Malevolence

Yesterday was another example of malevolence in our world: a school shooting in Florida. We don’t yet know all the details. But it appears there are 17 dead and another 14 injured and hospitalized.

Alaina Petty, age 14, a Mormon girl, was one of 17
killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Image from LDS Living

The 19-year-old perpetrator was previously identified as troubled. When he had been a student, he had been prevented from carrying a backpack, I’m assuming so that he couldn’t hide a weapon inside. He was expelled from the school for behavioral reasons. He was known to be threatening, and some say his social media declared his willingness, or perhaps plan, to become a school shooter. However, he had no criminal record.

The story is that he set off the fire alarm, which would cause students to pour out of their classrooms, where they were vulnerable to his onslaught.

He was apprehended alive. It may be possible to learn something in this case that we cannot learn when the perpetrator is among the dead.

But the real motive is malevolence: a delight in evil. It’s a conscious choice.

It is not a mistake to gather weapons, plan ways to do as much destruction as possible, and then take as many innocent lives as possible. That is a purposeful act, with many small actions leading to it.

In most cases, for malevolence of this depravity, we assume mental illness is involved. Because no one in their right mind would do such a thing.

A healthy mind shrinks from taking human life. There has to be an overwhelming need—such as self-preservation, preservation of loved ones, or protection of innocents—that allows a human with a healthy mind to take a life.

But there is a sort of “logic” in the malevolent mind. I quoted Jordan Peterson on this in the last post. Because you face bad experiences in this world, you could take either the immoral or the moral stance. Peterson said, “If you take the immoral stance and say, Well, the horror of the world has made me bitter, resentful, murderous, and genocidal; isn’t it no wonder?” that’s the logic of the perpetrator of great evil.

But, as he adds, the malevolent act still isn’t logical: “All that does is make everything that you’re hypothetically objecting to worse.” And, “You can’t logically conclude that you should act in the way that is certain to do nothing but multiply [the horror of the world] beyond comprehension.”

Since we all face bad things, and we all have the power within us to choose good or evil, we have to make a conscious decision to choose to be moral.

During church on Sunday, a man told a story from over 40 years ago that will remain memorable. Back in high school, his mother was on a date with a young man. Just a pleasant date, out to dinner, to get to know one another better. The couple were returning to their car, ready to drive home, when a drunken gang of four men set upon them and threatened. They ordered the young man to let them take the girl, and then they wouldn’t kill her. They planned to rape her and leave her on the road somewhere.

The young man told the girl to run, and then he took on the four thugs singlehandedly, without a weapon, long enough for her to get away. But he lost his life in the effort.

The two young people were about 17, and so innocent. It’s hard to know, until you’re faced with something really dire, how you will react. This young man was courageous. And good.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.—John 15:13.

A year or two later, the young woman met another young man, in another state she had moved to. In conversation, she mentioned where she was from. This young man knew only one person from that town, whom he’d met at a camp some years earlier. The one he knew was the young man who had given up his life for this young woman. So he was aware of the story and knew what kind of expectation she had of a good man.

These two eventually married, and raised several sons, including the man telling the story at church. He said you can be certain he and his brothers were raised to know what was expected of them. They would be expected to stand up against evil, and protect the life and virtue of women—even a young woman they only knew from a date or two.

Consider the difference, in the face of malevolence in the world, between the immoral and the moral choice.

Violence isn’t something we reduce by access to certain weapons; violence is reduced when we learn to make moral choices, even when life is unfair, ugly, or malevolent.

The policy questions surround what to do about the perpetrator, and/or what to do to prevent the next perpetrator. It’s a necessary debate. As long as we have people who choose to do heinous, immoral acts, we need ways to stop them.

If it is because of an identifiable mental illness, we may need better ways of identifying and preventing. That’s a tough question, because it requires, sometimes, physical restraint before a crime has been committed.

Depriving all of innocent society from having the means to defend themselves against a perpetrator, in the hopes of depriving the perpetrator of the means to do harm—that’s a common suggestion. But it’s not a satisfying answer. Even, hypothetically, if you could remove all weapons from all people in the world, you would still have evildoers who purposely do harm—using other tools, utensils, or muscles against people without those things.

Returning to civilization is a better answer overall. It begins with the individual. With each of us, choosing to do the right thing—as best we can discern it—each and every time we are faced with a moral choice. Then we have a world that is less unfair, ugly, and malevolent giving evildoers their rationale.

Larry Elder was talking about the horrendous event on his radio show today. During the discussion, he played the audio of the testimony of Darrell Scott, a parent whose daughter was killed in the Columbine shooting in 1999. It seems appropriate again today. I searched to see if there was video of that speech, and I’ve included that 5 minutes below. But I’d like to quote a couple of sections:

Since the dawn of creation there has been both good and evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other eleven children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers.

The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain's heart.

In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA—because I don't believe that they are responsible for my daughter's death. Therefore, I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel's murder, I would be their strongest opponent.

I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy; it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies.

He shared a poem he had written about the sad change in our culture. And then he offered this:

Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, mind, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact.

