A Mass Revenge Killing

In some very important fundamental ways I do not think people are all that hard to understand. Why they murder, for one.

I do not have to read Anders Breivik’s 1500-page manifesto. I’m not going to, either, not with that length. I don’t need to read it, for that matter.

People murder for one reason: revenge. Revenge is an attempt to replace feelings of shame and humiliation with feelings of pride and self-respect. It is primitive, destructive and violent but historically it’s been the main response to perceived injuries.

The first recorded murder in Western mythology is when Cain slew Abel. Why? Because God rejected Cain’s sacrifice and accepted Abel’s.

“Unto Abel the Lord had respect…unto Cain the Lord had not respect.” So Cain, humiliated, attempted to replace his feelings of shame and humiliation with pride by murdering his brother, on whom he (inaccurately in this case) blamed his problems. It was revenge.

For that matter, the first recorded war in the Bible comes right after Cain and Abel, when Dinah’s brothers slaughtered the entire tribe of the man who had seduced Dinah. It was to them a matter of honor and pride and in their minds it could only be restored by wiping out all the men and taking all the women and wealth.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent 35 years interviewing thousands of prisoners, said he always heard the same story as to why they murdered or brutally assaulted people. What he heard, every time, was “He dissed me” or else humiliated, mocked, insulted and ridiculed the prisoner’s children, wife, parents, friends.

Gilligan one day realized what he was hearing, over and over, was the story of Cain and Abel: the feelings of humiliation followed by revenge manifesting itself as murder. (Gilligan also said, “The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps.”)

John Douglas, the retired FBI profiler of serial killers and mass murderers, stated that every serial killer or mass murderer he encountered was an “inadequate” type (i.e., he felt unbearably humiliated) who covered it up with grandiosity (like a 1500-page manifesto) and sought revenge on those he believed caused his problems.

Wrote Douglas in The Anatomy of Motive about one mass murder: “…this crime…[was] a kind of revenge…it was retaliation for some perceived wrong – real or imagined – perpetrated against the killer” (in another case, a teenage school shooter said, “The world has wronged me, and I could take it no more”).

Breivik murdered those people for revenge because he believed they were the leftists destroying his country through multiculturalism and mass immigration of non-Norwegians, and he could no longer tolerate it. I believe he targeted them instead of Muslims because he decided it was easier and more effective to kill the head than try to kill the body.

After all, can you blame Muslims for wanting to get out of their failed nations and come to the West? I wouldn’t. Apparently Breivik didn’t either. He targeted the people who let them in.

There is what I call the Cycle of Murder and Revenge. I’m sure Breivik is fanatically convinced leftists are murdering his country, so he completed the cycle by exacting revenge on them. And I’m just as sure he believes what he did was fully justified. He probably always will.

People think revenge is justified because in their minds it’s self-defense – they kill the people who they believe are trying to kill them. They’re trying to restore their honor and self-respect by eliminating those who they believe are trying to murder them – or their self-image. Or their country.

What surprised me was the fact Breivik allowed himself to be taken alive. As Gilligan has noticed, “One of the most common fantasies I have heard from many of the most violent prison inmates is the scenario of going to their deaths in a hail of gunfire while killing as many people as possible before they die.” (Seung-Hui Cho, anyone?)

Apparently Breivik wants to stay alive to speak his piece, since terrorism is a political statement. (As an aside, I’m hardly the first to notice that if one person kills another he is a murderer; if he kills one hundred he is evil and a monster, but if he kills 100,000 or a million he is a hero and a patriot.)

Leftists, of course, will never understand the truth of things. They never do. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn observed in his Leftism Revisited, “Leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all.”

What we’re going to hear from the Left is more demands for gun control, education, tolerance. What are they going to do about the steroids Breivik used and the music he listened to in order to motivate himself? Ban them? Good luck. Nothing leftists do can work. Left-wing fantasies never do.

