Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

I pay homage to Ayn Rand, for how she helped me live better. Not just me, but millions of readers. She was not my prime inspiration: my first libertarian author was Hayek, and my favorite was and remains Bastiat, through another lover of which I discovered Ayn Rand. But my! an inspiration she was, in the literal meaning: not so much for ideas that I already knew, though she certainly helped me articulate them like I wouldn't otherwise have, but more so for the lofty ideal of the self to which she raised me. How glad I am she wrote what she did write! I never ascribed Rand any kind of infallibility, and I see no reason why she should be either held or rejected based on such an absurd standard, even though she may have claimed such a standard for herself amongst her followers. I admire her, and that doesn't require me to follow her blindly. Actually I think you can't fully appreciate an author if you're unable to partake in that dynamic critical conversation with her work, by which you see her deep failings as well as her lofty genius, that only appears greater by contrast.

In Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, Clay Shirky clearly explains the issue of a posteriori knowledge versus a priori knowledge -- the essential theme of austrian economics and libertarian politics. However, in the end, he not only fails to conceptualize the issue, he also steps into the trap laid by relativists: he confuses reality with knowledge about reality (a clear case of insanity, as defined by general semantics), and implies that we create meaning rather than discover it.

The nuance is tiny, but as Aristotle said, the least deviation from truth will be multiplied later. Human creation of meaning entails that meaning is an arbitrary product of human will, and that any disputes arising from divergent opinions cannot be solved by reason but only by brute force. Discovery of meaning entails that meaning is objective, and that disputes can be resolved by reason and other peaceful means. Thus, what appears as a mere detail in something as fundamental as metaphysics and epistemology has dramatic consequences when you later study ethics and politics!

Of course, Clay doesn't explore the political consequences of this tiny detail in his essay. His mistake is benign, and I'm sure he himself would be prone to dampen the mistake rather than amplify it, if he were to be taken in a more political discussion. Still, by admitting such wrong premises, Clay abandons all possibility of arguing back against those people who preach Evil. If he's not doing a disservice to himself, he is doing one to his readers. He is both a victim and a disseminator of one of the fundamental memes by which Evil disarms good people.

College Profs Denounce Western Culture, Move to Caves. (Cám ơn, GNXP).

At long last some coherence! Integrity, the cardinal virtue of a philosopher, is for the philosopher to live according to his philosophy. Not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk -- and precisely the walk that he talks about. Of course, walking the walk is more important; it's just that without the talk, you're not a philosopher; and what I meant above was that being a philosopher is less important than being a successful human being; but of course, being a philosopher can be a powerful means to the end of being a successful human being.

... is exactly what dominates the Intelligentsia in France and other countries.

You do not endorse Stalin. You do not call yourself a communist. You do not declare your love for the regime. You do not call on people to support the Soviets. Ever. Under any circumstances. You claim to be an independent-minded idealist. You don't understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break. You believe in open-mindedness. You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country. You are frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the working man. You think that the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works. You believe in peace. You yearn for international understanding. You hate fascism. You think the capitalist system is corrupt. You say it over and over again and you say nothing, nothing more.

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West by Stephen Koch

Of course, Stalin also had more obvious agents.

Le premier capitaliste était la première cellule à garder des réactifs et des catalyseurs pour un usage futur dans sa paroi cellulaire. Le capitalisme, c'est la vie. Le socialisme, c'est la dissolution de la vie dans le magma originel. Le socialisme c'est l'abandon de tout moyen de production -- et donc de survie -- à la fosse commune. Le socialisme, c'est la mort. 100 millions d'eurasiens ne sont plus là pour en témoigner.

Today is the centenary of the birthday of Ayn Rand, the great thinker of Liberty, who alone dared to defend Capitalism on moral grounds! Let's celebrate, together with the ISIL, Libertarian International, or the french ADEL!

