Mr. Know-it-all

I know that what I write on this blog will be seen as inflammatory by many.
In one sense, that is the purpose of what I write here.
These "editorials" are not meant to be feel-good material. They are my opportunity to "vent." Better here than in public where I might be lynched.
That is why the people who are most likely to read it are the people least likely to be able to hunt me down with a noose; people I meet online who know nothing about me.
There's one named Lois. I hope that's not her real name, that's it's only an alias she uses online.
She and I have traded meaningless pleasantries over the past year or so.
I told her about my blog, knowing she would check it out.
I was curious as to what her reaction might be. I was prepared for any of several possibilities, from "Hey, pretty cool!" on one hand to "What the...??" on the other.
This turned out to be an arbitrary polarity.
Here's what she wrote:

"I checked out thwe site. I'm not quite sure what I think of it. It kinda sounds like you think you have all the answers and all the rest of the world is doomed. that is a little too egotistical for me. Then again who am I that I could question you?"

I looked back over the last few posts to try to get some clue as to where she was coming from. And after giving it a lot of thought, I recalled something I read somewhere that goes something like this: "Some people hear the words - some people hear the tone." That goes for reading as well as hearing, of course.
When someone is offering an opinion, it can and probably should sound as if they think they mean what they say...that they think they have some answers.
All the answers? Do my posts come off as sounding that pompous? Somebody's been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh.
I pointed out to her that I refer to the entries as "editorials" for that very reason; that an editorial (in a magazine or newspaper, for instance) generally will take the tone that the writer thinks he "knows it all."
Her response?:

"that might be right. I think many people could be misled by reading articles like that. Are you out to make recruits to rebel against the political system?"

That's when it hit me.
What we're seeing here is not an example of someone who is uncomfortable with my opinions.
What we're witnessing here is someone who is uncomfortable with having opinions.
Opinions cause strife.
Opinions make people argue.
Opinions pit people against each other and lead to bitterness, competition, winners and losers, unrest at the dinner table.
All those dreadful things that can make our day so unpleasant.
"Why can't we all just get along?" as Clinton said.
He certainly wasn't "out to make recruits to rebel against the political system." The political system was the only thing keeping him out of jail.
In fairness to Lois, it must be said that this is the mentality that the vast majority of U. S. citizens subscribe to.
Best not to have strong convictions.
Best not to rock the boat.
From what I have read (meaning that it's not just my opinion - put down that noose!) most North Americans felt that way at the time of the American Revolution, as well.
Good thing somebody rocked the boat.

"Which one are you?"

Since hurricane Katrina, my wife has been working with the Vietnamese "Refugees" from New Orleans who have temporarily relocated to our city.
Some of these Refugees are second-time-around refugees.
They are the same people who were labeled "boat people" and who fled Viet Nam when things fell apart there a while back.
Some of these people are still trying to make sense of the political atmosphere they find themselves in here in the states.
Things are pretty simple in third world countries politically. Dictators do tend to cut through the red tape.
The Refugees have learned that there is an either/or mentality in American politics, and they have accepted that as the reality here, as have so many government-educated Americans.
It's a convenient way of looking at things. Convenient for the wolves as well as the sheep.
These Vietnamese, says my wife, are constantly asking her, "Which one are you?" referring to the arbitrary polarity of Democrat/Republican thinking.
She keeps telling them that she is neither. She says that she looks at what each candidate says he or she believes in and votes accordingly.
They are having a hard time assimilating this view, partly because it contrasts so glaringly with all the other information (propaganda?) they have gathered regarding American politics.
And partly because they have seen from harsh reality that what a candidate says he or she believes in rarely has any bearing on how that candidate functions once elected.
So they keep asking, perhaps rephrasing it each time within their limited English vocabularies, "Which one are you?"
The problem here is that my wife - an amazingly intelligent person, by the way - keeps telling them what she isn't.
She can't tell them what she is.
She avoids "isms."
She doesn't want to be an "ist."
Defining yourself can be so confining.
She chides me for being a Libertarian. She feels that by defining myself as such, I am now obligated to toe the line for any cause that the Libertarian "leaders" ask me to support, and that if I choose not to support a "Libertarian Cause," I will have proven myself to be a hypocrite.
That's the way it works with the two dinosaur parties, right? That's the way it works in the Left/Right, Democrat/Republican arbitrary polarity.
She doesn't want to be confined to that polarity.
Neither do I.
So she chooses to have an ill-defined philosophical construct.
I choose to be an "ist."
Actually, I am an Objectivist. And, politically, Libertarianism works best within that philosophical framework (despite the opinions of the followers of the originator of Objectivism, Ayn Rand, who felt that there is a disconnect between the two systems of thought - "philisophical protectionism?").
The real question contained within the simplicity of, "Which one are you?" is "Are you a proponent of the Left/Right arbitrary polarity - or are you a proponent of Freedom?"