Leftists never listen to those who disagree with them except to demonize them. I am reminded of what Chris Stout wrote in The Psychology of Terrorism: “The first stage in the development of terrorism begins when intolerable life conditions cause suffering that produces…a malignant alteration in the personality caused by the repeated failure to respond to overwhelming trauma.”

Breivik wasn’t evil or crazy. He was cold-bloodedly rational, lacked empathy and considered his enemies so dangerous, subhuman and evil they had to be eliminated. He had changed into a killing machine seeking revenge because of the trauma of seeing his country destroyed before his eyes. I’m sure he got a lot of satisfaction out of what he did. After all, in his own mind, he restored his self-respect and was trying to save his country from what he defined as evil.

Those who do not see what Breivik did as a warning shot against mixing different tribes on the same land are ignoring what is before their eyes.

I can’t predict specifically predict the future for Europe. But I will quote Gary Brecher (the War Nerd): “Traditionally, when one tribe runs into another the result has been genocide.” The leftists and the multiculturalists and the immigration enthusiasts won’t understand this until it’s too late.

I’ll close with another quote from Gilligan: “Those who have interviewed contemporary terrorists…have concluded that a primary motive for such behavior is humiliation -- not necessarily personal or individual humiliation, but rather the sense of collective or national humiliation that is felt when the religion or culture at the center of their collective identity has been seen as inferior and subjected to insult and contempt.”

Science Fiction Writers Should Rule the World

I’m not a science fiction writer but I am a fan, and have been since a few months before I turned 12. So I’ve been familiar with the genre and the writers for a quite a while, and so have decided that science fiction writers should be in charge of the government. I’m not kidding about that, either.

I hold nearly all politicians in contempt and suspect most of them are intelligent psychopaths (dumb psychopaths end up in prison). There are some exceptions, of course. Ron Paul is one of them. But most politicians are self-aggrandizing liars, murderers and thieves. Oh, I forgot – they’re also drunks and sexual perverts.

Is there anything lower than a politician? A serial killer? A child molester? The damage they’ve done is a drop in the ocean compared to the millennia of wreckage left by politicians.

Government has killed more people in history than everything else put together. I’ve read estimates that in the 20^th Century anywhere from 177 million to 200 million people were killed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – another name for the State.

All governments are based on force and fraud, without exception. Force and fraud, the two things that sent most people straight to Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

Why should science fiction writers rule? Because they are far more intelligent, sensitive, imaginative and empathic than politicians or the average joe. Most of them have libertarian sympathies, which is a prerequisite for good rulers.

Libertarianism – or classical liberalism – believes in the smallest necessary government (except for the anarchist libertarians, who are leftist fools). If the purpose of government is to, as John Locke wrote, protect “life, liberty and property” then what automatically springs up is political liberty and the free market. And that maximizes the well-being of everyone.

Politicians always try to expand government, and for that matter, so does much of the Herd. The Herd, unfortunately, isn’t merely dim-witted. It has no brains at all.

This Blob-like growth of government is why it always collapses. It gets too big and destroys or absorbs everything in its path, like the Borg. There in fact hasn’t been a government that hasn’t collapsed.

The first science fiction novel I remember reading is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars. It’s not exactly a libertarian novel but the Bad Guys are the power-mad rulers who want to conquer the planet and the Good Guys want freedom for everyone. I can’t tell you the effect this novel, with its swordfights and “radium pistols” and flying ships, had on my 11-year-old sensibilities.

There were other stories. Eric Frank Russell’s …and Then There Were None, a very funny story about a society that keeps its freedom by figuring out a fool-proof way to avoid being conquered: they just ignore their wannabe-be conquerors. In fact, they end up absorbing those who want to conquer them, just the way early America absorbed the Hessian mercenaries who wouldn’t go back to the Statist hell they came from.

There was A.E van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher, with its famous line: “The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free.” I still remember the frustration I felt that there were no Weapon Shop pistols, which threw up an impenetrable energy field about the owner and would not fire unless he was attacked. Imagine what that did for crime. Most especially, the crimes committed by the Empire, which, not surprisingly, hated and feared the Weapon Shops.

