Not to suggest I disagree with your thesis, here, but it does have one clear flaw in it —

To wit:
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

If you answer “Yes” to the above, then (hopefully) that’s the wrong answer, because it means you HAVE beaten your wife.

If you answer “No” to the above, then (hopefully) that’s the wrong answer, because it means you STILL are beating your wife.

The TRUE/CORRECT/RIGHT answer to the above, one hopes, is “nil’ or “N/A” — that is, “The statement/question has no meaning“.

If, as we hope, you do not and never have beaten your wife (ditto with another alternative, “I don’t have a wife”), then the statement/question has no meaning as phrased, since it has presumed inherently into it a faulty premise, to wit, that “you do or have beaten your wife” at some point.

This highlights the flaw in your overall argument, which is that it is based in dualism and dualist reasoning.

All too often, real world problems are trinary in nature — they respond properly to the “True/False/Nil” answer, not the “True/False” answer.

This is the nature of the problem behind Pascal’s Wager, for example. The dualist nature of Pascal’s argument requires the tacit acceptance of suppositions which may well be false.

Your analysis is, as well, inherently dualistic in nature, and thus almost certainly, since it’s dealing with the Real World, has a number of doubtful assertions or presumptions in it.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be rescued — but, if I were to take the opposing position, that’s the attack I would use, and, I believe you should re-analyze it from that viewpoint to arm yourself against those offensives, as, if you’re not prepared for them, you’ll get blown out of the water by a talented skeptic.

😉

Or I’ll be a cricket. And jump onto a liberal’s shoulder and steer him/her to understand that free markets and freedom is the way to prosperity.

Curtis Says:

This feller’s a good argument for mandating a rural upbringing for everyone. Only someone who’s been enclosed in concrete, smog, asphalt and welfare offices could think like that.

That’s a wonderful observation. The natural cycles of life and death are endemic to rural life and played out just about every day. So is a good work ethic important in rural life (or one starves). Then there’s the added bonus that people in a rural environment would come to see the utility of firearms as necessary tools not to be grabbed up by the gub’mint. Win-win-win.

Strictly a problem of the liberal inverting what authoritarian even means. An inversion so bizzare that the slave/master dynamic can then be totally acceptable as it’s really about protecting the slave.

I’ve posted on this before – as has neo – so just to recap: there’s a cottage industry in political science for so-called “authoritarian” studies, and they are taken with the utmost seriousness. All of the madness that we heard during the Loughner disaster is, in many ways, the trickled-down version of what the political scientists who study “RWA” (Right-Wing Authoritarianism) have been saying for decades – at least since Adorno et al.’s “Authoritarian Personality” and most of the work of Richard Hofstadter.

They’ve since moved on from the now unfashionable Freudianism of the earlier literature, and into genetics and evolutionary psychology – it seems that every week there’s a new study “proving” that the “authoritarian personality” is encoded, to a large extent, in one’s genes, and that that personality is by definition “right wing” or “conservative.”

Not the least of the problems with this ridiculous hypothesis is precisely that it fails to account for statements like the one neo quoted in her post. I have a friend who is left wing and works in the “authoritarian personality” field, taking its results as Holy Writ. Whenever he sends me a new “proof” that I’m a barbarian, I always write back one sentence:

“Once again, I will never take any study of authoritarianism seriously that cannot admit the possibility of, or account for, someone like Barack Obama being an authoritarian.”

He has never been able to give even a remotely adequate defense of the literature against that utterly fundamental objection. The answer is simply: “What are you an idiot? Of COURSE Obama is not an authoritarian! Or COURSE left-wingers cannot be authoritarian!”

Jacobins? “Conservatives.” Bolsheviks? “Conservatives.” Or rather, they are defined as “authoritarians,” and since “authoritarians” can ONLY be right wing, we are forced to conclude that the most left wing people in the world are really in the tradition of Aquinas, Burke, Hayek, and Buckley.

Anyway, the obvious thing to do, for a subversive political scientist such as myself, is to design surveys that tease out the authoritarianism in statements like the commenter’s. We’ve got some traction, but professors are not very enthused about it and so not very helpful.

In any event, it’s frightening that a foundation of our educational system is now the manichaean assumption that liberals are Good and conservatives are Bad. But that’s undoubtedly where we are. Hence why the commenter felt free to post such an astonishingly totalitarian opinion, without any awareness or even openness to the possibility of it being so.

The utopian mind at work.

It’s not quite as blatant as the commenter’s remark — but underneath, it’s the very same message: money — and even the capacity to make money — does not belong to the individual who earned it, but to society, and society, not the individual, determines what is “enough” money. (No wait, I’ve got that wrong. It IS an individual who decides: the President.) However, society reluctantly allows people to continue to make money “if” they are providing something good. This is not because it’s their money or because it’s up to them to earn it and they found a way to do so. It’s because they are fulfilling a duty — a “core” duty, no less — not to themselves or even their families, but to everybody else.