Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

A new book by Dr. Lyle Rossiter is causing a lot of anger among Liberals. The reason for their outrage is pretty clear just from the title: "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness". Dr. Rossiter states that, "Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded." He goes on to explain that, "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

Needless to say, this diagnosis has not been popular with Liberals, and their attacks on the author tend to be leveraged on the usual Liberal flawed assumptions. In their efforts to discredit the author they've implied that as an old man his medical knowledge - and judgment - must also be old and outdated. The arbitrary abandonment of history and "old" ideas is a core principle of modern Liberalism, which claims to be different from all of the similar failures of the past. Liberals insist that "old" documents like the American Constitution must be "living documents" subject to constant reinterpretation within the context of the current popular culture. According to Liberals, the tired old ideas of the unfairly privileged white men of 200 years ago are outdated and no longer valid in our modern world.

They also point out that roughly half of American voters support Liberal politicians and the expansion of intrusive parental government. If "normal" is equivalent to "average", then Liberalism is "normal", and it is the belief in individual liberty and the sovereignty of freeman citizens that is the aberration.

Technically this is probably true. However, in their reflexive defense of their own agendas, Liberals once again fail to understand the real significance of the inconvenient truths they disparage. Liberalism is hardly the only manifestation of mental illness, making demographics a poor diagnostic tool for mental illness. A rational analysis of human history makes it distressingly clear that the vast majority of humans down through history have suffered from pervasive mental illness.

At various times, the "normal" forms of public entertainment have included burning people at the stake, impaling them on pikes, stoning them to death, cheering as wild animals tore them apart, ritually cutting out their still beating hearts, or slowly flaying the flesh from their bodies. According to the Liberal view that demographics is the metric for mental health, engaging in these activities would have been the definition of the healthy mind of their day. Those who found such activities revolting or offensive would by the Liberal definition have been the mentally ill of their day.

It may just be me, but I find the above activities to be clear examples of depraved indifference to the unnecessary pain and suffering of others. If these activities aren't symptoms of mental illness, then there is something seriously wrong with the definition of mental illness. Imagine being "treated" for the "illness" of insufficient depraved indifference...

While there may have been brief periods of rationality in the past, all of the supposed "great" civilizations have been largely dominated by mental illness. They wasted the productive resources of the living on building vast tombs in the desert for the dead, constructed massive temples in the jungle for ritual human sacrifice, and erected elaborate public amphitheaters dedicated to spectacles of extreme violence and depravity. A distressingly common characteristic of human civilizations has been the use of some form of mass murder as public ritual. They enforced absurdly delusional world-views while aggressively suppressing meaningful scientific knowledge and rational thought. They murdered the citizens of other nations and stole their property in the belief that their imaginary god(s) had ordered them to commit violent crimes against the followers of other imaginary gods. Most if not all of the "great" civilizations of the past were destroyed from within as the wide spread mental illness afflicting the bulk of their participants became debilitating or even virulently self-destructive.

Our modern world is the result of a unique aberration in the long tragic history of mental illness when the dominance of the mentally ill was temporarily diminished by a unique combination of factors. While the majority of humans continued to suffer from various forms of mental illness, the unique socioeconomic structure established on a frontier partly isolated from the major power centers of the mentally ill, allowed the rational minority to temporarily overcome the self-destructive insanity of the majority, and create our modern world.

No other civilization has been as effective as Western Industrial Civilization (WIC) at improving the quality of life of its participants. No other civilization has managed to advance its scientific and technology base, or increased its productivity at anything close to the rate achieved by WIC. No other civilization has been as successful in limiting the self-destructive sociopathology of its mentally ill citizens.

A unique combination of socioeconomic and political conditions temporarily obstructed the ability of the mentally ill majority to forcibly project their inner demons and delusions onto the rest of the population. This allowed the minority of rational citizens to use their productive resources to develop meaningful improvements in their own lives, instead of wasting them on the usual make-work monuments to mental illness. It's amazing what can be accomplished when your spare time isn't wasted piling rocks in the desert, or as an expendable foot soldier in the latest outbreak of competitive insanity over which delusional ruler's mental illness is more malignant.

The core driving engine of WIC has long been the unique American grand experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and free market capitalism. The key factors that made this grand experiment possible were limited government and limited suffrage

Government evolved out of the collective efforts of the mentally ill to redefine reality to fit their delusions. The most aggressively violent and obsessive "won" the "right" to force their fellow citizens to accept their particular flavor of mental illness as "normal" and desirable - and violently suppress all those who failed to voluntarily afflict themselves with the same form of mental illness.

World-views that from the outside were clearly absurd became the official reality because to think otherwise would likely get you killed. Far more citizens have been murdered by their own governments than have died in all the wars between governments. As such, the primary historical role of government has been to violently suppress the rational minority who weren't mentally ill, and any rational scientific progress that might contradict the delusions of the dominant strain of mental illness.

