ON RIGHTS—Rand asserts that a “free society” is synonymous with “capitalism” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 108. All quotations from this section are from this text). Furthermore, Rand asserts that one can only have rights in a capitalistic society, and that capitalism is the only type of society that can protect rights. She accuses her “opponents,” whoever they might be—they are unnamed, as is frequent in Rand—of “the gimmick” of conflating political rights into economic rights (p. 112).

Rand’s entire argument for the exclusivity of libertarian economic rights is founded on two critical pillars. First, Rand presupposes an absolutist notion of freedom, such that any individual right to life and property is sacrosanct, never to be touched by any outside agent on pain of immorality or tyranny. Second, Rand engages in a logically faulty argument: that a person’s right to something that someone else has produced directly implies that those who produce that thing “are deprived of their rights and condemned to slave labor” (p. 113). One can see several factors at work here which make for Rand’s bad logic.

First, there is the falsely held logical notion that the universal-rational or even “common humanity” conception that the rights of one person (e.g. to life, liberty, and equality) be fulfilled by the assistance of those who are able to do so on the grounds that humans do not switch species simply because they are unable to fulfill their rights as independently as others, through the means of inconveniencing the self-interests of another (what Rand calls “sacrifice”) automatically (and actually) “deprives” someone else (the deprivation is in her definition of “sacrifice:” “the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue;” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 50). In this context, “sacrifice” is opposed to “the rational principle of conduct: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values…”). That there is no logical relation at all between the premise and the conclusion here may be seen by an example. This example is not abstract or hypothetical: I actually experienced this. I used to go to dinner several times a week with my colleagues in philosophy. We would meet, then walk to any local restaurant. On numerous occasions, one of our colleagues, John, would encounter a homeless person and actually walk with him or her to the nearest deli or sandwich outlet and buy that person a sandwich. “I’ll catch up with guys” was his daily line waving us on (and he always did catch up with us). When I once asked him whether he received anything other than a good feeling out of his charity, he said: “No. I just had the means to eat; he [the homeless person] did not.” When I played “devil’s advocate” with him, suggesting that he may have just taken a wealthy con man to dinner, he said: “Maybe. But it wasn’t really a sacrifice for me to help someone whom I thought could use the help.” Exactly. It wasn’t a sacrifice for him: he gave up some time and a bit of money for a perfect stranger in a non-emergency situation simply because he saw a need and had an ability to help. And that is precisely the point of all rational ethics: when one universalizes one’s personal moral code, one cannot escape reaching such a conclusion. Most importantly, one would have to argue quite dogmatically and rigidly to maintain that there was enough moral significance in my colleague’s understanding that the needs of another person outweighed his own personal inconvenience so much that it resulted in his being deprived of his self-interested freedom in any important moral sense. Rand has little appreciation of this type of rational calculation in any terms short of emergencies. Here is her take on my friend’s actions: “It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers” and that “illness and poverty are not metaphysical emergencies” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 55). But, then again, one would expect this out of someone who denies that a society of persons even truly exists. But the real-life example demonstrates the logic of the argument in this case: there is no relation between being “rational” and being “self-interested,” as Rand argues (see her essay “The Ethics of Emergencies,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, to see the details of her argument here). Quite the contrary: rational-practical calculation, weighing the benefits and burdens of a contemplated act, and/or my interests in comparison to another, as well as deontological ethics of universalizing one’s ethical principles, all would argue in support of what my friend did and does. “My personal choice” is only part of the ethical calculation required in such cases. If one stops there, as Rand does, one does indeed conclude the need to be selfish. But ethically speaking, reason requires us to do more than just calculate my own good, for the reasons just discussed.

Second, there is the position that deprivation of rights (“by force”) presupposes an absolutist notion of freedom, such that a freedom possessed is a freedom completely lost (to slavery) if surrendered for any other reason than by one’s free choice. But that a nuance or limit to absolute freedom becomes “slavery,” or even a significant “deprivation” is unsupportable and virtually incoherent, except as a rhetorical statement.

Further, Rand takes her two economic rights—to property and to “free trade”—and says they are also political rights (p. 115); yet, to those who extend economic rights beyond these, they are guilty of the “gimmick” of extending political rights into economic territory. Rand also defines rights as moral principles (p. 110), yet simultaneously calls them economic principles. So which are they? Or are they both? Further, on what grounds does one assert that (her preferred) economic rights may extend politically but not vice versa? Rand’s argument at best takes this position, but her reasons for allowing her own overlap of rights (from economic to political) and not the other direction are given nowhere in this essay. But rights are distinctly political—e.g. freedom, equality, etc. are not derived from, nor by necessity tied to, a specific economic theory.

Thus, Rand blurs moral rights and political rights, and holds that because the latter restrain government only, that no one has rights against others not to be treated similarly—e.g. Rand says that there is no censorship if private citizens do it, since “free speech” (i.e. the First Amendment) applies to government-citizen relations, not that between private citizens (pgs. 115-116). Rand has no use for the right of equality or equal treatment, and in this regard at least, Rand could use some instruction from John Stuart Mill on what democracy looks like—even more, on what individual liberty really looks like in a democracy. Regarding speech, Mill maintains that democratic liberty requires that opinions not widely shared be “encouraged and countenanced” since “only through diversity of opinion…is there a chance of fair play to all sides of truth (On Liberty, Chapter II, p. 46). Further, in America there has been a long and robust debate on the freedom of expression under the First Amendment notion of “free speech” that has not yet concluded. From the Federalist-Republican debate on what free speech meant, to the numerous Supreme Court cases concerning what counts as free speech in society, and we are still debating it today, most recently with the notorious Court decision in the Citizens United case in 2010. Justice Brandeis, in Whitney v. California (1927), gave four values protected by free expression: the search for truth; promotion of personal development—e.g. art, literature, etc.; respect for liberty—individuals are better able to judge what will make them fulfilled more than government; and enhancement of democratic process/political participation, which allows the political process to work effectively.  As the first and second reasons demonstrate, speech as a right absolutely does indeed involve the relationship between private citizens.

Moving on, contrary to Rand’s view, laissez-faire capitalism puts notions of equal rights under the boots of those who climb to the top of the economic ladder, and thus such types of rights cannot be held to be moral within a full-blown rights perspective. We would rather want to see a political and economic system that together enables all citizens, even those who are least advantaged in society, to manage their affairs within a context of both social and economic equality (see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pgs. 137-140).

Furthermore, Rand’s political theory puts things backwards. Rather than having what Rand calls “inflated” (i.e. expanded) notions of human rights threatening capitalistic (“true”) rights, one would have a fuller analysis if one argued that capitalism had actually restricted democracy. In fact, if we look at the development of the relationship between American capitalism and American democracy, the former has overtaken the latter, and taken control of the public sphere, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas calls it, while citizens have become just consumers of corporate goods, having their opinions formed by the dominant elites of the country (see Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, pgs. 41-49).

In her defense of her version of rights, once again we see Rand committing a significant logical error: she claims to deduce rights from the Principle of Identity. We have already seen how, from this rule of thought, nothing may be logically derived. So immediately Rand’s theory of rights is a suspicious one. Also, we see Rand in her understanding of rights confuse two notions: “right” meaning “correct,” and “right” meaning “a moral category of protection” (p. 111).

Finally, Rand demonstrates no familiarity with the tradition and debate concerning rights. By limiting rights exclusively to individual freedom and to negative rights against another, Rand ignores the fact that equality was as fundamental to rights as was autonomy; that without equality, women and blacks would not have the same rights as men. This fundamental emphasis on equality resulted in the recognition of such rights as the right to an adequate standard of living, seen in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Additionally, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), which mandates that States must take appropriate action to ensure the rights to adequate standard of living and to education, for example. This understanding of rights necessarily calls upon others to be responsible to and for their fellow world citizens. As a consequence, it mandates moral accountability of those who have toward those who do not have. Rand misses this idea entirely in her understanding of rights as limited to individualistic autonomous ones.

ON GOVERNMENT–According Rand, “man’s own life [is] the ethical purpose of every individual man” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 27). This assertion is based on her understanding of “rationality,” which means “that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others…that one must never grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit.” This is what Rand calls “the virtue of Justice” (p. 28). This, for Rand, conjoins with the virtue of pride, which is the recognition “that as a man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul” (p. 29).

Rand’s approach to government takes a minimalist form: the only proper task of government is to enforce individual rights (p. 128). For Rand, this applies to government in the following ways. First, “the only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect his rights” to life, liberty, and to own property. The last of these rights is the most fundamental one, according to Rand: “Without property rights, no other rights are possible” (p. 36). Thus, Rand’s ethics of individualism, which maintains that each person must value him or herself primarily, becomes a society of independent atomistic individuals who have negative claims on others not to interfere with their independent liberty and wealth accumulation. In fact, Rand says, no society may rightfully take what a person has earned for himself. If it does, it is not a society, “but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule” (p. 126). Thus, “if men are to live together in peaceful, rational, productive society…the basic social principle…[is] the principle of individual rights.” As a consequence of this philosophy, “taxation…would be voluntary” (p. 135). Any government that has for its mission to elevate individual citizens by educating them, or providing assistance for their wealth or health, violates rights—i.e. the rights of the true individualists, who should be permitted to maintain the property—all of it—that they have obtained for themselves. Taking anything from them violates their primary right of property. There is only one socio-political system that can maintain and fulfill these individualist rights properly, and that is “laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state [regulation] and [from] economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church” (p. 37).

This has become the primary philosophical platform of contemporary neoliberalism, even though they and Rand distanced themselves from each other.

However, Rand and her disciples miss something quite critical in taking this position, and that is the U.S. Constitution. Obviously, Randians have either never read it, don’t take it seriously, or just skipped over Article 1, Section 8, in which it states unequivocally that the philosophy of U.S. constitutional democracy is precisely the opposite of the Randian one. In Section 8, n. 1, it says: “To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…” Add to that n. 3: “To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” Thus, the idea that is often asserted by Randians that the Founders would have agreed with her philosophy is a bogus claim.

Examining this further, contrast Rand’s philosophy to that of Thomas Jefferson, who not only borrows directly from, but is himself philosophically much closer to Aristotle than is Rand. Jefferson says that “man was made for society,” and that humans “are endowed with a sense of right & wrong” in relation to this society.[1] Thus, both Aristotle and Jefferson grounded our social proclivities, our need for others and concern for others, in human nature itself. More to the point for Rand versus Jefferson, the latter took direct issue with Egoism by name, but rejected it on the grounds of Natural Law. We do things for others, Jefferson said, “Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct.”[2]

Rand and her followers also steadfastly ignore the Federalist, which is, of course, where the philosophy underlying the U.S. Constitution really is. In Federalist n. 10, Madison states that enlightened leaders will not always be at the helm. As a result, the structures of government must be in place “to secure the public good” as well as individual rights (my emphasis). Furthermore, Rand ignores the fact that all through the Federalist, there is deep and abiding concern with the “common good” and the need to balance it with individual rights (e.g. n. 42 & n. 46). There can be no doubt that Madison and Hamilton sought to balance individual rights with a conception of the common good, or as Madison called it, “the public good.” Thus, there is no cogent argument that can be made that the Founders were individualists, economically or otherwise.

As usual with Rand, much of what she has to say about the function of government is unobjectionable per se. Where she runs into problems, as she does in her ethics, her ontology, and her economic ideas, is taking one part of the proper concern at issue and inflating it to the “essence” of that issue. Once one takes account of other dimensions of human existence, one immediately sees the superficiality of Rand’s position.

Concretely, the blame pattern of growing inequity we see in the West today can be laid at least in part at the doorstep of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of self-interestedness, which in its political-economic manifestation asserts that monopolies and depressions result from government interference in the free market: “It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 26; 72). Standing in direct polarity to this position is Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism. Rand really does not refute Marx in her theory, in part because she rarely mentions him, in part because she never develops his position, and in part because she does not properly focus where Marx spent most of his analysis of capitalism, and that is in the chronic crises of overproduction. Marx describes these crises as follows:

“The quantity of commodities created in masses by capitalist production depends on the scale of production and on the need for constantly expanding this production, and not on a predestined circle of supply and demand, on wants that have to be satisfied. Mass production can have no other buyer, apart from other industrial capitalists, than the wholesaler. Within certain limits, the process of reproduction may take place on … an increased scale even when the commodities expelled from it did not really enter individual or productive consumption….[If this occurs], commodity-capitals compete with one another for a place in the market. Late-comers, to sell at all, sell at lower prices…[and] their owners must declare their insolvency or sell at any price…. Then a crisis breaks out” (Capital 2: 75-76).

This distinctive feature of capitalism is endemic to it, according to Marx, so the capitalists will not profit from paying workers more, and the cycle of crises will continue; or as Marx describes it in the Grundrisse:

“The highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with the depreciation of capital, degradation of the laborer, and a most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises, in which by momentous suspension of labour and annihilation of a great portion of Capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can[not] go on. These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow” (Grundrisse, p. 23).

Rand essentially does an “end run” around Marx by not taking him on directly.

Rand’s political ideas also run into logical problems. Politics is not rational if institutional arrangements are not legitimated by inclusive distribution patterns, since a truly rational politics must encompass universal concerns, and universals by definition include all facets of institutional arrangements. That is what is meant by “the good of the people” as being fundamental to democracy. Short of such inclusive concerns, political arrangements regulate only by protecting individuals as they increase their self-interested ends. But if some individuals are able by benefit of circumstance, inheritance, or race to advance their already advantaged self-interested pursuits beyond those of others, and as a consequence of that pre-given advantage detract from the ability of others to engage in the same pursuits, that can in no way be a fundamental part of a rational or universal conception of justice.

But rational-logical universality as class inclusion must include the issue of a fair distribution of goods to be rationally inclusive. While self-interest is to a degree rational and legitimate, it is not fully rational unless such rationality is seen to extend to all dimensions of society and its structures, and this means taking the interests of others into account (i.e. inclusion), not exclusion of others under some notion of rationality being defined in terms of self-interest alone.

Ayn Rand’s conception of justice is to give people what they deserve in terms of merit, not in terms of being human and having needs and interests. Because for Rand, injustice is giving people what they do not merit (or taking more than they merit), it serves as a perfect rationalization to dismantle equitable institutional arrangements which were set up to rectify social structures that advantaged some over others. This is the situation we find ourselves in today. Thus, the rational question we should be asking ourselves is: Do we really want to follow the direction we see the Rand philosophy of objectivism leading us to? Her philosophy certainly will be good for the few (e.g. “the 1%” as they are currently called), but for a philosophy that includes the ethical value of equity—that includes “the many”—we will need some kind of conception of a common good. That Rand totally rejects this value demonstrates the intellectually vacuous nature of her philosophy. Democracy has never been simply about freedom, as the writings of Madison, Jefferson, et. al. have demonstrated. Thus, a purely libertarian form of democracy is one that comes up short of what the “full flowering of democracy” would look like, if only we would let it grow by setting Randian individualism aside in favor of a form of democracy that truly values equitable relations between persons, instantiating mechanisms to prevent inequality of distributions that result in economic crises such as our current one, and ultimately result in oligarchy. This will be the legacy of Ayn Rand unless we wake up to it and reject it decisively right now, by opting for mutuality and solidarity against the individualistic preferences of those who already have more than their fair share of social goods, while simultaneously using those social goods for their private advantage.

As I was watching a Labor Day program on the brutality corporate managers used against American dockworkers in the 1930’s, it occurred to me that for someone who held Rand’s philosophy, there would be no reason not to support such violence toward another human being provided that it enhanced the self-interest of the brutalizer. We see the same thing happening today from corporate managers, albeit more frequently on an economic level than on a raw physical level. However, with some employment situations in an economy of scarcity, it may well take on the physical form, such as brutal working conditions, abuse of workers by heavy work, low pay, mandatory overtime, refusal to pay insurance for workers when injured, etc.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS–As I have been arguing all along in this series of articles, the entire point of ethics and particularly of justice is to take into account the good of the other. To the extent that Rand does this at all, it is strictly on the grounds of individualistic presuppositions. And in this regard, she fails to instantiate a workable theory of justice. Quite the opposite, actually: the fact that Randian selfishness is the admitted philosophy of the people in charge of both our economy and government (to the degree that they profess or even care to think out a philosophy of sorts at all, apart from acting strictly on the insatiable desire for more) shows why we are imploding as a nation right now.

