Chapter 26
Philosophy
I was about seven years old when I started thinking about problems of perception. I suppose my favourite was to ask how I know if you and I see the same thing when we see a colour. We can easily describe a shape such as a square or a tree, but values such as colour are unique to each of us. The problem is trivial but it is a sign of an enquiring mind.
At twelve I decided that much of the information I was receiving from other people was false. There were so many contradictions that it was impossible they could all be correct, and highly unlikely that any of them were. They were mostly opinions.
At sixteen I rejected every religious idea I had ever been taught on the basis that every different creed demanded that its own ideas were the truth and that its God was the only God. This was so prejudiced that none of it was likely to be true. I have not changed my mind since.
I searched for 24 years for the truth and finally decided I knew the truth when I was around forty years of age. For me the truth lies with a philosophy developed quite independently by a Jewish Russian émigré who left Leningrad during the first world war to escape the consequences of the communist revolution. She had studied philosophy at university and was a quite brilliant student. She lived the rest of her life in relative quiet in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
She wrote several philosophical books and edited a magazine for many years and developed a small circle of like-minded friends. One of them has been a well known senior member of the American establishment for many years now. She called her philosophy Objectivism and I have never been able to fault any of her multitude of ideas.
The vast majority of so-called philosophers since the enlightenment talked a lot of convoluted rubbish. She expounded a simple, logical and very satisfying set of ideas that accurately describe civilisation the way it is and ought to be. She starts from a very few basic postulates and argues with complete, and somewhat ruthless logic, to reality.
Your first contact with her is inevitably harsh as you cannot believe that the world is that simple and that brutal. But she has cut to the quick and eliminated the cant and describes civilisation as it really is, not as we dream it might be. She advocates no great schemes or Utopias, on the contrary she advises that we keep our feet very firmly on the ground. I cannot fault her arguments.
One of the cornerstones of her philosophy is the notion that a contradiction is impossible. If you reach a contradiction then one of your premises, or arguments, must be false. That may sound trite or obvious, but the vast majority of people do not observe that principle in their daily lives.
The lady was born and named Alice Rosenbaum but later lived and wrote under the name Ayn Rand, a name she took from her typewriter. Her best known fictional works were The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Both are hard work but well worth the effort. She is almost unknown in this country but has had a profound influence on thinking in America. A biography by Barbara Branden well explains her influence in that country. She died in 1982 but her influence remains to this day.
Over the years I have developed my own brand of her philosophy. She established a complete set of principles to guide human behaviour and it is not always easy to fit your personal situation into them. Achieving that is a lifetime’s work. The only guidance I have is “To thine own self be true”
The philosophy I try to practice is my own and I am not at all sure that Ayn Rand would approve. But it is the nearest I have been able to get to comply with her principles that I accept in totality.Concrete
There are absolute realities. In our complex world everything seems to change all the time, but there is a body of principles which describe reality. We live in accordance with them or we die.
We have an absolute right to be here. We did not ask to come and the simple fact that we exist gives us the right to exist. Any alternative notion involves some form of slavery.
The right to be here is the right to be. It exists equally for every human being on earth. A right cannot be a right if it is not shared equally by all. A privilege is something that certain members of society have negotiated at the expense of, and to the exclusion of, others. For example “Worker’s rights” are not rights at all but privileges as they do not belong equally to everybody.
This definition of rights is the only one I have ever come across that will stand up to scrutiny for ever. It also means that human rights are actually very few. It also means that they are a very powerful concept.
The first right is the right to be, the right to your life. This requires the right to maintain your life. In a free society of equals, the only way you can do this is by work. You have the right to work. This means the right to sell your services to whoever wishes to buy them and can afford to pay from their own resources. To make this system logical you must also have the right to retain the product of your efforts. This is what we call the right of property. You have the right to own your property.
You have a right to protect your life and property and the practical means to this we call law. The law is made by means of a Constitution that clearly defines our rights. The law is applied and administered by Courts and breaches of our rights may be dealt with by civil law or criminal law, depending upon their nature. Criminal law is administered by the police and their power is controlled by the law.The relationships of these organisations to each other and to individual citizens is called a Constitution and has been under development for many centuries. The development process we call politics and the policies we call philosophy.
That is about it. You have the right to be. You have the right to work. You have the right to own your property. There are a number of necessary corollaries that derive their validity from these three fundamental rights. Everything beyond that is a matter of negotiation. The forms of negotiation are as many as there are people on earth. But they must all observe the three rights of every individual or breach those rights. That is not easy to achieve and it is inevitable that the process will be huge and difficult.
Sand
From here on things become much less certain. I shall attempt to expose a few misconceptions. I do not doubt I shall make myself quite unpopular and much misunderstood.
