"If men want to oppose war..."

"If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.”

~ Ayn Rand, from her article 'The Roots of War'

'Not Left, Not Right . . . Try Up: To the individualist alternative"

"This is addressed to all those repulsed by the political alternatives offered today, those who are seeking a rational social-political position....
    "The solution is not centre-Left, centre-Right or centre-centre. The truth is not a compromise between two errors. What is needed is a radical alternative to both Left and Right, a system that doesn’t attempt to work with the worldview of either tribe, but starts with a fresh, first-handed view of the individual vs. the state.
    "I have found four ethical-political ideas that together open the door to a radical ... alternative.
    "Only four? You may be dubious. But watch.

1. Your life is your own. You are not the slave of any other man, group, or entity—human or divine. “Society” does not own you ...

2. You have rights. ... Each individual has the right to his life, and as corollaries, the right to what living a human life requires: the right to liberty, to property, and to 'the pursuit of happiness.'

3. Only physical force can violate rights. ... Persuasion appeals to the mind. It points to facts and offers incentives. Force negates the mind. It coerces by threats of destruction. Your thoughts, your plans, your decisions become irrelevant, courtesy of the gun of the holdup man or of the Gestapo.
    "The basic social-political alternative is: freedom vs. force. That means: the mind-respecting vs. the mind-negating.

4. Government is force. ... The laws of a government are not suggestions. They are not requests. They are commands. ... A proper government will use its physical force only in retaliation ... But the peaceful man should face no threat of force from the government. ...

* * * * 

"What kind of society do these 4 points mandate? A voluntary society.
    "All human interactions must be voluntary, entered into by mutual consent. ...
    "Both Left and Right are collectivist; neither side takes seriously the reality of an individual life and the individual’s right to live it according tohis own judgment. ...
    "The Left wants the regulatory state or even a socialist takeover of the economy. The Right wants a populist, police-state, whose Supreme Leader can decide to round up 'internal enemies,' deport 'illegals,' legislate morality, and junk the Constitution.
    "The Left used to uphold the right of free speech. No longer. The Right used to uphold business freedom and international free trade. No longer.
    "Try 'up': to the individualist alternative."

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'Not Left, Not Right . . . Try Up'

"If you have a set of views that you can’t question, and a group of friends who’ll disown you if you do, you’re not a political activist – you’re in a cult."

Pic from The Spectator

"I have in the past admired twentysomethings for their interest in politics at an age when I was mostly clueless. I still do. But if you have a set of views that you can’t question, and a group of friends who’ll disown you if you do, you’re not a political activist – you’re in a cult."

~ Mary Wakefield, from her post 'No one will change their mind about Hamas'

"It is fear that drives them to seek the warmth, the protection, the 'safety' of a herd.
    "When they speak of merging their selves into a 'greater whole,' it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies. And what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance."

~ Ayn Rand, from her essay 'Apollo and Dionysus' [hat tip Hilton H.]

'Selfishness' without a self

 

"It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. ...
    "[T]oo selfish? In what act or thought of [theirs] has there ever been a self? ...  [Their] aim in life? Greatness — in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy — all that which comes from others. ... [They do]n’t want to be great, but to be thought great. ... There’s your actual selflessness. ... But everybody calls [that] selfish. . . .

    “Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. . . . They’re second-handers. . . .
    “They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ ...
    "Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation — anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility."

~ Ayn Rand, the character Howard Roark speaking, from her novel The Fountainhead — excerpted as part of 'The Nature of the Second-Hander' in her book For the New Intellectual

How the Enlightenment solved all of our problems

I love it when historical/philosophical eras are trending.  

Fortuitously, philosopher Stephen Hicks (author of the essential text Explaining Postmodernism) has posted this chart, conveniently summarising 'how the Enlightenment solved all of our problems.'

For reference, for the easily confused, the items in the third column are the desirable ones ...

NB: Check out all of Hicks's posts and lectures on the Enlightenment here.

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by Karl Marx" [updated]

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject Marx’s term, because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. 

    "Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people, as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it. 

    "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about this ... [not least that] capitalist savings benefit workers.

"An often unrealised fact about capitalism is this: savings mean benefits for all those who are anxious to produce or to earn wages. When a man has accrued a certain amount of money—let us say, one thousand dollars—and, instead of spending it, entrusts these dollars to a savings bank or an insurance company, the money goes into the hands of an entrepreneur, a businessman, enabling him to go out and embark on a project which could not have been embarked on yesterday, because the required capital was unavailable.
    "What will the businessman do now with the additional capital? The first thing he must do, the first use he will make of this additional capital, is to go out and hire workers and buy raw materials—in turn causing a further demand for workers and raw materials to develop, as well as a tendency toward higher wages and higher prices for raw materials. Long before the saver or the entrepreneur obtains any profit from all of this, the unemployed worker, the producer of raw materials, the farmer, and the wage- earner are all sharing in the benefits of the additional savings.
    "When the entrepreneur will get something out of the project depends on the future state of the market and on his ability to anticipate correctly the future state of the market. But the workers as well as the producers of raw materials get the benefits immediately....
    "The scornful depiction of capitalism by some people as a system designed to make the rich become richer and the poor become poorer is wrong from beginning to end. Marx’s thesis regarding the coming of socialism was based on the assumption that workers were getting poorer, that the masses were becoming more destitute, and that finally all the wealth of a country would be concentrated in a few hands or in the hands of one man only. And then the masses of impoverished workers would finally rebel and expropriate the riches of the wealthy proprietors....
    "If we look upon the history of the world, and especially upon the history of England since 1865, we realize that Marx was wrong in every respect. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way. All these improvements of the last eighty or ninety years were made in spite of the prognostications of Karl Marx.
    "We must realise, however, that this higher standard of living depends on the supply of capital. ... A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital per unit of its population."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the collection of six of his lectures titled Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, and in Brazil under the title As Seis Lições (The Six Lessons) [hat tip Renato Moicano]

UPDATE:  Sad news just in that economic historian Robert Hessen has just died. David R. Henderson remembers him, and quotes from his contribution to the Concise Encylopaedia of Economics on Capitalism. 

"Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations).   Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their efforts in terms of assets, sales, and profits; or the number of customers, employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional, national, or international markets.

Here’s another great paragraph:

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavourably with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist “good old days” simply never existed (see industrial revolution and the standard of living).

And:

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments; then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently, TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones. ...

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.”Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs. They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally.

March being Women’s History Month, it's a good time to recall how Rose Wilder Lane’s experience with the reality of Russian socialism, as a visitor there with the Red Cross, brought many, like her, to see the paramount importance of freedom.  Rose later wrote that she “came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist.” She began to realise America enjoyed a degree of freedom no other nation held. “Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born. It seemed as necessary and as inevitable as the air I breathed; it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived.” For Rose, the Soviet Union was “not an extension of human freedom, but the establishment of tyranny on a new, widely extended and deeper base.” Gary Galles give more of the story in this guest post.

The Moment Rose Wilder Lane’s Faith in Communism Was Pierced

by Gary Galles

March is Women’s History Month. Among the women who have been remembered and honoured, however, one has clearly not received enough attention: Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of 'Little House on the Prairy' creator Laura Ingalls Wilder).

Among the past century’s most ardent proponents of liberty, she developed the inseparable connection between life and liberty and the importance of individuals understanding the implications of their freedom. In her honour, especially given the current lack of serious attention to protecting our liberties in current American politics, revisiting her book Give Me Liberty (1936), which traces her evolution from believing in communism to devotion to liberty, seems particularly appropriate. The book has surprisingly clear implications for today.

In 1919 I was a communist.

From this point of view… the Profit System causes the injustice, the inequality, we see. We must eliminate profit; that is to say, we must eliminate the Capitalist. We will take his current profits, distribute his accumulated wealth, and ourselves administer his former affairs…When the Capitalist is gone, who will manage production? The State… It was at this point that the first doubt pierced my Communist faith.

This economic revolution concentrated economic power in the hands of the State… so that the lives, the livelihoods, of common men were once more subject to dictators… Every advance toward personal liberty which had been gained…was lost by the collectivist economic reaction.

Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people…the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills…Any government of multitudes of men, anywhere, at any time, must be a man, or few men, in power.

Centralised economic control over multitudes of human beings…must become such minute and rigorous control of details of individual life as no people will accept without compulsion.

What I saw was not an extension of human freedom, but the establishment of tyranny on a new, widely extended and deeper base.

The Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not… To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience.

[Coordinating] vast multitudes of human beings are activities so intricately inter-related and inter-dependent that efficient control of any part of them demands control of the whole.

The Communist hope of economic equality… rests … on the death of all men and women who are individuals.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom…I [saw] an essentially medieval, planned and controlled economic order was taking over the fruits of the industrial revolution while destroying its root, the freedom of the individual.

I understood at last that every human being is free; that I am endowed by the Creator with inalienable liberty as I am endowed with life; that my freedom is inseparable from my life, since freedom is the individual’s self-controlling nature.

I hold the truth to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable liberty, with individual self-control and responsibility…The extent to which this natural liberty can be exercised depends upon the amount of external coercion imposed upon the individual.

The men who met in Philadelphia to form a government believed that all men are born free. They founded this government on the principle: All power to the individual…The intent was actually to give the governing power to each common man equally…Common men were to govern themselves…Power was diminished to an irreducible minimum…Never before had the multitudes of men been set free to do as they pleased.

Individualism. In less than a century, it created our America.

American wealth is innumerable streams of power…flowing through the mechanisms that produce the vast quantities of goods consumed by the multitudes, and the men who are called the owners can hardly be said even to control the wealth that stands recorded as theirs, for…in this American chaos business and industry were compelled to serve those desires or perish.

There is no system here…But if this chaos were replaced by a system…functioning for the sole purpose of serving the public good, these men must be replaced by a bureaucracy…controlling in detail, and according to a plan devised by men possessing centralised economic power, all the processes.

[America’s] brief experiment in individualism has not only created great wealth and an unimaginable multiplication of forms of wealth in goods and services, but it has also distributed these forms of wealth to an unprecedented and elsewhere unequalled degree.

As I read Lane’s words, a strong sense that “this is as much about today as it is about when she wrote” began to grow in me. But as I kept reading, I was floored by just how true that was.

I read … that less than 10 percent of our population own more than 90 percent of the wealth. This alarmed me in 1893 … But it seems to me even more alarming that many American minds accept this statement as true upon no better proof than that they have read it, and from it conclude, first, that “something must be done,” and, second, that the proper thing to do is to take ownership away from individuals and have property administered by The State; which means, by autocratic rulers giving orders through an enormous bureaucracy.

There is nothing new in planned and controlled economy. Human beings have lived under various forms … for six thousand years. The new thing is … individualism … the principle that created this country and has, in fact, brought the greatest good to the greatest number.

Can individualism … stand against the determined attack of [those] organised, controlled, and fanatically sure that a strong man in power can give a people better lives than they can create for themselves?