Parfois, je me dédouble. Armé d'un objet coupant, je me tranche en deux, parfois même en trois, en quatre, en dix, voire plus! Alors s'ensuit une bataille acharnée, de laquelle une unique des parties de ce qui fut moi sortira seule victorieuse. La certitude de cette brutale fatalité écarte toute pitié d'un affrontement devant lequel le fratricide paraît bénin. L'arme apporte bien sûr à celui qui la possède initialement, ou à celui qui s'en empare, un avantage meurtrier. Mais parfois la bataille dans sa sauvagerie primordiale se mène à coups de dents et souvent l'anthropophagie en est l'issue pécheresse damnant irrémissiblement son auteur aux flammes d'un enfer où l'horreur de son geste le poursuivra pour l'éternité. Les vaincus réduits à l'état de miettes finissent dans les poubelles de l'histoire, vite oubliés dans le mépris de tous, sans que personne ne trouve à s'émouvoir le moins du monde de leur sort. Le vainqueur, par contre, auréolé de sa gloire assassine, a la part belle, et devient, lui, un moi régénéré, que tous alentour regarderont plus favorablement que le moi d'avant. Et cependant, cette victoire reste éphémère, car bientôt ce vainqueur d'un jour doit se résoudre à un acte sacrificiel, et par son auto-mutilation appeler au suivant de ces cycles de renouveau par la destruction.

Cette semaine, j'ai fini de traduire en français Philosophy: Who Needs It. Les non-anglophones pourront donc découvrir, modulo les lacunes de ma traduction ce chef d'oeuvre de Ayn Rand: La philosophie: qui en a besoin.

My Creed

I do not choose to be a common man.
It is my right to be uncommon -- if I can.
I seek opportunity -- not security.
I do not wish to be a kept citizen,
humbled and dulled by having the state look after me.
I want to take the calculated risk;
to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed.
I refuse to barter incentive for a dole.
I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence;
the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia.
I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout.
I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat.
It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid;
to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations
and to face the world boldly saying, this I have done.
All this is what it means to be an American.

Dean Alfange

This poem was the basis for Douglas Rasmussen's speech in Aix. I thought I should not only share it with friends, but cast it in gold into my blog. Yes, I am an American, just born in the wrong country. Actually, America is an idea, not a country. Someday, the whole world will be America: land of the free, home of the brave. In the meantime, America experiences a relative shortage of Americans.

Qui sont les résistants, qui sont les terroristes? Qui sont les assassins, qui sont les héros? Un indicateur qui marche souvent étonnament bien: prendre à contre-pied la presse nationale socialiste. Mais bon, comme passer de cet indicateur approximatif à un principe systématique?

Do you prefer X or Y?

Mu. The question is irrelevant to me, because it's not a choice I have or am ever likely to have.

OK, but what if you could make this choice?

How so?

For instance, imagine you had a magic wand that you could wave either way, to achieve either X or Y?

You mean a device possessing a great power capable of achieving either X or Y?

Il faudra qu'un jour j'écrive un long billet sur la différence entre Droit et Fait. L'absence de conceptualisation de la distinction catégorique nette entre Droit et Fait semble être une caractéristique commune à de nombreux esprits intelligents qui rejettent le libéralisme. Le Fait est de l'ordre du Métaphysique, de ce qui est donné, de cette Réalité "qui reste quand on cesse d'y croire". Le Droit est de l'ordre de l'Éthique, de ce qui doit être, de cette Action Humaine qui est le fait de l'homme parce qu'il y croit. (Notons qu'à défaut de lui connaître un meilleur nom, j'appelle ici Éthique ce continuum qui contient entre autres la morale individuelle autant que l'espace juridique du Droit, qui se distinguent en ce que le premier fonde ses évaluations sur les opinions individuelles, tandis que le suivant fonde les siennes sur les connaissances communes, sans parler de tous les variantes imaginables.)

Là où la confusion catégorique entre Fait et Droit devient la plus grotesque est quand un bienpensant de quelque bord en vient à rejeter avec véhémence un point de vue sous prétexte qu'il mène à des conclusions odieuses. Exemple récent, un communiste rejetait le point de vue Darwiniste, sous prétexte qu'il promouvrait l'exploitation du faible par le fort. Dans cette démarche comme partout dans le reste de notre échange épistolaire, il était incapable de distinguer métaphysique et juridique, incapable de faire la différence entre discours normatif et discours descriptif. Or, interpréter normativement en "cela DOIT être" ce qui se veut le descriptif "cela EST" relève de l'erreur de catégorie; et cette erreur est invisible à qui est innocent de la distinction entre Fait et Droit. D'où la psychopathologie qui consiste à redouter et vouloir censurer un point de vue descriptif sous prétexte qu'avec ladite erreur de catégorie on obtiendrait une conclusion gênante. Encore une phobie basée sur une croyance irrationnelle de l'ordre de l'erreur catégorique -- où Albert Ellis et Alfred Korzybski se complètent. (Pour un esprit rationnel, tous les points de vue rationnels sur la réalité sont valables, et de par l'existence de la réalité, ils se recoupent forcément de façon cohérente moyennant réinterprétation adéquate, tout contradiction étant dans l'observation ou l'interprétation et non pas dans la structure objective sous-jacente. Pour resortir un vocabulaire de matheux, ces points de vue sont des homéomorphismes locaux dressant des cartes d'une variété et localement identiques à isomorphisme près sur les domaines où ils se recouvrent.)