What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence.

And then he suggested prayer—connection to God—as one answer.

As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, he did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America, and around the world, to realize that on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain. Dare to move into the new millennium with a sacred disregard for legislation that violates your God-given right to communicate with Him.

We get better at choosing the right thing with practice. That’s why “What religion do you belong to?” isn’t as useful a question as “What religion do you practice?” And it isn’t for one religion or sect to win out over another. It is to encourage a person in the way he has found in his life journey that leads him to honor God, life, family, property, and truth.

As I heard once: If all your life you will try to be more fair and more kind to others than some of them may sometimes be to you, then you will be happy, and your life will be full and useful."*

__________________________

* From a talk by Marion D. Hanks, entitled "More Joy and Rejoicing," October 1976.

Speak the Truth and Play Fair

How would it be if we lived in a place, a culture, where people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor? Where people live in peace with other people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear? Where there’s a thriving economy, where poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise?

How would that be? Good? That’s what we call Civilization, here at the Spherical Model. I’ve been describing Civilization and how to get there for a while. And I’m on the lookout for ways of explaining it—or other people who are explaining it too, in their ways.

I’ve been listening to enough Jordan Peterson lectures  lately to feel like I’m actually one of his students. [I wrote about him here and here.] And I’ve been collecting a few things that connect with my purpose here of bringing us northward on the sphere toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

He has a book—12 Rulesfor Life: An Antidote to Chaos—which I think I’ll have to go ahead and read, since it’s reportedly not the same as what is in his various lectures and interviews. But there’s a chapter in the book, Rule 6, which he says is: "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world."

Dr. Jordan Peterson with Patrick Coffin
screen shot from the interview

Dr. Peterson waxes philosophical, often. And it’s hard to distill down for brief reference here. But, in an interview with Patrick Coffin, he starts with the idea that good and evil exist. In reference to PTSD patients, he says:

If you have PTSD, it’s because you’ve been touched by malevolence in one way or another. You need to reorganize your thinking along lines that are fundamentally religious. You need to start seeing the world as a battleground between good and evil—which is what it is, in the most real sense.

So, as a clinical psychologist, he says, in order to heal from a particular disorder, you need a religious viewpoint. I’ve been saying, in order to have a civilized society, you need to have a religious people. No one gets forced, but civilization requires a critical mass of people who live the rules required for civilization. There are answers that have to do with choosing right over wrong.

image from here

There’s another speech, in The Netherlands, where Dr. Peterson is referring in a way to immigration issues, but he spends a lot of time building a framework about two things: fair play and truth. In the fair play section, he talks about a study of rat behavior, where the rats learn that, in order to keep being able to play, you need to play fair—abide by the rules—so that others will want to continue to play with you. Even rats know that.

And then he deals with the truth section, which I’ll cover a little more in a minute. But he has this conclusion:

Now, I didn’t know what to say about immigration when I decided to do this talk, but I don’t think it matters, because there are many complex things that can be said about immigration and many of the problems that face us.

But there’s a meta-question, which is not, How do you solve a difficult question? But, How do you solve the set of all possible difficult questions? And the answer to that is quite straightforward: Speak the truth, and play fair. And that works.

And so I’ve been communicating that as diligently as I can for the last three decades, predicated on my observation that we got some things right, that we should do better with it even. And that, if we transformed ourselves, each and every one, into better people, predicated on the observation of that core identity, that we would then become collectively the sort of people who could probably solve any problem that was put to them, no matter what its magnitude.

In civilization, the smallest social unit is the family. You get a good family by being good individuals working together. So you can see it happen on that small level. As I say in the Civilization section of the Spherical Model,

As long as families are allowed to live among themselves (children are under the care of their own parents), it is possible to have a civilized society that is just one family in size. Then, if that family can find additional similarly civilized families to associate with, their society grows. If it could grow to the size of a village or township, all the better.

So you start with yourself, and then your family. And, as more people do that, society is transformed in remarkably positive ways—and become able to solve, eventually, any problem.

In the Patrick Coffin interview, Dr. Peterson says this need to change is actually an optimistic thing. He begins by laying out the story from Genesis of Cain killing his brother Abel. He makes the case, first, for Cain’s line of reasoning:

Being [the way things are in this world] is tragic, being is touched by malevolence. It’s, Why not develop resentment and hatred for it and do everything to extract revenge? Revenge against God, because that’s really what it is— It’s like that in the Cain and Abel story. In fact, it’s exactly like that. And the answer is something like, That’s cowardly. Something like that. And the other answer is, All that does is make everything that you’re hypothetically objecting to worse.

And so, if you take the immoral stance and say, Well, the horror of the world has made me bitter, resentful, murderous, and genocidal; isn’t it no wonder? Well, you can’t logically conclude that you should act in the way that is certain to do nothing but multiply that beyond comprehension.

And so, there’s a call to truth in there, and responsibility, as an antidote to resentment.

He adds, “It’s also an optimistic viewpoint, because, maybe you can change yourself. It is possible. Maybe that will work.”