Will [we] defend the Constitutional law that divides, restricts, limits and weakens political-police power, and thus protects every citizen’s personal freedom, his human rights, his exercise of those rights in a free, productive, capitalist economy and a free society? Or … suppressing individual liberty, sacrificing human rights to an imagined “common good,” and substituting for civil laws the edicts, or “directives,” once accurately called tyranny and now called administrative law? This is the choice that every American must make … the present situation puts it before us and requires a decision.

In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and … began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.

Reactionary pseudo-thinkers shifted American thought into reverse … They called it “liberal” to suppress liberty; “progressive” to stop the free initiative that is the source of all human progress; “economic freedom,” to obstruct all freedom, and “economic equality” to make men slaves … We never heard that these United States are a political structure unique in all history, built upon … the fact that individual persons are naturally free, self-controlling and responsible.

These United States stand for a political principle that must conquer and change the whole world, because it is true.

Today, Federal administrative agencies have nearly destroyed those divisions of the political power which alone protect the property, liberty and lives of American citizens … because a state that dictates men’s action in producing and distributing goods must have undivided and absolute power.

Leading statesmen assume that … suppression of liberty is good for mankind, and that these new forms of an old tyranny are here to stay.

Free thought, free speech, free action, and freehold property are the source of the modern world. It cannot exist without them. Its existence depends upon abolishing these reactionary state controls and destroying the socialist State.

The task before Americans is to end these police-controls of peaceful, productive American citizens, to repeal all the reactionary legislation and … executive orders … to abolish the Federal corporations, departments, bureaus and agencies that dictate and enforce these State controls … to require men in public office to recognise again every American’s natural right as a free person.

No politician, yet, has asked American voters to give him the power to strip any State of the powers it has usurped from its citizens, nor to strip the Federal Government of the powers it has usurped from the States; to restore the rights of the citizens, the rights and powers of the States … nor to add …further restrictions that will adequately protect the property, liberty and lives of persons …  and make the United States again the world-champion of human rights and the leader of the world-liberating revolution.

Rose Wilder Lane’s experience with the reality of Russian socialism, expressed insightfully, has brought many to see the paramount importance of freedom (or more often, the tragedy of its absence) in human lives. What we can learn from her Give Me Liberty is also reinforced in her 1943 companion book The Discovery of Freedom. She offers us lessons which need re-learning in each generation, if liberty is to be defended from the erosion that is not just ongoing but accelerating now. And it is very hard to miss just how appropriate her words still are for the political situation Americans face now. That is why it is useful to remember what she wrote in her autobiographical sketch,

I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire and … capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better — and more productive, even in material ways — than … any other rigidity organised for material ends.

* * * * * 

Dr. Gary Galles is a Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University, California. His research focuses on public finance, public choice, the theory of the firm, the organisation of industry and the role of liberty including the views of many classical liberals and America’s founders­. His books include Pathways to Policy Failure; Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies; Apostle of Peace; and Lines of Liberty.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article. 

China's history "presents some interesting and broader lessons for us, even in New Zealand"

"Frank Dikotter ... has written a number of books on the modern history of China. Of particular note are three titles which form 'The People’s Trilogy' and which cover the history of China under Mao Zedong. ...

    "Dikotter’s books present some interesting and broader lessons for us, even in New Zealand. The lessons are considerable but as I read the following matters occurred to me.
    "Communist rule thrives in an authoritarian atmosphere where a single line of thought and expression prevails. There is no room for contrary opinions. There is no tolerance of dissent. ...
    "Communist rule cannot tolerate any expression of individualism. Everything and everyone must be subordinated to the interests of the State. Individual initiative, individual betterment, individual ambition cannot be tolerated. Individual economic improvement is unacceptable. ...
    "The sort of levelling that is anticipated by a wealth tax – proposed by the Greens and by some element of the Labour Party - is typical of the type of levelling that took place in Mao’s China. The motives and the methods may be different as may be the context within a supposedly democratic environment — but the outcome is the same — the subordination of the individual to the interests of the State.
    "Finally there is the casual attitude towards human life — indeed the lives of the citizens which, under a civilised State, the State is duty bound to preserve and protect. Lives became numbers to the Communist bureaucrats and those numbers became quotas for the widely scattered cadres who not only tried to fulfil but at times endeavoured to exceed the death quotas dictated from Beijing. The message is clear. Under Communism even the life of the citizen is subordinated to the State.
    "These are but three of the lessons that come out of Dikotter’s study. Clearly he is no friend of Mao or his methods and how could he be. Indeed, how could anyone be."

~ David Harvey, from his post 'The Tragedy of Liberation'

"Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us"

 

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred [and its result] is always the same."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 lecture 'Global Balkanisation,' examining the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics -- quoted in Tom Bowden's post 'Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us'

 

"Since only an individual can possess rights, the expression 'individual rights' is a redundancy. But the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms. "

"Rights are a moral principle defining proper social relationships. Just as a man needs a moral code in order to survive (in order to act, to choose the right goals and to achieve them), so a society (a group of [individuals]) needs moral principles in order to organise a social system consonant with man’s nature and with the requirements of his survival....
    "What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that 'Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that 'Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues. ...
    "Yet that is the goal of most of today’s intellectuals. At the root of all their conceptual switches, there lies another, more fundamental one: the switch of the concept of rights from the individual to the collective—which means: the replacement of 'The Rights of Man' by 'The Rights of Mob.'
    "Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression 'individual rights' is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms. [Emphasis mine.]
    "Any group or 'collective,' large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the 'rights' of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By 'legitimate,' I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)
    "For instance, the right of an industrial concern to engage in business is derived from the right of its owners to invest their money in a productive venture—from their right to hire employees—from the right of the employees to sell their services—from the right of all those involved to produce and to sell their products—from the right of the customers to buy (or not to buy) those products. Every link of this complex chain of contractual relationships rests on individual rights, individual choices, individual agreements. Every agreement is delimited, specified and subject to certain conditions, that is, dependent upon a mutual trade to mutual benefit.
    "This is true of all legitimate groups or associations in a free society: partnerships, business concerns, professional associations, labour unions (voluntary ones), political parties, etc. It applies also to all agency agreements: the right of one man to act for or represent another or others is derived from the rights of those he represents and is delegated to him by their voluntary choice, for a specific, delimited purpose—as in the case of a lawyer, a business representative, a labour union delegate, etc.
    "A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations. [Emphasis mine.]
    "Any group that does not recognise this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.
    "Any doctrine of group activities that does not recognise individual rights is a doctrine of mob rule or legalised lynching.
    "The notion of 'collective rights' (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that 'rights' belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the 'right' to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority. [Emphasis mine.]