Animal rights are particularly irksome. Rights are a construction of the human intellect and only humans can have rights. The reality of the animals with which we share this planet is that we all live in an extremely complex ecosystem that we are only just beginning to understand. We live on the “higher” layers of this system, or so we like to think. We should not forget that we consist of around ten billion cells and one thousand billion bugs of millions of kinds. The notion that we can go around killing bugs and other animals without consequence to ourselves is quite ridiculous.
We are part of this ecosystem for ever and we will respect it or it will reject us. The four genes from which we are constructed have been around for a hundred million times longer than us and have infiltrated every single living matter ever recorded above the size of virus. They are the real life form of this planet, not us. Our arrogance on this point can only kill us. It is in our self interest to respect all life forms. We need them more than they need us. That does not mean we have to distort reality by pretending the other life forms have rights. They do not. Only we have been unfortunate enough to develop the intellect that allows us to formulate the concept of rights. The rest eat or get eaten. It ill behooves us to mistreat them.
Workers Rights were a common political war cry through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a means of conducting politics it was probably justified but it has now been extended by political correctness and other forms of fascism to hand privileges to many different groups of people. Many of these discriminatory practices may well be justified to even out the inevitable inequalities that grow in a free society. But calling them rights is highly misguided as it debases the concept of rights and seriously distorts our thinking on rights. A privilege is a privilege and can be negotiated. A right is a right and is not negotiable. A right can be abrogated but it cannot be given as it belongs to no one to give it.
The right to education is invalid. Education is a service just like any other. It is highly desirable that every member of a society should have a good education so that they can secure their right to work and earn and own property. It is highly desirable but cannot be a right as it has to be provided by someone else. Rights exist of right and might have to be fought for and jealously guarded, but they do not have to be produced. They exist of right.
Education requires a teacher to learn the subjects he or she teaches and develop the skills to pass that knowledge on to others. He is entitled to be paid for that service. To demand that that service be supplied to everybody on demand is to imply the enslavement of that teacher. If you wish to argue that the teacher should be paid you will have to answer the question, By what standard? The politics of the last century have been messing with these concepts and practicalities but the one thing they have rarely done is recognise the right of the teacher to determine his terms of employment. He has a right to work on his own terms.
You may then say you agree and that his services must be paid for from public funds. But the collection of public funds by taxation is a violation of the right to keep the rewards of your efforts which is a necessary corollary of the right to work. The fact is that the only way to solve the contradictions in this system is to set education free. Those who demand that this must not be so and education must be controlled by the state are both a century out of date and advocating their own self interest and privileges. They are guarding “Jobs for the boys (and girls)”. They are also controlling the content of education - what we teach others. Is it any wonder that standards of education are a never-ending source of angst and debate?
The arguments will go on for ever until a system is found that will observe human rights. That will be by far the most likely system to work.
One could repeat the argument for education for Health, and probably for Social Security and virtually all forms of production. Many industries were nationalised in the twentieth century and almost none of them succeeded. The natural state of man is to compete on sensible terms. A political system that allows this is likely to be the most successful.
There are certain exceptions to this rule. The idea of competing governments is unreal. The purpose of government is to protect human rights. As rights belong equally to all they must be administered without favour. There can be no such thing as competition. The courts and the police are similarly constrained. They are branches of government, not commerce. That does not mean, of course that they are entitled to be run in an inefficient or corrupt manner so as to be a drain on the resources of the citizens. The armed forces are a branch of government and must remain constitutionally regulated. Their purpose is to protect the people against the government and external enemies.
Privatisation of the formerly nationalised industries has become a double-edged sword. Nationalisation is in principle obnoxious as it prevents natural competition in the provision of services. Privatisation has led to dramatic reductions in prices in certain instances such as power, but many other factors have been at work such as the supply of gas from the North Sea and it is by no means clear that the benefits have come from privatisation.
The downside is that we had to invent regulators who have themselves become a nightmare organisation and may well have undermined the fundamental structure of the National Grid and power station base. Another negative is that the suppliers have become much more difficult for the individual to deal with. There is no longer a concentration of authority and responsibility and finding your way through a large organisation has become a nightmare, especially since the introduction of telephone direction systems that were invented by an extremely perverse sadomasochist.
A very special case seem to be railways. There is little doubt that nationalisation was not very good, but what preceded it had problems. Privatisation has been close to a disaster. Whether that is because the method chosen was ill conceived or because there is a fundamental problem with a constrained transport system is not clear. The problem is probably that the terms of privatisation were far too constrained and the separation of responsibilities has been chosen on political terms rather than in accordance with reality. A truly free privatisation would not separate responsibility for track and stations from the train operator. The other factor is that road transport is probably far too cheap and is probably subsidised far too much. Whatever the solution may be you can be certain that the most successful one will be that which best observes the rights of man.