How do you do it? What is it you actually need to do in order to change yourself, to do the moral thing? He says, “Stop doing things that you know to be wrong. That’s a good start.” He has been challenging people to do a 30-day challenge, to not say anything for a month that you believe to be untrue. Just do it, as an experiment, and see what happens.

And here’s the philosophical underpinning of the experiment:

So there’s this idea; there’s a deep Christian idea—and it’s deeper than Christianity even—but it’s a deep Christian idea. But, the being that is brought into being by truthful speech is good. It’s like the moral of the first few chapters of Genesis, right? If you use the Logos to bring order into being, that’s truthful speech—then the being that emerges is good. It’s like, that’s a hypothesis. Maybe it’s true. Maybe if we told the truth and induct the good, then being would transform itself around us into something increasingly less tragic and certainly less malevolent.

There’s more about that truth telling, going back to The Netherlands speech:

The Logos is the deepest idea of the West. And it means something like: clear, competent, truthful, communicative endeavor.

So there’s an idea in Genesis that that’s the spirit that God used to bring forth order from chaos at the beginning of time. When God employed the Logos to extract order out of chaos, He extracted habitable order and then pronounced that it was good.

And, at the same time, when God made human beings, He pronounced them made in the image of God, which means that human beings have the capacity—that Logos-like capacity—to speak habitable order into being out of chaotic potential.

And the deep idea is that, if you do that truthfully, then what you bring forth is good.

What is it a society needs, in order to become a civilization? Religious people (bringing non-religious people along with them) who honor God,family, life, property, and truth. That’s a condensation of the Ten Commandments. Dr. Peterson simplifies it even further into “speak the truth and play fair.”

Or, we could say, Always do the right thing. Always knowing what the right thing is might be a challenge for most of us mortals. But there is an ultimate Good, and the source is God. Otherwise it’s all opinion. But we know, if we train ourselves to tell the truth—especially to ourselves—and then we act in the best way we know, even when it’s hard, that is going to be good enough to transform society, as he says, “into something increasingly less tragic and certainly less malevolent.”

It’s worth trying.

The Law

Frédéric Bastiat
image from Wikipedia

French political economist Frédéric Bastiat published The Law in 1850, just months before his untimely death at age 49. The Law is a short work but packed with quotable lines. It reminds us that these truths are not new, nor were they limited to the United States. And it dispels the idea that we’re evolving into smarter humans, so we don’t need to listen to the wisdom of past generations.

This first quote lays out the proper role of government as well as anything since the Declaration of Independence:

Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

The next several relate to something I’ve been thinking about lately: the limits of government to do goodwill. Government doesn’t have a heart; it only has power. If it takes from someone to give to someone else, Bastiat identifies that as plunder:

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve… But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn’t belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay—No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live

at the expense of everybody else.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state.

They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.

Legal plunder has two roots:

One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed;

the other is in false philanthropy.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.

 

A week ago my post dealt with two competing impulses: compassion for people around the world who live less well, and the need for maintaining our borders to maintain our sovereignty. Individual stories tend to bring out our compassion. The law is intended to be just and fair, not persuaded by the most emotional story.

If you use Bastiat’s principles, you would need to ask yourself, “Am I willing to take from my neighbor at gunpoint to give to this person I think is deserving?” If you don’t see that as moral, then it cannot be moral to get your government to do it for you.

I was surprised to find Bastiat mentioning Socialism by name. Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in just 1848. But Bastiat was ready for them by 1850. We ought to be better ready for them by now:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Bastiat mentions some sacred cows, such as public schools, which we forget were not required to educate the public until just about a century ago:

In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge. But in the second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property.

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.

Here are a few more that could come under the heading “good to be reminded of”:

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state.

They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it--then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

Liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Diversity Where It Matters

A conversation that followed my last blog post turned in part to President Trump’s policy on immigration, which isn’t going to the be main point of this post either. But in that conversation a friend said, “If you believe our diversity makes us stronger, as I do,” then you ought to oppose Trump’s doing away with the diversity lottery.

Again, I don’t want to deal with immigration issues today. They are complex, and I have long believed they need a good overhaul. But, until we have secure borders, it’s pretty pointless to talk about the specifics.

But I asked myself, “Do I believe our diversity makes us stronger?"

It totally depends on what diversity means. Are we stronger because people among us have varying levels of melanin in our skin? In what ways? Maybe there are genetic strengths from combining DNA from around the world; I don’t know. I’m open to that possibility and would like to see the studies.

But what if skin tone is really irrelevant? What if, as Martin Luther King dreamed, the important thing is the content of our character?

As an exercise, let’s look at some segments of our society we encounter, and experiment with adding diversity (differences) for diversity’s sake.

Take the US gymnastics team. Looking at the past Olympic team, they’re already pretty diverse in the sense of skin color. But they’re really not very diverse in other ways, like body type. They’re all short, compact, little firecrackers. Some are very thin, and others are a bit sturdier, but they could probably all share uniforms; they’re not that different. What if they were required to have tall gymnasts, over 5’10”? And while we’re at it, maybe women’s volleyball could use a couple of 4’11” players? For diversity. Because diversity makes us stronger.