Henry Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality took the classical view of ethics, debunking usual mistakes and fallacies, reaffirming the essence of what must be retained. It was a necessary cleanup and restatement of ethics; however, it didn't try to study the nature of the foundations of ethics but to explore what kind of ethics can stand firmly or not on its foundations.

Thus, Daniel C. Dennett's Freedom Evolves can be seen as a complementary text. It establishes the modern foundations upon which ethics can be rebuilt, and related to the sciences of nature: physics, biological evolution, economics. And at the same time, it avoids to delve in the realm of ethics itself (and reveals several time the wrongheaded statist ontology of the author, though in a few isolated marginal remarks orthogonal to the discourse of the book).

Finally, Ayn Rand, in such books as The Virtue of Selfishness or Philosophy, Who Needs It?, gives rational foundations to Ethics, relating it to Metaphysics and Epistemology. And she even studies the psycho-epistemology of anti-morality.

Mon camarade Sylvain Poirier, dans une interrogation métaphysique, ne conçoit pas que deux êtres différents puissent avoir le destin identique d'une mort physique suivie du même néant: comment pourrait-il y avoir un avenir identique [après la mort] à partir de vies différentes? Voilà qui m'inspire cette parabole.

Dear Roderick,

in your blog entry Are We All Consequentialists Now?, you argue against consequentialism. What a joke! Your opposition between consequences and principles is a false dichotomy. The objective world is one and does not depend on the point of view taken. When you consider things up to isomorphism, you realize that consequentialism is but the requirement that theories be logically coherent. Denying consequentialism is denying that logic applies in philosophical matters. Deontics and utilism (to reuse the term by Hazlitt instead of the over-ended "utilitarianism" -- but then why not usism?) are but different points of view, and can but coincide in their conclusions. As Bastiat would put it, there are Harmonies in Nature. These harmonies are but the correspondances between various points of view due to the fact that they all valid points of view but describe the very same underlying structure from various different angles. Any possible contradiction is but a mistake in whoever reaches an absurd conclusion, and not an indictment of the coherence of the universe. There is no contradiction in the universe. Let's leave philosophical dilemmas to absurdists.

Roderick replied:

Last wednesday, I met Mr. Libertarianism @ Japan, one of the happy few japanese libertarians. Quite a nice fellow.

In the last few months, I've read a few books by Ayn Rand. Each was quite an agreable surprise, despite my already knowing much about it. Recommended reads.

I am not a Libertarian. At least not in the sense argued against by Daniel C. Dennett in chapter 4 his book Freedom Evolves.

With Dubya promising to spend zillions of dollars to send a few privileged civil servants to Mars, I am irresistibly reminded of this quote from one of my favorite books, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman (RIP) and Charles Weingartner:

Consider this: The first hole ever dug on the moon by a man-made machine is now done. It is the most expensive hole in the history of the human race. Now what does that mean? How do we know whether this is one of man's noblest achievements or if it is a game being played by a small group of lunatics for their own amusement -- at our expense?

Postman hits the nerve, he knows what questions to ask, what assumptions to question. But being a depraved leftist, he can provide no justifiable criterion to answer. Ayn Rand does, in her essay Collectivized Ethics, as included in her essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness. Too bad it's not on the web yet, but here's a purchase well worth it: concise, compelling, to the point. And no, I prefer not to retranslate to English the relevant excerpt back from the French translation on my laps.

Quel nul je fais! Avec son tact habituel, Hervé de Quengo me fait prendre conscience de ce que lors de mon passage à la radio, j'ai erronément attribué à Henry Hazlitt un texte qui était de Leonard Read: I, Pencil. De plus, j'avais oublié qui, dans les années 1950, avait réintroduit le mot "libertarian" dans son acception moderne. Mea Magna Culpa.