    "Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine—and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like 'The Divine Right of Kings'—or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.
    "The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today ..."

~ Ayn Rand, from her article 'Collectivised Rights' [emphases in the original, except where noted]

"...it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity."

"[T]he myth of a supernatural recorder from whom nothing can be hidden, who lists all of a man’s deeds ... That myth is true, not existentially, but psychologically. The merciless recorder is the integrating mechanism of a man’s subconscious; the record is his sense of life. ....
   "What he does not know is that every day of his life is judgment day — the day of paying for the defaults, the lies, the contradictions, the blank-outs recorded by his subconscious on the scrolls of his sense of life. And on that kind of psychological record, the blank entries are the blackest sins.
    "A sense of life, once acquired, is not a closed issue. It can be changed and corrected — easily, in youth, while it is still fluid, or by a longer, harder effort in later years. Since it is an emotional sum, it cannot be changed by a direct act of will. It changes automatically, but only after a long process of psychological retraining, when and if a man changes his conscious philosophical premises.
    "Whether he corrects it or not, whether it is objectively consonant with reality or not, at any stage or state of its specific content, a sense of life always retains a profoundly personal quality; it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity."

~ Ayn Rand, from her article 'Philosophy and Sense of Life' (collected in her book The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature)

Why are some Māori protesting the new government? And what can we learn from it? [UPDATED]

 

SO LET'S FISK WHAT one of the Te Pati Māori (TPM) protest leaders said this morning, about why they've been out there trying to block traffic, because I think it's helpful to understand the protestors' objections to the new government's policies. And particularly revealing about a key difference on Te Tiriti.

Tureiti Moxon runs primary health provider Te Kōhao Health in Hamilton which is taxpayer-funded by Whānau Ora. She is against any rearrangement of Whānau Ora. She was also on the establishment board of the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora). Unsurprisingly, she is also against the new government's plan to bring Te Aka Whai Ora back into the mainstream health system. Before joining Te Kōhao Health, she worked for several years as a lawyer, working on Treaty claims. He has stood several times for Te Pāti Māori, and been their electoral chair for the Tainui electorate.

She is articulate, and seems representative both of those who've risen in protest against the policies of this government -- and those who've benefited from those of past governments. She told Corin Dann on Morning Report that the new government's policies are "anti-Māori" -- a "sweeping suite of policies" that are just, she says, "archaic."

THE "SUITE," SUMMARISED BY by interviewer Corin Dann, is what she claims to be an attack on Te Tiriti, on the Maori language, on the Maori health authority, and on a "smokefree" New Zealand. [her points are in italics]:

"[The new government] has been given sovereignty ... but what it doesn't have is the support of the people to whom a lot of those policies are aimed at."

Since her claim in about numbers: The number voting for TPM was in the thousands. The number out there this morning was in the hundreds. The number voting for the new governing parties is in the hundreds of thousands. But since Luxon has said he's going to govern for everyone, she has that point.

"In many ways we just feeling as if we're being attacked, every which way" she said, attacking the new government, "simply because a lot of their policies are ... anti-Māori policies."

Are they? Let's hear her argument.

"The worst of it is [the suite of policies is] taking us back a hundred years. It is taking us back to colonisation."

Really? Big claim. Still no argument.

"What we're saying is: No, we've ... worked too hard on our race relations [not just in] our organisations but in this country ... to bring about a better partnership in terms of Te Tiriti with the government and all those partners that we now have good relationships with."

The principle of partnership here is her key point. Which doesn't go back to colonisation, but only to Geoffrey Palmer and Richard Prebble -- and to Lord Cooke of Thorndon, whose Court of Appeal found, when asked by Palmer and Prebble to define (without offering any guidance from Parliament, as you'd expect from decenty-written law) what the principles of the Treaty might be, that it is "akin to a partnership." And which is, in fairness, what the new government says it will question via new legislation taken to a first reading in Parliament.

"They've decided to take back the power and control unto themselves" she says of that fairly tepid promise. "For a very long time ... iwi have been working very closely to bring about a partnership that actually has meaning, and is not just on paper.

But it's not even on paper. Cooke's Court only found something "akin" to a partnership, inviting further definition from lawmakers. 

In the meantime, "akin" is not "is."

Nonetheless, there's been significant momentum in the 36 years since to ignore that word "akin' and to cement in this idea of a full partnership -- as if that principle had been there since 1840, or had been enunciated in 1987 by the Court of Appeal.

And we might also ask: a partnership between whom exactly? That is to say, between the Crown (which Moxon acknowledges as one of the parties) and which particular individuals? Because, notice that she seems to be talking about a collective effort here, as if Māori as a collective should be co-governors, with some special class of rangatira acting as power-brokers on their behalf.  This is important in understanding her objections. 