US Gymnastics Team 2016
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images, found here

Some years ago I noted the typical size of a defensive blocker on my college football team. They were around 6’6” and 325 pounds, and I told my mountain-sized giant son Political Sphere, “There are some things you’re just not big enough to do.” For the sake of diversity, shouldn’t the team be required to recruit some 5’10” skinny guys as defensive blockers? Wouldn’t that diversity make them stronger?

You get my point. We specialize where it makes sense to specialize, sometimes even physically. We ignore differences when they don’t matter.

If we’re not ignoring differences when they don’t matter, that’s a problem.

In 2015 I heard an interview with the great Thomas Sowell, following the publication of his book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics. I agreed with him about diversity. I wrote*:

First is his assertion about diversity—that it does no inherent good. I’ve long believed that. I remember the first time Mr. Spherical Model came home and discussed diversity training at work. They had been taught that they benefited from diversity. And I said, “You mean you learn how to get along despite diversity?” No, they were supposed to see that they got additional viewpoints from ethnic diversity.

That struck me as pointless. There are types of diversity that can help benefit the whole: variations in style, attention to detail, energy for leadership, different talents. You get a diverse team, and you all benefit from each other. But skin color and ethnic background don’t provide you with that addition. In international business you do benefit from someone on your team familiar with the culture you’re doing business with. But a basic classroom in America doesn’t benefit educationally from having students with different amounts of melanin in their skin.

Thomas Sowell
screenshot from Uncommon Knowledge interview

Thomas Sowell talked about the school he had attended. This is an interview between Dr. Sowell and Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson:

PR: In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics you describe three very selective—they’re public high schools in New York, but they’re very selective. You have to test to get into them. They’re Stuyvesant High—your Stuyvesant High—Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Quote:

“The triumph of egalitarian principle and demographic ‘diversity’ in the rest of New York’s education system has not resulted in an increase in the number or proportion of Black or Hispanic students passing the admissions tests to get into Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. On the contrary, the numbers and proportions of Black and Hispanic students have declined substantially over the years at all three institutions.”

So, telegram to Mayor DeBlasio: As diversity becomes championed in the city of New York over the last forty years, fifty years, diversity actually diminishes at these very selective high schools. Why?

TS: Well, diversity really doesn’t do anything for you. There are many cultural…

PR: Doesn’t do anything for you as a society?

TS: As a society, or the people in whose interest you’re promoting diversity. In other words, when Black and Hispanic kids go to schools other than those three, they get a load of diversity. It doesn’t do them any good. For example, as of about 2012 or 2014—I forget the exact one—the percentage of Blacks at Stuyvesant High School was one tenth of what it was 33 years earlier. There’d been a major retrogression. So while they’re being taught, filling their heads full of diversity, the Asian students are learning math and science. Plus, the schools are also…  Another point against diversity is that in years past, those schools were so heavily Jewish that Stuyvesant was referred to once as a free prep school for Jews. Well, they weren’t diverse, but it was very successful.

And now, Asian Americans outnumber whites by more than two-to-one in all three of those schools. It’s still not diverse. But they’re turning out people who do marvelous things. And that’s what they’re there for—to benefit society, not to present this tableau that will please a handful of people.

There are places in our society that truly lack diversity: higher education, mainstream news media, and Hollywood’s entertainment industry. 

They’re the very ones preaching diversity—of race. But what they lack is diversity of viewpoint, or diversity of belief. It’s enough to get a person blacklisted if they come out as conservative in Hollywood. And, with a few exceptions, typically in math, economics, and some of the harder sciences, percentages of university professors with conservative or religious views are often low enough to be in the single digits. In media, the so-called “liberal” viewpoint is so pervasive that they believe everyone agrees with them. They encounter so few people with differing views, that they dismiss disagreement as stupidity, or they stamp it as evil, and they’re unaware of their obvious bias.

We need free speech to preserve diversity of ideas, and freedom of thought—to allow all of us to seek for truth, and be wherever we are on that journey.

So, does diversity make us stronger? Only if it’s diversity of thought, style, personality, approach, or capability.

Diversity of “character” doesn’t even make us stronger; only a critical mass of good character makes us stronger as a whole. If everybody had an equally strong good character—that would be better overall than diversity of character. Weak character isn’t something to be celebrated, just because it’s diverse from strong character.

I think the diversity of skin color movement is a lie covering up the anti-diversity of thought movement.

I went to college in a religious school, so, even though people of other religions went there, it was pretty religiously homogeneous. But that opened us up for a lot of safe, open conversations, with a diversity of ideas. A friend shared a story about being a law student at BYU some decades ago. For some reason he needed to take one class at the University of Utah, which is not that far away, in a city still predominantly Mormon, but not a religious school. The difference to him was stark. They could discuss widely varying opinions at BYU, fully and openly. But at the U of U, everybody towed the line, and didn’t dare express opinions that weren’t the established opinions of the teacher or the mainstream.

