rights of others at the anarchists’ pleasure.)

With its utter agnosticism, anarchism refutes concepts wholly.  A concept is formed by accurately integrating the data of the senses through essences, by stripping perceptual entities of their discrepancies and finding their unique underlying commonality.  Concepts are the key to man’s survival, as it is essential to man’s nature that he live by concepts.  That is what distinguishes him from all other organisms and makes him qualitatively superior to them.  Without concepts, he loses that distinction and is ruled by whim (or instinct).  Rule by whim psychologically means rule by force politically.  It means that man becomes impulsive like David Hume’s legendary billiard ball being struck by the cue.  Just like the billiard ball, men lose the ability to peaceably resolve disputes – even honest misunderstandings – and have no choice – no choice but to use force to survive, to force the other billiard balls out of their path.  As Hobbes famously put it, this natural (read: pre-conceptual) state is “nasty, brutish, and short.”  Anarchists really only want freedom from one thing: concepts, which means freedom from thought, which means freedom from the responsibility which a state’s rule of objective law codifies.  If man is “freed” from thought, he thereby becomes an absolute slave to everything else: disease, famine, the elements, and especially the fear that his neighbor next door might spontaneously murder him in his sleep.  If one accepts anarchism, who is to stop his neighbor from doing just that (or himself from doing just that to his neighbor)?  Anarchism is nothing more than the advocacy of a return to a pre-historic condition, with all of the “freedom” which that entails.

While anarchism is nothing more than a negation of all thought in a societal context, a rejection of anarchism must propose a positive, constructive alternative.  (Since the focus of this particular piece is to demonstrate the invalidity of anarchism, I will discuss the proper alternative only insofar as is necessary to prove that there is one.  I would like to put forward a more focused address of the subject in the future.)  That alternative is a state with an objective government, which requires an entity that has a monopoly on the use of force over a certain geographic area.  Yet of what would an objective government consist?  It would be one that is ruled by objective law.  By “objective law” I mean law which is designed only to protect the rights of the governed and is applied only to protect those rights.  This requires three apparatuses: the courts, to provide arbitration of disputes between men, both honest and criminal; the police, to enforce the law domestically amongst citizens; and the armed forces, to protect the collective citizenry of the state from external threats. 

The key objection brought forth by anarchists is that this is the initiation of force by the state because it does not allow men to pick and choose whose laws they will abide by on which days – assuming they choose to abide by any.  There is no way to guarantee that the government will not become corrupt just as every government today is to one extent or another, so why should men not have the right to “subscribe” to another code of laws at their own leisure?  The response is simple: there simply is no way to “guarantee” that a government will not become corrupt because there is no way to “guarantee” that its citizens will not become corrupt.  Thus, we have come full-circle: the nature of man is that of a being with free will.  The only way to prevent corrupt, tyrannical, bad government is to change the fundamental philosophy of that government’s society.  The mechanistic, deterministic, clockwork society for which anarchists search simply does not exist if the society in question is made up of human beings.  This is also to what I was referring at the beginning of this essay when I said that the myriad hair-splitting distinctions between anarchists are false since they are based on a forecast of how men must behave when government is dissolved.  No matter how perfect, how utopian, how peaceful a society becomes; the price of freedom always remains eternal vigilance.  A society will be free only so long as its citizens work to both achieve and then to perpetually maintain that freedom.  Any talk of a system that removes the contingency of free will talks of removing man since he is the contingency.  It can be guaranteed that good philosophy leads to good government (freedom) and bad philosophy leads to tyranny (I take this term to encompass anarchism).  Yet guaranteeing that men will choose one over the other is a metaphysical impossibility as it contradicts the nature of man as a being with free will.  It is for each individual in a society to decide what he believes, what he advocates, what he strives toward.  Thus, men must become rationally convinced if they are to uphold a free society while anarchism attempts to bypass the nature of man altogether and thereby only ends in bypassing freedom to make way for force.  Thus, a society’s level of freedom is in direct correspondence to that same society’s reverence for concepts, thus exposing the reality that anarchism’s hatred of the state is really a hatred of concepts, man, and freedom.

Invisible Ideas

Invisible Children Movement Influences Abuse of Political Power

By: Patrick T. Adams

Two weeks have passed now since what can only be classified as a social media phenomenon: the Kony 2012 viral video. For about a week, this 30-minute video, sponsored by the not-for-profit group Invisible Children Inc., spread like wildfire through YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, bringing the video to over 85 million views. It had nothing to do with the usual suspects of social media mentions: March Madness, American Idol, the GOP campaign, etc. In fact, oddly and frighteningly enough, it was political without seeming political – your typical trip into postmodern hipsteria. It had nothing to do with the Keystone pipeline, the Arab Spring, ObamaCare’s constitutionality, birth control, or unemployment, but rather with the welfare of displaced and abused Ugandans amidst a violent insurrection led by religious extremist Joseph Kony. There is a crucial contention to shed light on, though not with the moral status of this civil war in itself. On the contrary, the contention is with the U.S. decision to intervene politically and militarily. I can tell already that I’m fighting an uphill battle against a vast social media army, but you have to climb a few flights of stairs just to defenestrate anything.

The subject matter of the video concerns Joseph Kony, a Ugandan guerilla warlord and religious zealot who is notorious for his abduction and conscription of thousands of children into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). While his political ambitions are to usurp the current Ugandan regime and erect a theocracy based on the 10 Commandments – a sort of Christian Sharia law – his militant sadism and mystical obsession with black magic seem to suggest pathological megalomania.