"... [that] includes Maori in decision making ..."

Individual Maori make decisions every day about their own work and wellbeing. They're perfectly capable people. Why do they need the patronisation of a government? There was nothing in Te Tiriti requiring that. Nothing requiring they be in government -- even though many are, on their own merits.

"... and in co-governance ..."

Why? Te Tiriti never called for co-governance (see below). And the previous government's covert push to implement it was only partially successful. (Which suggests her main objection is to the break in momentum that she thinks this government represents.)

"... and with a swipe of the pen they decide, 'Nah, we're not having that any more'...."

And yet that's what governments (in whom she seems to put her faith) do all the time. And she does agree that this one has sovereignty. So we're back to her simply saying "I don't support it."

"... without even thinking about the consequences of what that actually means in terms of Te Tiriti O Waitangi, which has the guarantee of tino rangatiratanga; and there's no guarantee of tino rangatiratanga in the policies [inaudible]."

She's implying here that tino rangatiratanga must equal respect for Te Tiriti and the Maori language, for the existence of a Maori health authority and "smokefree" legislation, and support for widespread co-governance. Big claims! Respect for the first two can be agreed with -- even as we can debate what form that takes. The next two have no basis therefrom -- and in any case the majority of the "smokefree" legislation remains in place, unfortunately. 

Her last point, really, is the point in question here, and the one from which everything else would flow, if the last half-century's momentum (which she celebrates) were to continue.

"The Waitangi Tribunal has been around for about fifty years, and they have been the ones who have been the experts in Te Tiriti ..."

Not exactly. The Tribunal is only asked to hear and to advise the government of the day on alleged breaches of the Treaty, its hearings being adversarial (rather than any kind of partnership, or investigation), its historians being funded largely to seek out and highlight these alleged breaches, their reports on these breaches becoming (by their sheer volume) becoming the locus of modern-day historical research. And so if  they as historians and it as an institution have become experts in anything, it is primarily as experts in the Treaty's alleged misapplications, rather than in its ideal.  

There is a difference,

Note too that the Tribunal's findings are not and never have been binding on the government of the day. Depite all its apparent lustre, it is an advisory body only.

"... and in the principles ..."

No, the Tribunal is not even empowered to rule on the so-called principles -- which have developed in other courts as they have struggled to make sense of what this phrase means that inserted so unthinkingly into most law since. The Tribunal is empowered only to hear and advise on breaches of promise of Te Tiriti, not on any of that other legislation.

"...and in the development of Te Tirity jurisprudence. And what we're saying is that after fifty years of all that institutional knowledge is that everybody knows more about it than them."

No, I don't think that's what the new government is saying at all. One of the coalition partners (an actual partner) is saying it was a mistake thirty-six years ago to insert into legislation the phrase "the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi" without first defining it in legislation  -- a mistake, because it invited the courts to do the lawmakers' job for them, which one of the coalition partners is now trying to do.

"A lot of New Zealanders unfortunately do not know a lot about it..."

And this is very true. 

"...and they'd like it to disappear, as this government is trying to do now. To make it invisible. Well, it's not invisible, it's the founding document of this country."

It looks as if Ms Moxon knows very little about what this government is trying to do. Or at least, what one coalition partner is trying to do. Which, in this context, is to call for the undefined principles (dreamed up in 1987 and on) to be well defined. As all objective law should be. And not at all to touch what she calls the founding document.

"Whānau Ora  .... is an example of what New Zealand can look like: Maori looking after ourselves ..."

As the head of a Whānau Ora practice herself, Moxon is (like the well-heeled TPM president John Tamihere) a beneficiary of the taxpayer's funding. To be cruel, one might say it's more an example of the taxpayer looking after a Māori elite, like Tamihere, who funnel the crumbs to those they claim to represent.

"...Maori having control over our own health ..."

She's conflating two people here. Individual Maori do have control over their own health. And always have, And did just as much before the creation of the separatist health organisation that has missed all its own agreed targets. (Waikato Tainui leader Parekawhi Maclean saying (very kindly): "its inability to put in place the necessary level of capability and capacity to progress its key functions had hampered performance.") 

What she means is that some Maori have control over other the health of other Maori. Why does shared ancestry make that necessary? How does that help an individual's health outcomes?

I am hardly an advocate myself for a government health system of any kind. But a separatist system seems the worst of both worlds, particularly for individual Maori concerned with their own health, and forced into this system, for whom results have been less than stellar. Suggesting that prioritising kaupapa over medicine is perhaps not the best idea.

"...Māori having a say in what we would like to see, and what is needed, in our own communities ..."

Individual Māori, qua individuals, have a say in their community just as much as the next individual. It's becoming apparent that what she's advocating for is for some Maori (those like her and Tamihere et al) to speak on behalf of and 

"...and when they take those things away from us [that] we have worked so hard to stand up and to put into legislation and to get that real kind of partnership that we believe is necessary for us to thrive in this country as equals...."

This is the crux: Who's this "we" here?

She's not calling for all New Zealanders to be equal as individuals -- i.e., each of us enjoying equal individual rights and privileges under law per the third Treaty clause.  What she's after instead -- what she and others in her elite strata have worked so hard for, to achieve that momentum -- is for Māori as a collective to be made equal in political power to the government. With a Māori elite distributing the spoils.

That, to her and to many others, is what "partnership" truly means. Political power. 

It's a patronising collectivist vision that looks to government for power and largesse, and to individuals of every ancestry to be milch cows. It's not one envisioned by either treaty.