Our society is much more polarized now than those two law schools several decades ago. It might be that I’m right: differences are either a challenge that requires some work to overcome, or differences are neutrally harmless or at best pleasant variety—such as the variety of ethnic food we get in Houston, because it’s cosmopolitan. Is our food here better than French food in France, or Thai food in Thailand, or Vietnamese food in Vietnam? No, it’s just a pleasant variety we get here that people in, say New England might not get—and yet New England clam chowder might be better than you get here.

Food variety is nice, but it isn’t necessarily better, or stronger, than places with mainly their own ethnic foods. It’s neutral, or something you might have a taste for, like an eclectic appreciation for art or music.

The “diversity makes us stronger” doctrine is just not true, unless it’s referring to diversity of thought—which can make us stronger. And MLK is still right: character is more important than skin color.

_______________________________

*I wrote similarly last May in a piece called "Shame Culture vs. Guilt Culture."

Where They're Planted

When you’re at zero—subsistence—with no hope and no help, that can feel pretty desperate. Sometimes that inspires creative invention. But sometimes it just overwhelms.

We talked about that in part of Monday’s discussion. I was thinking about it more this week, especially following a lot of immigration discussion after President Trump suggested, in the State of the Union Address, that 1.8 million illegals who were brought here as children might get a path to citizenship.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the SOTU, but the plan, as he laid it out, was more generous on DACA than the Democrats were insisting on—which was the continuation of Obama’s executive order to fail to follow the law concerning them. The Trump plan, however, also included a strong border, stopping gang infiltration, and getting rid of chain migration—the practice of letting in one, and then allowing all their extended family to attach to them.

So, this puts the opposition in a tough place. They get what they want—and then some—and then they get an end to allowing the problem to keep happening over and over. As Elle Woods would have said in Legally Blonde, “It’s a perfectly brilliant plan!” And yet, they sat on their hands and accused the president of insane racism. Why? For giving 1.8 million a path to citizenship that they didn’t have—against the will of his base, so costing Trump some political capital.

Or maybe they like having the “dreamers” available as a tool to hit their opposition with, and it wasn’t really about helping those young people; it was nothing but posturing.

I can’t tell whether President Trump made a genuine offer, or whether he was setting up the Democrats so he could demonstrate to the American people directly how unreasonable those Trump-deranged Dems are.

I’ll just leave that there.

What I’m thinking about is that zero level poverty—abject and hopeless. And how do we, as civilized people, help solve that.

The immigration debate is relevant here, because so many people come to America in hopes of something better. There’s a gut reaction among compassionate people, thinking, “I feel so sorry for them. We should let them come. Just open our borders. Anyone who doesn’t want to do that is just heartless.”

The problem is, there’s more poverty in the world than we could solve through any amount of immigration.

There’s a video—from 2010, but still pretty accurate—that illustrates the problem using gumballs. I think we need to see this 6-minute lesson, to understand the scope of the problem, before we go ahead with the conversation:

So, if the best way to help people is to help them thrive where they are, that should be the goal.

Foreign aid is another feel-good idea that causes compassionate people to say, “I feel so sorry for them. We should give them our money—whatever they need. Anyone who doesn’t want to do that is just heartless.”

But foreign aid isn’t the answer either. It passes nation-to-nation, so it doesn’t usually get past a corrupt leadership—and if you’ve got a country with a lot of systemic poverty, you can be certain there’s corrupt leadership.

So how about giving humanitarian aid, through service organizations? If they can get past the corruption and get to the people, that’s part of the answer. I wrote this back in 2013:

Sometimes there’s an immediate need to give a man a fish. But that is never a long-term solution to his hunger. You teach a man to fish, and he has the skill to take care of himself. But maybe he also needs the means to make or otherwise get hold of a fishing pole or net.

LDS Humanitarian Services recognized that following the Christmas tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004. Aid workers would interview the survivors to find out what they needed. After meeting immediate needs of food, clothing and shelter, which LDS Humanitarian Services was known for supplying following disasters around the world, what the survivors needed was a way to replace some of what they’d lost, to get back on their feet and self-sustaining. So aid became a sewing machine or two, plus enough for a few starting supplies of fabric and thread. Sometimes it was a fishing boat, or even just a new sail. Enough to get a person or a family back on their feet and independent.

That leads to long-term happiness more than just receiving necessities without hope for self-reliance.

One solution I’ve liked for a long time is microcapitalism. In the book Influencer, the authors talk about combining microloans—typically around $250—with a small group council, to improve the success of fledgling businesses. The example they share is a small village in central India, where a group of housewives meet to discuss ways they can individually develop very small businesses, such as starting an egg business.

And the next step up is small-to-medium-sized loans, which can lead to real economic growth. Here’s their description:

While many organizations have promoted microloans (typically under $250) to start one-person businesses, we are also aware of encouraging cases in which Christians have decided to invest in for-profit businesses in the “small and medium enterprise” (SME) range, where $25,000 to $1 million is required to start a business. Such businesses are crucial for larger economic growth in poor nations, but they are more difficult to launch due to high start-up and due-diligence costs, and the challenge of providing a reasonable risk/return model for investors.

