I’ve been wanting to write a post about socialism and pacifism and thought I’d do a bit of research into what my betters may have already said far more coherently than I and that I might shamelessly appropriate, naturally with all the proper citations. This not being a paper for credit, either academic or financial, I don’t suppose anybody would care.
However, Google being what it is, and I being what I am, i.e., lazy, after clicking through several pages and finding nothing but leftwing claptrap much of it aimed at Mr. Bush, I decided to go it alone, so unless I come across something serendipitously to which I will link. . .
There are doers and dreamers. The categories aren’t completely cut and dry and there are many areas where may they spillover, but essentially doers do stuff and dreamers don’t. Without dreamers, life would be dull and even robotic, however, without doers, there would be no life, no civilization, and most of all, no dreamers. A society that can afford the luxury of a dreamer class must be prosperous. There must be stability and security and that’s where we doers come in.
Dreamers, not needing to worry about the mundanities of life, can skip the light fantastic, delight in confections, write poems, paint, sculpt and think deep thoughts in the perfect knowledge that we doers aka trolls will be keeping the machinery working, the lights turned on and the cable humming. Not for them things that make their hands dirty and cause their brows to bead up.
This is fine with us doers because we actually enjoy the tasks that fall to us and look boring to dreamers like bringing civilization into the 21st century by spending hours trying to figure out things, doing complicated math problems, writing computer programs, building bridges, etc.
Rarely do doers get involved with telling dreamers what to dream about. In fact, dreamers wouldn't tolerate advice from doers about what they should dream about, but that doesn't stop them from telling doers what to do.
Dreamers, not content with the world being laid at their feet, want to improve it and frequently tell doers what to do, but thinking through and past slogans isn’t something dreamers do well, so socialism which sounds so fair and inclusive with everybody holding hands and singing Kumbaya caught their imagination.
Unfortunately, we doers, knowing darn well, it won’t and can’t work, but not wanting to be accused of being troglodytes went along with it and as a result millions upon millions have suffered and been murdered in the name of socialism and communism. For these tragedies, we doers must accept full responsibility because we knew better and allowed it to happen. Dreamers not being introspective never had a twinge of guilt for the people killed on behalf of their childish notions and, in fact, they weren’t finished making mischief.
They noticed that we doers were constantly in conflict with the bad guys who wanted to interfere with us and take what we worked hard to achieve. In order to defend ourselves and our friends and allies, we had to prepare for war, raise an army, develop weapons, make laws, build prisons, aircraft carriers and missiles, but dreamers insisted that we play nice, talk things out, sign treaties, have summit meetings, etc. which were a waste of time and allowed those who wanted to kill us to gain strength while we were being weakened internally by the dreamers who didn’t understand that wishing doesn’t make it so.
To our disgrace, we doers again went along with this pacifism and gave peace a chance. More dead resulted and we were almost at the brink of destruction, when Reagan appeared and we came to our senses, rebuilt our defenses and put our foot on the right path again.
More fools we.
18 comments:
Pacifism's fatal flaw is the complete, gasping, inability to deal with defectors.
Skipper, I'm not sure understand your comment about defectors.
I think pacifism's fatal flaw is that the murdering marauders seeing our weakness, kills off all us good guys and society reverts to the rule of the strongest instead of the rule of the law.
erp:
Your second comment essentially captures the essence of the defector problem.
A pacifist society will work fine so long as everyone is a pacifist.
But should there be just one person who decides to be aggressive, that person rules.
It is related to the free-rider problem that plagues both socialism and libertarianism (the former far more than the latter).
The peerless Steven den Beste explains the problem perfectly.
The den Beste link doesn't work, but I'm sure it's brilliant. Too bad he had to stop writing and hope his health is holding up. Time for a retrospective of his work?
Entrepreneurs are dreamer-doers and are part of the material and social progress experienced by the world.
Bret, there is spillage between doers and dreamers, but I think entrepreneurs are doers because dreamers just think about starting up a company but rarely get past the “wouldn’t it be nice” stage, but if you like, I’ll note the exception.
erp:
Here is the link in its raw glory:
http://www.electricminds.org/ussclueless/essays/pacifism.htm
Don't know why it doesn't work for you; it worked for me just now.
It appears my accusing pacifists of being free riders has rather annoyed monix.
I don't mind pacifists/dreamers getting a free ride from us doers if they practice their pacifism peacefully without violence, unlike the peaceniks and anti-Vietnam war activists whose violent demonstrations forced us to pull out of SE Asia (to our everlasting shame) and resulted in so many millions of deaths.
The 60’s/70’s style love-iners almost destroyed our civilization and it irks me no end that their latter day selves still claim the high moral ground and accuse us of being blood-thirsty warmongers.
The height of irony here is that Viet Nam is now quite the capitalist nation and striving hard to become the next Asian miracle economy while the old-time pacifists/socialists in the west are still singing the same old tired song.
e and Skipper, I wonder sometimes if we speak the same language. Your pacifists seem to be rather militant anti-war activists, mine see war as a last resort and therefore a failure to sort things out around the negotiationg table. There have been many conflicts which, in my view, could have been avoided or ended sooner.
