Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

According to the legacy media, the major parties, and what passes for political humor these days, the solution to any problem is another government program. Unfortunately for the future of our once free society, a lot of those advocating government solutions truly believe that government can actually solve problems.

It's become a standard item of faith among the true believers that America's relative peace and prosperity has only been possible because of government regulation and control of the economy and society. They openly promote the fiction that our lives and wellbeing are provided to us by our benevolent government, not by the unseen hand of our free market economy. They increasingly claim that the very fabric of our society is - and should be - the product of the endless laws and regulations generated by various levels of government. Most of all they want us to believe that those with the power to pass laws and regulations also have the right and power to shape society to fit their visions of how things should be.

This is essentially the concept being tested in Iraq. The rapid renovation of Iraq into a peaceful productive society was supposed to prove that all that was needed to turn a wrecked country into a modern showcase of social engineering was a progressive government to tell the citizens how to live.

According to the [liberal, progressive, socialist - whatever the authoritarians are deceptively calling themselves these days] political fantasies that dominate the western legacy media, it should have worked. We rushed into power an impressively multicultural gang of local belligerents who have never experienced anything but violent authoritarianism, and who like to give orders. The general population was already accustomed to taking orders from government officials. The new gang of ruler wannabes wasn't anywhere near as sociopathicly homicidal as the previous gang, so what could go wrong?

What could go wrong was that the whole concept was fatally flawed in its most fundamental assumptions.

There are still some freemen capable of recognizing that our increasingly authoritarian government is progressively destroying the founding principles of our once free society. It's hardly surprising that Iraq is degenerating into violent chaos, to those capable of recognizing what is happening in America. The government bureaucracy in charge of creating a free democratic society in Iraq is filled with the same kinds of authoritarians that have been busy destroying freedom in America. Sending American authoritarians to Iraq to create an enlightened westernized socioeconomic system is a bit like sending the American mafia to clean up organized crime in Sicily. Our home-grown gangsters may be capable of a great many things, but making productive contributions to legitimate society isn't their most practiced skill.

The same misguided advocacy of multiculturalism that is progressively destroying our shared common culture in America, has also been arbitrarily imposed on Iraq, resulting in a perverse parody of an enlightened free society. Rather than establishing the rights of multi-ethnic individuals to be free to live as they please, the multiculturalists have instead focused on protecting the residue of Iraq's past failures of authoritarianism from further loss of power and respect - granting them the "right" to use the coercive power of the "new and improved" government to impose their flawed political concepts and insane superstitions on the citizens, and block any form of enlightenment that threatens their continued ability to deceive, abuse, and manipulate their captive followers.

The result is an authoritarian Constitution and government structure that protects and preserves the malignant detritus of Iraq's past authoritarian failures, while institutionalizing the suppression of the basic principles of secular individualism necessary for the creation of a true free self-regulating society. There isn't any mention of trial by jury in the Iraqi constitution, or true freedom of religion, or freedom of speech. However, there are numerous empowerments of government to intrude into the private lives of citizens that the frustrated authoritarians have long been trying to impose on Americans.

To understand the real reasons why the current "nation building" in Iraq is doomed to failure, one has to first consider the role of culture in society.

A free society of individuals isn't a natural state for man - it requires the conscious adoption of an entirely artificial set of principles and practices. Sets of principles and practices define cultures that in turn create societies. Many sets of principles and practices have been tried over humanity's short and bloody existence, but none have proven as successful as the set that made Western Industrial Civilization possible.

The core essence of Western Industrial Civilization has been the purposeful adoption of a social contract implemented through the voluntary self-regulation of the participants. The motivation driving this self-serving self-regulation has been the intellectual recognition of the profound value of the free enterprise/free market economy that is only possible through voluntary self-regulation.

America has been the most successful nation in human history measured by the improvements in quality of life it has provided to its participating citizens. American society continues to function because the vast majority of its citizen participants continue to want it to function, and continue to voluntarily self-regulate their interactions with others accordingly.

America started out with maximum self-regulated individual freedoms and minimal interference by artificial authority. Over two centuries, authoritarianism has grown along with the incremental expansion of the powers and scope of government. America's current relative prosperity is a legacy of its earlier period of individual freedoms, and testament to the robust resiliency of our common culture. America continues to prosper in spite of the ever increasing parasitic load of intrusive government, not because of the increased government interference in the lives and lifestyles of the citizens.

The source of many of America's current social problems can be traced to the incremental shift from self-regulation to external regulation that has accompanied the incremental expansion of authoritarianism. And just as in Iraq, the advocates continue to dismiss their failures as the result of insufficient authoritarianism - claiming the solution is to do even more of what is already causing the progressive breakdown of our once free society.

