The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
We on the Right never organized to save this country like the Left did to destroy it. They burned, looted, censored, persecuted, silenced, cancelled but they were organized. We, by contrast and with several notable exceptions, thought that a few good men (and women) could turn the tide. But we cannot because we didn’t organize the tide. We had individuals, not organizations and now we are suffering for it. People like Shapiro, Bongino, Levin, Peterson, and a few staunch conservatives in Congress couldn’t rally the troops enough to change things.
We’re too comfortable and now it’s getting very uncomfortable, with the Marxists tyrants in America going after our guns, our bank accounts, our children, and our liberty. This American experiment is coming to an end unless there is a new birth of patriotism, perhaps with blood, that is organized against the tyranny of the Left.
With each new Trump indictment, the left’s strategy becomes increasingly clear. It isn’t to bring real criminal charges based on actual violations of the law, or to see justice applied equally and fairly even to a powerful person like Trump. The strategy is to demonstrate power and thereby humiliate and discourage Trump supporters by showing them how powerless they are.
Another aspect of this strategy, as James Lindsay explained in a Twitter thread Tuesday, is to provoke the right into reacting. This is what Lindsay calls “leftist dialectical political warfare,” or, in Trump’s case, “Operation Poke the Bear.” The purpose of such warfare, says Lindsay, is to provoke a reaction that would justify the further consolidation of power on the left.
[from The Federalist]
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…[T]the Democrat effort to criminalize their political enemies has reached its climax in 2023. Republicans have sat and watched as four separate indictments have come down from three separate prosecutors, all with the same purpose: imprisoning Donald Trump and as many of his political allies as they can get away with. Monday’s indictment out of Fulton County, Georgia, is the most extreme yet, seeking to ensnare not just Trump but 18 of his associates for the “crime” of contesting the 2020 election through the courts and legislative process.
The goal of all these indictments is simple: rig the 2024 election in the court system before a single ballot can even be cast, and criminalize the MAGA political movement Trump has built.
It’s August. Many young people head off to college.
This year, fortunately, fewer will go.
I say “fortunately” because college is now an overpriced scam.
Overpriced, because normal incentives to be frugal and make smart judgements about who should go to college were thrown out when the federal government took over granting student loans.
Why?
Because our government basically vomits money at everyone who applies.
If private lenders gave out the loans, they’d look at whether they were likely to be paid back. They’d ask questions like: “What will you study? You really think majoring in dance will lead to a job that will pay you enough to allow you to pay us back?”
Government rarely asks these questions. Bureaucrats throw money at students. Many don’t benefit. Many shouldn’t even be going to college. Today, nearly half of the students given loans don’t graduate even after six years.
Many feel like failures.
College is good for people who want to be college professors or who major in fields like engineering and computer science that might lead to good jobs. But that’s not most people. Government loans encourage everyone to go to college, even if they’re not very interested in academics.
Government’s handouts also invite colleges to keep raising tuition. Over the past 50 years, college cost rose at four times the rate of inflation. Four times!
Years ago, I reported how colleges were suddenly wasting money on luxuries like fancy gyms and even day spas. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that it’s gotten worse: The University of Oklahoma bought a monastery in Italy for study abroad students! The University of Kentucky built a theater where students play video games.
“Why not raise tuition?” asks the typical college president. “Uncle Sam pays the bill!”
When I went to Princeton, tuition was $2,000. Now its $60,000.
Colleges have little incentive to cut costs or innovate. Princeton still “teaches” by having professors lecture. Super boring. I slept through many.
Although today, I guess I should thank Princeton because its tedious lectures inspired me to try to find better ways to present information. That made me successful on TV.
Today, student loan borrowers owe tens of thousands of dollars. Last year, the president announced he would cancel up to $20,000 of that debt per person.
Indebted students loved that! A group named the Student Debt Crisis Center called that “a major win for many.”
But it would be a major loss for many more! Canceling debt is unfair to the people who work hard and pay off their debts.
Fortunately, Biden’s plan was struck down by the Supreme Court, which said only Congress has the right to cancel student debt. Congress didn’t.
Now Biden’s trying again. The administration announced they will forgive debt for anyone who’s been making payments for more than 20 years. That’s better, but still bad. Maybe courts will stop this handout, too.
College students take on loans and spend decades in debt because they believe they must get a degree to be hired. But that’s no longer true. IBM, Accenture, Dell, Bank of America, Google and other big companies, recognizing the uselessness of many undergraduate degrees, recently dropped college-degree requirements. So have state governments in Maryland, Utah, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Alaska, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia.
Good jobs in the trades, like welding and plumbing, don’t require a college degree. Trade school programs often take less than two years and cost much less than college.
To have a good life or get a good job, you don’t need fancy dining halls, video game auditoriums or a college degree.
College has become a government-subsidized rip-off. It’s good that fewer people go.