There is no question that Kony is truly evil and quite insane – bearing an uncanny resemblance to Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – but are his actions proper grounds for a U.S. political or military intervention? Many seem to think so, including George W. Bush (ordered the 2008-2009 Operation Lightning Thunder during his presidency), President Obama (signed into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act), and an overwhelming consensus crossing both sides of the aisle in both the Senate and House of Representatives. The acclaimed documentarians from Invisible Children clearly reached some very elite ears in addition to those of several impassioned Americans.

The government’s role, however – despite years of neoconservative and liberal welfare wars – is not to apportion its troops’ lives and its civilians’ money for the sake of foreign disputes that have negligible relevance to U.S. foreign policy interests. The government, as the American Founders imagined and established, should be reined in because of its monopoly on the use of force, a monopoly to be exercised only in retaliation to initiated force (there is no such thing as a right to initiate the use of force). Man requires individual rights, within a social context, as a moral sanction to act on his own judgment for the sake of his own life. To surrender one’s judgment to another or idling oneself to deterministic forces is to surrender the only human means of survival: the mind. In this respect, government is necessary as a means to securing man’s rights.

Rights are also not determined by arbitrary, subjective whims. Conceptually, rights are conciliated by a philosophical axiom, the law of identity, meaning that rights are not contradictory (i.e. they do not apply only to certain individuals but not others, or in some scenarios but not others). The identity in question when regarding man’s rights is the identity of man qua man, thus by being a man (read: human being) one has certain rights. As mentioned before, man’s identity is that of an organism who survives by the unfettered use of his mind, and rights are the recognition of this fact insofar as they leave a man free to follow the convictions of his own mind. A slave owner who believes in the right to life while denying it to his slaves has some premises to recheck.

A proper application of individual rights to foreign policy will show that government action not on its citizens’ behalf is a sacrifice of its citizens’ pursuits, and therefore of their individual rights. International political and military engagements require an enormous commitment of resources: strategic planning, time, money, and often human lives, with the latter being the most important consideration. When and if the government commits these things to any other purpose than ensuring the protection of its citizens, it is then abusing the powers delegated to it.

This is the case with the U.S. providing assistance to the Ugandan government. One hundred U.S. troops have been committed by the authorization of President Obama, but consider taxpayer dollars as well. According to a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate published in late 2009, implementation of the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act would cost $28 million over the 2010-2014 period.

But these are just insignificant considerations, right? It’s just 100 troops. They’re just advisory. It’s only $28 million. The Ugandans are less privileged than we are.

To think in such a way drops context and marginalizes our own problems. The U.S. is not a disposable asset to the rest of the world simply by being the most prosperous nation on Earth. Those 100 troops, advisory or not, are being put at risk simply by allying against such a radical militant group, and even if it were just one troop, that doesn’t reduce the significance of that life, let alone 100 of them. Servicemen do serve a purpose, but it’s to protect our individual rights, not to distribute war handouts. Remember the hellhole of Vietnam?  The U.S. initially became involved only in sending Green Berets as “advisors” to the South Vietnamese. We all know how that turned out. It’s really easy to get desensitized to numbers in this day and age when politicians toss around the military and billions of dollars like pocket change. This is why it’s so important to deal in concepts in lieu of the sensory overstimulation and shock value coughed up by sensationalist documentarians and politicians.

Also, the focal point of this movement is what appears to be a madman driven by religious ideology. Assuming Kony is still alive - and apparently there is reasonable speculation that he isn’t - who’s to say that making him “famous,” as the Invisible Children movement intends, or offering financial and military assistance to his enemies won’t provoke the LRA to commit retaliatory violence, possibly exacerbating the situation and requiring more effort to defeat the LRA? Who’s to say that this won’t become pro-Kony propaganda that gains him recruits in the form of opportunists and similarly minded ideologues?  Islamic terrorists acting in the name of Allah certainly didn’t mind provoking the powerhouse United States over the past few decades.

However, it’s important to identify the critical difference between the actions of Islamic militants, specifically al-Qaeda, and those of the LRA. The former actually initiated aggression against innocent Americans in multiple instances throughout the 1990s and 2001. In such cases, the U.S. had moral justification in responding with retaliatory force. On the other hand, the LRA is indeed contemptible, but they do not warrant a U.S. political or military intervention; they have not initiated aggression against us.

It’s no wonder that pacifist anti-war groups gain so much clout when the U.S. sacrifices human lives and spends itself into oblivion with so many altruistic liberation wars and skirmishes. On the current path, if the time comes when the U.S. is truly put in a position to defend its citizens’ rights and safety, it will be even more difficult to gather the resolve to successfully engage in an armed conflict when resources are allocated elsewhere.

What is particularly unsettling is that a string of well edited documentary clips and poorly developed concepts is enough to mystify and incite mob rule from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. And a couple of weeks later, it seems to be completely forgotten. Although it’s creepy, it’s not surprising in a country where the overwhelming attitude is that benevolence requires coercively forcing the sacrifice of its citizenry to the latest emotional impulse. The proper alternative to this altruistic bandwagoning, however, is a genuine intellectual commitment to principles and not mere stimuli. A positive difference in the state of the world can’t be achieved by drawing tickets randomly out of a lottery of issues.