One-hundred and eighty-three years ago, Te Tiriti emancipated Māori slaves, and put an end to the idea that the mass of men here had been born with saddles on their back, with a few rangatira booted and spurred to ride them. That was the effect of Te Tiriti: to free taurekareka.

"... and they made it [the Māori Health System] out to be race based ..."

Isn't it?

"...in actual fact it's something that is needed in our country."

An already-failing separatist system is needed? I'm not sure she's even made an argument for that, beyond the argument that the ancestry of here and those like her should bestow upon them political power.

There was a name for that in mediaeval Europe: it was called feudalism.

"The government has to hear [this] because as long as it keeps pushing that  kind of rhetoric [?] and that kind of belief system, that's what's divisive, that's what's pulling this country apart, because we have a special place in this country, and that's [inaudible], and it's important that they get it right now." 

It is important they get it right. And I think they think they might.

Ned Fletcher argues that English and Māori texts of the Treaty
agree, and that both promise Māori self-governance.

HERE'S THE MOST IMPORTANT point she made -- and there are many. But this one stands out: that she  is talking at all times of Māori as a collective rather than of individual Māori. This helps reconcile the two apparently competing views of two persuasive recent views on the Treaty, aired in Ned Fletcher's recent book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi (which Moxon cites approvingly), and in Ewen McQueen's 2020 book One Sun in the Sky.

 Both books argue persuasively that the English and Māori texts do reconcile (which overturns the scholarship of several decades, since Ruth Ross first raised the issue fifty years ago), and both argue that Māori did cede sovereignty (without which any "partnership" would be moot in any case). 

But Fletcher argues that Māori (as a collective, through their rangatira) were promised self-governance, leading to partnership; whereas McQueen (writing before Fletcher's book) argues this paradigm makes no sense:

Taken to its logical conclusion, this paradigm sees iwi not so much as loyal subjects of Her Majesty's Government but rather co-regents expressing their own sovereignty. Advocates of this position assert the Treaty merely granted the Crown a partial concession to exercise authority over incoming settlers, while at the same time preserving for iwi ultimate authority over all things Maori. In effect it is argued that the Treaty established a dual sovereignty in New Zealand.

However, such thinking ignores both the Treaty itself and the historical context in which it was signed.

Start with the Treaty text. Much is made of the differences between the English and Maori versions. But one thing is certain - the word partnership appears in neither. The Treaty articles do not even imply a partnership in a constitutional sense. Rather they establish the British Crown as the ultimate legal authority in return for protection of Maori interests. The latter include land and chieftainship (rangatiratanga). However, that chieftainship is guaranteed within the context of the overarching sovereignty of the Crown.

As the Waitangi Tribunal noted in its 1987 Muriwhenua report: "From the Treaty as a whole it is obvious that it does not purport to describe a continuing relationship between sovereign states. Its purpose and effect was the reverse - to provide for the relinquishment by Maori of their sovereign status and to guarantee their protection upon becoming subjects of the Crown."

The tribunal's reference to the Treaty 'as a whole' is key. The Article Two guarantee of rangatiratanga must be understood in the context of the whole document. Iwi signed up to the whole Treaty, not just the second article. Article One establishes Crown sovereignty. In it chiefs agreed to 'give absolutely to the Queen of England forever the complete government over their land.' That's Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu's translation of the Maori version. It doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre.

[Hugh] Kawharu's translation of Article Three is equally straightforward. Maori took on 'the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England.' The Court of Appeal reinforced this in a key 1987 judgment, stating 'For their part the Maori people have undertaken a duty of loyalty to the Queen, [and] full acceptance of her Government.' Ironically this judgment also introduced the Treaty partnership concept that is now so popular. Full acceptance of Crown sovereignty is less fashionable.

The key difference is that Fletcher, I think, sees the Clause Two promise or "rangatiratanga" as a collective one, to be exercised by chiefly rangatira; whereas McQueen more properly sees the promise as applying individually, as a property right that could be enjoyed individually.

Just as Magna Carta was an agreement between nobles and king that came to recognise and protect individual rights of all, even commoners, so too does the recognition and protection of rangatiranga when seen individually come to do the same thing -- protecting all individual rights equally:

The preamble to the 1840 Te Tiriti makes clear that its purpose was to create a settled form of government and to secure peace and good order.

Article One confers on the Crown sovereignty or kāwanatanga (the right to make laws and to govern).

Article Two protects property rights and is based on Magna Carta principles. Magna Carta aimed to protect the English nobilities’ property rights by limiting the Crown’s powers. It catalysed a dynamic relationship between property rights and political power that led to the emergence of the modern British democracy. It created a basis for human rights protection by linking it to property rights. Magna Carta established the principle that no one is above the law – it helped establish the rule of law.

In Te Tiriti Article Two Queen Victoria promises ‘te tino rangatiratanga’ of their properties not just for rangatira and hapū, but for ‘nga tangata katoa o Nu Tirani’, that is ‘all the inhabitants of New Zealand’.

Article Three made Māori subjects of the Crown. It gave Māori equal rights with other Crown subjects, not additional or superior rights.

To use Moxon's words, but with this understanding: to thrive in this country as equals we all (as individuals) must take off our collectivist lenses...

Ewen McQueen argues that English and Māori texts of the Treaty 
agree, and that neither promise Māori self-governance.

UPDATE:

Writing back in mid-November, Moana Maniapoto confirms that Māori activists are interpreting rights to be collective, rather than individual -- the effect of equal rights being to make a Māori elite equal in political power to the government -- a clear grab for political power based on an incorrect understanding of rights.