I did take exception to your 'free ride' comments, Skipper because they appear to deny freedom of opinion. You apply the term to Quakers; I thought they left our shores for yours to find a more tolerant society.
Afterthought to my last comment - perhaps 'free rider' is not the dreadful insult it would be in English English? Here, to call someone a sponger or free loader is just about the worst abuse, especially to a proud northerner like me!
m. my understanding of American slang is that getting a free ride isn't at all the same as being a free loader. I’ve never heard of anyone being called a free-rider in that sense.
A free ride is more like a pass. Here’s how I would interpret it’s use it in the current discussion: people who are pacifists get a free ride because as part of our community, they don’t have to put their pacifism to the test, we provide their security as part of the general welfare. If we excluded pacifists from this protection, I believe there would be as few pacifists in society as there are atheists in foxholes.
Could some wars be avoided? Undoubtedly. Have we gone way too far in trying to resolve issues by talking to lunatics over the past 100 years. IMO we have. Far fewer people would have died if we had stepped on Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Mao, Arafat, Castro, etc. as soon as the threat appeared rather than wait until they were already dug in.
A free loader, on the other hand, is a parasite with a serious personality flaw who lives off others. They’re usually able-bodied people who work very hard at never taking any responsibility for doing or paying their share. They are the kind of sniveling whining creeps that I can’t tolerate.
Thank you for that clarification,e. I thought free rider (which we don't use) was the same as free loader, which is used as a term of great abuse. You have probably averted another war!
erp, on the subject of doers and dreamers, if you haven't read this, please order it now and I promise you a very Merry Christmas indeed. Just to tickle your interest, it includes an account of what must be history's ultimate putdown. Apparently Karl Marx's mother, tired of being hit up for cash by her son, is reported to have said: "Wouldn't it be nice if Karl went out and actually earned some capital rather than just wrote about it?"
m. Delighted to have been of service.
Peter, I read "The Intellectuals" many years ago and since have read almost all of Johnson's oeuvre -- to paraphrase Rush, a little French lingo for turkey day.
monix:
... mine see war as a last resort and therefore a failure to sort things out around the negotiationg table.
Then you are not, truly speaking, a pacifist.
However, you appear guilty of placing faith in process at the expense of consequences. In other words, I don't believe you have thought clearly about what exactly is entailed in sitting down at a negotiating table.
The moment you do so, for the term "negotiation" to mean anything, you must be prepared for quid pro quo.
The problem is, you must have a quid which you are willing to trade for a quo. Unfortunately, there may be no such quid that is morally defensible.
Taking the Falklands War for example. The Argentinians invaded sovereign territory based upon nothing more than a claim they alone asserted. Argentina had never inhabited the island, there were no Argentinians living there, and, being over 400 miles from the Argentinian coast, was well and truly in international waters.
Now, imagine a negotiating table: Which quid would you trade, and for what quo? There is none that does not reward rapaciousness.
Note well: the moral justification of choosing war is entirely independent of the number of Falklanders. That is a matter for cost benefit analysis, which can have very little to do with morality, and, far too often, completely neglects the knock on effect of deciding to cave.
If, in your view, there are conflicts that could have been avoided, or ended sooner, I'd love to hear some examples. Keeping in mind, of course, the quid pro quo problem.
... perhaps 'free rider' is not the dreadful insult it would be in English English?
In this case, free rider is an economics term, and refers to receiving benefits accruing to a group of people without making the investment that group makes. While superficially similar to "free loader" it is does have some significant differences.
For instance: You could go to any store, and without doing any comparison shopping whatsoever, buy a TV that meets your requirements, and be pretty confident you achieved very near the best possible combination of price and performance.
In that case, you would be free riding on those shoppers who take sufficient interest in TVs to have done the required research before making their decisions.
The case with pacifism is slightly different, in that pacifism presumes for itself a moral superiority; however, it can only do so by completely ignoring the one intractable problem for which it has no answer whatsoever: evil, whether implacable, or merely stupid.
The moral superiority of pacifism is based, therefore, on failing to make the most fundamental moral judgment pacifism faces.
In other words, there is no such thing as a good theory that doesn't work well in practice.
Similar free loader and defector problems also fatally afflict socialism. Equally, socialism pretends to a moral superiority that is possible only by avoiding the most basic moral judgments.
I did take exception to your 'free ride' comments, Skipper because they appear to deny freedom of opinion.. You apply the term to Quakers ...
My free ride comments do not deny anyone's freedom of opinion.
Pointing out that the Quaker's position amounts to the smug self-satisfaction that comes with wish fulfillment at the expense of analysis may be harsh. Being critical of unjustified, and damaging, assertions, does not constitute "intolerance". To claim otherwise returns us to the failure of making critical, evidentiary, judgments.
Unless my (I say "my" here provisionally; obviously, it is not "mine" in the sense that I have originated any of it) analysis is wrong, the conclusion is unavoidable: it is what it is.
Bravo Skipper.
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