On his show today, Andrew Klavan mentioned that Plato told
us: “What erupts out of chaos is tyranny.” I looked for the quote and concluded
he was paraphrasing. But I found this quote, and I’m
highlighting what I think Klavan was referencing:
By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses…The
son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either
of his parents; and this is his freedom… Citizens…chafe impatiently at the
least touch of authority… they will have no one over them… Such…is the fair
and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny… Liberty overmasters
democracy…the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the
opposite direction… The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals,
seems only to pass into excess of slavery… And so tyranny naturally arises out
of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the
most extreme form of liberty.
By “the most extreme form of liberty,” Plato means anarchy,
or chaos, not actual freedom.
The Spherical Model gives us a perspective when we’re
dealing with ideas in the political sphere, and how they interrelate with the
economic and social spheres.
I thought this might be a good time to review the idea of the Spherical Model and show some ideas on it.
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| The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model |
Instead of right and left, we have three dimensions, so we
use a sphere. North on the sphere is the freedom zone—the good direction—where
we enjoy our God-given rights, and governments are limited to only protecting
those rights.
South on the sphere is the tyranny zone—the bad direction—where
we suffer oppression, and our rights are not respected.
That very farthest south area, the polar area, we might call
totalitarian, because it would attempt total control over every aspect of
life—actions, beliefs, associations, ways of doing business, use of money and
property.
On the website, we use this description:
Totalitarianism means that the state has all the power—the
police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is
without any rights except what the state decides to grant. Anarchy, on the
other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the
next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give
you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have
power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have
to yield power to them. In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power
in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just as in totalitarianism.
A large part of world history has been the creation of chaos
for the purpose of accumulating power over people. Stalin and Lenin stated that
as their purpose. People like Obama’s advisor Rahm Emmanuel put it as, “Never
let a crisis go to waste.” Use the chaos to build your power.
It doesn’t really matter what you call that southern tyranny:
fascism, socialism, communism, or some other -ism or -archy. They’re still
tyranny.
The horizontal direction on the sphere indicates level of
interest, from individuals and families on up to states, nations, and world
levels. At any of these levels, tyranny can be a statist tyranny—coercion run
by the government. Or it can be anarchic tyranny—run by non-governmental
individuals or groups that assert dominance by physical force. To the person
being oppressed, it doesn’t make much difference who’s doing the oppressing.
Anarchy might mean lack of government, but there’s never a
lack of people trying to exert power over others.
On the sphere, anarchic tyranny would always be to the west
of statist tyranny. But when you look at the southern pole of the sphere, you
can see that, whatever type of tyranny, at whatever level, they are very close
to each other.
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| south pole view of the Spherical Model with Anarchy adjacent to Statist Tyranny |
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| Communism, Socialism, and Fascism are close and overlapping as varieties of statist tyranny. |
The value of using the Spherical Model, rather than the
typical left-right model, is that we can see just how close the “extreme left” (statist
tyranny) is to the “extreme right” (also statist tyranny). And calling the “right”
fascist, as though that were diametrically opposed to “socialist” or “communist”
is misleading at best. They’re overlapping ideas.
Up there we have our Constitutional Republic. When we always
abide by the Constitution, we remain up there in the freedom zone, with
accompanying prosperity and civilization.
We can’t, as a people, compromise with southern hemisphere
tyranny and expect to remain in the freedom zone. One compromise pulls us southward. The next compromise pulls us further southward. And so on,
until the Constitution looks like a distant memory.
You can’t trust a party. You can choose a party that gets
you closer to what you want—south to tyranny, poverty, and savagery; or north
to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. And you can participate to move the
ideas of that party toward your preferred ends.
In recent years, the Democrat Party has sunk further
southward. It has people in it that think they value freedom, prosperity, and
civilization. But their party—it’s ideas, platform, and thought leaders—do not want
those things. However, they use language to relabel things to convince people that
they can bring about good results, while claiming the conservatives—their enemy—want
all things bad, which they tend to describe in terms of tribalist biases: racism,
bigotry, homophobia, sexism, etc.
They talk about a utopia, but not a real world. They think
they should get credit for simply wanting some good outcome—even when everything they
do can only lead southward, because it takes away individual rights and grants
power to government far beyond government’s proper role. With the help of a
willing, biased media, they get away with the relabeling, despite their own
pitiful track record of bad outcomes—particularly for the minorities they claim
to be compassionate about.
I wanted to talk about this today, because of the calls for
defunding the police, in the wake of the protests—and then riots—in Minneapolis,
and then around the country.
Black Lives Matter is claiming the high ground. They’re the
protesters, not the rioters. They want the protests to remain peaceful; they
just want to call for the elimination of racism among police. They want things
to get better in society. It’s those rioters who are trying to tear down
everything, to create chaos.