She begins her opinion piece by quite explicitly opposing David Seymour "pushing individual rights over collective rights." So when Seymour clarify the Treaty's third clause to mean "All New Zealanders are equal under the law, with the same rights and duties," she opposes this because, she says:

Act interpret this to focus on individual rights. Not the obligation to ensure that all who share this land under the Treaty have equal enjoyment of their respective collective rights and responsibilities....

The "Tiriti-centric constitutional model" she demands would require power-sharing between collectives -- "Māori, Pākehā and tangata Tiriti, joining the dots to solving practical problems around housing, health, schools, water, environmental degradation . . .  roads."

Ayn Rand points out the flaw, and the power grab:

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.

Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By “legitimate,” I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)

For instance, the right of an industrial concern to engage in business is derived from the right of its owners to invest their money in a productive venture—from their right to hire employees—from the right of the employees to sell their services—from the right of all those involved to produce and to sell their products—from the right of the customers to buy (or not to buy) those products. Every link of this complex chain of contractual relationships rests on individual rights, individual choices, individual agreements. Every agreement is delimited, specified and subject to certain conditions, that is, dependent upon a mutual trade to mutual benefit.

This is true of all legitimate groups or associations in a free society: partnerships, business concerns, professional associations, labour unions (voluntary ones), political parties, etc. It applies also to all agency agreements: the right of one man to act for or represent another or others is derived from the rights of those he represents and is delegated to him by their voluntary choice, for a specific, delimited purpose—as in the case of a lawyer, a business representative, a labor union delegate, etc.

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

Any group that does not recognise this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.

Any doctrine of group activities that does not recognise individual rights is a doctrine of mob rule or legalised lynching.

The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine—and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like “The Divine Right of Kings”—or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today ...

Thankful

 

It's Thanksgiving weekend in the States -- oddly, one of the few American celebrations we haven't imported here, but should, because the celebration is universal. Canadian philosopher Stephen Hicks for example is "thankful to be an individual, to be living in the modern world, and to be able to enjoy its wonders — good food and plenty for me and those I care about, safe travel to exotic places and home again, books and music and art and conversation with the many active-minded and free-thinking people living vital lives."

He backs it up with three quotations to who just how thankful we should be to be an individual in this modern world:

From William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, on life in medieval Europe:
“Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.
“Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible. Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning. There were no newspapers or magazines to inform the common people of great events; occasional pamphlets might reach them, but they were usually theological and, like the Bible, were always published in Latin, a language they no longer understood.” (pp. 21-22).

From Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:
“Difficulty of empathy, of genuinely entering into the mental and emotional values of the Middle Ages, is the final obstacle. The main barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.” (p. xix).

From Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy:
“In the Middle Ages … [m]an was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spirited individual, and recognised himself as such.” (p. 70).

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes"

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred [and its result] is always the same."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 lecture 'Global Balkanisation,' examining the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics -- quoted in Tom Bowden's post 'Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us'

"Protecting the right and freedoms of the individual is the key to peace and prosperity for humanity."

 

I have no idea who (or what) Max Justice is, beyond this quote above, which I thoroughly endorse. Understanding it is  vitally important: 

"Protecting the right and freedoms of the individual is the key to peace and prosperity for humanity."

The one follows from the other: To see each other as individuals, not as a "member" of some collective, is the beginning of peaceful co-existence. Individualism, properly espoused and protected, is the antidote to the demands for "group rights" exploding in the Middle East and around the world. 

Take off your collectivist glasses about which group a piece of land "belongs" to, or not, and look instead at where individual rights are understood and protected.

If we are ever to banish war (the second greatest evil human societies can inflict), we need to understand the roots of war:

"If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation, and no peace among nations."

Start there. 

"...it doesn’t say anything about the man himself..."

Thomas Merton
photo by John Howard Griffin via an article by Daniel Esparza in 'Aleteia'

"You think you can identify a man by giving his date of birth and his address, his height, his eyes’ colour, even his fingerprints. Such information will help you put the right tag on his body if you should run across his body somewhere full of bullets, but it doesn’t say anything about the man himself ... If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

―Thomas Merton, from his autobiographical novel My Argument with the Gestapo [hat tip Carrie-Ann Biondi]

 

"The pronouncements of progressive politicians, woke academics, and senior bureaucrats increasingly sound like characters out of 'Atlas Shrugged'."

"A friend who shall remain nameless suggested something last week that I can't shake: The pronouncements of progressive politicians, woke academics, and senior bureaucrats increasingly sound like characters out of [Ayn Rand's 1953 novel] 'Atlas Shrugged.'
    "I liked Atlas Shrugged--still do--but also shared the common view that the villains were overdrawn. And as of the 1950s, when Rand was writing it, they were. As of the 2020s, not so much. Merit is racist. Individualism is evil. Objective truth is an illusion.
    "There's an op-ed to be written, with direct quotes from leading contemporary progressives and direct quotes from Wesley Mouch, Robert Stadler, and Floyd Ferris. The parallels are amazing."

~ Charles Murray

"It’s not just high taxes that are driving people out of cities.
    "There are other costs—moral, social, and cultural—when you create communities that spurn property rights and celebrate looting.
    "IRS data only tell us so much. If you want to better understand those costs, pick up 'Atlas Shrugged.'"

~ Jon Miltimore, from his post 'America’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Moment Has Already Arrived, New IRS Data Show'

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 1 - By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

Good to see one of the Blue Team explicitly pushing back against identity politics. A rare thing, but necessary -- and especially good, because he clearly states the cure: individualism.