I think it is important to add here that if we take Rand at her word—i.e. that there is no human nature or essence and no ethical responsibility to another short of our self-interest—then what we really have is a form of radical subjectivism, not a form of “Objectivism” in the sense in which she seeks it. As Rand puts it: “…men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally…” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 54). For if there is no essence, no duty or responsibility toward others qua human, nor a common good or community of persons, then Rand’s use of the phrase “man qua man,” although borrowed from Aristotle to refer to human essence, for Rand means literally what it says: “each individual person qua each individual person.” This can in no way argued to be objective, even in Rand’s quirky way of defining the term, if there are no real universals, no ethical universals, and no necessary inter-human connections, the latter expressed either in terms of compassion or in terms of positive rights and responsibilities. Instead, it is really an attempt to make intellectually palatable the Rand ethics, synopsized by the assertion with which she entitled one of her essays: “leave us alone!” In short, I see no way that a philosophy of mutual exclusion, defined here as separating the communal ties that bond humans (e.g. language; compassion, universal extension of constructed axioms, reason as necessarily inclusive [universal] and discursive, etc.), can ever result in anything that could be called “a fully human life.” Aristotle instructed us as to why that is the case, and that need not be repeated here, since we dealt with this in Part II.

Rand’s philosophy is at best incomplete, a cherry-picking of aspects of the philosophical tradition chosen in order to defend her ethical viewpoint of selfishness. At worst, is a philosophy either for adolescents, who are still socially maturing, or sociopaths, who never will understand their inter-relations with other people (qua people). But with its complete disregard for the rational, compassionate connection with others that underscores all our actions anyway, it is ultimately a philosophy for individual people and nations that have a suicidal urge. Persons or groups that follow Rand, to use Rand’s own evaluation against her (emphasis hers): “They are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer…”

Let us begin our analysis of the politics of Ayn Rand with a key claim of hers that we noted in our assessment of Rand’s ontological ethics: that freedom to think implies freedom from any others (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 17. Unless otherwise noted, all citations will be from this text). We noted then that there is both collapse of metaphysical and epistemological understandings of humans as rational, and hence an additional logical problem involved in attempting to move from applying a trait such as reason to individuals of a class and then trying to derive an ethical trait from it. We also noted that there was a problem in predicating mutual class exclusion as the predicate defining (by necessity of her overlapping of metaphysics and epistemology) a universal class. All of these issues are foundational not only of her ethics, but also of her politics, since the entire Randian edifice is built on the foundation of individual selfishness, as we have already seen. The reason is that from these ideas Rand moves forward to define everything in the political realm as a function of, and predicated on, individualism: rights are individualistic (pgs. 18-19); capitalism is individualistic (p. 19); and human relationships are individualistic (p. 19. Also, relationships are defined by the capitalistic presupposition of the “trader principle;” see The Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. 30-39, passim). Finally, notions such as the “common good” destroy this individualistic “truth” by taking away individualistic rights (pgs. 15-20). Rand goes so far as to maintain that tyranny results from a conception of the common good, not from individualism, since, as she argues, every other theory but hers “make it possible for a man to believe that the good is independent of man’s mind” (p. 22). Further, as Rand asserts, there is no such thing as “the common good” to begin with (p. 21). In Rand’s words, it makes the superiority of certain individuals “sacrificial animals” to others who aren’t as superior. If this is not a form of social Darwinism, then it implies it. To be clear, social Darwinism is the attempt to apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to politics and social thought, such that the struggle for existence (what Rand calls “survival”) is used to craft a social and ethical world view that refuses to take into account the distinction between those who are able to achieve success in the world and those who are not.

A Note on Rand’s Political Ethics

It is worth pointing out in this regard that one of the reasons she says that she cannot accept an ethics that advocates principles of general responsibility or duties to others (i.e. deontological ethics) is that it’s principles are “subjectivist,” based on individual “feelings, desires, ‘intuitions,’ or whims,” and thus the principles produced by such ethics are “an arbitrary postulate or emotional commitment,” and are thus necessarily “subjective” in Rand’s understanding of the term. Here, however, she grossly misreads the ethical tradition. To take a single example, the universality posited by such thinkers in this camp such as Kant is based on a logical extension of one’s asserted norms of action: that if something is said to be “moral” it is said because it can be logically and willfully extended to apply to everyone, not just to the individual who produces it. Thus, even if Rand is right that such ethics is based on individual desires (like hers is not?), it nevertheless tests its legitimacy by the distinctly rational principle of universalizability of judgments. In other words, when making any kind of moral judgment, intellectual honesty requires that we take into account the interests of others (more on this below).

Here again, we see Rand attempting to blur the “is/ought” gap by positing her political values as “an aspect of reality in relation to man;” it lies somewhere waiting only to be “discovered, not invented by man” (p. 22). She accuses (Kantian) constructivism as “mak[ing] it possible for a man to believe that the good is independent of a man’s mind and can be achieved by physical force.” Note that I have to assume she is referring to Kant, since she never once even mentions anyone who might hold the positions she rejects. Further, she never really refutes such positions; she just names them and rejects them. Third, aside from the fact that no one in the deontological tradition ever argues in favor of forcing others to conform to a given code of ethics, there are at least three significant problems in Rand’s stated position here. First, note her gross misreading of the deontological position. Two issues are worth mentioning here. Kant, for example, distinguishes between a material and a formal rational principle. The former is based on desire and is not distinctly ethical; the latter involves a formulation of judgment for action that is not based on desire, and is more properly considered to be ethical. In connection with this, Kant never claims that we “invent” values or principles; he only claims that when reason posits them, the requirement of an objective, rational judgment is that they be universalized as a test of their consistency: “Act only according that maxim by which you could will that it become a universal law of nature” (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, n. 402).

The second problem comes with Rand’s claim that the principles espoused by deontology are invented by individual minds as “existing in reality,” while her own view of morality is objectively perceived (“discovered”) by human minds to exist in reality (pgs. 21-23). How exactly does an ethical value exist “latent” in nature and/or mind; how is it waiting to be “discovered” by a human mind? Wouldn’t that mean that they exist objectively, in the traditional sense? Additionally, if Rand is correct that moral principles are not “in reality,” yet not “in the mind,” how is it that they can be “discovered” to begin with? Exactly where do such values exist? Rand’s attempt to “objectivize” them, using her understanding of “objective,” ends up in an inconsistent position, as they seem to be simultaneously in both places and in neither place.

Third, there is also an inconsistency in holding that humans are by nature radically free from others to think about their moral codes as required by their nature, while simultaneously being radically determined by their nature to think in a certain way (i.e. her way of rational egoism) about their moral codes. But Rand cannot have it both ways here. If one is truly free to think (i.e. apart from the “force” of other opinions), how can the content of that thought be reduced simply or even primarily to the self-interest (“survival”) of the thinker? If Kant is right that formal rational principles of ethics are defined as a universal way of thinking (called “reversibility” or “reciprocity”), then Rand’s limiting rational ethical thinking to individual self-interest is simply false. It looks as though Rand wants to box moral norms into a tight corner of individualism by fiat; in no way has she opened up the road to her version of egoism by refuting the tradition of deontological thinking. She rather simply redefines thinking about ethical values in her own way (selfishness) and simply dismisses all other possibilities.

These issues aside, let us examine Rand’s politics by using her own themes for it. We will examine Rand on economics, on rights, and on government.

The Foundation of Rand’s Politics

One thing Rand is surely correct about is the intrinsic connection between egoism and laissez-faire capitalism. In laissez-faire capitalism, there is no imposed limit on individual wealth accumulation. The philosophy of selfishness underscores this dogma by the “no sacrifice” principle combined with the idea that justice is not giving to people what they haven’t merited (read this as a condemnation of the welfare state).  However, if Kant is right that reason transcends self-interest by its ability to universalize conceptual notions such “man being an end in himself,” one of Rand’s favorite ethical expressions (stolen from Kant, whom she despises), then such a notion of ethics not only allows but requires us to engage in what is frequently referred to as “reversibility.” This is the process of making a judgment of ethical universality which puts oneself in the role of the receiver of action rather than the doer. This directly implies a formal equality between agent and receiver. If universal reason can recognize this, then humans are capable of a more human, more inclusive politics. So let us examine Rand’s alleged connection between rational essentialism and selfishness.

First, to advocate self-interest as a political base is to ignore its own social underpinnings, such as a shared language, shared social constructions, shared physical environment (earth), shared communal goods (e.g. roads, schools, parks, etc.), and shared cultural embeddedness, out of which arise certain beliefs and behaviors based on those beliefs. This is, in my estimation, central to understanding the problems with Rand’s politics. Cultural presuppositions deeply influence the content of thought. Although Rand does talk about the inability of human ethics to transcend social conditions (“the nature of reality,” in her terms), she avoids such notions of finding ourselves embedded with others already, and proceeds to strictly limit such social contexts to individualistic presuppositions (see The Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. 59-60). This negation of sociality results in a conception of individualist “trading” in a marketplace of products. Thus, Rand’s ethics is really a justification of a particularly selfish form of capitalism rather than to see what is truly “objectively” right, even though she claims that she is examining “right” (p. 58). But when “right” is defined in narrow terms of self-interest, and “man as an end” is not universalized to include treating others as an end, such an ethics is stripped of its larger, universal meaning that is required by a rational judgment. Even more, sociality is stripped of any inter-human embeddedness in favor of individuals in “isolated” competition—i.e. I cannot be in a relationship of mutuality if I only see you as a trader.

Although Rand attempts to “de-market” the “trader” into those who mutually respect each other’s individual rights (The Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. 34-35), that type of mutual respect must itself be predicated on the recognition of the other qua person (i.e. as someone whose being merits respect), not “qua individual with something to offer me,” nor on the other as they merit it, since the entire tradition of human rights recognizes the “human being” conception and not the “meritorious individual” as the foundation on which ethics may properly be said to commence. While Rand ignores this tradition and wants to rewrite it as “trader individualism,” the rights tradition itself is predicated on the concept of mutuality, which itself answers the question: “What do I owe to others?” Rand’s answer to that question begins with what I want and thus what others owe me—i.e. with individualism/self-interest and thus radical individual freedom. Granted that Rand is willing to admit that I owe others what they owe me, again though, the recognition of mutual rights is underpinned by recognition of a certain type of mutuality that Rand lacks, seen by recognition of shared language, shared values, shared discourse, shared social institutions in which we participate and in which we find ourselves already when we begin to think, and a rational ability to think beyond “self.” And the individual right to property, or even the more general right to life, both of which Rand advocates, are insufficient to capture this situation of co-existence and of mutual recognition adequately, since it ignores the inter-human social milieu by straight denial, and ignores the proper universalizing of ethical claims in a process of reciprocal application of ethical principles.

Nor is her conception of rights in general supported by individualist/self-interest claims. For now, it will do to support this claim by stating that her conception of rights is “negative;” that is, the right of individuals to be left alone from the imposing claims of others (see her essays “The Ethics of Emergencies” and “Let Us Alone!” both in The Virtue of Selfishness, for more detail on this). But such a conception of “negative rights” is incomplete, for “each person as an end” does not imply “me as an end” and also “you as an end” with no connection between agents other than the negative one. Kant, for example, holds that humans constitute a “kingdom of ends,” in which individual subjects have positive duties toward one another (to treat others with “respect,” using contemporary nomenclature). Rand ignores this completely when she steals this ethical phrase from Kant in order to twist it to her own limited philosophical presuppositions of worship of the individual. This tradition is extended in John Rawls political conception of the two primary rights of liberty and equality of opportunity as definitive of democracy. This is closer to traditional American democratic thinking (e.g. “all men are created equal,” “we the people,” and “the general welfare” that ensures individual liberty) than it is Rand’s conception of “I am my own end” and there is no such thing as a common good or general welfare. If that is not enough, one need only examine both the structure and content of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights to see that the idea of self-sufficient individuals who have only some amorphous “good will toward others” as Rand advocates, is in fact insufficient to actualizing the rights of all people. The Declaration is predicated not on a Randian notion of individual autonomy, but on human beings as equal in individual autonomy, two critical factors absent from Rand’s conception of rights.

Rand states that with a “trader principle” ethics there is no conflict of interests, nor a resulting view of another as a mere “competitor.” How this can be is unclear in Rand, but there are two arguments she presents that seem to be intended to clear this up. First, she connects the trader principle to individual responsibility for taking care of one’s own life, and by expenditure of individual “effort” (The Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. 60-63). There is nothing in these pages to allay one’s fears of seeing others as competitors, however. They simply state her position. So she attempts to support the lack of conflict in operating from the trader principle through an analogy with romantic love: when a woman chooses one man over the other, it is not a matter of competition or conflict of interest, nor is it the case of one man losing to another. It is only a function of the winner having “earned” the love of the woman he won (p. 63). How this is possible is unclear, but since in the preceding paragraph Rand denies luck, chance, favor, or breaks, and reduces everything to merit, Rand is not only ignoring the complexity of human psychology, but is also short-changing human motivations and circumstances by reducing them all to the single motivation of self-interest, which for her implies responsibility and self-effort. Again though, that human relationships can be reduced to this is simplistic and one-dimensional at best.

On Economics

In regard to capitalism itself, Rand maintains that it is the most “objective,” that is, natural, system of economics (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pgs. 23-27; passim), based on the idea that “the good” is “a value pertaining to reality, to this earth, to individual human beings.” In general, because private property is a good for individual people, it is “objective” for Rand. Thus, the capitalistic system, as the one that honors private property above all else, is the best system “objectively” for humans. However, if one takes history seriously at all, the recognition of the historical evolution of capitalism allows one to understand three things: first, that it is an artificial system, to be taken, left, and/or adjusted by human decision. There is nothing within the capitalistic system per se that grants it the kind of objective magnitude Rand sees in it. Second, this historical recognition allows philosophers such as Karl Marx to argue (e.g. in the Communist Manifesto) that the way in which societies organize to produce in order to fulfill their needs not only determines what that society will look like, but also in which direction it will go in the future. Thus, capitalism is the historical-material consequence of another system that it superseded, and would itself be superseded by another system. Rand does not refute this conception of history or of the distinctly epochal nature of capitalism; she simply ignores it in asserting the “objective” nature of private property. Third, this historical conception of capitalism puts one in a position to be more critical of its shortcomings than does the position that creates apologetics for capitalism.

As a result of this, one of the problems in Rand’s economic theory is that she is unable to account for the contradictions of capitalism for the exact reason that such contradictions are defined in terms of the private appropriation of public wealth, and this in terms of the suppression of generalizable interests through treating them as particular. Rand ignores this crucial aspect of capitalistic practice. As a result, Rand’s position that there are no conflicts of interests between individuals cannot be maintained, since political decisions of a society that reflect this type of organization do not admit of a rational consensus (Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas, p. 358).

One of the reasons that Rand is unable to engage a detailed sociology—indeed, the reason she finds it necessary to deny that a society defined in terms of a common good actually even exists—is because it is impossible for her to conceptually make the leap from individualism to social concerns. But as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas puts it, one cannot abstract a social system from structures of personality; it is rather the other way around: “personality structures must be grasped within the determination of the institutional framework and of role qualifications.” There is enough social and psychological evidence available to allow us to conclude, as Habermas commentator Thomas McCarthy puts it, that “the forms of individual identity are intimately connected with the forms of social integration,” and not the other way around, as in Rand (see McCarthy, p. 334-ff).

Overall, Rand’s egoism has no vision of the future; it is only focused on self and “rational survival.” There are some problems with this type of focus, however. First, the theory is unclear regarding what constitutes “rational survival” over time. If my “rational” self-interest now is in conflict with what I know my future self-interest will be, for which alternative do I opt right now? Even if Rand could answer this problem, it still remains the case that the Rand egoist does not dare to imagine what “existent entities” or their cultural and/or institutional constructs could be if mutual cooperation based on our interrelationships with each other was a part of our social theory. As we noted in Part II of this series, and in the preceding paragraph, psychological evidence and sound social argumentation both show that maximal human development and self-understanding entails taking into account notions of cooperation, community and shared resources. Yet these very things are all anathema to Randian individualism. We have already seen in Part I of this series how Aristotle himself considers the development of individual good to be embedded within the polis; that there can be no person who can grow in their moral or intellectual character without being involved with others. We have just demonstrated how, in contemporary philosophy, thinkers like Marx and Habermas take this Aristotelian insight seriously. All of these thinkers have in mind not just the current situation of humans, but in fact have teleological concerns that clearly recognize that the desire for a better human being depends on a better human community. This dimension of teleological thinking is also common to nearly all Utilitarian thinkers of yesteryear as well as today. Because the Rand dogma is concerned with the isolated wants of egoists, it does not recognize nor debate the philosophical tradition of human common good at all.