There are many others. James Hogan. Jerry Pournelle. L. Neil Smith. Neal Stephenson. I’m sure there are others I’ve never read, maybe even heard about.

When people are imaginative they have the ability to empathize with other people, to put themselves in their shoes. That’s why Stephen King is so popular: he can put himself in all of his character’s shoes.

I doubt a literal-minded person could easily sympathize with others, especially the more different those others are. I am reminded of something I read: the stupid don’t learn from their mistakes; the more intelligent do; and the smartest of all learn from other people’s mistakes. And you’ll certainly have a very difficult time learning from others unless you have some imaginative empathy.

Imagination, when united with reason, is my definition of creativity. And creativity is what advances all societies. And no society can go anywhere unless it has small government.

And who else besides science fiction writers are imaginative, reasonable and libertarian?

The world has given other types of government its chance. Kings, constitutional monarchies, republics. They’ve all degraded. It’s time to try something different. Just don’t ask me what kind of government we should have, because I don’t know. I just know who should be in authority.

It’s too bad those damn Weapon Shop pistols don’t exist. We wouldn’t need anyone to rule.

Open Borders are Not Free Market

I’ve never been able to come up with a completely satisfactory definition of “the free market.” It’s always been eluded me.

I don’t think I will ever go able to come up with one that satisfies me. It is a fact, and not an opinion, that the map is not the terrain. All theories are convenient fictions used to describe reality, but none are reality itself.

It isn’t a problem for me for that being unable to formulate a comprehensive theory to describe everything is impossible. To understand everything is, theologically, to know the mind of God, which is beyond human abilities.

The closer the theory describes reality, the better it works. But no theory will ever be able to describe reality perfectly. At first, I used the word “theory,” which is the most commonly used one. Then I switched to “model.” But perhaps “theology” is the best word.

Why the word “theology”? Because any endeavor to understand reality is the attempt, ultimately, to understand the mind of God. By the way, I don’t care if you use the word “God” or “the Absolute” or “science.” It’s all the same thing: the attempt to understand the whole of reality.

I studied the neo-Keynesian synthesis taught in college. I dismissed it as dangerous nonsense believed only by what I call high-IQ idiots, the dumbest of which come from Harvard and Yale and Princeton and then go to work for the federal government or else regurgitate what they have learned by teaching college. None have any practical experience in business.

Monetarists out of the University of Chicago are better but still dangerous. Fortunately they’re not as dangerous as Keynesians of whatever perversion.

The closest economic theory I have encountered that describes reality with much accuracy is the Austrian School. But I have my disagreements with some its more vociferous and confused supporters.

Let’s say the “free market” is what occurs when the government only protects “life, liberty and property,” as John Locke suggested, and which made it into the Constitution as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

What automatically springs up is the maximum of political and economic liberty – what is commonly defined as the free market. This is a very good thing for maximizing people’s well-being, although some people prefer security, not understanding they always give up their liberty for it. They don’t get their security, either. 

There is no such thing as economics per se. Economics is inseparable from political science, and in wiser days it was called “political economy.” It’s also an inseparable part of the law, since under that minimum of law protecting “life, liberty and property” we get the maximum amount of liberty.

Those three things –- economics, political science, and law – also cannot be separated from religion. All religions agree people should not murder or steal or lie, and without religion I doubt there would be anything except a wolves-eats-sheep society. With no religion, contrary to the delusions of atheists (and John Lennon, too), you’ll get not much more than chaos.

So you can see my problem in trying to define the free market. It’s not just economics. It’s also politics, law and religion. But it gets even more complicated. It’s also tribe.

Let’s look at the relationship of open borders to tribe. Are open borders part of the free market? The open-borders libertarian crowd claims that it is. They operate on the assumption the free market will turn all immigrants into Americans who share American values – whatever the hell they are these days.