What is identity politics [writes National's Simon O'Connor], and why does it matter to you?
Well, the first thing to understand about identity politics is that you don’t matter. All that matters is what group, or tribe, are you are part of:
Are you black or white, Māori or Pākehā; are you gay or straight, young or old – in the fact, there are so many various and possible group identities are almost endless.
What isn’t included is you – your life, your experiences, your thoughts, desires, or ambitions.
To embrace identity politics is to say that the group is always more important than the individual. And so, all that matters is that you fit into some sort of group, usually based on your race, or gender, or ethnicity....
At the heart of identity politics is the rejection of you as an individual. You are no more than the groups you are assigned to. And once in these groups, there is no hope, there is no redemption. Just perpetual victimhood and oppression.
We should reject identity politics and intersectionality and instead celebrate everyone for who they are in their own right. Martin Luther King’s words are truer than ever – let us judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. 

Right on!

So, since Labour-Lite are finally realising they're little more than just Labour-Without-the-Identity Politics -- and pushing back on it -- and we're entering an election year in which identity politics is already front and centre -- as many "adult human females" and "middle-class cis white boomer males" might already appreciate -- it seems like a good time to repost (in several parts) an excerpt from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Today: What is Identity Politics?

“Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought but has now 

become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era’s most potent 

political forces. This is the revival of tribalism in thinking and politics.” 

~ Keith Windschuttle 

"If the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then 

civilisation is already irredeemably lost." 

~ Yaron Brook

[...]
This particular brand of nonsense comes under the bigger heading of “identity politics,” but it could just as easily, and more simply, be identified as the modern-day tribalism that it represents. It is a politics that identifies people by their group identity in order to effectively silence them – the Christchurch killings being a particularly gruesomely extreme example of what that can mean. Yet it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

I’m going to start by talking about what this thing called identity politics is, where it came from, how it has morphed since – how identity politics has been used to shut down speech -- and what you can do to counter it.

PART 1: What is Identity Politics?

“We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern coloured leaders 

in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, 

race men, and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and 

another is condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race, 

the motive may be good, but the method is bad. 

It is an effort to cast out Satan by Beelzebub.”

~ Frederick Douglass

I write this here today as a cisgendered, heterosexual white male[1]. So as everybody imbued with this notion would “know,” what I say here should only be taken seriously by other folk who share that identity. Because as “everybody knows,” your identity – your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class – these are the things that truly define you.

You speak “as a woman of colour.”

You speak “as a disabled lesbian.”

I speak, Galt forbid, “as a white man.”

In more-and-more meetings and debates in recent years, these words “as a/azza” have become not just the accepted way to begin speaking – like a reflexive cough at the start of every speech -- like some natty politically-correct version of reciting your whakapapa – but an implicit admission that one’s views will be irretrievably coloured (ahem), either positively or negatively, by the group of which one is an unchosen member.

American politician Ayanna Presley put it bluntly at progressive activists’ 2019 Netroots Convention, warning folk that only those raising the right voices, coming to the table “as a something,” were welcome there:

If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalised and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice!

Ayanna Presley is black. Her call – “brown face, brown voice; black face, black voice” – is “the very essence of identity politics.” Yet only five decades before, in the vanguard of change (or so he hoped) Martin Luther King declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

"One day"? King’s day has still not come. Judged by contemporary cultural affairs, that blessed day may have to wait a few more decades yet.

The morality of identity politics can seem benign, when for instance the new Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle guest-edits Vogue [as she did back in 2019], choosing for its famous cover not the usual stylishly sleek model but instead a rainbow coalition of appropriately figured stars (Fig. 2).

The message behind her choice of cover stars was clear enough [argues the Spectator's Joanna Rossiter]: you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are – be it female, transgender, black or freckled.

Yet that, right there, is the identitarian message: “you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are.” Because of the group into which you fell accidentally at birth.

The group into which one falls may be defined by race. Or it may be by class, by ethnicity, by disability – by freckles – by hair colour (if you’re a ginger[2]) -- or by geographical area. The important thing here however is that while you may choose your ideas and your values, you did not choose your group.

(And everyone is treated in this ‘lowest-common-denominator’ way; as if this is all about you that really matters.)

And also, as you will no doubt have noticed by now, while all groups are allegedly equal, there will be implied a clear sense of victimhood making some groups more equal than others.

There are some groups, we see, whose speech should not be set free. ["Cis white males" and "adult human females" increasingly prominent among them.]

We’ll discuss this galloping inequality shortly. But the fact your defining group (or groups) is unchosen is important here. It’s important because it ignores, and makes un-important, every human being’s defining attribute: which is their reasoning power. This modern tribalism serves to remove reason from modern debate, and to elevate instead the trivial, the accidental, the irrational.

Philosopher Tara Smith insists that “it's not irrational by mistake …. It's brazenly irrational. It's irrational on principle. It is anti rational.”

Its view is: we don't need reason. I don’t respect it. I don't go by reason. I go by race, ethnicity, geography, et cetera. Solidarity with my group is more important than evidence or logic. Tribe over truth.
    It erases the individual. You personally do not matter. [What’s important is] you “as a woman.” Now, you’ve always got to be on the lookout for the “azzas” – “as a woman,” “as a gay woman,” “as a white male” … “Azza.” But notice that you, the individual, Thomas, Maria, … You're a token. You're one of them – of your “azza” group.

By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

This in a nutshell is “identity politics.” It’s as if they think your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class are what determines your thought. And in fact, yes, this is precisely what “they” do think. Determinism is not dead, it has just shrivelled up and morphed its way into what’s now called “identity politics.”

CONTINUED IN PART 2: 'Determinism is not dead, it just smells that way'

[1] For those unaware of this nomenclature, “cisgendered” means “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”
[2] Tim Minchin, “Only a ginger can call a ginger ‘ginger’” – excerpt from ‘Prejudice’ (2009)