People ask me all the time, “So what’s better? Psychiatric drugs or talk therapy?” Regular visitors to this page know that ideas and thoughts are the cause of emotions and actions, and that psychiatric drugs cannot be the primary tool for correcting negative thoughts or actions. At best, they might help to “even out” emotional instability while the client works to correct misguided ideas.
Interestingly, when meds and talk therapy are combined, it’s difficult to determine which contributes more to the subject’s improvement. Many years ago, a client told me, “It’s better to swim with the current than against the current. Psychiatric medication might help me swim with the current, but if I’m going to get anywhere, I still have to swim.” And therein lies the key. Medication is secondary, and the mind must continue to think and function in order for flawed ideas to be changed. Indeed, with or without drugs, I still work together with my clients to correct misguided and false ideas.
Sadly, medication is often prescribed in an effort to bypass that process. A psychiatrist might spend five minutes with a patient, decide the patient is depressed, and prescribe medication. Often, the doctor doesn’t talk with the patient about his or her problems, and might not even refer the patient to a psychotherapist who can get a better idea of what’s going on. This conveys to the patient the false idea that medication is the first and only option.
If, in fact, drugs do “even out” emotional instability while the person takes responsibility for thinking, then the medical path is all well and good. But in almost 35 years of professional counseling, very few people have ever told me that their medication helps, and more have said that it either doesn’t help or that it makes things worse.
Sadly, all of this can lead the patient to believe that he has no responsibility for his mental functioning, and therefore no control over it; thus triggering a vicious cycle of more anxiety and/or depression. If someone simply told him that medication is, at best, a way to calm him so he can think more effectively, he would be a lot better off.
I’m not against anything — medication or whatever — that objectively helps. What I am against is the idea of biological determinism, i.e., that biology is destiny, that genetics and brain physiology determine everything about a person. If this were true, a doctor could just prescribe medication for everything; pretending that the patient’s attitudes and behaviors have nothing to do with how she feels. That sense of helplessness would be more depressing and anxiety-provoking than anything the patient was probably thinking in the first place.
People sometimes tell me, “I’m taking these pills and I’m doing better. But I’m not sure if it’s the medicine or the counseling that’s helping. Or, maybe I’m better because the problem got better.”
Psychiatric medications rarely, if ever, clear up or truly cure emotional problems the way antibiotics heal infections or a cast helps to mend a broken leg. In fact, I haven’t seen a single example of that. There are just too many variables that impact a person’s emotional situation.
The most potent factors affecting a person’s psychological state are ideas, beliefs and the actions one takes as a result of those beliefs. When all is said and done, my advice regarding medication is to take it if it helps. And, by “help,” I mean that it makes it easier to do what you ultimately need to do: To think, introspect and use your mind to reason things out – with or without a therapist. My client so many years ago said it best: “…if I’m going to get anywhere, I still have to swim.”
Labels are useful, though not always totally accurate. The quick, short answer to the question in the title is “no, it’s not,” and I will elucidate further below. The CCP is no more true “communist” than the Democratic Party in America believes in democracy. Calling the CCP “communist” is a misnomer. Just because they have stated a goal—a “communist” society—doesn’t mean they have reached it, or ever want to (and believe me, the CCP doesn’t).
Communism has been attempted often in history but never practiced successfully. As Ronald Reagan said, “Communism only works in heaven, where they don’t need it, and in hell, where they already have it.” Indeed, communism is, frankly, impossible because it espouses equality of outcomes, which will never happen.
Despite some conservative claims, neither the CCP nor the Democrats are ”communist” in the true sense of the word. There is no “egalitarianism” in either. The CCP is a totalitarian government with many features of Leftist ideology—control of the economy, censorship and silencing of opposition, dictatorial domination of the people, no respect for human life, etc. These also clearly mark the actions and/or aims of the Democratic Party in America. The CCP and Democrats both believe in Leftist ideology. The Democrats are trying to install it in America but cannot fully do so until they get totalitarian control. But, being Leftists, they WILL do the same things in America that Leftists have done elsewhere, if they ever get the power to do so. If not, why not? A Leftist is a Leftist is a Leftist, no matter what rock he slithers out from under.
Folks, egalitarianism is the great lie of the Left and is one reason it will always fails. People are not “equal.” There should be “equality under the law,” but, otherwise, we all have different abilities, talents, intelligence levels, motivations, etc. Stephen Curry and I are not “equal” on a basketball court and never would be, unless maybe you tied his hands behind his back, broke both his legs, and didn’t let him go across midcourt. Then there might be some sort of “equality of outcome.” But that can only be accomplished by distinctly limiting his freedom. Even Thomas More concluded that “utopia” is impossible without government force. If people are free, they will not be equal. If people are equal, they will not be free. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” had nothing to do with economic outcomes.