How do you define tribe? Essentially, an extended family that have many traits in common. It can be race, religion, ethnic group or nationality. But they always must have certain core beliefs in common.

Open borders, however, aren’t part of the free market.  Let’s do a thought experiment – a rather extreme thought experiment – and imagine a country of three tribes: Wahabi Muslims (the ones responsible for 9-11), Zionists, and fundamentalist Christians. Now imagine them trying to share the same land.

Some will claim such a hypothetical example will never happen. True. But it doesn’t matter. Let’s quote Ludwig von Mises: “There is no such thing as too much of a correct theory.”

If the belief in open-borders is a correct theory, then there can be no such thing as too few borders. If the theory is completely correct, there should be no borders at all.

So what would happen with the example I just created? Would all of those people be turned into Americans, united in their love of DVD players, wide-screen TVs and SUVs?

Nope. There’d be violence and murder as each tried to expel the other from their land. As Gary Brecher (the War Nerd) has written, “Traditionally, genocide has been the result when one tribe encounters another.” It’s been the history of the world.

The free market makes life better. Open borders makes things worse. Ergo, open borders are not part of the free market and political liberty.

“Economics” is not based on empiricism. You can’t do repeatable experiments in a lab, which is why it’s not a hard science. It is historical in that you can look at what has happened in the past, such as what inflation has always done.

Yet even history doesn’t always work. Historically it’s possible to see what the oversupply of money does, but you can’t always tell about the demand, or velocity, for money.

That’s why economics is based on rationalism, as von Mises commented. But in order for it to be a comprehensive, rational theory it must take human nature into account – the differences in race, culture, religion, intelligence.

My conclusion? The free market must take into account the tribal nature of mankind. That is the application of the “correct theory” of which von Mises wrote.

Since open borders (i.e., the unimpeded free movement of labor throughout the world) do not work, and in fact is immensely destructive, this means, contrary to the hallucinations of anarchist libertarians, there will always be some kind of government.

A cohesive, workable country must be overwhelmingly of one “family” that shares certain traits in common.

The only way open borders (or no borders) would work is if everyone in the world was of the same race, same language, same religion, and shared the same culture; specifically, the belief in the smallest possible government with the maximum of political and economic liberty. Otherwise, it would never work.

Leftists, who truly are fuzzy-minded (as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in Leftism Revisited, leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature but instead don’t understand it at all), believe that all cultures can learn to co-exist peacefully.

How they believe this is beyond me, considering Jews don’t believe in Jesus at all, Christians see him as the Son of God and consider Muhammad a psychotic child-raping false prophet, and Muslims consider Jesus a mere man and Christians who believe in the Trinity as polytheists. The idea these people could share the same land peacefully and productively is something only a mentally-stillborn leftist could believe.

The free market is based on economics, political science, law, religion, and a culture with shared views. Those five pillars must support the minimum number of laws to obtain the maximum amount of political and economic liberty.

The only place where those five things coalesced to discover political and economic liberty is the Christian, European “West.” It came from no place else in the world, and for that matter, isn’t taking root beyond its birthplace. It’s not going to, either.

Unfortunately, these five pillars are close to collapsing. Mainstream economics is a dangerous joke, as is much of political science, law, religion and culture. They’ve all been degraded. Since all of those things are so severely damaged, and since all of them are essential pillars of society, I see no way around a coming collapse of some sort.

What passes for economics today is dominated by blundering neo-Keynesians; the law is about lawyers suing those with money to transfer it into their own pockets; a lot of political science is leftist looniness; a politically-noticeable number of “Christians” believe Jesus is going to come back, rub out all the Muslims and kill Jews until they convert to their perverted version of Christianity; and “Western culture” (sic) has become multiculturalism (actually multitribalism) which is going to lead to nothing but conflict, destruction and backwardness.

It won’t be the Dark Ages, but it won’t be much fun.

So even though I cannot come up with a fully satisfactory definition of the free market, I do know enough about it to know that its loss is a terribly dangerous thing.