What needs to be recognized here is that Randian selfishness is a direct driver of inequality, since it would oppose those very structural arrangements that would prevent power and wealth from being concentrated in the hands of a few. It would take away the ability of individuals to organize in order to stand up for their rights to and against those individuals who have accumulated money and power and operate the mechanisms of cultural and institutional arrangements to increase their own advantage. This type of individualism results in oppressive power structures that only unified individuals can challenge (e.g. trade unions; collective bargaining; social and institutional arrangements for equity for the less powerful, etc.).

But contrary to Rand, equality is a pre-condition of good politics—i.e. institutional arrangements for the good of others and/or the common good is ethically preferable to individual voluntarism to equalize distribution of goods. The reason is that some citizens are not in a position to be individualists, due to lack of resources such as education, income, basic goods, cultural prejudice, historical and/or institutional racism, dominance of unenlightened rulers, etc. In other words, individualism in politics presupposes a level playing field, but that does not exist in a capitalist world (this is why the movement known as “fair trade” arose). Even now, Randian arguments for creating such a level playing field say nothing about actually creating that level field—i.e. the arguments continue to leave the inequalities as they are in place, and call for a “leveling” “in our future arrangements.” But this “leveling” is a process of leaving those who have the most alone to hoard their gains. Of course, when one denies that a common good even exists, one is free to embrace such claims.

We will continue with this point in our concluding section of this series.

In this series so far, we have made several arguments concerning Rand’s epistemology, her metaphysics, and her ethics. Some of these arguments have resulted in bringing out the ire of many of Rand’s fans. So before moving on to Rand’s politics of selfishness, perhaps it is prudent at this point to address some of the misconceptions that have occurred concerning the arguments made against Rand so far. From here we will be in a better position to address her specifically political arguments for selfishness.

The first criticism that Rand-fans make is that Rand does not argue that “reason implies self-interest,” since she never said that humans have rational “essences,” only that the “can” be rational. While it is true that Rand never explicitly asserts this (that is why I paraphrased her argument), it nevertheless remains the case that she must make this argument or at least assume it, even if she never made this derivation explicit, in order to make her position consistent. It can be understood in this way. Rand claims to have shifted the Aristotelian notion of “essence” from metaphysics to epistemology, but then turns around and presents an ontological/metaphysical definition of “essence,” to wit: “the fundamental characteristic without which the others [non-essential characteristics] would not be possible. This fundamental characteristic is the essential distinguishing characteristic of the existents involved…” (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 45) Thus, Rand states in the Introduction to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology that she intends to deny the reality of universals (i.e. nominalism—see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, pg. 2), yet when it comes to defining “essences,” she defends the opposite point of view (i.e. a version of Aristotelian realism) by talking of such essences as common characteristics of entities (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 44).

Further, when it comes to explicating her understanding of human reason, she defines reason ontologically in various ways, as “a faculty” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 22; Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 44), “a consciousness able to abstract, to form concepts…,” and as always conscious of something (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 29). Yet she simultaneously maintains that humans are self-created; that somehow volition must give rise to reason, which is not “automatic” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 23). There are two problems here. First, which is it? Rand never says, and because she does not make this clear, and because they cannot simultaneously be true, she (second) has involved herself in a contradiction . But since reason cannot both be aware of something and yet be completely blank and self-created (e.g. “man has to be man by choice,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 27), Rand “finds” in consciousness certain concepts “already there,” as it were (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 55). To the degree that she argues that latter—and she does it quite a bit—she has lapsed into a rational essentialism, and actually needs this essentialism in order to get to selfishness as the primary “human” virtue (as I argued earlier). She clearly admits this shift from rational ontology to rational selfishness when she states that “epistemologically [with the proper amount of metaphysical defining of it, as we have just seen], the concept of ‘value’ is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of ‘life’” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 18).[1]

Further still, if reason is tied so tightly to perception, and no concepts can arise from the mind (because there is no “essence” of human mind), then how do logical principles, such as the law of non-contradiction arise? My students and I wrestle with this problem every semester. Rand states in several essays that there is “no contradiction in reality” (e.g. The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 58), but how would we know that without having “in mind” a principle that allowed us to understand that assertion, its meaning, and its truth? Rand certainly buys into the principle of non-contradiction, along with the principle of identity. But it will not do to simply assert that “man has to discover the laws of logic” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 23), since we must be operating by them in the process of finding order in the world, and it makes no sense to say that “reality” “writes” the law of non-contradiction on our passive minds, since it is a principle of thought, not of being (or at best, it is only a principle of being secondarily, even for Aristotle, as we argued in Part II of this series). In other words, there must be more to the intellect than Rand allows for it to reach such concepts. That she doesn’t see this is exemplified in such ideas as her assertion that “existence, identity and consciousness…are perceived or experienced directly, but grasped conceptually,” thereby collapsing perception and conception into an amorphous whole (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 55).

There is another issue related to this on the very next page of The Virtue of Selfishness (p. 23). There Rand tells us that it is human volition that chooses to usher in reason. What kind of volition? Human volition. So does she then mean that the class of those beings who are already human make a willful choice to then be rational? Is human nature being implied here to be volitional, then created by choice to be rational? If we create our own rational nature by choice, and we become human by such choice to be rational, what do we say of the volition to do so? Were we human before we became rational? What is this “willful choice” and from where did it come, if only humans can make it, as Rand clearly states on page 23? Does not all of this presuppose some kind of human essence that Rand is simply hiding from us?

All four of these considerations encourage us to affirm my original re-phrasing of Rand’s argument. Even though Rand wants to deny it, she must hold to some kind of rational essentialism by her own arguments, and “reason” (ignoring for now that “rational” and “reason” are not necessarily synonymous) is defined by Rand both ontologically as making sense of sense-perception and instrumentally as the means of survival qua human (pgs. 22-3), which implies that humans are self-interested. She says this directly: a human “is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life…to a living consciousness, every ‘is’ implies an ‘ought’.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 24) “Self-interest” here is defined as an ethical (“ought”) category, meaning both biological survival and individual happiness (pgs. 23-5; 30). I argued in Part I that it is illogical to attempt to derive such a conclusion. I will now add to that argument that it is the use of the term “survival” that is used to both define reason and to support the ethical conclusion from reason that opens her to criticisms:

1. Equivocation: “survival” is used both descriptively (what humans do) and normatively (what we ought to do), without properly delineating them. Even if Rand had worked this out, it is still a question-begging argument, since the premise states that survival is reasonable and the conclusion states that survival is ethical. This leads to the second problem here.

2. Thought becomes strictly instrumental and utilitarian for Rand, oriented only to survival. But here again we see a significant problem: survival does not imply ethical virtue. Even if Rand was right about survival being the foundation of values, that does not imply that it is our only or even our most fundamental or cherished value. Countries go to war and nations and soldiers take risks far beyond that of mere survival. One cannot help but hear echoes of Thomas Hobbes when reading Rand, where ultimately an individual’s life would be solitary and brutish, if not also nasty and short. Primary among the reasons for this is that Rand ignores the history of human cooperation for a common goal that transcends individual interests. There is much more that needs to be said about this, which we will do in the next section of this analysis.

3. Whether Rand advocates rational essentialism or not, to move from the assertion that individual humans that are rational implies that they “ought to be self-interested” is still a non-sequitur argument originating in the attempt to use the Principle of Identity as the logical rule to move from premise to conclusion. I referred to this problem in Part I.

4. Instrumentalist view of reason—i.e. that reason arises from sense-perception and is directed to organizing sense-date and to survival (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 22-23). But instrumentalist views of rationality run into the following dilemma: what happens if my reason dictates that my own self-interest be abandoned in favor of others? At that point, self-interest is no longer rational.

In sum, for Rand, to be a human is essentially to be either willful or rational or both, and this cannot be glossed over, as Rand does, by attempting to confine it “epistemology,” and to define this is a matter of perception. She mixes her epistemology with a healthy dose of ontological definitions and assumptions.

This should serve to clarify and lend support to the refutation of the second frequent and favorite objection of Rand-fans’ to criticisms of their philosophy: that the critic has “misunderstood” and/or “misrepresented” Rand’s egoism. The followers make a distinction between psychological egoism, which is descriptive, and Rand’s rational egoism, which is normative, and accuse the critic of attacking the former but missing the latter. But this objection, while valid in itself, is misplaced in three ways.

First, when she defines “rational selfishness,” in contradistinction to deontological ethics, as not having a duty or responsibility to care for another person’s needs or interests (and worse, equates deontology with a radical form of altruism in un-argued fashion), then it remains true that her selfishness is in fact defined as the ability to exclude other members of one’s own class (of rational beings) from equity of treatment. Even her assertion that acts of benevolence are permitted to the rational selfish person (The Virtue of Selfishness p. 56), it still redounds to this type of self-interest: exclusion of the other from one’s necessary concern. As an ethical position, it is in direct contradiction to her inclusion of all humans in the category of rational beings.

Second, when Rand argues in sweeping fashion that all deontological ethics is “altruistic” and “holds death as its ultimate goal” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 38), because it advocates something other than self-interest, one has to ask who is misunderstanding whom? The argument of deontological ethics—that one has certain responsibilities to others (e.g. Kant’s “What ought I do?”)—is not the same as the radical altruism as defined by Rand and thus certainly not the same as “death.” A more moderate and rational understanding of altruism is one of rationally taking account of the needs and interests of others as a condition for one’s ethical judgments. But how does this logically entail sacrifice of (of death to) one’s self? If I have $200 in my wallet and I buy a homeless person a sandwich because I believe in his humanness and in my duty to help others, how does that entail sacrifice on my part, instead of, at best, mere inconvenience? Rand must be defining sacrifice quite radically as “any inconvenience that will cause me delay in fulfilling my own goals” or something to that effect.

Further, Rand does not differentiate forms of altruism, but just as her fans are insistent that one not conflate Rand’s “rational egoism” with psychological egoism, the very same concern may be expressed regarding Rand’s characterization of altruism: do all of our actions have to concern others in order to be altruistic, or do only some of them have to be so directed? Further, is Rand discussing psychological altruism (where some of our actions toward others may be motivated by concern for them), biological altruism (where there is an “automatic” acting for the good of another in one’s group), ethical altruism (where the consequences of one’s action on others is considered to be the only good), or rational altruism (where there is a willingness to sometimes act for another’s good)? It is unclear in Rand; she seems to prefer lumping them all together and condemning them all through her rhetorical dismissal of altruism as “death-seeking.”

Third, the criticism of Rand’s egoism is not a question of motivation, which is what distinguishes psychological from rational egoism. The point of the criticism at issue is that, in attempting to ethically universalize the self-interested nature of a being who knows others in his/her class through the rational process of universalizing to class inclusion, there is a logical inconsistency in thereby maintaining that exclusion in the sense of being duty bound (to self) not to take another’s interests into account is the proper predicate of the universal class of humans. In contradistinction to this, Peter Singer argues that such a statement can be universalized, but only on pain of either incoherence (i.e. simultaneously holding that each person should maximize his self-interest and also that all people should maximize their own self-interest) or of switching into a utilitarian mode of argument. I do not see Rand lapsing into Utilitarianism, so that is why I maintain that her ethical position, allegedly implied by her understanding of human nature (i.e. her ontology), is incoherent.

In part I, I rejected her implicit notion of the predication of a universal category of “humans” with an ethical predicate of selfishness. Since we are moving into her politics, let me now add to this that she also uses humans as a subject conjoined with a predicate of “self-interested” through an ethical copula of “ought to be.” This defines a class of humans ethically obligated not to include the members of their class in their deliberations, when in fact those members are already included in a class of which there is a predication to be made.  There are numerous inconsistencies in Rand’s philosophy at issue here:

1. Ontological: The denial of class existence (i.e. actual universals), and yet implicitly using that very concept in as a condition of its denial (see above);

2. Ethical: Collapsing this class inclusion (Rand’s “common characteristics”) into an ethics of moral exclusion;

3. Logical: “rationality” does not imply “self-interested,” either on an individual or a class statement—i.e. not as a “can be rational” implies (or of which is predicated) “should be selfish,” since there is nothing in the former that necessitates the latter, and since the proposition as a whole cannot withstand the empirical test: there are simply too many counter-instances of this for it to be true. That is why I maintain that it matters not which form of egoism one uses—psychological or rational—in egoism there is no recognition of the other qua other, like oneself, thus implying certain responsibilities to that other that do not redound to self as a condition for distinctly ethical action;

4.Moral: as an ethical maxim, exclusion of the concerns of others fails the test of universality (e.g. “All rational beings must exclude others from their concerns” is a meaningful [and thus rational] but not an ethical maxim, since she denies anything resembling inter-personal relationships, either on an individual or a societal level, all her talk of “society” notwithstanding).

The third objection concerns understanding of selfishness as the exclusion of others rationally recognized to be in one’s own class or species. Although Rand does not advocate that other persons automatically or necessarily be excluded from one’s own concern (i.e. she does say that selfishness does not mean that one is required to be indifferent to others— The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 56), nonetheless, selfishness in Rand’s sense does mean that any assertion of a commonality with others that would call into play mutuality or equality, as I defined them earlier, is a priori excluded from being “rational” (there is abundant evidence to support this reading—too much to even note fully here. But for examples, see Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. x-xi; 28; esp. 56; 80; 112-113; 115, etc.), and this is where I submit that her ethics is inherently unethical. Notice how such “other-regarding” virtues are missing from Rand’s ethics: charity (which Rand denies is a virtue), magnanimity (an important virtue for Aristotle, completely missing from Rand), and other such virtues are denied by Rand to be goods per se, having their values determined instrumentally as contributing to self-interest (see her 1964 Playboy magazine interview to see this aspect specifically dealt with by her). Even where Rand submits that there is a unity of virtues such as integrity and justice (The Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. 28), that unity is both in and for the self, and in that respect, misses the ethical target. Much has been said of this by other critics, notably those philosophers such as Peter Singer, who use the now-famous Prisoner’s Dilemma to demonstrate the short-sightedness of holding selfishness to be a virtue (the easiest way to enter into Singer’s arguments in this regard is to read his Encyclopedia Britannica article on Egoism).

We ended the last section by outlining Rand’s attempt to close the “is/ought” gap by including ethical class exclusion as part of an ontological understanding of human nature as rational. In sum, the argument was that if thinking is necessarily in the form of judgments, and judgments are the process of subsuming particulars under universal principles; further, if selfishness is not in fact a perception, but a judgment, then the principle of selfishness as an explanatory principle of particular actions of individuals is not a universal (i.e. necessary) principle, since there are too many falsifications of it in the particulars—e.g. compassion, social good, mutual assistance, etc. Nor does empirical evidence support such a principle. People regularly act outside the bounds of self-interest. Further, even if they know in advance that their interests will be served by a particular action, that does not mean that such prediction motivates their action.

Selfishness as a universal is disconfirmed by the evidence of human actions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that Rand uses the term both to attempt to describe human behavior and thought, as well as to name it as the prime “virtue.” Such blending of judgments regarding selfishness (i.e. explanatory principle and prescriptive principle) does not fill the “is-ought” gap; it just blurs the gap. The inconsistent use of the term selfishness (i.e. first allegedly descriptively, then prescriptively, rocking back and forth between these two senses) indicates its lack of suitability as a universal principle in the epistemological sense.

We stated that to do so requires one or all of three conceptual missteps: 1) a confusion of ethical and ontological concepts; 2) a cherry-picking and/or misreading of Aristotle; and/or 3) an inconsistent assumption that theoretical reason and practical reason are different kinds of rationality, and yet answer the same questions. As we shall see, these two aspects of human reason deal with different issues. If they are to be united, it cannot be by the content of thought, but by the normative principles each type of thought follows, since their content concerns different issues. Yet, Rand tries to unite them by blending an ontology of human nature embedded with an ethical principle. Let us now examine these issues.