Try this thought experiment. Give everybody in America $100,000 to start with. Within a month (if everyone is allowed freedom to use their money as they wish), some people will have doubled their money, and some will have lost it all, with varying degrees in between. Some people (Elon Musk) have a talent for making money. Some people (Mark Lewis) have a talent for losing it. We aren’t equal in all matters. The only way my bank account and Elon’s will ever be equal is by forcibly taking his money away and giving it to me. That’s not freedom.
And communism, in practicality, recognizes this. There is always the “nomenklatura”—the elite—who rule and are rich while the masses struggle to survive—those who aren’t shot. Marxist “freedom” and “equality” are the greatest chimeras ever concocted.
China is a Leftist totalitarian government, not a communist one. “Rightist” totalitarian governments, usually military dictatorships, have existed, but China is a “Leftist” one, not “Rightist.” American Democrats are “Leftists”; some of their more starry-eyed idealists might think they want “communism,” but it will never happen, as they would quickly discover. What Democrats want is what the CCP has—totalitarian control of their country, not “communism.” The CCP may talk “communist” or “Marxist” rhetoric, but they have never had it and never will.
The man I worked for in China who stole thousands of dollars from me was a greedy, selfish, immoral, “bourgeois capitalist” in Marxist terms, the supposed enemy of communism. I was the “proletarian,” the worker, Marxism’s hero, and I was robbed. And even the Chinese government (the court when I sued him) decided for the “rightist, capitalist roader,” not the “proletarian worker.” Don’t tell me that China is “communist” or “Marxist.” The government is totalitarian, and distinctly favors “party members.” The “Chinese Communist Party,” like the “Democratic Party” in America, is only a useful label, not an accurate description.
China fled any supposed “communist” intentions after the disasters of Mao Zedong, who actually didn’t apply “communism” universally either, certainly not to himself. And looking at the 20th century, we discover no Marxist society that succeeded, at least by using Marxism, to materially or spiritually advance their people. Indeed, can anyone name one single benefit any Marxist government has given to the world? Marxism teaches that government is a tool of the rich and powerful (the “bourgeoisie”) to oppress the masses (the “proletariat”). Once the great “socialist” revolution takes place, and “communism” arises and ushers in a Golden Age of equality, freedom, and plenty, government will no longer be necessary and will fade into oblivion. Government will disappear in the perfect Marxist Utopia. Can you imagine the CCP ever giving up power in the name of “communism”? THAT is a hoot.
Here is why Marxism fails: when I was teaching history, I would always tell my students that “the greatest resource in the world is not oil, or water, or some natural element. The greatest resource in the world is the human mind set free—to create, explore, innovate.” Set free from economic (not moral) restraints, for there will be no economic freedom for all if there are no moral restraints on human behavior. Capitalism, not socialism, provides—has provided—the economic freedoms that have created human prosperity the past 200+ years. The CCP knows that, and that’s why it is not a “communist” system.
Totalitarian, yes. Communist, no. Don’t confuse labels and rhetoric with reality.
Man’s distinctive characteristic is his type of consciousness—a consciousness able to abstract, to form concepts, to apprehend reality by a process of reason . . . [The] valid definition of man, within the context of his knowledge and of all of mankind’s knowledge to-date [is]: “A rational animal.”
(“Rational,” in this context, does not mean “acting invariably in accordance with reason”; it means “possessing the faculty of reason.” A full biological definition of man would include many subcategories of “animal,” but the general category and the ultimate definition remain the same.)
Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.
The key to what you so recklessly call “human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness.
Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it.
Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality—which means: to be conscious—by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological.
Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom—by instinct.
Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it—is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.
To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.
If some men do not choose to think, they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others—but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others—but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived. Regardless of what choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any number of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil course they may choose to pursue—the fact remains that reason is man’s means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.
A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not.
The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects: 1. unlike the metaphysically given, man’s products, whether material or intellectual, are not to be accepted uncritically—and 2. by its metaphysically given nature, a man’s volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity “man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.
An animal’s life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal’s consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man’s life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him.
Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind’s progress, when the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.
Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered).
A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
Almost unanimously, man is regarded as an unnatural phenomenon: either as a supernatural entity, whose mystic (divine) endowment, the mind (“soul”), is above nature—or as a subnatural entity, whose mystic (demoniacal) endowment, the mind, is an enemy of nature (“ecology”). The purpose of all such theories is to exempt man from the law of identity.
But man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.)
They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.
Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.
Man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and . . . he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions.
Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears. In that sense, man is the weakest of animals: he is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or “instinctual” knowledge. Physically, he would fall an easy prey, not only to the higher animals, but also to the lowest bacteria: he is the most complex organism and, in a contest of brute force, extremely fragile and vulnerable. His only weapon—his basic means of survival—is his mind.
In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.
“It’s only human,” you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept “human” mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure—as if “to feel” were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not—as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.
In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.