But who, then, is calling for the defunding of the police?
It turns out that Black Lives Matter has that on their website.
Maybe we need to know more about them. On their “What We Believe” page, they say they started out as a response to state-sponsored
racism. They use Trayvon Martin as an example [he was killed while attacking citizen
George Zimmerman, not by racist police, however]. They add Ferguson, Missouri,
which, if you’ll recall, brought about the lie “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” when a
black thief, Michael Brown, attacked a police officer, who killed him in
self-defense, according to multiple eye witnesses, including black ones. Despite their lie about Brown being gunned down with his hands up
in surrender, this is the case that “galvanized” their movement, which they
claim is not only national but worldwide.
What a treasure this George Floyd case must be, a black man
actually killed by police! And possibly even because of race. They leave out
that everyone the whole country over is appalled by the killing, regardless of
any guilt of the victim. This was not justice, and Americans everywhere want to
see justice done.
Let’s go on. This is further down the page:
We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter,
regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender
expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or
disbeliefs, immigration status, or location….
We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle
cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk….
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure
requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that
collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that
mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so
with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative
thinking….
So, this complaint about blacks needing to be treated fairly
is something of a “social justice” whatchagot stew.
They want to toss out the idea of gender. They want to get
rid of the traditional family, remove the responsibility of rearing children
from parents and place it on the collective, so that mothers are free to go protest.
On another page, they proudly claim they are working
tirelessly to dismantle ICE and concentrate especially on freeing black illegal
immigrants, of which they say there are 600,000.
If you’ve been sympathizing with them because George Floyd
was black, consider whether the rest of their agenda is relevant to your George
Floyd sympathy.
Consider also that one of their three founders (all three
are self-styled Marxist-Leninists), Assata Shakur, whom they revere at every
meeting, fled to Cuba after being convicted of shooting a police officer during a routine traffic
stop, and, finding him wounded on the ground, executed him . BLM uses the final line of the Communist Manifesto as a battle cry,
apparently condoning the millions of deaths that manifesto has led to.
Back in 2014 and 2015, at their inception, they declared war
on law enforcement. As David Horowitz has written,
The Black Lives Matter activists fomented riots, burned and
looted cities, and incited their followers with chants that ranged from “What
do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!” to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”[i]
Oh, and the hashtag #Defund the Police—that’s theirs. They say explicitly, “We call for a
national defunding of police.” They’ve been putting forth that idea for years. It isn't a sudden response to the incident in Minneapolis. But now they are getting actual policymakers to go along with them.
The nine-member Minneapolis City Council voted over the
weekend to dismantle and defund the city’s police department. They have a vague
plan to cover public safety needs with social workers and counselors of some
sort.
CNN host Alysin Camerota talked with Council President Lisa Bender, asking what most of us would think
is the logical first question:
Camerota: What if, in the middle of the night, my home is
broken into? Who do I call?
Bender: Yes, I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of
my neighbors, and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of
privilege. Because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we
need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that
reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.
In other words, you only think you deserve police protection
from a home invasion because of your white privilege. Blacks, I guess she’s
claiming, couldn’t call the police to protect them from a home invasion, because George Floyd was killed? But
she isn’t asking you to imagine what it feels like to live in a system without
protective police; she is forcing the people of her city to experience it.
Not to be outdone, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio committed
to diverting funding from police to “youth services” and “social services.” It's unclear how much money, and how many police jobs will be cut.
In our nation’s capital, Washington DC’s mayor had the street painted with “Black Lives Matter,” and renamed the place Black Lives
Matter Plaza. Further down, the street was painted with “Defund the Police.”
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| "Black Lives Matter" painted on street in DC screenshot from here |
Meanwhile, when protesters refused to obey the law and
blocked a bridge, the black Dallas Police Chief Renee Hall had 674 arrested. "We
warned them.... If you break the law, we will arrest you,” she said.
As a regular law-abiding citizen, I much prefer the Texas
way.
In the US we’re a federation; states and local jurisdictions can do
some experimenting. My guess is that, in a city with no police, you will get a
lot of crime—what we've always called crime. Bad guys come in
with weapons, take what they want by force—what can you do? Defend yourself with your own
gun—if you’re in a place that hasn’t already taken that right away from you.
We could watch and see.
But since we know that chaos leads to tyranny, we aren’t really
guessing about how that experiment will turn out.
I suggest those cities fence themselves in first. Or, maybe,
allow refugees to escape before the worst happens. Because, when people are
given a clear choice, they don’t choose to live oppressed, poverty-stricken
lives in a savage society. They’d rather enjoy their God-given rights, in a
society that is much more likely to be prosperous for all, and where civilized
people actually treat each other with respect and caring, regardless of race. People choose north.
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