So, there are steps to helping people in abject poverty:

1.       Alleviate starvation and provide basic survival needs.

2.       Help people work together to do small enterprises that will begin to provide a livelihood. These are loans, not handouts, with group help to think fully through ideas to make them work.

3.       With enough people doing small enterprises successfully, communities will develop enough experience to support slightly larger enterprises. These are higher risk, and some will fail, but some will succeed. And more success will follow.

It isn’t heartless to face the fact that we can’t bring everyone here to solve their economic woes. And it isn’t heartless to face the fact that we can’t just pour money on a problem and call it good. Insisting that government take tax money from your neighbors to alleviate your guilt about the poor of the earth isn’t really charity.

If you really care about people, then support good ideas that help individuals and local communities. I like LDS Humanitarian Services, which puts 100% of donations to use—no overhead (which gets covered through other Church donations). They carefully target where and how to help, and they keep learning.

And I really like the microloan idea. If you want to help someone out of abject poverty, try giving a $250 loan.

Inside the catalog of WorldCrafts. I've bought from them,
and I think they are a way to connect local
artisans with buyers around the world.

Or buy what local artisans produce. Let them know they are creating value. That’s a free-market idea, which is the best way out of poverty ever invented. And it’s also the most moral, and the best path to a satisfying life.

Pareto Distribution

The past three posts [here, here, and here] were all a declaration that feminism doesn’t speak for me. That was prompted by a video of an interview with Jordan Peterson. I hadn’t been aware of him before, but I was certainly not the only one whose attention was caught by that interview. There were entire collections of responses to it on YouTube, and a series of memes featuring the flummoxed interviewer.

When you watch something on YouTube, a whole list of suggested videos appears based on what you were watching. I was thinking it was time for an economic post. It turns out Jordan Peterson can help there too. I came across one where he talks about income inequality, on the Joe Rogan podcast, from October 2017. (You can watch the whole 25-minute interview below.)

In this discussion, Jordan Peterson presents the problem, or the phenomenon of inequality. He refers to the Pareto distribution, which I had to look up. The Pareto principle is also called the 80/20 rule, which is, in essence, that 80% of outputs come from 20% of causes. And, further, 20% of producers bring about 80% of production in any particular class of production.

Image from Wikipedia, which explains
"The Pareto Principle claims that
only a 'vital few' peapods
produce the majority of peas."

Jordan Peterson explains it this way:

If you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in—so that would be an endeavor where there’s variability in individual production. It doesn’t matter what it is. Here’s what happens. People compete to produce whatever that is, and almost everybody produces zero. They lose completely. A small minority are a tiny bit successful. And a hyper-minority are insanely successful. And so, the Pareto distribution is the geometric graph representation of that phenomenon. And so, here’s how it manifests itself.

If you have 10,000 people, 100 of them have half the money. So the rule is, the square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is that’s under consideration. So, this works everywhere. So, if you took 100 classical composers, 10 of them produce half the music that’s played. And then, if you take the 10 composers, and you take 1000 of their songs, 30 of those songs, which is the square root of 1000, roughly speaking, are played 50% of the time.

So, when people work to produce something—anything: a product, wealth, music—the outcome will be unequal. Quite dramatically unequal. In a distribution we can estimate with a mathematical formula of

√X = ½ Y 

where X is the total number of something, and Y is the recipient of the reward or whatever you’re counting.

There’s a field of study that measures this kind of thing—econophysics. Econophysicists, Peterson tells us, “use the same mathematical equations that represent the propagation of molecules—gas molecules into a vacuum, to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy.” Cool. I didn’t know that.

He also refers to the Matthew effect. This references the parable of the talents. To one man is given five talents (a sizable amount of money); he doubles that for the master and is rewarded. To another is given two talents, which he doubles for the master, and he is also rewarded. To a third man is given a single talent. He does nothing with it and returns only that single talent to the master at the day of reckoning. He made no use of what he was given, so he has that talent taken from him and no reward.

The verse referred to as the Matthew effect is 25:29:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

In a parable, things are metaphorical. It is about using what you have—not about producing five more or two more of something. But sociologists describe this effect as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

As we also know from scripture, “For ye have the poor with you always” (Mark 14:7), there will always be work you can do to help them.

The question being discussed in the podcast is a combination of “Why are the poor always with us?” and “Is there something that can or should be done about it?”

The whole discussion shows just how interrelated economic and social issues are. Given the Pareto effect, as long as people do different things, think up different things, and find solutions to various problems, they will acquire differing rewards for their efforts. Some will create wealth more successfully than others.

As Peterson explains, “The problem is, if you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a few—a very small number of people.” That is only a problem when things are wildly unequal—more than that, wildly unequal and with some having essentially zero—subsistence with no way out. Add to that a sense of oppression or systemic unfairness, and bad things happen.