But for one brief moment in human history, limits on government power restricted the ability of the mentally ill to use the coercive power of government to violently define society as a projection of their delusions and neuroses. The majority of humans were still suffering from mental illness, but their ability to collectively impose it on the non-ill was greatly diminished. It's estimated that only a third of the citizens of the original American colonies supported the establishment of an enlightened free society. A third wanted to remain subservient subjects of hereditary British Royalty, while a third didn't care either way. Of the third who supported the cause of liberty, it's likely that only a percentage of them did so out of an enlightened understanding of the profound value of liberty and individualism.

For a brief moment in history, the rational minority were sufficiently free of the aggressively mentally ill to establish an enlightened socioeconomic and political system. Drawing on the lessons of history, they understood that the madness of the mob would always be seeking ways to regain its status as the official reality. To guard against the restoration of mob rule, America's founders established constitutional limits on the usefulness of government for manipulating society and coercing individual citizens. They sought to distribute government power among competing factions, creating a balance of power that was inherently self-limiting because each faction had a self-interest in keeping the other factions from gaining additional power.

Temporarily deprived of the organized coercive violence of government, the mentally ill majority were unable to suppress the rational minority, with the result being the creation of WIC, and all of the benefits it has provided.

The primary traditional attraction to "government service" has always been the potential to abuse discretionary power. It is the discretionary power of government officials that creates the salable power that corrupts and perverts the purpose of government. Officials purchase access to this salable power with obligations to their supporters - obligations that tend to compromise their functional purpose. Election to office becomes the opportunity to abuse the power of office, and the process of getting elected obligates the winner to abuse the power of his office for the benefit of those who elected him. In a populist democracy, elections degenerate into little more than sporting contests to decide which gang of surrogate criminals gets to squander the treasures looted by the tax man, and impose their delusional fantasies as public policy.

In a constitutionally limited government, elections have a functional purpose far different than the current populist auction of the rights and property of whoever is the current focus of the mob's envy and irrational fears. The objective of limiting government is to ultimately limit the ability of government employees to impose their will on the citizens. Stripped of discretionary power, a government official becomes simply a hired functionary.

In a constitutionally limited government, candidates are elected to perform specific limited functions, not to become rulers of the electorate. Elected officials have minimal discretionary power, and therefore the exploitable value of public office is also minimal. Elections function primarily as a method of collectively selecting competent employees. Ideally, those who vote in elections are those citizens with the strongest motivation to protect the principles on which the nation was founded, which will in turn tend to result in the election/hiring of public servants who will actually respect the rights and freedoms of their employers.

Three key protections of limited government in early America were limited suffrage, the Electoral College, and the appointment of senators by state governments.

Suffrage in early America was limited to landholders because in the largely agrarian economy of early Colonial America, owning land was the most reliable measure of an individual's competence as a citizen. Owning land tended to mean the individual was a relatively competent participant in the free market, and would have a vested interest in preserving and protecting the economic principles that had made his success possible. Land is a fixed asset, and its owner has a clear long term interest in encouraging the continuation of peace and prosperity in order to preserve the value of his property. Since landholders were the ones most likely to have to pay any taxes levied by government, they were the ones with the greatest interest in minimizing the cost of government.

Within the context of the times, landowners were the least likely to suffer from the kinds of self-destructive mental illness that have always been endemic among the irrational masses. They were the citizens most likely to carefully elect competent technocrats who would simply do their jobs as public servants. They were the least likely to use their votes to steal the property and trample on the rights of their fellow citizens. It wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did serve its intended purpose at the time.

As a further protection against the mental illness of the masses, those qualified to vote still didn't directly elect the nation's chief executive. They elected representatives to the Electoral College who had earned local respect for their wisdom, to further interview and investigate the candidates, and make an informed decision which would make the best president.

Senators were intended to be the representatives of state governments as a counterbalance to the potential short term irrationality of the popularly elected House of Representatives. State governments had a clear self-interest in restraining the power of the federal government, and minimizing the intrusion of the federal government in the lives of the citizens of the states.

As these critical protections have been eroded or outright inverted in the name of egalitarian democracy, the endemic mental illness of the majority has incrementally subverted our once free society. Over time the enlightened wisdom that laid the foundations for our modern world has been denigrated as obsolete and antiquated - or forgotten altogether. As a result, America's constitutionally limited republic has been incrementally replaced with a populist democracy.

It's estimated at as much as 80% of the laws and activities of the current federal government violate the constitutional limits on its power as the clearly written prose was understood by the average citizen during America's first century. The words haven't changed, but their meanings have been subverted or even inverted by the pervasive mental illness that is humanity's "normal" affliction. And as that endemic mental illness has gained ever more influence over our once free civilization, our ability to remain civilized has been incrementally undermined. Elections have been transformed from the selection of competent public servants into a sad spectacle of competitive criminality, with each candidate promising to commit ever greater crimes against society on behalf of his mentally ill supporters.

Returning to the original point, modern Liberalism is certainly a form of mental illness, but it isn't just Liberals who are mentally ill. Sadly, the mentally ill of both "left" and "right" have largely regained their dominance over the temporary aberration of rationality that created our once free world. Our reversion into humanity's traditional state of irrational self-destruction is already well underway.