Regarding the first option, let us be clear that “selfishness,” even in Rand’s sense, is an ethical category of thought. It is an ethical term because, in Rand’s own words, it “serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s conduct” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 27). Thus, all parties would agree that ethics deals with what its holder advocates to be “proper” behavior on the part of humans. Rand states that such proper behavior, in her view, is that “man [is] an end in himself,” which means for Rand “his own life [is] the ethical purpose of every individual man” (emphasis hers). Yet, she blurs this into an ontology when she attempts to equate the “ought” of ethics with the “is” of her ontology by saying such things as “ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p.24; emphasis hers). But individual need and the choice connected with that need in no way exhaust ethical concerns. In nearly every definition of ethics, there is a primary concern for the conduct of agents toward others. Rand limits ethics to one’s conduct regarding oneself, and to the conduct toward oneself expected by others. Therein lies the problem. She ignores both the Aristotelian dictum that it is part of human nature to live together in communities (Politics I.2), as well as the larger traditional ethical concerns of duties and obligations toward others that are either universalizable (Deontological) or for the greatest good (Utilitarian). Without extensive criticism as to why these longstanding traditions are not properly ethical while selfishness is, attempting to redefine ethics in terms of “self” will not suffice to convince a skeptic.

Further, she attempts to bridge the ontology/ethics gap by using Aristotle’s teleological ethics. She says, for instance, that “an ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means.” She then asserts that “an organism’s life is its standard of value” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 17). In other words, humans have a single goal: human (rational) life. They have no choice in the ultimate goal; only a choice in whether and how to follow it. In direct contradistinction, Aristotle’s teleological ethics distinctly ties the individual human good to community. One of the nicest summaries of this idea is from an article entitled “Moral Character” by Dr. Marcia Homiak of Occidental College. It is worth quoting at length:

“According to Aristotle, the full realization of our rational powers is not something we can achieve or maintain on our own. This is true even for the activity of contemplation, which, Aristotle says, is done better with colleagues. So we need at least a group of companions who share our interests and aims, and who provoke us to think more and to achieve greater understanding of what we observe. Rational activity performed in the company of competent others makes our own rational activity more continuous and a more stable source of enjoyment and self-esteem. As we develop our abilities to think and know in the context of social groups, the enjoyment we take in learning and thinking affects our emotional attitudes and desires. We develop friendly feelings toward those who share our activities, and we come to develop a concern for their good for their own sakes. Once bonds of friendship are formed, it is natural for us to exhibit the social virtues Aristotle describes in Nichomachean Ethics IV.6–8, which include generosity, friendliness, and mildness of temper.”

Continuing on, Homiak says:

“Aristotle thinks that, in addition to friendships, wider social relations are required for the full development of our rational powers. He says we are by nature political beings, whose capacities are fully realized in a specific kind of political community (a polis or city-state). Aristotle’s ideal political community is led by citizens who recognize the value of living fully active lives and whose aim is to make the best life possible for their fellow citizens. When citizens deliberate and legislate about the community’s educational, office-holding, and economic policies, their goal is to determine and promote the conditions under which citizens can fully develop their powers to think and to know. Thus Aristotle recommends in the Politics VII-VIII that the city provide a system of public education for all citizens.”

Furthermore, Aristotle differs significantly from Rand in that he sees human character to be composed of multiple virtues, not a single virtue, as does Rand. Additionally, none of Aristotle’s virtues is egoistic in Rand’s sense, and none of them can be tied down to a univocal definition, let alone to a single virtue (see Nichomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch. 6, on “the intermediate relative to us”). Further, although Rand seems to gain her understanding of justice as based on merit from Aristotle’s Politics, he does not limit it as severely as Rand does. For Aristotle, merit is defined differently in different situations. Most specifically, in democracies, “merit” is defined in terms of “the status” of being a free citizen, he says (see Nichomachean Ethics, Book V, Ch. 3). Note that Aristotle’s understanding of “freedom” is connected with “citizens,” and not with “individuals.” The Aristotelian implication is clearly political—i.e. a person in a polis. Thus, justice based on merit, for Aristotle, is not at all the same as Rand’s tying merit to “production,” and calling those who take from those who produce “parasites” and “looters” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 25). Rand is assuming the virtue of capitalism in order to argue for the virtue of selfishness, when it should be the other way around. This leads to the next point.

As to the state, for Aristotle a state exists for the sake of the good or happy life, so that the best form of government will be one which promotes the well-being of all of its citizens (Politics VII). In his emphasis on the rule of law and the role of a constitution in defining a state, he says “Nor does a state exist for the sake of… security from injustice” (1280 a35 — cf. b27, b32). As this passage progresses, it is quite clear that Aristotle categorically rejects Rand’s view of the “minimalist” state as one whose function is only to protect individual rights of acquisition.

Thus Rand, for her alleged reliance on ancient Greek wisdom, ignores crucial aspects of Aristotle that are worth developing here, as they directly contradict her cherry-picked Aristotelian themes.

All of this indicates perhaps the greatest flaw of Rand’s work: taking what is simply a potential and occasional motivation for human behavior—self-interest—and inflating it to the central foundation of her entire philosophy, using it across the board in as the basis for epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. In this respect, her philosophy commits two large fallacies: Hasty Generalization and category mistakes, the latter in Gilbert Ryle’s sense of construing objects of inquiry that belong to one category in terms of concepts of another. Or, put another way, the category mistake is thinking the erroneous view that two things (in this case, reason and selfishness; human nature and motivation for action) are of the same logical type. (See Ryle G., The Concept of Mind, Chapter 1, sec. 3, pgs. 18-23). With Rand, the use of “selfishness,” a distinctly ethical category of either moral character or action-assessment, is used in her metaphysics and in her epistemology.

Regarding the second option suggested above—the inconsistent assumption concerning the relation between theoretical reason and practical reason—Rand is sketchy, but does not seem to hold that they are distinct. Most philosophers hold that theoretical reason is the function of reason that deals with matters of understanding both experiential and conceptual claims—determining what is or is not the case, and how and why it is or is not. Rand seems to agree with this, limiting reason as she does to a narrow empiricist understanding: “Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 22). However, it is important to note that from this conception of reason alone, one is not in a position to discuss ethical type of reasoning. Thus, most philosophers also discuss what they call “practical reason” (starting with Aristotle, incidentally),which deals with deliberations concerning human actions. Rand attempts to unify these two types of reason not only by tying the function of reason closely to the senses, but by using the unity of ontology and ethics to maintain that “the virtue of rationality” means “never sacrificing one’s convictions…[and] never seek[ing] or granting the unearned and undeserved…” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 28). So if we want to maintain the connection between ontology and ethics, as Rand clearly does in her claim to have resolved the “is/ought” problem, we would be on much firmer conceptual ground to maintain that theoretical and practical reason have a unified structure: that if one rationally recognizes universal class inclusion, one must also, on pain of inconsistency, recognize the ethical universality involved in the recognition that one belongs to such a universal class. In following this line of thought, we can use the argument of Immanuel Kant that a rational imperative is part of—or has the same form as—the ethical categorical imperative (i.e. universality and normativity). In the first Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers to “reason’s common principle.” Although he never addresses what this principle might be, according to Onora O’Neill, since for Kant practical reason is primary to theoretical reason, it must be the case that Kant’s Categorical Imperative (his ethical principle of reason) is the supreme principle of reason (Constructions of Reason, pgs. 23-24). If this is correct, then the unity of theoretical and practical reason would be in the maxim that one should think in accordance with that maxim whereby one would will that it be a universal law of thought. O’Neill introduces two texts from Kant in which he discusses such a unity: his “What is it to Orient Oneself in Thinking?,” and his Critique of Judgment. Respectively, she introduces these Kantian lines:

“To make use of one’s own reason means no more than to ask oneself, whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to make the ground or the rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason” (“WOT?” 8:146n).

Kant maintains that reason has a sensus communis, which he defines as: “a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account…of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind” (CJ, V, 293).

The sensus communis has three maxims: 1) think for oneself; 2) think from the standpoint of everyone else; 3) always think consistently (CJ, V, 294-295).[1]

This notion of thinking “from the standpoint of everyone else” is, significantly, the best way to avoid the problems, distortions, and omissions that can arise from purely individualist thinking.

This understanding of the unity of practical and theoretical reason introduces another problem with Rand’s ethical rationality: she ignores the need for discourse with others in claims of knowledge or ethics. How is any claim to universal (Rand’s “conceptual”) knowledge possible without discourse with others? Who can claim to know the universal class inclusion under a predicate (class attribute) if one is unaware of potential shortcomings of one’s judgment? Objectivity is only guaranteed by dialogue with potential objectors. Kant distinctly acknowledged the autonomy of reason, as does Rand. But Kant does not make the same mistake Rand does, which is to take the independence of individual reason to be the reasoning of individualists. Reasoning universally, for Aristotle as well as for Kant, is never a self-referential or self-interested activity. For Aristotle, even that most revered form of reasoning that leads to human eudaimonia (happiness) and is the ultimate good, contemplation, is never a strictly self-based enterprise: “the just man needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly…[and] the philosopher can [contemplate] better if he has fellow-workers…” (Nichomachean Ethics, Book X, Ch. 7, 1177a34-1177b1).

When rational inclusion is applied to ethics, and ethics is defined minimally as the justification of (or for) the conduct of one human toward another, I can draw these conclusions:

1. To be truly “objective” means taking all factors into account in one’s environment, which includes one’s relationship with others and impact on others. To ignore inequality caused by radical self-interest is not to be objective in the rational sense.

2. Thus a notion of formal equality is called for, which by definition demands recognition of others in my reasoning.

3. Kant’s Categorical Imperative, in the form of “Act only according to that law by which you can will it to be a universal law of nature,” best captures this objectivity in its practical use;

4. Psychological evidence and theories indicate that psycho-social maturity is a function of taking account of others. Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Erik Erikson, and Abraham Maslow, to name just a few, have argued quite convincingly for this.

Conclusion: Individualists like Ayn Rand want to be treated by others in a certain way, and then attempt to universalize that desire (i.e. self-interest). But that puts the ethical concern backwards. The Golden Rule, for example, does not have as its major term how I want to be treated; rather, it concerns the maxim by which I treat others: “Do unto others…” Thus, universalizing in ethics is not about universalizing what I want for myself and calling on others to do the same; it is rather about universalizing my actions toward others; or, if one really does want to reverse the direction of the rule, how I would evaluate the treatment of others toward me if I was to treat them the same way. Thus, ethical universal thinking is about reciprocity of actions between agents, not about agents acting alone for themselves and wanting others to give them space to do it. Rand and her followers leave out this key notion of universal ethical concern, and this is where their alleged emphasis on rationality and universality becomes contradictory and thus self-refuting, since the laws of logic would require that the norm of reversibility apply across claims—i.e. that if I do action x, then in any other similar situation, action x may be done to me. That is rational and universal, and most importantly, the true criterion of a distinctively ethical rational universality.

Thus, the key to understanding universal ethical concepts is not the alleged self-interest of each and every individual; that overlays content onto form and claims to derive that content from the form. Universal ethics such as the Golden Rule is rather the claim that whatever action I contemplate, its normative status is determined by the interests of any other in the stipulated category (e.g. persons). “Interests” in Golden Rule thinking are better defined as “a conceived action toward another that the other him/herself would approve as being critical to his/her well-being” (i.e. “as you would want done to you”). This conception of interest goes well beyond an individualist notion of self-interest, since another’s good might conflict with my own self-interest, and yet I would be obliged by universal considerations of inclusiveness or reciprocity to surrender my self-interest for the sake of the interests of another. For example, to save another’s life, I might have to (i.e. be obliged to) surrender some of my money, as happens in families when a member is struggling or meets with unfortunate events. Or again, in a community setting, where my hoarding my goods would or does contribute to the life struggle of others, universalizing my actions would not meet the ethical demands of reciprocity. In short, Randians take the notion of ethical “responsibility” to be self-referential, and in doing so strip it of its essential meaning of being directed primarily toward others, not others toward oneself. But ethics is not about oneself and one’s self-interest, with each looking out for him/herself, and a fortiori it rejects the notion that selfishness (i.e. individualism) is a virtue.

It is fairly easy to see why professional philosophers ignore Rand’s philosophy. At a superficial level, it is tightly knit, but when one looks for empirical or further rational justification for her positions, one will be disappointed. This is not to say that her most devoted followers have not systematized her philosophy in much better fashion than did Rand herself. But even those followers frequently miss the blind spots in Rand’s philosophy.

From here the examination of the position of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness can either take a forward-moving or backward-moving direction. The backward-moving direction would be one which examines how her philosophy of selfishness impacts her epistemology and metaphysics. The forward-moving direction would be one which examines how her philosophy of selfishness is used to support her political ideas, particularly her promotion of laissez-faire capitalism. We will engage in this forward-moving direction at a later date.

(This is part one of a four-part series on the ethics and political theory of Ayn Rand, written exclusively for The Daily Censored, by Dr. Robert Abele, professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Ayn Rand has become the darling of both neoliberals and, unfortunately, many young people today. The latter phenomenon has been due in large part to the intense promotion of her writings by the well-organized and well-funded Ayn Rand Institute. Their public relations work has resulted in a proliferation of Rand’s books on college campuses in the United States, in exchange for having her philosophy taught.

In order to best understand the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, one needs to read her backwards from the way she writes it in, for example, The Virtue of Selfishness. Rather than beginning with metaphysical and epistemological claims, one would best begin with the ethics she wants to draw from these claims: the ethics of rational egoism. By reading “backwards,” one can see (if not by her own argument, then by the volume of work Rand wrote on each category) that it is not the Principle of Identity that logically implies the specific brand of Rand’s extreme egoism, her “virtue of selfishness.” It is rather her extreme egoism that leads her to her peculiar understanding of Aristotle’s Principle of Identity and other epistemological and metaphysical commitments. As we shall show, not only is this conception of virtue itself fraught with problems, but it does not logically connect to the metaphysics and epistemology to which she appeals.

First, I would like to make some general observations concerning Rand’s philosophy. She makes few specific references to, nor does she do any critical (in-depth) analysis of, specific philosophers’ arguments. She relies more on rhetorical flourishes to do this kind of work for her. Second, she demonstrates little knowledge of or response to criticisms of or weaknesses to her arguments. Third, she does not read Aristotle fully, and misinterprets Kant on several levels, some of which will be outlined below. Finally, you know you have a dogmatic philosophy (if not a pure ideology) when you are blind to and/or misinterpret first, the history of the problem/issue; second, the problems and criticisms of the stated position.

Thus, in my estimation, Rand’s philosophy stumbles out of the starting gate. Overlooking these general problems, though, I should like to point out specific problems with one specific dimension of her philosophy in this writing: her ethics.

Rand’s argument concerning the rational essentialism of humans is inconsistent in its positing selfishness as the essence of human reason (to say nothing of using selfishness as an ethical concept!). Paraphrasing Rand’s argument, “humans are rational” implies that “humans are selfish,” through the additional premise that “human rational survival (‘man’s survival qua man’) is the ‘is’ that determines the ‘ought’ of human actions.” In this way Rand believes that she has solved the traditional “is/ought” problem of ethics (The Virtue of Selfishness, pgs. 24-25). But the judgment that all humans are selfish (i.e. for Rand, self-interested and individualist) would make for a very odd class of beings indeed if it consisted of members who denied that they belonged to a class of beings that was defined as those who, despite having a large number of substantial similarities to themselves, had no natural (rational) regard for the rational members of their own class. There is something distinctly counterintuitive about this assertion, if it is not downright inconsistent. More importantly, Rand’s argument posits simultaneously a rational understanding of the universal essences (natures) of humans (for Rand, under her term “concepts”)—and thus the universal inclusion of a subject term/class (“human”)—and a denial of rational recognition of the ontologically equivalent status of the members of their own class as part of that rational essentialism—and thus a negated predicate, resulting in the judgment that all humans are inclusively rational but excluded from being equivalent with one another in terms of equality of treatment. This raises two problems for Rand’s position. First, it does not solve the “is/ought” problem, as she claims; it just underscores how difficult it is to tie ethical terms onto an ontology. Second, it surely must be true that the concept of ontological equivalence provides far stronger logical support for the ethical concept of equality than it does individual self-interest. Ontological equivalence implies relationship of some type of mutuality, not the mutual exclusion of individualism. Put more colloquially, if humans can understand themselves as comprising the same essential traits, there is no logical reason to conclude that the proper ethical action based on that recognition is to act individualistically; i.e. the opposite of the assertion of equivalence.

Another, similar argument is that if each individual human is selfish, then nothing will hold for humans as a class and therefore not for human nature, since humans as a class cannot exist if the defining trait of that class isolates individual entities from others of the class, since then the class would be defined in terms of an identical trait that humans recognize in other humans, yet deny that it has equal status as one’s own (identical) traits. I take it that this underlies G.E. Moore’s concern that egoism is self-contradictory. In Principia Ethica, Moore argues that “that a single man’s happiness should be the sole good, and that also everybody’s happiness should be the sole good, is a contradiction which cannot be solved by the assumption that the same conduct will secure both…” (p. 103; emphasis his).