People with no way out get desperate, which leads to high crime, or revolt. That’s what you see in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. I wrote about this result of disparity in 2015:

In Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth, there’s a point where the poor are starving and growing daily more desperate, squatting along the walls of the wealthy, until things get so heated, the poor rise up and raid the property of the wealthy, looting and killing. That was a book of fiction, but the Durants’ book [The Lessons of History] describes that as a typical cycle.

It might look like the problem is too much wealth at the top, but it’s really about too little at the bottom. When people are starving and suffering while the wealthy ignore their needs, that is an injustice that won’t stand indefinitely.

As Peterson put it, “If you don’t have any money, it’s really hard to get some. Once you have some, it’s not so hard to get some more.” And that's the underlying problem of inequality--not too much in some places, but too little in some places.

As Peterson points out, “what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and he said that’s a flaw of the capitalist system. That’s wrong. It’s not a flaw of the capitalist system; it is a feature of every single system of production that we know of, no matter who set it up and how it operates.” 

But it becomes more troublesome when someone—usually a Marxist—reframes the situation as rich = evil and poor = good. It is not the fault of successful people that they tend to accumulate the good stuff. It is also true that being poor is not simply a matter of failing to work hard enough. Getting the ones at that near zero situation unstuck is necessary, not only for those stuck there to improve their lot, but also for the successful to not lose what they have from a revolt.

I don’t think the discussion got all the way to a solution, but Peterson frames it right:

You need innovation. You pay for innovation with inequality. But you need to bind inequality, because if it’s too intense, then things destabilize. OK, we can agree on that. We’ve got the parameters set. Now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue, and we don’t know how to do that.

I understand what he’s saying, but I wouldn’t use the term “bind inequality.” That sounds like something that needs to be imposed from some greater power—although I don’t think he intended that. He’s literally talking about the “redistribution issue,” but I wouldn’t use that term either, although technically that is the issue. Redistribution, again, sounds like something imposed.

What we really want—and he suggests, although I’m not sure how we get there—is “equality of opportunity. Because people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect; they’re resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed.” He adds, “It has to be a straight game. And that’s why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable. People can’t play crooked games.”

So a discussion of civilization has to come into it. People have to be honest in order for it to work for everybody.

Also, people have to care about those stuck at zero, where high IQ and conscientiousness—the best predictors of success—are just not enough to get going. In a civilized society, people care about one another. They give freely to help those who are temporarily downtrodden, or those who are not capable of helping themselves, or who just need a break.

We can only have that to give, if we’ve had enough success to build up surplus beyond our needs. And we only get surplus—or wealth—by creating more than subsistence and having a way to store the surplus. The most effective way ever invented—the natural way—is trade in a free market economy.

The answer comes down to free market—free of crony capitalism and con games—plus philanthropy. We’ve talked about that before [here, here, and here]. The addition today is, there will always be natural inequality, but even the wealthy benefit economically by being honest and giving freely. So, you need a civilized people to get and keep a healthy, prosperous economy.

Feminism Turns Women into Bad Men

The last couple of posts (here and here) have been about women’s issues. I think I’ll make this a third in the series.

Feminism is an ideology at odds with the feminine. Feminism, in a misguided scree, declares that women can be men as well or better than men can be men.

There are many ways in which men and women are equal. Intelligence, according to IQ data, is essentially equal. Individuals differ. And interests differ. Women who enjoy math, engineering, and other left-brain-labeled fields do as well (sometimes better) in those fields as men who enjoy those things. And men who enjoy arts, humanities, social sciences, and other right-brain-labeled fields do as well (sometimes better) in those fields as women do. Nevertheless, a larger number of women gravitate toward the “right-brain” side, and a larger number of men gravitate toward the “left-brain” side.

But it’s a rare woman who makes a better physical laborer than a man. If you can’t carry a fire victim over your shoulder to rescue them, maybe firefighter isn’t the best career choice for you. Same for construction fields, heavy equipment operations, oil rig worker, or a lot of other physically tough jobs.

Some women flourish in STEM fields.
image from here

If you’re 5’4” and 120 lbs., you probably can’t lift a 100-lb. sack of grain as easily as a 6’ tall 190 lb. man. Fact of nature, like gravity, not worth fighting.

Should qualifying women be prevented? No. And in my lifetime (I’m upper 50s) they haven’t been. And during my lifetime, when they do equal work, they get equal pay.

Women are not lesser women, or less feminine, for pursuing something different from most women, nor are men lesser men, or less masculine, for pursuing something different from most men.

But women who pursue something to prove that women can do it too are not doing it to help women; they are doing it with the attitude that women’s choices are less valuable. This is what feminism does; it shames the feminine.

Women are biologically made to bear children, and most women naturally bond with those children and care deeply about their welfare, sacrificing time, energy, and resources for the good of her children.

But, consider the feminist attitude toward women who choose to stay home to raise their children—they’ve sold out their sisters. Consider the derisive feminist sneers against women who choose to have a large family.