Another difficult matter is Political Correctness. This has become very fashionable in recent years and is a method of forcing conformity. The statements are typically “No member of this body would act in such a manner”. The philosophical description of this is Argument from Intimidation. The object of the statement has to conform or be implicitly rejected from the group. The method is as old as the hills. Only the name has changed. I call it fascism. Bullying it usually is. When you hear those words, you should run a mile. The problem is that nowadays you are unlikely to stop running.
As I have already dealt with the matter of political correctness, I shall simply point out at this stage that by man I mean mankind which includes women. I do not make any distinction in the matter of rights. They belong equally to all humans. I accept no criticism in my use of the generic term “Man”.
Force is a major issue. The whole essence of human rights is to exclude the use of force. This objective derives from rights themselves. A lion uses massive claws and stealth to survive. A bird uses his wings to escape danger. An antelope can run like the wind. These are their methods of survival. Take them away and they die. Civilised man uses his brain to survive. Take it away and he dies.
To come between a man and his brain, his rationality, is the worst crime you can commit against him. His brain is his tool of survival. The act of coming between him and his brain is called force. A necessary corollary of the right to life is that the use of force by any man against another man is forbidden.
Force can range form the political correctness described above up to full scale war. Regardless of its scale or nature, the use of force is immoral. The correct nature of human intercourse is negotiation and agreement. This is called trading. Minds meet and make agreements which the law requires them to honour. By this means civilisation is conducted peacefully and each man is able to exercise his talents to the full.
Carl Marx propounded a maxim “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. My maxim is much different. “From each according to his will, to each according to his success”. By this means you are free to work or not as you please but you must also suffer the consequences of your indolence if you choose not to work. Marx’s dictum was a recipe for slavery, the ultimate expression of force. It is not surprising that its adoption by Stalin and the Soviets led to their ultimate bankruptcy. It did not do us much good either for half a century. My dictum gives each of us the incentive to work and to succeed. To pretend to work is easy. To achieve success requires real effort.
The control of force is a prime function of government. The law proscribes it and the police monopolise it. The armed forces can use it only in war or declared emergencies. The individual citizen may not use it except in defence. This last matter is a source of much concern and misunderstanding, much of it quite deliberately done to cause confusion in the hope of gaining an advantage.
The principle is quite simple. If a man has the right to keep his property then he must have the right to protect it. If another man uses force to violate his right, he must have the right to protect himself and his property. The law of this country has accurately supported this principle for many centuries. That principle is currently under threat by political correctness used to argue illogically against property rights.
The principle used in this country is that a man may use reasonable force to protect himself and his property. This has been brought under pressure by the legal system which has put much more emphasis on the rights of criminals to fair treatment and a fair trial. One cannot argue against due process of law but the reality is that the power placed in the hands of criminals by universal provision of legal aid has meant that the balance has swung much in favour of the criminal. Thugs flout the law all their lives while their victims suffer indignity, violation and the decay of civilisation. The honest citizen who breaks a speed limit is treated much more harshly than a thug who drives a car without tax, insurance or concern.
Political correctness has placed more power in the hands of the criminal than in the hands of the victim. We will correct this and act in accordance with the principles of human rights or we will suffer the inevitable consequences. Reality will not be denied.
There are thousands of issues which I could discuss but all of them are best addressed with reference to the same fundamental principles of human rights. That is the best reference ever defined and its use will inevitable lead to the best possible success. The use of an inferior set of ideas will always ultimately lead to a worse ending.
Summary
The Russian communists helped fight and win a terrible war against a filthy fascist regime but at the end of the day their philosophy led them to bankruptcy and destruction. Every society achieves its philosophical aims. Both fascists and communists held enslavement as their primary aim. Both suffered the consequences.
The essence of our system of government has been freedom. This has been threatened many times and is under almost constant threat as men jockey for an advantage. But the Western world has developed a system of government based upon principles of freedom never seen elsewhere either in time or place. The best expression of these is the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which was written by a bunch of Englishmen who stated they wished to remain so. They then explained the reasons why they could not, and defined the principles of freedom which both the US and UK have adopted since as the basis of government. The US fought the war of independence and got on with it. We in this country have been fighting the same battle ever since but with similar results. We have grown up together and reached similar destinations. Our “special relationship” has nothing to do with our almost common language or history, but with the fact that we both hold human rights as the basis of government. We have managed to pass this notion on to Australia and New Zealand and Canada and with less certainty to parts of Europe. But the rest of the world is a mess.
The notion of rights has come under intense pressure on both sides of the Atlantic without let for ever. There is always someone trying to pervert the notion of freedom to benefit himself. It is our strength and pride that, overall, we have maintained our regard for human rights for well over 200 years now. Rights are still under fire daily, but we still manage to retain more than any other country on earth.
That is what I fight for. Nothing is more important. Although I am waiting to die, an event that might happen in ten minutes, I have not lost sight of the fact that I am alive and the maintenance of my life requires freedom and that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. So be it.