Part of the problem in Rand’s argument connecting selfishness to human nature is her attempt to derive selfishness ultimately from the Principle of Identity (A = A). There are three problems in doing this. First, for Aristotle, who enunciated this principle, it is just an axiom of thought concerning metaphysics, while also serving as an ontological assertion. But because of the close connection between metaphysical knowledge and the syllogism, it would seem that Aristotle did not intend this principle to be a content premise for any syllogism, but rather a logical presupposition that underlies any ability to think cogently about ontology. Thus, from the Principle of Identity, nothing logically follows. It does not directly imply individualism or anything else Rand claims for it. Second, Rand confuses this principle with the Principle of Non-contradiction (A and not-A cannot be simultaneously true) when she explains the former through the latter (see The Virtue of Selfishness, pg. 58). But the Law of Non-contradiction by definition is concerned only with the consistency of and between assertions, not with what those assertions say per se. Thus, to appeal to a philosophy of self-interest on the basis of the laws of logic or “rationality” is completely question-begging, since it assumes as a premise what it attempts to prove: that statements advocating self-interest can be derived from the laws of thought they rely upon for internal and logical consistency. Thus the laws of logic do not allow the conclusion that statements that human nature is selfish to be based on or drawn from those laws, and this is a significant philosophical error. Finally, Aristotle himself did not hold the Principle of Identity to be a primary law of thought. He did not even consider this to be an indemonstrable principle of knowledge, as Rand does. It is rather the case that the Principle of Non-contradiction is the primary and “most certain principle” (see Metaphysics Book IV, Chapters 3-4).

In sum, to understand ontological equivalence and yet deny ethical equality would result in the strange position that rational beings cannot recognize the rational imperative to “treat like cases alike,” as Aristotle put it (Nichomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 3, 1131a 10-b15; 1130b-1132b). Rand and her followers regularly appeal to Aristotle for their philosophical base, but to ignore such important Aristotelian precepts as this one demonstrates yet another significant inconsistency in the Randian argument. To show how absolutely fundamental this notion of ontological equivalence is ethically and politically in Aristotle, one should not stop with the Nichomachean Ethics, but also read his Politics, in which equality plays a critical role in political rule. Equality is the form of rule appropriate when the ruler and those ruled possess equal and similar rational capacities (Politics, Book III, Chapter 9, 1280 a8-15; and Book III, Chapter 12, 1282b18-23). This is exemplified by naturally equal citizens who take turns at ruling for one another’s advantage (1279a8–13), and by “true” constitutions, which aim at the good life for all citizens: “Governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and therefore are true forms…” (1279A17-21).Yet, according to Rand, recognition of the rationality of the human species implies that each individual within this species by nature is concerned fundamentally (if not solely) with themselves. In other words, Rand holds that although class inclusion (defined as a recognition of the rationality of [fellow]) humans) is itself rational, rational class inclusion understood as implying a rational ethical “ought” extending to actions toward others in the same class is suddenly irrational or non-natural when rational-universal inclusion is expressed in an ethical form. Rand attempts to overcome this problem by positing negative rights—i.e. the mutual-reciprocal demand on others to be left alone to pursue one’s own good (we will deal more with this specific idea when we examine Rand’s political theory).

Herein is the key problem in Rand’s ethics. One cannot consistently hold to an ontology of universal class inclusion (human essential rationality) predicated on the universal mutual exclusion (selfishness) of its individual members. To do so is to assert that what binds humans as a class is the fact that they rationally understand that they aren’t bound by their class membership; or more charitably, that what binds humans into a common class is that they are rational enough to understand that their class membership is defined by their excluding one another from their essential concerns—i.e. that they are a class (rational) that denies their class membership with others (selfish). It is difficult to see how a universal class could be defined as consisting of members who are rational enough to understand universal class membership but who necessarily (i.e. by nature) exclude one another from equal or reciprocal consideration as members of that class. Yet that is exactly what Rand does by asserting that the rational nature of humans is inherently selfish. She defines the mutual exclusion of those who possess a common rational nature in this way: “man must live for his own sake… neither sacrificing himself to others, nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the highest achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose” (“The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 30). Further, for Rand, it is the nature of humans not to “subordinate one’s life to the welfare of others…that the relief of others is not his primary moral concern…not of moral duty…” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 56). Rand claims that by uniting these logically contradictory concepts, she is solving the “is/ought” problem of philosophy. Her solution attempts to resolve this issue by including ethical class exclusion as part of an ontologicalunderstanding of human nature as rational. However, to do so requires one or all of three conceptual missteps: 1) a confusion of ethical and ontological concepts; 2) a cherry-picking and/or misreading of Aristotle; and/or 3) an inconsistent assumption that theoretical reason and practical reason are different kinds of rationality, and yet answer the same questions. As we shall see, these two aspects of human reason deal with different issues. If they are to be united, it cannot be by the content of thought, but by the normative principles each type of thought follows, since their content concerns different issues. Yet, Rand tries to unite them by blending an ontology of human nature embedded with an ethical principle.

We will examine these possible options in the next section.

Find Robert at http://spotlightonfreedom.com

If a study of U.S. government actions since 9/11/01 teaches anything, it should bring into relief the overall plan of the world’s sole superpower to extend its hegemony to all lands and nations, including our own. A small-scale study of this process of the U.S. evolving into a National Security State could be done in five steps. In addition to outlining those steps, the intent of the present article is to offer four essential elements needed for any solution to this problem of U.S. government dominance in foreign lands and domestically.

Step 1: The Institutional Goal of the Victors of WW II: Preserving the Victory. The idea of hegemony is that of institutional self-interest in dominance. Noam Chomsky calls it “the imperial grand strategy,” and defines it as the U.S. holding “unquestioned power.”2 Andrew Bacevich calls it “Washington Rules,” and defines it as the belief that the U.S. ought to enforce its perceived norms as to how the world should behave, combined with “the sacred trinity” of global military presence, global power projection, and global interventionism.3 Regardless of the term used, it is the U.S. goal to maintain the war’s victory status as pre-eminent world power.

This may be seen as part of the culmination of the understanding of the doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” that started in with President Reagan and culminated in the Bush years—i.e. that the U.S. is not just qualitatively different (the historical meaning), but “better” or “above” others.

Step 2: (Result of step 1): Observe and eliminate any potential competition for hegemony, including that of dissident citizens. This is propagandized as “a threat to our national interests,” when really it is only to the interests of the agents doing the bidding of the state complex. Examples of this abound in just recent history:

a) Reagan’s “War on Terror” in Central America in the 1980’s;

b) The government and media’s rhetoric for those who question U.S. foreign policy as “anti-American” or even “terrorist.” In the old Soviet Union, the operative term for traitors was “anti-Soviet.”

c) The 755 U.S. military bases around the world;

d) The U.S.’s attempted coup of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002;

e) Bush’s “War on Terror” in the 2000’s—Afghanistan and Iraq;

f) Unwarranted domestic spying by the federal government against its own citizens, and its infiltrating progressive groups;

g) The U.S. government attacks on groups such as ACORN, war dissidents in Chicago and Minneapolis, and protestors at the Republican Convention in 2008;

h) Obama’s rebranding of the “war on terror” as “challenges to America’s interest,” while maintaining Bush-era policies of the war on terror.4

Step 3 (Result of Steps 1 & 2): Use of the Idea of Supreme Emergency to preserve and increase hegemony. “Supreme emergency” is defined by political scientist Michael Walzer as a threat that causes a fear beyond the ordinary fears of war, and that that threat and fear may require those measures that the war convention bars.5

There are serious problems that occur when using this concept to expand hegemony. First, most of what governments classify as “Supreme Emergency” is at root only an expression of institutional self-interest or expediency, and is the direct result of this basic impetus toward hegemony. For example, Winston Churchill’s use of the term to describe Britain’s situation in 1939 was a bit of rhetoric designed to weaken the British people and government’s resistance to maintaining the war convention’s proscription of extreme brutality.6

There are many examples of the U.S. following a similar pattern, domestically. For example, after 9/11/01, Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant, in a letter sent to key senators during debate of the Patriot Act: “As Commander-in-Chief, the President must be able to use whatever means necessary to prevent attacks upon the United States…Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and its citizens…If the government’s heightened interests in self-defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it certainly would also justify warrantless searches.”7 Further, President Bush used the events of 9/11/01 to claim the power to detain, without charge, any person—including U.S. citizens—he declared to be “enemy combatants” or “suspected terrorists.” Additionally, he claimed the power to engage in preventive war as well as to practice indefinite detention   of arrested suspects. Critically, the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003” empowered the state to rescind one’s citizenship for providing any type of “material support” to an organization that the state has deemed to be involved with terrorism.

Barak Obama has followed his predecessor in this thinking. President Obama claims to have executive power to order the assassination of U.S. citizens. Further, he is continuing the concentration camps in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, along with the practice of torture, as well as escalating drone attacks (started by Bush in Afghanistan) to Pakistan and Yemen.

A second significant problem with this notion of supreme emergency is that when a hegemonic understanding of “Supreme Emergency” becomes the rule rather than the exception, as it has with the “war on terror” (often called “global civil war”), the institutional mindset of “supreme emergency” becomes the standard government way of operating. The result is predictable: if the “state of emergency” is not brought to an end, totalitarianism results. Georgio Agamben refers to this as a “state of exception.” According to Agamben, totalitarianism “can be defined as the establishment, by means of [a constant] state of exception [supreme emergency], of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.”8 The Nazi jurists spoke regularly and openly of this, calling it “a willed state of exception,” done “for establishing the National Socialist State.”9 The United States perches precariously close to falling into this. One need only examine the USA PATRIOT Act, and/or the Bush military order of 2001 allowing “indefinite detention” and trial by “military commissions” of those noncitizens who were only suspected of some involvement in “terrorist activities,” to see how close we are to this becoming a reality in the U.S.

In the U.S. today, our “state of exception” is called “Continuity of Government” (COG) planning, and includes plans for suspending the Constitution in the event of an attack. Thanks to patrons like Oliver North, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, the COG calls for warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention, and militarization of domestic security. As to the latter, Peter Dale Scott documents that since 2008, we now have a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team stationed permanently within the national boundaries of the United States.10 Scott adds that, since 2002, American citizens have lived under a U.S. Army Command called NORTHCOM. Additionally, we have also seen this militarization of the domestic U.S. in action already on the streets of Toledo, Ohio, in 2008.11

The mechanism by which Supreme Emergency is established is fear, not serious threats. It involves the use of propaganda to create fear in the populous so that hegemonic plans can continue unabated. This fear is exaggerated for the populous in order to alleviate potential resistance to government self-interest in dominance. Witness, for example, the well-planted line from Condoleezza Rice: “We don’t want the smoking gun [of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction] to be a mushroom cloud.”12 Additionally, President Bush made use of such fear tactics in a speech at the United Nations on September 12, 2002. He followed it by a similar speech in Cincinnati, Ohio in October. Finally (for now), Colin Powell’s U.N. speech presented many assertions without much evidence, all intended to “catapult the propaganda” as Mr. Bush put it.13 Powell’s unsubstantiated assertions, placed for propaganda purposes, included charges that Iraq was hiding their WMD programs from the world; that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs, and was preparing “delivery devices” to attack others by using them; that Iraq was connected to and supportive of terrorism in general; that Iraq was connected to the events of 9/11; and that Iraq was guilty of not being able to prove a negative—i.e. not being able to prove that they destroyed munitions. This now-famous “proving of a negative” that made Iraq guilty would later be used by then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld used to justify the U.S. inability to find WMD in Iraq after the invasion.

Step 4: The Permanent State of Emergency = Continuity in Government (COG) = the National Security State. This state has been characterized by Gary Wills as “permanent war in peace.”14 It started in 1945 with the organization of the Strategic Services Unit, until, by 1952, a full National Security State was in place.15 This state is finally established when government rule engages the following actions:16

a) it is fixated on alleged foreign enemies and the threat they pose to the homeland;

b) the threat is used for the justification of any military solutions to “pacifying” those enemies;

c) it maintains political and economic power not primarily in the people, but in the military (and defense contractors);

d) it uses propaganda methods to narrow the parameters of political debate and to put fear in the populace regarding perceived state enemies (e.g. the Truman Doctrine speech of 1947: “Totalitarian regimes” anywhere in the world “undermine…the security of the United States”);

e) it uses many appeals to “national security.”

Step 5: Six Characteristics of the U.S. Version of the National Security State

a. National Security State engages in regular, unannounced, unapproved (by Congress or law) wars

i. Drones in Yemen and Pakistan: The U.S. first said it used targeted killing in November 2002, with the cooperation and approval of the government of Yemen.

In April of 2009, The News, a newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan, published figures provided by Pakistani officials indicating that 687 civilians have been killed along with 14 al Qaeda leaders in some 60 drone strikes since January 2008—just over 50 civilians killed for every al Qaeda leader.17 Further, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported: “According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.” For each al Qa’eda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”18

On June 3, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) delivered a report sharply critical of US tactics. The report asserted that the US government has failed to keep track of civilian casualties of its military operations, including the drone attacks, and to provide means for citizens of affected nations to obtain information about the casualties and any legal inquests regarding them. Obama’s response was to ignore the U.N. report, and increase the drone attacks. As neoconservative architect Francis Fukuyama stated: the U.N. is “perfectly serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism.”19 When it isn’t, the National Security State can and does ignore them. Since 1966, the U.S. has cast more vetoes in the U.N. than any other nation, with 82 vetoes. The previous record was held by the former Soviet Union, which cast a total of 121 vetoes between 1946-1989.20

ii. The Coming Wars for Oil: From whence comes the oil of the future? Experts generally agree upon the following list: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, the Caspian Sea area (consisting of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), and Latin America (consisting of Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, and Ecuador).21 Given these locations of oil, what are the global strategies, especially by the world’s largest military power, the U.S., for securing its own and its ally’s oil needs for the 21^st century?

Under President Clinton, the U.S. secured the Caspian Sea basin oil supplies by exchanging arms and military training, along with conducting joint military maneuvers for an oil pipeline. Because of U.S. distrust of Russia, Clinton negotiated a route from Azerbaijan through Turkey and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.22

President Bush increased the military presence in the Caspian Sea basin after 9/11, and deployed military trainers to Georgia.23

The trip by President Obama to Turkey—his first foreign trip as President—was an attempt to break a deadlock in building the pipeline through Turkey.24

Additionally, the U.S. and NATO now have troops and military bases established in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. These countries have agreed to supply oil and natural gas to NATO countries, thus undermining agreements and sought-after agreements involving these countries and Russia, China, and Iran. In conjunction with this, the U.S. is directly undermining the attempts of Russia, China, and Iran to continue their agreements with Central Asian countries for oil and natural gas. This is especially true with the TAPI (Turmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline to run from the Caspian Sea to India, which killed the Iranian-Pakistan-India deal to run a pipeline between them (IPI). In sum, TAPI is the finished product of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. NATO will be expected to use military power to protect the pipeline, and thus consolidates Western power in the region.25

Similar U.S. machinations were undertaken with West Africa and even Latin America. For example, the U.S. has established smaller-type military bases– what the Defense Department refers to as “lily pads”—in an arc running from the Andes in South America through North Africa and across the Middle East, to the Philippines and Indonesia. These locations are consummate with the fact that the bases are located in or near the oil-producing states of the world. In Latin America, the U.S. military uses bases in Paraguay to monitor, and to be in position to move against the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments, since both countries nationalized their oil companies.26

Furthermore, according to The London Guardian, the April, 2002 military coup in Venezuela was clandestinely supported and organized by the U.S. in response to President Hugo Chavez’s nationalizing Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA.27

The two main players on the oily world stage today, besides the U.S., are Iran and China. The role of Iran is dual: geographic and geologic. Geographically, Iran sits between three important sea shipping lanes: the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Sea of Oman, and is the geographical point of intersection for the Middle East, Asia, and the steppes of Russia. Geologically, next to Saudi Arabia (264.3 billion barrels), Iran has the largest oil reserves in the world (132.5 billion barrels). That the U.S. wants control of Iran is beyond doubt. Aside from continuing threats to Iran made by former President Bush and now President Obama, Iran is completely surrounded by U.S. military bases, in the Persian Gulf, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Iraq, in Cyprus, in Israel, in Oman, and in Diego Garcia.28 Iran itself has become an “Observer State” (along with India and Pakistan) to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Created by China in 2001, and with members including Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, these members and have pledged mutual economic and military aid.

b. The National Security State results in a Repressive State at home. When Supreme Emergency becomes the order of the day, it may be turned against domestic civilians. For example, Hitler’s February 28 “Decree for the Protection of the People” which suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties, was never repealed.29 In the U.S. similar events have come rapid-fire since 9/11/01, beginning with the USA PATRIOT Act, and George Bush’s “military order” of November 13, 2001, authorizing the “indefinite detention” and trial by military commissions of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. Add to these power grabs the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which grants the state a wide swath of powers, including the powers to: suspend the right of habeas corpus for those deemed “unlawful enemy combatants;” hold people indefinitely and without charge; shield administrative agents from prosecution for criminal behavior in violation of the Geneva Conventions; and permit hearsay evidence and evidence obtained by torture.