Feminism has resulted in a cultural shift, from women who expected to spend some years, or adjust a career around, raising young children—to women expecting to work, and possibly limiting the number of children, and time for them, in favor of the career. The result is that economic adjustments practically require women to work in order to maintain the socioeconomic level of the previous generation. There are more amenities at that socioeconomic level than before—bigger homes, multiple cars, smart phones, multiple television, etc. Still, the expectation for women to work, even while children are young, adds considerable pressure to women’s lives.

The result is less choice and more pressure on women to do both what they feel the urge to do and what they feel the necessity to do—or to do just way too much, almost all of which is pressure more than pleasure.

As Jordan Peterson said in the interview we reviewed the other day, if you require equality of outcome—such as certain quotas of women in every field, or at every level—then you do that by taking away the choices women would make if left to choose for themselves. In other words, to get the outcomes feminism claims are for the good of society, that requires tyranny—more against women than men, although they’re plenty willing to tyrannize men as well.

There’s another cultural shift resulting from feminism that is not helping women. It is a biological fact that pregnancy results from heterosexual sex. Not every encounter, not every time. But pregnancy doesn’t come any other way (including in vitro fertilization, which puts together the sperm and egg, just not during a sexual encounter). And it’s always the woman who gets pregnant, never the man. That’s not a social construct; that’s not an invention of society. That is biological fact.

What is social is the support and partnering a husband provides to a wife when she is bearing his child. In a civilized world, sex outside of marriage is always wrong—because it puts the pregnant mother and her child at risk, both economically and physically. But in an uncivilized, savage world, men engage in casual sex, sometimes leaving a woman pregnant, and then failing to provide for her and the child, leaving them economically and physically vulnerable.

The man in this uncivilized situation could get away with casual sex without apparent consequence, leaving individuals and society as a whole to pay the price. The appropriate response would be for women individually and society as a whole to hold men accountable. Do not allow or participate in casual sex. Hold men socially and economically responsible when they act in this savage way.

Feminism looked at this savagery and said, “That’s not fair. We need to be allowed to have casual sex without consequence too.” Put another way: God is wrong to burden women with a baby. What can we do to overrule God? Birth control, to prevent consequences—or abortion, if the consequences start to show up.

Women are still biologically going to face pregnancy following sex. Encouraging women to engage in frequent, casual, promiscuous sex—because a man can—means there will be more frequent vulnerable situations for women and children. Meanwhile irresponsible men get more casual sex that they are not held accountable for.

Expectations change, so it is actually harder for a woman to enforce the expectation on a man that sex with her must only follow commitment. By giving in to feminist pressure to pretend to be a man—and not a good man, but an irresponsible man—she loses the expectation of respect for her body and soul that she had before feminism stepped in to “help.”

4D ultrasound at 12 weeks
image from here

And how does abortion help a woman? She is pressured to kill her child in order to maintain the façade that casual sex is what she does willingly, since she’s just as much of a man as any irresponsible male. She denies biology. And she denies the naturally feminine part of herself. And, if you believe in good and evil, right and wrong, she sacrifices her soul to kill her child, gaining nothing but fake masculinity in exchange.

Sex only after marriage has always worked better for families than sex outside of marriage. But there used to be serious social pressure on a man to step up and do his duty by marrying a woman he caused to be pregnant. Now the pressure is on the woman to do away with the child so it doesn’t look like she was entrapping a man into responsibilities he didn’t want.

There’s a piece from National Review that I came upon week (from 2016) on the damage legalizing—and mainstreaming—abortion has done. Here’s an image to grasp the numbers: 

In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

Author of the piece, Frederica Mathewes-Green, says this about the pressure to abort:

We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?

We can use a rule of thumb, to tell whether something is anti-woman—or anti-feminine: If you have to deny who you really are and portray yourself as more man-like, that’s anti-woman.

If you’re a competitive person, go ahead and compete. But don’t force yourself to be hyper-competitive because some feminist says you ought to for the sake of women everywhere.

If you’re a high-energy force to be reckoned with (as a lot of women are), go ahead and be that. But if you’re gentle and nurturing, don’t force yourself to be someone you’re not just because some feminist says you ought to for the sake of women everywhere.

If you like STEM studies better than soft sciences or humanities, pursue those interests. But don’t force yourself to become an engineer because some feminist says you ought to for the sake of women everywhere.

If you love children—especially your own—and you’d rather give them a well-run family with a nurturing mother than push yourself to work overtime and get the next promotion, do what’s right for you and your family, rather than what some feminist says you ought to do for the sake of women everywhere.

If you want to have a committed, permanent relationship with a man who will support you and your children, growing with you to become a strong, loving family together (which offers a greater sense of joy than any career position), don’t give that up in favor of casual, irresponsible sex—the results of which you may end up feeling pressured to get rid of with an abortion—just because some feminist says you need to prove women can be like irresponsible men. That’s not doing anything good for the sake of women everywhere.

If you’re a woman, be yourself, and be a good woman. That is the best thing you can do for women everywhere.

If you’re a man, be yourself, and be a good man. That is the best thing you can do for both men and women everywhere.