Kleptocrats

So here I am in this "social situation."
You know, finding yourself in the company of people you don't know, don't care to know, probably wouldn't spend any time with even if you did know them.
Having lunch in a cafeteria with friends of friends of friends.
And a lady says something like, "They've even coined a new word for people like Bush, Rove, and Cheney - for politicians who seek office so that they can use their power to make themselves rich. It's 'kleptocrat.' From the root word 'klepto' as in 'kleptomaniac.'"
We all nodded or chuckled or hmm-hmmed in appreciation of her political astuteness.
There was more banter along those lines.
Then I piped up, "I guess that would make Clinton a nymphocrat!"
Crickets.
[Meaning that you could hear the crickets in the background. Kind of like "You could hear a pin drop." I think it was Hemingway who wrote "And somewhere in the distance, a dog barked" meaning essentially the same thing.]
This line was dropped in the middle of what one might call an "artsey" group, which, as you may know, usually means a "liberal" group.
Now I don't really mind if people don't share my brand of humor, if they just don't find funny something that I say that is funny in my opinion.
I really don't care if they found my comment too "racy" for their tastes.
But neither of these was the case.
They would have politely chuckled anyway, just to be nice. That was the tone that had been established.
They were stone silent because they took offense.
Even that would have been okay - but let's examine what it was they took offense to.
From their viewpoint, the most important factor of my statement was that they felt that I was DEFENDING BUSH.
Attacking Clinton was, perhaps, excuseable. But in this case, following on the heels of an attack on Bush, attacking Clinton was seen as defending Bush. And that's not allowed.
Of course, I was neither attacking Clinton OR defending Bush. I was just trying to be funny. And maybe inject a little political astuteness of my own. I happen to think Bush is a "knucklehead." It doesn't matter that Clinton is just as bad, if not worse.
But they were momentarily afflicted with the Us-and-Them Syndrome.
GASP! There's a Republican in our midst!
Nope, not a Republican. Would they have run from the cafeteria screaming if they had known it was a Libertarian?
It goes way beyond, "Hey, can't you take a joke?"
Our so-called Two-party System has become a National Schizophrenia, some kind of hideously twisted Catdog-like beast that loathes its other self, like a set of Siamese twins each dreaming of clubbing the other into oblivion so that it could be "whole."
And becoming more and more like each other every election.
We pat ourselves on the back every four years telling ourselves that, in this country, we have a "choice."
We had a choice between Kerry and Bush.
A choice between two of the finest "kleptocrats" this country had to offer.
Kleptocrats?
If only they were simply stealing money, power and property.
What they are all stealing is so much more precious than any of that.
They are stealing nothing less than mankind's best hopes for a meaningful existence.
They are stealing our Freedom, our Liberty... and even our ability to visualize what those words really mean.

What is an "Arbitrary Polarity?"