Obama himself has continued down this road, with his deepening of unchecked surveillance powers (including warrantless wiretapping of citizens, accessing personal records, monitoring financial transactions, and tracking email, internet and cell phone use), his claims that the federal government cannot be sued for illegal spying, his claims of Executive privilege to order assassinations of U.S. citizens, and his continuation of torture and Guantanamo Bay prison.

All of these actions and others are direct legislative erasing of any legal status of the individual, in some cases individual U.S. citizens.

Historically, similar structural mechanisms of governments in Rome, Spain, Portugal, and Britain all led to repressive governments which fell quickly when they began to govern through a structure of repression.30 Today we see the same thing beginning to take shape in America.31

c. The National Security State has automatic Just Cause for any military action. This is arguably the most critical aspect of an ethical justification going to war. By this, it is generally meant that an attack from another nation is either occurring or imminent. The National Security State sees any long-range, potential threat as casus belli. For example, Thomas M. Nichols, Chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, in an article published in 2003 in Ethics & International Affairs, crafted a list of reasons to support the Bush case that the cause for military action against Iraq was just:

“Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both U.N. resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts.”32

The conclusion Nichols draws from this impressive list of Saddam Hussein crimes is that “any one of these would be sufficient to remove Saddam and his regime…but taken together they are brief for what can only be considered a just war” (emphasis added).

Nichols is arguing from the viewpoint of the National Security State. Any other analysis would not be so hasty to conclude the necessity of an invasion. For example, the list of studies from the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies should be enough to demonstrate clearly that the claims Nichols makes are very broad and general in the first instance (e.g. “a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities”); and insufficient in law or morality to support a preemptive attack on another nation. Nichols’ premises that Hussein attacked “the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War” and that he “has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians,” happened during the Gulf War of 1991, and thus are not legitimate pretexts for a 2003 invasion.33

Perhaps most importantly, Nichols states explicitly that “any one of” the premises listing Saddam Hussein’s bad behavior is a sufficient condition for invading Iraq.  This cannot be true without the value premise that “any violation of international law or U.N. mandates morally justifies an invasion of Iraq.” This normative premise is absurd because, if true, then any country may be invaded by another for a single violation of international law or U.N. mandate. Without weighting values from innocent violations to gross violations, his conclusion is a non sequitur. If it is the conclusion Nichols wants, then the U.S. should have invaded Israel, for instance, before we invaded Iraq, since Israel has ignored far more U.N. mandates concerning its nuclear weapons and its treatment of the Palestinians than has Iraq concerning weapons pursuits.

d. The National Security State is its own Proper Authority. The Bush administration and the American writers who supported the war made it clear that they did not believe that the U.S. needed U.N. authorization to pursue preventive war.  However, simultaneously and in contradictory fashion, they all likewise stated that in attacking Iraq they were enforcing UNSCR 687 and 1441.

In March of 2003, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, argued in the New York Times that there are “Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.” in order to war with Iraq. Her main reasons for maintaining this included the fact that the U.S. has done it before, with Kosovo; and that the U.N. “cannot be a straightjacket, preventing nations from defending themselves or pursuing what they perceive to be in their vital national security interests.”34 Ms. Slaughter concludes “that which is legitimate is also legal.” But this is a non-sequitur argument, as Ms. Slaughter completely ignored international law in this argument, which would clearly see the invasion as illegal. Significantly, she disregarded Nuremberg Charter, Article 6, which makes criminal invasions of other countries as “Crimes against Peace,” and the United Nations Charter, Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 51, all of which condemn the use of force against another nation without imminent provocation. Ms. Slaughter places the National Security State above the law, which is certainly not a legal or moral casus belli. But arguing that historical precedent makes for legality would legitimate Hitler’s invasion of France, once he had invaded other countries.

Further, the idea that the U.S. can bypass international bodies and use only its own authority to send its military into another country presumes that the National Security State trumps international law by allowing one nation to determine what is best for both itself and the world and then to act on it, whether or not it is in concert with the rest of the world.  Because it excludes dialogue and more importantly the demands of universality of principle required by ethical thinking, it has no place in a moral analysis of war.

e. The National Security State does not count Civilians as Important to its Functioning. By a long and time-honored tradition in ethics and in international law, when the practice of either ignoring (by not taking into account) or intending civilian deaths becomes commonplace, whether proportional or not to the good intention of defeating the enemy, the war itself may be said to be conducted unjustly.

The Bush administration and its generals did not consider the category of discrimination to be of importance. The Obama administration has continued this policy. This is demonstrated by two facts: first, the U.S. military spokespersons have stated directly that it does not count the civilian dead in Iraq. Second, the newly formed Iraqi government issued an order in December of 2003, with pressure from the (U.S.) Coalition Provisional Authority, that there was to be no counting of Iraqi dead civilians.35 If it was truly U.S. policy to protect noncombatants and to avoid injuring or killing them, one would think that knowing how many they have killed or for whose deaths they are at least partly responsible would be something the military would want to know and engage, not suppress.

We must add two massacres to this ever-growing category of civilian abuse inflicted by the U.S. incursion into Iraq: Haditha and Fallujah.  In November of 2004, the U.S. military engaged in an assault on the city of Fallujah. Among the atrocities engaged by the Americans, such as dropping a number of 500-pound bombs on the city of Fallujah, Italian television documented a story showing that the United States used both cluster bombs and white phosphorus bombs on the citizens of Fallujah.36 The use of such bombs is strictly prohibited not only by the ethical principle of discrimination, but by international law. These actions, as well as the assault on Fallujah in general, violate the Geneva Convention and the War Crimes Act of 1996.

According to press reports, there are many more such incidents that occur in Iraq that never get reported, such as the civilian massacres in Balad, al-Latifya, Samara, Najaf, and others.37 In Najaf alone over 200 civilians were massacred by U.S. forces.38

Michael Walzer has said it best: if there is no distinction possible between the guerrillas and the civilians,

“the anti-guerrilla war can then no longer be fought—and not just because, from a strategic point of view, it can no longer be won.  It cannot be fought because it is no longer an anti-guerrilla but an anti-social war, a war against an entire people.”39

Haditha and Fallujah were both war crimes that the U.S. military attempted to cover up.  But according to press reports, there are many more such incidents that occur in Iraq that never get reported, such as the civilian massacres in Balad, al-Latifya, Samara, Najaf, and others.40 In Najaf alone over 200 civilians were massacred by U.S. forces.41

f. The National Security State is concerned solely with its Own Existence. Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant, in a letter sent to key senators during debate of the Patriot Act: “As Commander-in-Chief, the President must be able to use whatever means necessary to prevent attacks upon the United States…Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and its citizens…If the government’s heightened interests in self-defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it certainly would also justify warrantless searches.”

Congress is not permitted to interfere with the military maneuvers of the National Security State.42

What we have done in this brief analysis of the paradigm examples of the National Security State at work, is two things:

1. Demonstrate the slide into a national security state by such appeals to “threat + fear = supreme emergency.”

2. Demonstrate the slide from national security state into repressive state.

3. The slide into a repressive state coincides with a slide into perpetual war.

Stopping the slide

What can we do to prevent the U.S. from sliding into totalitarianism? Here are just a few provisionary steps.

Step 1: Recognize that radical change is required, because the state apparatus has been structured so as to continue to push to achieve and maintain complete state hegemony in the world. With this foundational mode of state structure and purpose, radical change of state structure is required. This can only be done with some kind of people’s push to return the power to themselves, as we see in Egypt and Tunisia (and, arguably in Madison, Wisconsin). Without that, or without a cataclysmic world event, such as a united Arab front against American attempts at dominance, or the collapse of the world economy, state mechanisms will continue to be structured as hegemonic agencies, and perpetual war and continued assault upon citizen rights will be the ongoing and deepening modus operandi of the state.

Step 2: One of the ways to recognize and acknowledge the slide into a full-blown repressive state is to maintain objectivity in analysis. Focus on the government structure that leads to national security state. This does two things: first, it keeps the positing of “evil-doers” and those with “evil intent” to a minimum, since this cannot usually be demonstrated empirically anyway. It is a more objective, less passionate analysis. Second, it demonstrates the pattern of a movement from democracy to authoritarianism.

This type of objective analysis is easily applied to issues we have discussed above, such as the development and consequences of the National Security State in general, and/or to the development and spread of U.S.-NATO military bases to prepare for military defense of oil and gas supplies.

Step 3: Focus objective analysis on ethical prescriptions as well. Ethically speaking, objective analysis can be done by analyzing how universal ethical analyses can be. For example, using what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant termed “reversibility,” one can maintain objectively that if our nation can declare a supreme emergency from a feared, temporally-distant potential threat, and attack them militarily on that basis, so can other states so engage. Or, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas puts it, for authentic communication between parties to take place, all affected must be able to accept the consequences of any proposed norm.43

Application of such analysis might include discussion of the Crime of Aggression of Obama’s drone strikes. In 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI, specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

A tentative definition of aggression was adopted by the U.N.  International Law Commission on June 4, 1951, which stated:

“Aggression is the use of force by a State or Government against another State or Government, in any manner, whatever the weapons used and whether openly or otherwise, for any reason or for any purpose other than individual or collective self-defence or in pursuance of a decision or recommendation by a competent organ of the United Nations”.

Another application might be the violations of the Geneva Conventions in attacking civilians, by troops or, more importantly in Obama’s case, by drones. Article 51, Section 2 proscribes “indiscriminate attacks:” those not directed at specifically military targets; those attacks or weapons that cannot be limited to military objectives and that strike civilians or civilian objects as well as military ones; and attacking military targets that the belligerent has reason to believe in advance will cause excessive and disproportionate damage to civilians or civilian objects, the latter defined simply as non-military objects.

Protocol II, “relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts,” specifically calls upon all nations to refrain from all “violence to the life, health, and physical and mental well-being of [noncombatant] persons.”

The Hague Conventions of 1899 ban the attacking towns and cities that are undefended, and collective punishment. Prescriptions to limit the conduct of war include the requirements to warn towns of impending attacks, to protect cultural, religious, and health institutions, and to insure public order and safety.

Step 4: Get Organized; Get Active!

The reason the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt are in revolution is because the U.S. National Security State has backed dictators like Mubarak for our own hegemonic interests. The people there are now taking their country back not only from Mubarak, but from the National Security State apparatus. We ought to get with it and do the same.

Conclusion. This approach represents a first attempt to formulate an alternative model for progressives to use, in place of analyses of individual events. It’s the system and the way it is structured that needs attention. This National Security system can be shown to exhaust economic resources and personnel, and to be a repressive model of government, both internationally and domestically. A new model of mutual exchange and mutually recognized moral standing is a better model for future government because it is closer to the fundamentals of a democratic society, based as it is on equality of citizens as well as their liberty.

About the Author

Dr. Robert P. Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is the author of three books: A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); and Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment (2009). His latest articles on political theory and war will be published in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Justice, by Springer Press, in the spring of 2011. Dr. Abele is an instructor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in the San Francisco Bay area.

Notes
1 This article is an adaptation of a transcript from a presentation given at the Project Censored Annual Awards Event, on February 5, 2011.

2 See Chomsky, Noam, Hegemony or Survival, p. 15, and all of Chapter 2.

3 See Bacevich, Andrew, Washington Rules, pgs. 12-15.

4 See “Barak Obama Declares ‘War on Terror’ is Over,” The U.K. Telegraph, February 4, 2011.

5 The “war convention” is Walzer’s term for the set of norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles, and reciprocal arrangements that shape our judgments of military conduct—set forth most explicitly in international law. For definitions and elaboration on both “supreme emergency” and the “war convention,” see Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars, pgs. 44-47; 129-137; 231-232; 251-255.

6 Walzer, ibid., pgs. 251-252.

7 Chang, Nancy, “The USA PATRIOT Act: What’s So Patriotic About Trampling on the Bill of Rights?” www.ccr-ny.org.

8 Agamben, Georgio. States of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2.

9 Ibid.

10 Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy,” Global Research, January 22, 2011.

11 Darsha Philips, “Mayor Kicks Marines Out of Toledo and Ends U.S. Military Takeover Drill,” Prison Planet Forum, February 9, 2008.

12 In a CNN interview on September 8, 2002.

13 In a speech at the Athena Performing Arts Center at Greece Athena Middle and High School, on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 in Rochester, NY. See Jacob Weisberg, “Bushism of the Day,” Slate.com, May 25, 2005.

14 See Wills, Gary, Bomb Power, pgs. 57-105; 120-135; and Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules on pgs. 12-15; 20-21.

15 Wills traces this history in ibid, pgs. 57-105.

16 This list is a variation of one presented by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Brave New World Order (Orbis Books, 1992).

17 Harper’s Magazine, June 12, 2009.

18 “US Drone Attacks Killed 700 Civilians, Officials Say,” The National, 4 January 2010; and “Over 700 Killed In 44 Drone Strikes In 2009,” DAWN, 2 January 2010

19 Cited by Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, p. 29

20 From “Changing Patterns in the Use of the Veto in the Security Council,” Global Policy Forum, on information provided by the United Nations

21 Klare, Michael, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (New York: Macmillan/Henry Holt Paperbacks; March 31, 2009).

22 Klare, “Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World’s Oil,” Foreign Policy in Focus, January, 2004.

23 Ibid.

24 Engdahl, F. William, “U.S. Strategy of Total Energy Control Over European Union and Eurasia,” Global Research, July 16, 2009.

25 Rick Rozoff, “Wars Without Borders: Washington Intensifies Push into Central Asia,” Global Research, January 30, 2011.

26  Johnson, Chalmers. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

27 Campbell, Duncan, “The Coup,” The London Guardian, April 22, 2002.

28 Escobar, Pepe. Globalistan: How the Globalized World is dissolving into Liquid War (Michigan: Nimble Books, 2006).

29 Agamben, op. cit., p. 2.

30 Phillips, Kevin, Wealth and Democracy, (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), and Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); both quoted in Peter Dale Scott, op. cit.

31 See Scott, ibid, and Agamben, ibid, for more on this.

32 Nichols, Thomas M. “Just War, Not Prevention,” Ethics & International Affairs, 17.1 (April, 2003).

33 For more detail, see Abele, Robert. The Anatomy of a Deception (Maryland: University Press of America, 2008).

.34 Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Good Reasons for Going around the U.N.” New York Times, March, 18, 2003.

35 Niko Price, “Iraq to Stop Counting Civilian Dead,” Associated Press, December 10, 2003.

36“U.S. Broadcast Exclusive: “Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre’ on the U.S. Use of Napalm-like White Phosphorus Bombs,” Democracy Now, November 8, 2005.

37 For more, see Dahr Jamal, “Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq,” www.truthout.org, May 30, 2006.  See also Aaron Glantz and Alaa Hassan, “U.S. Miltary Hides Many More Hadithas,” Inter-Press Service, June 7, 2006.  See also Patrick Cockburn, “U.S. Victory against Cult Leader was ‘Massacre’,” The Independent/U.K., January 31, 2007.

38 Dahr Jamal and Ali al-Fadhily, “Official Lies Over Najaf Battle Exposed,” Inter-Press Service, February 1, 2007.

39 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 187.

40 For more, see Dahr Jamal, “Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq,” www.truthout.org, May 30, 2006.  See also Aaron Glantz and Alaa Hassan, “U.S. Miltary Hides Many More Hadithas,” Inter-Press Service, June 7, 2006.  See also Patrick Cockburn, “U.S. Victory against Cult Leader was ‘Massacre’,” The Independent/U.K., January 31, 2007.

