4. Systems Man

The American liberal is, more than anything else, a deeply religious person. His faith may be of a strictly secular nature, but it is a faith nonetheless. Like many fundamental faiths, liberalism is accepted without rational analysis, offers the promise of an eventual paradise, and is resistant to any facts contrary to its basic tenets.

American liberalism, at its basic core, is a religious reverence of the state. Once the people have surrendered enough of their power to the state, all social ills will be cured and a utopia will be achieved under the benevolent rule of those enlightened enough to share the liberal vision.

The religion of the state is, for the liberal, a substitute for the fundamentalism that he so desperately needs to cope with life that intimidates him. He is essentially a “system person,” a man who needs to go through life knowing the ultimate answers to the challenges of daily living. A system, whether it is called communism, fascism, socialism, or just liberalism, provides the true believer with a certainty that cannot be found by rational analysis of an uncertain world.

The deification of systems began with the birth of modern philosophy when Rene Descartes pronounced that “I think, therefore I am.” The thinking mind became the creator of new worlds, future paradises, and final answers. Descartes became known as the “father of modern philosophy” and man found a god that could replace the dying one – man came to believe that his thinking mind could settle the wilderness of the uncertain universe with systems of ideas.

Prior to Descartes, man killed other men for the sake of gods that were spiritual in nature. His politics was even an extension of the will of these gods who selected the political leaders by divine appointment. Man was intellectually passive as the gods and their earthly agents decided when war was justified and when murder would become a duty. After Descartes, wars and persecution would become increasingly a service to be paid to the newfound deities – the systems that were the product of man’s thinking mind.

As kingdoms became states, royalty was replaced by systems people – people who had a divine right to rule others. While kings were selected by old gods, the systems man selected himself by his new god – his ego. See p. 189, Being and the End of History.

We think that we will be able to live happily, creatively, if we learn a method, a technique, a style, but creative happiness comes only when there is inward richness, it can never be attained through any system.
J. Krishnamurti

1. Introduction

Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must realize that the basic principle of our freedom is freedom to choose, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.

Dante

There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all of its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Henry David Thoreau

Liberalism, as the term is used in American politics, encompasses a number of labeled ideologies, including socialism, statism, communism, fascism, Maoism, Marxism, and even welfare-statism. As the term is used in this blog, as well as how it is used throughout America, liberalism refers generally to the advance of the power of the state over the individual and is often juxtaposed to American conservatism, which, while advocating the preservation of many social traditional values, has generally come to represent the preservation of individual liberty from the violent authority of the state.

Liberalism itself is not just an ideology; it is, in fact, an ideology of ideologies; a “meta-ideology,” referring to the more general notion that men should be ruled by ideas of one form or another as opposed to by their own free will (within the bounds of laws whose non-ideological purposes are to prevent the savagery that arises from mankind’s natural covetousness, of course). Liberals in America, while belonging to many specific ideological faiths, generally believe that the lives of men should be ruled by ideas that may or may not be their own. In this regard, they stand in direct opposition to the founding fathers in the American political tradition who believed, and implemented in their constitutional laws, that each individual should, as much as possible, have the liberty to pursue his own happiness.

This blog is an inquiry into the reasons why people continue to be liberals in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence that it simply does not work. The history of the last four-hundred years clearly demonstrates that ruling ideas eventually reduce society’s members to abject poverty and tyrannical cruelty. The efficacy of liberalism is not an issue here, it being assumed that any well-informed readers have already seen the evidence that it, in all of its forms, is simply a recipe for social disaster. The idea that governments (as opposed to customers) are always right has consistently led to bankruptcy and starvation wherever it was tried in the twentieth century, the three centuries previous to that, and the current young century that we live in now.

In addition to its economic unfeasibility, the idea that one man’s ideas should rule another man has consistently led to the natural violence of determining which man’s ideas should be the ruling ones. In turn, this competition of ideas has consistently lead to the rule of one man whose sociopathic personality has allowed him to most easily eliminate competing ideas and the men who spawn them.

That only leaves us with the question of why does liberalism persist as a bad idea – a bad idea of bad ideas. Liberalism flourishes in the face of failure because it is a part of man’s nature. Liberalism will always exist for the same reason that rape will always exist – because fear, guilt, and envy reside in the heart of man. External violence over others will always be an appetizing alternative to men who suffer the internal violence of their own alienation from themselves.