The kind of enlightened self-interest necessary for the creation of a free self-regulating society is entirely lacking in Iraq. Iraq has suffered from generations of irrational authoritarianism where externalized regulation became a necessary individual survival strategy. The rules of engagement constantly changed depending on who was in power at the moment. Those who attempted to live enlightened ethical lives tended to end up in unmarked mass graves. The entire concept of a free self-regulating individual is alien to the authoritarian mindset of the average externally regulated Iraqi citizen, so there is no legacy of individual freedom to even partially counterbalance the intrusive authoritarianism of the "new and improved" Iraqi government.

Externally regulated individuals only comply with the constraints of external authority to the extent they expect that external authority to be able to impose its will on them. They are constrained from committing wrongful acts only to the extent they believe an external authority will be able to physically stop them from acting, or punish them for acting.

Even within the constraints of external authority, the very definitions of right and wrong are subject to the objectives of the most immediately threatening authority. Context becomes everything. Murder and depravity become honorable activities when committed in the service of an authority with the will and power to demand such services from those subservient to it. History is full of authoritarians who redefined murder and depravity as "honorable" tools for gaining and maintaining power.

While the government installed by the American led coalition forces is sufficiently authoritarian to obstruct any chance of the citizens creating a true free society, it has been crippled by the need to maintain the fiction that it is a benevolent ruler. It wouldn't do for western audiences to find out that their governments were creating the same kind of murderous tyrannies the soviets were rightfully vilified for creating. Unfortunately for the current rulers, the Iraqi people have developed an elevated tolerance for authoritarianism, and the level of coercion available to the current government is insufficient to get much respect from the general public - or from the array of competing authoritarians eager to impose their own variations of violent oppression.

On a superficial level, religious morality motivated by fear of accountability in an imagined after-life, might appear to mimic the functional value of enlightened self-interest. But religion has never been a reliable or effective substitute for rationality, as is today so vividly demonstrated by the contrast between the unparalleled prosperity of secular Western Industrial Civilization, and the sociopathic death cult violence of the primitivist Islamist world.

The Islamist death cult religionists are among the most aggressive competitors seeking to become the new rulers of Iraq. In yet another theater of the absurd required to deny the reality that the Islamists have openly declared themselves to be our intractable enemies, the Islamists have been granted special protections in Iraq. Rather than reining in the ongoing murder and mayhem by the "religion of peace", we have enshrined the Islamists' vicious religious authoritarianism and sociopathic intolerance for enlightened western values, in the founding documents and political structure of the new Iraq.

Islam is waging global war against western civilization because the self-inflicted misery it offers to its deluded believers can't compete with the quality of life offered by enlightened western civilization. It's easy to understand how the advocates of a degenerate religion would want to use the coercive power of authoritarian government to protect their remaining powers from further erosion, and protect their fallacies and absurdities from exposure to the rational ridicule they so richly deserve. What is much harder to understand is how it is in the best interests of the American people to enshrine and protect in the official structure of the "new and improved" Iraq, the power and privileges of those who openly declare their intention to destroy the kind of free society we are supposedly trying to create in Iraq. This travesty in the making is distressingly similar to the vile betrayal of the Allies "liberating" Eastern Europe from the Nazis, only to sell them into Soviet slavery at the end of the war.

It seems to me that the reason nothing seems to be working as expected in Iraq is that our supposed representatives are asking the wrong questions and trying to achieve the wrong objectives. The problem isn't that we've failed to bring enlightened western principles to the Iraqis, it's that our representatives have been actively obstructing the creation of the kind of free society America is supposed to be.

In order to have a peaceful self-regulating society, you must first have a self-regulating population - a population that freely and peacefully participates in society regardless of the presence or absence of coercive authority. The Iraqi people are a long way from being capable of establishing an enlightened free society, and joining the civilized world. They must undergo fundamental cultural changes before they will be capable of self-government. They must abandon their legacy of violent authoritarianism, and embrace the values of individualism, self-regulation, and enlightened self-interest. At that point the objective of self-government would change from an impossible dream to a simple recognition of existing reality.

Without fundamental cultural change, the sectarian and religionist violence in Iraq will increase until it has destroyed everything and everyone within range of a gun, bomb, knife, rock, or sharpened stick. A degenerate primitivist society with access to the kinds of destructive technology an advanced technological civilization is capable of developing, probably comes as close to creating a biblical hell on earth as humanly possible.

The odds of the American government creating a functioning free society in Iraq are vanishingly slim. Americans would have to take their own country back from the authoritarians before there would be any chance of our representatives allowing the establishment of a free and peaceful Iraq.