41 Dahr Jamal and Ali al-Fadhily, “Official Lies Over Najaf Battle Exposed,” Inter-Press Service, February 1, 2007.

42 See Memorandum for William J. Haynes IT, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, by John Yoo and Daniel J. Bryant.

43 Habermas, Jurgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 63.

Bibliography

Abele, Robert, The Anatomy of a Deception (Maryland: University Press of America,

2008).

Agamben, States of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Bacevich, Andrew. Washington Rules (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).

Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).

Cockburn, Patrick, “U.S. Victory against Cult Leader was ‘Massacre’,” The

Independent/U.K., January 31, 2007.

Democracy Now, “U.S. Broadcast Exclusive: “Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre’ on the

U.S. Use of Napalm-like White Phosphorus Bombs,” November 8, 2005.

Escobar, Pepe. Globalistan: How the Globalized World is dissolving into Liquid War

(Michigan: Nimble Books, 2006).

Glantz, Aaron, and Alaa Hassan, “U.S. Miltary Hides Many More Hadithas,” Inter-Press

Service, June 7, 2006.

Habermas, Jurgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990).

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Jamal, Dahr and Ali al-Fadhily, “Official Lies Over Najaf Battle Exposed,” Inter-Press

Service, February 1, 2007.

Johnson, Chalmers, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

——–, Nemesis (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Klare, Michael, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (New York: Macmillan/Henry Holt

Paperbacks; March 31, 2009).

Nichols, Thomas M. “Just War, Not Prevention,” Ethics & International Affairs, 17.1

(April, 2003).

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2003.

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Global Research, January 30, 2011.

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According to political scientist Michael Barkun, conspiracy theory was once a general definition for any conjoint operation of persons, whether it was civil, criminal, or political (Barkun, p. 7). But particularly after the events in the United States on September 11, 2001, the term has become a derisive one for those who believe that some secretive group is responsible for a significant and/or tragic event. Thus, for example, University of Florida Law School professor Mark Fenster defines conspiracy theory as “the conviction that a secret, omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the political and social order or some part thereof” (Fenster, p. 1).

Central to much of the discussion of conspiracy theory today are the events of 9/11/01 in the U.S. Those whom Fenster calls “conspiracy theorists” reject the official 9/11 Commission Report on the grounds that the actual events could not have been perpetrated in the manner the Report describes: that nineteen men hijacked planes and flew them into the towers and Pentagon, causing the former to collapse and causing massive damage to the latter. The “conspiracy” dimension occurs when an analyst maintains that the events of 9/11 were intended to serve as a “precipitating event for some larger, more nefarious project” (Fenster, p. 241).

Perhaps the best example of a conspiracy theorist today—one connected directly with 9/11 analysis—is David Ray Griffin, emeritus professor of philosophy and religion at Claremont School of Theology, in Claremont, California. As a self-proclaimed reluctant conspiracy theorist, Griffin regularly engages in vocabulary that portrays 9/11 as was what he calls “an inside job” (Griffin, 2004, xvii-xviii; Griffin and Scott, 2007, Chapter One). From there, he attempts to show how some nefarious agents, likely governmental, had to be involved in the events of 9/11.

Fenster responds to this by saying that conspiracy theorists are paranoid because they draw conclusions that are too strong on the basis of the scant evidence they provide, and their explanations of events are either too simplistic or too complex to explain the phenomena they seek. In essence, they bring totalizing explanations to events that move well beyond the standard norms of inference. Thus, conspiracy theory is paranoid because it explains events through a master narrative. In fact, for Fenster, conspiracy theories really function to replace political engagement with a circular narrative of conspiracy, propelled by its insatiable need to find information to justify conspiratorial assertions.

Adding to Fenster’s criticisms, Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert reject conspiracy theory on the grounds that a “proper” leftist critique concerns institutional analysis only. For both authors, there is an exclusive disjunction between conspiracy theory and their own preferred method that scrutinizes structural or institutional phenomena. For them, conspiracy theorists fail to recognize how “the normal operations of some institutions generate the behaviors and motivations” that lead to events such as 9/11. As Albert puts it, the primary assumption of his model (and that of Chomsky) is that “if the particular people hadn’t been there to do it, most likely someone else would have.” Thus, individual agents and their interests are only facts about the institutions. Policies arise from institutions, not persons, in this perspective.

But the institutional analysis of Chomsky and Albert, as legitimate as it is, is unwarrantably suspicious about evidence that might indicate the role of human agency within institutional activities. Their commitment to institutional analysis results in their own reduction of human agency to little or no merit in significant events.

This brings us to the position of Peter Dale Scott, whom Fenster identifies specifically as a conspiracy theorist. Scott argues empirically that the events of 9/11 and after demonstrate the “deep politics” that have been expanding in U.S. government operations since the end of World War II. The institutional movement in this direction was precipitated by individuals who sought to increase their own wealth and power. If Scott is correct in his analysis, then the confidence that Fenster, Chomsky, and Albert have in institutional analysis is misplaced, as are their criticisms of conspiracy theories.

What differentiates the conspiracy analysis of Peter Dale Scott, in comparison to the features of conspiracy theory delineated and rejected by analysts like Barkun and Fenster, is that Scott does not presume a totalizing narrative. Nor does he seek an endless loop of information to support a position that can never be proven definitively anyway. But what makes him a conspiracy theorist, according to Fenster’s analysis, is that he aims to trace out historically the movements, events, and “secret” decisions that “small cabals” of persons within our (public) governmental institutions. These secret decisions of persons are deliberately intended to replace the “public” dimension of U.S. foreign (and domestic) policy with what Scott calls the “deep state:” an elite, authoritarian politics whose concern is with global hegemony. By this blending of agency and institution, Scott produces a narrative that has historical and factual documentation, and finishes with the kind of conclusion that so repulses Fenster and Chomsky. Because Scott’s analysis is at once historical, factual, non-totalizing, and non-paranoid, his analysis is plausible. And if his analysis is plausible, his may represent the most cogent place to situate oneself between Fenster’s rejection of conspiracy theories and those who embrace conspiracy alone, such as David Ray Griffin.

In conclusion, whatever one’s views of justice are the practices of dominance and the self-interested motives of power and wealth will be repudiated as incongruent with justice. But if conspiracy theory aims at anything, it aims to expose the actions of a powerful elite engaging in nefarious activities for their own benefit, and this is an element of political analysis that all parties of the debate can agree to in order to begin dialogue about what needs to be done.

Robert P. Abele

Diablo Valley College

USA

Further Reading

Albert, Michael, “Conspiracy Theory,” Z Magazine, August, 1995.

Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Chomsky, Noam, “9-11: Institutional Analysis vs. Conspiracy Theory,” Z Magazine, October, 2006.

Clark, Steve. “Conspiracy Theories and the Internet: Controlled Demolition and Arrested Development,” Episteme 4, 2, 2007, 167-180.

Coady, David. Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2006).

Fenster, Mark, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Griffin, David Ray, and Richard Falk. The New Pearl Harbor (Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Publishing Group, Inc., 2004).

Griffin, David Ray, and Peter Dale Scott. 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Publishing Group, Inc., 2007).

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

Keeley, Brian L., “Of Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Philosophy, 96, n. 3, 1999, 109-126.

Parenti, Michael. Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996).

Scott, Peter Dale. The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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The term “conspiracy theory” has become a derisive term for those who believe that some secretive group is responsible for a tragic event. The result of painting people with such a broad brush has been that media elites, both local and national, dismiss such groups before allowing them to present their argument.

For Americans the primary reference to conspiracy theories today comes in discussions of the events of 9/11/01. Let us begin by making an important distinction. There is a difference between rejecting official government and media explanations of events, and maintaining that there was a sinister collusion of secret, unnamed parties. Any objective observer can see that the 9/11 Commission Report was clearly either hurriedly or incompetently done, or they are covering something with it. But to conclude from that, that the cover-up is the specific one of a nefarious government inside job in the destruction of the World Trade Centers is a different issue, and requires a high standard of evidence. This is not only because of the nature of the charge—it involves the charge of mass murder if not treason—but because it charges that particular parties did the deed rather than that particular institutional structures were dysfunctional that day. Beyond that, it is a demand that such individuals be arrested and brought to trial. So it is both the grandiose nature of the charges, in conjunction with the hypothesis that given individuals within our own government did it, and in conjunction with bringing such ghost figures to justice, that such hypotheses are called “conspiracy theories.” Consequently, many political party and media elites shut the parties holding this view out of the debate.

But let us discuss this conspiracy perspective a bit further. There are four possible approaches to analyses of significant social and political events today: conspiratorial, institutional, “agency and structure,” and what I will call “the ignoratii.” This term refers to those who not only don’t know the distinction between these modes of analysis, but more importantly have not examined the evidence produced by these three modes of investigation, but who nonetheless think themselves expert enough to scoff at one or both positions. Usually this occurs by the ignoratii heaping their ignorant disdain on the conspiracy folks through name-calling or through mocking their position by condescendingly mischaracterizing it as a form of psychological malady; for example, not seeing that real airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Through such simplistic smearing of others, they perform the elite institutional role of keeping dissenting voices out of the public discussion.

The institutional analysts take the structural approach, ignoring human agency. Noam Chomsky, for example, operates strictly from a paradigm of institutional analysis, and that logically entails that he consistently deny that human agency plays any appreciable role in significant political events. The result is that he a priori dismisses the very possibility that any individual or small group could engage in dastardly deeds such as the assassination of President Kennedy, and, more to our point, the possibility that there were specific agents involved in the demolition of the towers beyond those who piloted the planes on that fateful day. But Chomsky’s institutional analysis, as legitimate as it is, is unwarrantably suspicious about evidence that might indicate the role of human agency beyond the pilots of the planes. His commitment to institutional analysis results in his own ideology of belittling human agency as of little merit in significant events.

The conspirators take the agency side, often ignoring the structural side. The conspiracists spend much time and energy trying to establish their assumption that someone or some group committed a high crime, and then additionally attempt to show who did what, how, and why. They tend to ignore institutional patterns of organization and norms that open up and perhaps even encourage such behavior. For example, David Ray Griffin regularly engages in vocabulary that 9/11 was what he calls “an inside job,” and then proceeds to show how some nefarious agents had to be involved in the events of 9/11. Additionally, Griffin consistently encourages a wider understanding of the term “conspiracy theorist” so that everyone in essence becomes a conspiracy theorist.

But the conspiracy theorist viewpoint, like the institutional one, is unduly narrow. By focusing on agents, it ignores institutional norms and mechanisms that would allow the possibility of persons engaging in the actions at issue and even covering them up. The latter is an important issue for conspiracy theorists: without institutional analysis, they pay the high cost of not being taken seriously. They could make their case stronger if they challenge the structuralists such as Chomsky by demonstrating how the institutional operations could conceivably have been configured so as to allow agents to operate in such rogue fashion. A purely conspiratorial theory would require tracing the evidence of their hypothesis directly to the guilty parties for prosecution. The chances of that happening are slim, at best. To be taken more seriously, the conspiracy analysis should go past the allegedly guilty party or parties of the deeds of 9/11 to the mechanisms of an institution that would generate such actions. To the degree that they do this, they combine the best of structure and agency analysis, which would be the preferred option.

The result of this reflection is that if one combines an agency and structural analysis, one must conclude that the question concerning whether 9/11 was an inside job is too narrow, because it focuses not just on agency, but on government agency. Further, the question itself is framed in terms that favor a conspiracist analysis over an institutional one.

But if those who want to be taken seriously in the media debate, they should change not only their vocabulary, but also their focus, from “inside job” to, for example, “structures of agency.” They should also take seriously such analyses as Peter Dale Scott, who certainly sides with the “9/11 Truthers,” but who takes a more institutional approach to his political analyses. Finally, they should drop the name “9/11 Truthers.” That sounds like either                    or a cult, convinced that they and only they have the truth on their side. Such adjustments in method, focus, and vocabulary would go a long way to reopening the debate about the events of 9/11, and would make it more difficult for the media elites to keep them out of the debate by hook and by crook.

———————————————————

More than this, if conspiracy theories remain simply at the level of conspiracy—i.e. who did it and why—they run into further problems. First, a complex agency analysis, with all the levels of evidence that would be required, would be difficult at best, and would take many years to compile. It would also be incomplete and largely circumstantial. As a consequence, such evidence will never convince skeptics. Third, it ultimately won’t matter for prosecution sake, since the agents will be dead by the time they are revealed. Finally, using the Kennedy assassination as an example, the case is still not closed, fifty years after the fact. Thus, it would be much more beneficial and important to discuss what was done by the Bush and now Obama administrations in the wake of the events of 9/11 instead of trying to focus on who did it.

The “agency and structure” analysis asserts that human agency is too closely intertwined with institutional structures and norms to lessen the importance of individual intention to a second-class standing in analysis. This analysis maintains both the individuals sought to cause a catastrophic event and that the institutional structures were in place to either permit or encourage it to be done. It sees agency as important and instructive on a micro level, and to be used where needed. It sees institutional analysis as a macro approach, generally valid where group movements and institutional patterns are discernible. The two approaches are not contradictory, and can even be mutual. But it denies the tendency of the institutional approach to maintain that human actions are in some way predetermined or at least generated by the institutional organization itself. It also denies that only rogue agents of some sort acted outside of the institutional structures. It is a “both-and” approach, compared to Chomsky’s “either-or” approach.

If the conspiracy approach widened their investigative concerns over 9/11 to institutional structures and then to the agents they want to maintain were behind 9/11, they may be taken more seriously by the media, and be less subject to the ridicule and scorn from the liberal intelligentsia that has kept them out of the media debate about this critical question of our generation: “What indeed happened on 9/11?”

© Robert P. Abele, Spotlight on Freedom, Inc., 2011

So reflective citizens need to ask, what is the celebration of Veterans Day really about? If we are no longer celebrating the cause of peace, and instead are celebrating the military, what exactly are we celebrating? Are we celebrating the (capitalist) system which perpetuates war and the oppression of others in order to make billions in personal profit? Are we celebrating the soldiers who in large measure have joined the military not so much “to keep us free” (whatever that means), but because that is their best or only way out of poverty? Are we celebrating the imperialism of American foreign policy by celebrating its enforcers? Or are we just generally celebrating our militaristic culture?

The most vitriolic dime store patriots will find this series of questions most offensive. They choose to focus on the “protectors of our freedom” theme. But from what threats to “our” freedom” have the protectors defended us? In the hundreds of small and the two big wars in which the U.S. has engaged, there is only one—WW II—that was arguably for our freedom. So whose freedom is being protected by all the wars in which the U.S. engages? It is unlikely that the freedom involved is that of the average U.S. citizen, since there has been no overwhelming foreign threat to the daily freedoms which we take for granted. That is demonstrated clearly by the fact that most citizens do not even know how many wars have been and continue to be fought in our name. But if one defines as a “war” the use of military force in another country or against another group, the U.S. has been involved in no fewer than 145 “wars” during its 235 year history. That’s a new war approximately every year-and-a-half. Surely the world is not that threatening to the freedom of the U.S. people, especially when it is recognized that most people around the world, when polled, have their freedom at the top of their agenda as well.

A reasonable answer to the question why we celebrate Veterans Day is to be seen by comprehending who benefits from all these wars. Certainly it is the case that those who desire world power benefit. The U.S. leaders have consistently attacked those countries which do not agree with them or do what they are told to do by the U.S. leaders. A short and certainly non-exhaustive list would include U.S. military attacks against Iran, Guatemala, Panama, Palestine, Haiti, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Turkey, El Salvador, Cuba, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

It is also the case that those who crave resources for control and/or consumption likewise benefit from U.S. wars. This would obviously include the corporate “captains of industry,” who salivate from thoughts of control of resources and the cheap labor desired to procure those resources. Note not only Iraq in this context, but also the diamond industry and the materials needed to make cell phones for Americans. These materials are all procured from Africa, and the exploitation of the people there to mine these materials is indefensible for a country that touts “freedom” as a reason to celebrate. Note that this would include not only the capitalist leaders of the country, but also we, the citizens, who consume as though we had an unencumbered right to strip the world bare of its natural resources for our own comfort and convenience. To keep that consumption going, we need access to the world’s resources and we require that the poor population of those countries mine and produce those resources for us, and remain poor in the process. This is in part because the more resources they want to live like us, the less we will be able to live in unchallenged fashion (witness the problems of power-producing pollution concomitant with the clamor for equal standards of living as the U.S., in India, China, and elsewhere). So we are all guilty of contributing to the U.S. militarism celebrated by and in Veterans Day as long as unconscious uncontrolled consumption is part of our culture’s daily living.