It's a phrase I have been kicking around in my head for years.
At first, I just liked the sound of the phrase.
But I soon realized that the mental rambling that I had been engaging in that produced the phrase had been onto something at least somewhat significant.
There are polarities that guide our thinking in certain areas for better or for worse.
An important example is the political polarity of Left and Right. Even the terms "Left" and "Right" refer to a visual representation of a polarity.
People who prefer not to think too deeply feel comfortable in the "Middle."
They like to feel "Mainstream."
They are often accused of "straddling the fence."
Most people who claim to be Agnostic make that claim because it makes them feel that they are in the middle of the Atheist/Holy-Roller polarity.
This harkens all the way back to Aristotle's "moderation in all things" ethic, in which he did, indeed, make a thorough case for staying close to the middle of almost any polarity. (See Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics.")
Upon close analysis, agnostics really fall into the Atheist camp by definition. An agnostic is not a theist. By definition, an Atheist is one who is not a Theist. (See George Smith's book, "Atheism: The Case Against God.")
Even the Left/Right polarity has been shown to be somewhat arbitrary, as demonstrated by the folks who designed the World's Smallest Political Quiz. (See http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html)
Deep analysis in almost any field of thought will reveal polarities that can be shown to be at least somewhat arbitrary.
And many of those polarities are deeply ingrained in our culture - we think of them as the correct way of viewing things.
The phrase "thinking outside of the box" is, in most cases, really just a way of saying "thinking outside of the arbitrary polarities we have been trained to use since early childhood."
War is largely a result of Us-And-Them thinking. (See Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon"!)
Another arbitrary polarity.
It's either/or thinking.
And you can be sure that, in one way or another, it is holding you back from making important discoveries, decisions, or changes in your own life.

"Faith Is the Enemy of Truth"

"Faith is the Enemy of Truth."
This is either self-evident - or dismayingly alien.
And the points-of-view that find it self-evident or dismayingly alien are easy to identify.
"But Faith is a good thing!" some will cry.
But some of us question that, which brands us with a peculiar stripe of evil.
When I coined the phrase, "Faith is the Enemy of Truth" years ago, I thought that perhaps I had originated a phrase that distilled centuries of thought about religion and belief into an ultimate sound-byte, one that would clarify once and for all one of Philosophy's greatest questions.
Yeah, right.
Not long after that, I read the same quote in a somewhat altered form from Mr. God-Is-Dead, himself; Nietzsche.
The problem with Faith, the problem with Belief, is that they feel so much like Knowledge.
Try this on the next person who asks you what you believe:
Say, "I try not to have beliefs. I find knowledge to be so much more useful."
Mark Twain also said it in his ascerbic way: "Faith is believing things that you know aren't true."
That hits the mark by missing it. Only Twain.
Is it possible that a word ("faith") can be so venerated and yet so unworthy of veneration?
Is Faith a colossal mistake?!
Are there any other examples of words like that?
How about "tradition." Similar can of worms.
Witch-burning was once a tradition.
Infanticide has been a tradition in one culture or another throughout history. Is Tradition necessarily a good thing?
Faith?
On a planet where there are one hundred mutually exclusive "Faiths," what are the odds that your Faith is the true one?
One percent. At best.
"But as long as you have faith, that doesn't matter..."
They are saying, that having faith that a thing is true is more important than Truth.
"Having faith that a thing is true is more important than Truth."
The mind that can believe that is doomed to a life of lies.
Another way of putting it: a god who requires its subjects to believe such a thing in order to escape eternal punishment is an insane god.
I'm captivated by the image presented in one of Philip K. Dick's excellent science fiction novels of the discovery of a gargantuan corpse in space, larger than any planet, stranger in structure than any life form ever encountered or imagined. Nietzsche's dead God.
Of course, what Nietzsche meant was that the concept of God is dead. That the mind of Man had reached the point intellectually that it could no longer sustain primitive beliefs in supernatural beings.
If only.
A culture in which supermarket tabloids still sell like hotcakes is far from out of the mental swamp of Faith.
Ayn Rand's view was that Religion is a primitive form of Philosophy.
I think that pretty much nails it.