It is thus the freedom for the economic elites to force markets open by military means, the expansion and “defense” of capitalism’s alleged “free markets” (which historically are anything but free, due to the lopsided use of protectionism for U.S. corporations while holding other nations to the standards of “the free market”), and the freedom of Americans to consume, cheaply and without limits, that all underpin the accolades that go into celebrations of Veterans’ Day. The sooner we realize this and reject it, the healthier our country will become. Stop celebrating Veteran’s Day, period. Return to Armistice Day, if we want an excuse to declare a holiday before we celebrate even more our consumptive abilities as we gorge ourselves at Thanksgiving and then again at Christmas. Veterans Day continues to underscore our lopsided consumption, our militarism and our imperialism, and cannot help but end with deepening the world’s animosity toward the now-dying Imperial Rome.

The news from Obama’s speech at the U.N. this morning (September 25, 2009) was accusatory and grim: Iran is hiding a nuclear processing plant from the international community, to which the U.S. would not hesitate to respond militarily.[1] And so the drumbeat to war begins anew. While this may seem like a hasty and superlative conclusion given Obama’s remarks, this latest attempt to keep pressure on Iran to remain militarily weaker than Western nations has a historical precedent in U.S. interest in regional hegemony. The U.S. has given Iran plenty of reason for seeking a nuclear deterrent (i.e. by its complete economic and military support of Israel, and by its invasion of Iraq).[2] While I am not attempting to argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would necessarily make the world safer (one could turn the same argument made by Western leaders against them regarding the possession of nuclear weapons by the U.S. and especially by Israel), any analysis of the latest accusations made by Obama and western leaders must be put in historical perspective.

Although the circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that Iran did in fact hide this second processing plant from the IAEA, this accusation was strategically made by Obama at the U.N. to demonstrate Western resolve in the face of a threat to its hegemony in the Mideast. It is the beginning of the next chapter of our corporate wars—which we may rightly entitle “The Obama Wars”—which may not be televised, but can be recognized as being fought already: the continuing war in Iraq; the expansion of war in Afghanistan; drone use in the Pakistan war; and for now, new rhetorical (only) wars against Iran. The Obama administration is simply continuing with the long-running series of the historical U.S. push for world military dominance.[3] As is by now well-known, the U.S. has had its eye on control of Iran for many years, beginning with the U.S. installation of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran in 1953. But before commencing with the next corporate-sponsored installment of America’s attack on other countries, whether it is Iran or not, perhaps we would benefit by a quick look back at how they led us into Iraq and Afghanistan. Understanding that history and its structure (contrary to the Obama desire to “look forward, not backward”) will allow us to see the manipulations and machinations that are and have been used by the corporate government to keep us at war with the world. If knowledge is indeed power, and power belongs to the people, we can stop future military attacks by the U.S. by knowing in advance how the government will attempt to manipulate citizens into believing that the U.S. (or its Israel surrogate) “must act” militarily against Iran.

Summary of How We Got into Iraq and Afghanistan

The book Anatomy of a Deception lays out the main premises of the decision of the U.S. government to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. In sum, there are at least four converging factors that led to the invasion of both countries: the general philosophy of Realpolitik of the U.S. government, which the U.S. has used with rigorous historical consistency to support Mid East, Central American, and other world-regional dominance; critical thinking derelictions and culpable information ignorance on the part of the media, passed on to the uncritical populace, particularly concerning the public debate on invading Iraq; violations of basic ethical principles; and violations of international law.

The book traces the philosophical reasons our government led us down this path to invasion stem from three things: the history of U.S. ambitions in the Middle East; the imperialist philosophy of the U.S. government; and the neoconservative philosophy of Leo Strauss and his followers. Specifically, there were numerous critical thinking failures made in the public debate over going to war on Iraq that are seen in this study. Just by way of example, here are a few of the critical thinking omissions we saw with regard to Iraq alone. When these categories are applied to Afghanistan, the same pattern can be observed. The interesting thing about these derelictions is that together they constitute the historical pattern the U.S. government uses when it wants to dominate another country or region. Watch for it again as Israel and the U.S. ramp up their rhetoric against Iran and other mideastern countries, such as Syria, Lebanon, and even the East, such as Pakistan, in order to increase its hegemony over this region.[4] Some call it “propaganda;” I call it the cultivation of “groupthink,” the antithesis to which is critical thinking. Applied to Iraq alone, here is what we saw (specific instances and the arguments given, along with supporting premises and footnoted evidence of the critique of those instances and arguments, can be seen in the book):

• A lack of evidence for justifying either invasion, seen especially in Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations regarding Iraq.
• Hasty Generalizations—i.e. drawing the strongest possible conclusions from weak evidence for the conclusions.
• Suppressed Evidence—i.e. picking only evidence that supported the predetermined U.S. administration conclusion that an invasion of Iraq was needed. This includes redefining terms to better suit their position (e.g. “deterrence;” “torture”). It also includes ignoring evidence such as increasing Iraqi compliance with U.N. mandates for inspections and WMD destruction; doubts about the American case for the invasion expressed other U.S. government agencies (e.g. CIA) as well as U.N. inspectors and groups (e.g. IAEA).
• False Premises—Facts given were erroneously stated or just plain false, and were shown to be so at the time they were being used.
• Questionable Sources—e.g. Iraqi defectors (some unnamed; some named), shown at the time they were being used to be bogus witnesses with bogus information; rejecting reports from other government agencies (e.g. CIA) in favor in insider administration reports (e.g. Douglas Feith).
• Arguments from Ignorance—e.g. Iraq did not prove that they did not possess WMD’s, so they are hiding something and/or they must have them.
• Non-sequiturs—when attempting to compile evidence to meet normative criteria (either ethical or legal), the premises given were in some cases not necessary and in nearly all cases insufficient to support the conclusion that the invasion of Iraq was justified.
• Vague and overly-broad generalizations in premises and conclusions—e.g. Iraq is “a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities” (John Nichols).
• Characterizations used in place of evidence—e.g. “Butcher of Baghdad;” “Dr. Death;” “Chemical Ali;” “he has gassed his own people,” etc.
• Use of circumstantial evidence to justify conclusions—e.g. Christopher Hitchens argued that Saddam Hussein “harbors every species of gangster” but presented only one very dubious case (al Zarqawi).
• Red Herring/Post hoc fallacies—e.g. “humanitarian intervention” in 2003 as necessary, but such arguments were based on pre-1991 actions done by Hussein. In addition, the same arguments ignored the fact that U.S. sanctions and regular missile attacks on Iraq both caused and deepened the humanitarian crisis in Iraq.
• Contradictions—e.g. U.S. does not have to follow the U.N., but the U.S. is fulfilling U.N. resolutions in invading Iraq.
• Failure to take proper accounting of potential consequences from the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

There were also numerous ethical violations in the public case for going to war:

• Use of self-interest over principle—the latter is engaged with general or universal rules of conduct toward others.
• Ignoring or flatly rejecting international law—e.g. Nuremberg Charter; Geneva Conventions; U.N. Charter, etc.
• Moral inconsistency—i.e. picking and choosing which U.N. resolutions to follow, and also using principles to support self-interest.
• Interpreting U.N. resolutions narrowly or broadly to suit the U.S. interest in invading Iraq.
• Hubris—believing that conquering Iraq would be quick and easy (a “cakewalk” according to Assistant Defense Secretary Ken Adelman), and that we would be “greeted as liberators” (Vice President Cheney), and that, while the rest of the world disputed the U.S. concerning the morality of an invasion, the U.S., with its presumed exceptionalism, believed it had the moral and/or legal right to unilaterally invade anyway (with only a bit of assistance from a few other countries).
• Ignoring or giving only superficial acknowledgement of the rigorous requirements of Just War Theory.
• Refusal to negotiate with Iraq or cooperate with the United Nations—both are requirements of Just War Theory, but also related to hubris.
• Preventive war (as distinguished from pre-emptive war).
• Piling on the bad behaviors of person or country x, y, or z—in this case, Saddam Hussein—as premises for invasion, without listing or naming the distinctly moral premises needed to conclude from those bad behaviors that an invasion was justified.
• Double standards regarding U.S. actions and Iraqi alleged actions—e.g. support of terrorists, as in Luis Posada Carilles living with impunity in Miami, and Iraq allegedly harboring al Zarqawi.
• Duplicity (Machiavellianism)—appealing to high-sounding norms (e.g. freedom; liberation; democracy) while engaging in precisely the opposite behavior (e.g. invasion; domination; control; ethnic cleansing; targeting civilians and infrastructure; torture).
• Disrespect for the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq.
• Violation of Iraqi civilians—between 500,000 and one million Iraqi citizens are dead either through or as a consequence of the U.S. invasion.
• Ignoring predictable damage to America’s moral culture, its reputation, and its domestic economy that results from American bellicosity.
• American military casualties and the wrecked lives of the thousands of American families whose loved ones have been (and will be) killed in Iraq.
• Torture of citizens of the purported “enemy,” in violation of all ethical principles and international laws concerning the use of torture.

Given all this, the obvious question that arises is:

What Must We Do to Avoid this Deception in the Future?

First, we citizens must become—and remain—more informed about the workings of our government and what they are doing than we have heretofore been. Granting from the start that there is much that is kept secret from us, the fact of the matter, as has been demonstrated in the book, is that enough information was available to us prior to the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, to cogently debate the issue and to come to the conclusion that such a proposal was unfounded empirically, not logically sound, unethical in its formulation, and illegal according to international law. These are all categories of knowledge which citizens must be as adept at engaging as they can be. That is the only way to stop this type of action from happening again.

Second, we, the citizens of the United States, must return to distinctively ethical principles and values rather than purely pragmatic dialogue and actions. This must be accompanied by a development of critical thinking when it comes to government pronouncements and propaganda intended to take us to war. We must demand of government accountability, and that implies that we become informed of the issues at hand.

Third, we must demand more from our media. The media, from the ostensibly liberal New York Times to FOX News, was not only completely delinquent in actually investigating the government case for invading Iraq, but they in fact served as volunteer cheerleaders for the invasion. Judith Miller at the Times was responsible for pushing the now-famous “Iraq aluminum tubes” lie, and for reporting, on the basis of second-hand sources, that the U.S. had found the Iraqi WMD’s they were looking for. Katie Couric gushed as the anchor of NBC’s Today program that “I think Navy SEALs rock!”[5] and Dan Rather pandered that “I want my country to win, whatever the definition of ‘win’ may be. Now, I can’t and don’t argue that that is coverage without prejudice.” The American media was nothing short of disgraceful in its coverage of the planned Iraq invasion.[6] Even worse, this media, with few exceptions, has repeatedly shown its willingness to capitulate its duty to inform citizens and to challenge those in power, in favor of obliging the interests of those in power, to the point that one might rightfully ask what the difference is between American media and former Soviet-owned media.

This is not new: the same pattern has replayed throughout U.S. history. The government lies, the U.S. corporatized media uncritically and complicitly replays the lie and even magnifies it by advocating its support, in the face of evidence to the contrary, the war is commenced, the truth starts to overtake the lies, people withdraw their support, the war drags on. We have seen this pattern repeatedly in American history: USS Maine (1898); Gulf of Tonkin (1964); Dominican Republic (1965); Grenada (1983); Panama (1989); Kosovo (1999); Iraq (2002-2003), just to name a few of the more prominent cases.[7] The case of media complicity in the planned Iraq invasion is demonstrated clearly by the overwhelming voice given to pro-war advocates and the marginalization of dissenting voices. In one study, conducted by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the following media outlets were studied: ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The study lasted about two weeks, from 1/30/03-2/12/03.[8] A total of 393 on-camera sources were on these programs, more than two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, and more than 75% of whom were former military officials. Only three of the 393 sources used were anti-war, less than 1%. If media-maintained government propaganda trumping up war support is nothing new, then pre-Iraq invasion coverage fit right in with our history. We need news sources for democracy to function properly as invoking an open dialogue, not as Stalin-like propaganda machines for government manipulation of the populace by extreme one-sidedness. This is why it is critically important that citizens become more sophisticated about what they consume as truth. This implies using several sources of information, and that we avoid relying heavily on what is euphemistically called the “mainstream media.”

Fourth, we must demand that our government follow international law. If anything should convince us of the need for the adherence of all nations to international law and its standards, it is the shift of the United States from a nation which at least acknowledged the rule of law to the rogue state that we have become in foreign affairs through the policies of the Bush administration. This is particularly true with regard to our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Condemned by international law and the world at large, it is a glaring instance of the need for compliance with international law on the part of all nations. Without compliance with international law, no international cooperation is possible. Nations need structure in order to work together, and international law is that structure. McGwire again writes that the most important reason to condemn the invasion of Iraq was that “such an operation threatened to undermine the very fabric of international relations. That decision repudiated a century of slow, intermittent and often painful progress toward an international system based on cooperative security . . . agreed norms of behaviour and a steadily growing fabric of law.”[9]

The importance of international law is underscored when we realize that there is no true security between nations without it. How can one nation condemn another for its actions if there is no ground for condemnation?

More important that this, the United States representatives must acknowledge that all principles of ethical conduct and thus law are based on the principle of universality: “If one does it, then anyone may do it.” Think of what would happen if every nation in the world made the same claims that the U.S. has done, does now, and did with abandon under the Bush administration regarding invasion of other countries and the right to nuclear first strikes. For a specific example, since 1992, the United States has exported more than $142 billion dollars worth of weaponry to states around the world. [10] The U.S. dominates this international arms market, supplying just under half of all arms exports in 2001, roughly two and a half times more than the second and third largest suppliers.[11] U.S. weapons sales help outfit non-democratic regimes, soldiers who commit gross human rights abuses against their citizens and citizens of other countries, and forces in unstable regions on the verge of, in the middle of, or recovering from conflict.

Conclusion

The point of the book is not that we now know the Bush administration lied to us and to the world in order to take the United States into an unnecessary war—i.e. a war of aggression upon the sovereign state of Iraq. Rather, the point has been that all of the issues and problems of their deceit were there from the start, and could have and should have been noticed, and in some cases, unmasked, by a thinking and ethically conscious public and media. That it was not is to our collective shame. That we can avoid this in the future is the point of this book. We cannot expect a significant change in this type of U.S. action in the world in the administration of President Barack Obama. Not only does the United States have a long history of unethical and illegal behavior toward other nations (some of which has been spelled out in this study), but Obama himself pledged repeatedly to continue the “war on terrorism” (even in his inaugural speech), to step up the war in Afghanistan by deploying even more troops there, and has made no pledge to withdraw all troops from Iraq. So although Obama may nuance U.S. actions abroad, by no means does he plan to change them. It is up to us, the citizens of the U.S., to put pressure not just on Obama, but on our alleged Representatives and Congress people, to make the change needed. They will not do so by themselves. By engaging the tools of critical analysis and moral principle, we will be able to recognize our government’s moral failures and their own terrorism, and then be in a position not to be led by the propaganda that the government and media use to direct our support for future wars. If we think these issues through by demanding more information and by weighing that information against the proposed action, and filtering it through the lens of ethical principles and international laws, we can stop our government from taking us down the dark road of wars of aggression and torture. It is our government, not theirs, and it is up to us to hold them accountable for their actions. With such information, critical thinking, and ethical consciousness, we can guide the U.S. back to a more positive relationship with the world, and restore democracy at home.

Notes

[1] Charles Babington and Robert Burns, “Obama Warns Iran: ‘Come Clean’ on Nukes,” Associated Press, September 25, 2009.

[2] For more on this, see Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 73.

[3] In addition to Failed States, see also Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003);

[4] See, for example, Pepe Escobar, Globalistan (Ann Arbor: Nimble Books, 2006).

[5] Today, NBC, April 3, 2003

[6] CNN, April 14, 2003

[7] For details on the media as megaphone for government interests in these and other military adventures, see Norman Solomon, War Made Easy (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005)

[8] “In Iraq Crisis, Networks are Megaphones for Official Views,” FAIR study, 3/18/03.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Data compiled from addition of Foreign Military Sales (FMS) deliveries and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) deliveries, FY1990-FY2000. a. “Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts as of September 26, 2001.” DSCA. Available online:DSCA 2001 Facts Book.

[11] “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1994-2001.” CRS Report for Congress, by Richard F. Grimmet. August 6, 2002. Order Code RL31529. Available online: Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations.