Translated from German by
Ohad Osterreicher[1]
“We paint
the world to ourselves as we like – until everything breaks down and no longer
holds.”
We live in the age of the American Empire.
It can be that this empire will someday crumble. In the foreseeable future,
however, it is here to stay, not on account of its military strength but first
and foremost because of its ideological power. For the American empire has
achieved something truly remarkable: the internalization of its core belief
system as an intellectual taboo into the minds of most people.
Granted,
all states rest upon aggressive violence, and the USA is no exception. The
United States as well do not hesitate to annihilate everyone who opposes their
legislative despotism. Though the USA had thus far employed little actual
violence to have its orders submissively followed because the overwhelming
majority of the population and especially of the opinion-forming intellectuals
have accepted the system of values and convictions which makes up the American
empire.
According
to the official, USA approved belief system, we are all equally intelligent and
reasonable people, who are confronted with the same “harsh reality” and are
bound to the same facts and truths. Of course, it is true, that even in the age
of the American empire, in the USA, people do not live in the best of all
worlds. There are many more problems to be solved. Though with the American
system of a democratic state, humanity has found the perfect institutional
framework which makes the next step in the direction of a perfect world
possible; and if only would the American system of democracy takeover
worldwide, would the way to perfection be clear, smooth and free.
The
single legitimate form of government is democracy. All other forms of
government are worse, and any government is better than none. Democratic states
like the USA are of the people, by the people and for the people. In democracies
no one rules over the other; instead, the people rule over themselves and are
thus free. Taxes in democratic states are therefore contributions and payments
for governmentally provided services; accordingly, tax avoiders are thieves,
who take without paying. To provide shelter for fleeing thieves is thus an act
of aggression against the people, from whom they are trying to escape.
Though
there are still other forms of governments around the world. There are
monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies, and there are feudal landowners,
tribes, and warlords. And for this reason, democratic states often must
necessarily deal with non-democratic states. Eventually, all states must be
converted to the American ideal, because only democracy allows for a peaceful
and continual change for the better.
Democratic
states like the USA and its European allies are inherently peaceful and do not
wage war against each other. If they must fight any wars all at, then these are
preventive wars of defense and liberation against aggressive and undemocratic
states, that is, just wars. All countries and territories that are presently in
war with or occupied by American troops or its European allies – Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iraq, Libyan, Syrian, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen – were therefore
guilty of aggression and their war waging and occupation on behalf of the
democratic West were an act of self-defense and liberation. However, there is
still much to be done. Especially Russia and China still pose a huge threat and
must be liberated, in order to make the world finally safe.
Private
property, markets, and profits are useful institutions, but a democratic state
must ensure that with the appropriate legislation, private property and profits
are acquired and used in a socially responsible manner and that markets
function efficiently. Moreover, markets and profit-seeking entrepreneurs cannot
produce public goods and are thus incapable of satisfying any social needs. And
they cannot take care of the truly needy. Only the state can take care of
social needs and the less fortunate. The state alone can, through the finance
of public goods and aid to the poor, increase the public welfare, and diminish
poverty and the number of the needy, if completely not eliminate.
Especially the state has to put the private
vice of greed of the pursuit of profit under control. Greed and the pursuit of
profit were the leading causes of the most recent large financial crisis.
Reckless financiers generated an irrational exuberance among the public, which
ultimately had to crash into reality. The market was wrecked, and only the
state stood ready to save the day. Only the state, through appropriate
regulation and supervision of the banking industry and financial markets, can
prevent such a thing from happening again. Banks and companies went bankrupt,
yet the state and its central banks held ground and protected the money and
jobs of the workers.
Advised by the leading and best-paid
economists in the world, states and especially the USA have discovered the
causes of economic crises and realized that in order to get out of an economic
mess, the people must simultaneously consume more as well as invest more. Every
cent under the mattress is a cent withheld from consumption and investment, which
in turn impairs future consumption and investment expenditure. In a recession,
spending must first of all and under all circumstances be increased; and when
the people do not spend enough of their own money, the state has to do it
instead. Prudently, states have this option, for their central banks can
produce any necessary liquidity. If billions of Dollars or Euros are not
enough, then trillions will do; and if trillions do not meet the goal, then
surely quadrillions will. Only massive state expenditure can prevent an
otherwise unavoidable economic meltdown. In particular, unemployment is the
result of low consumption: people who do not have enough money to buy consumer
goods; this problem must be remedied by providing them with higher wages or
higher unemployment benefits.
When
the last financial crisis is finally overcome, the democratic state can and
must devote itself once more to the really urgent remaining problems of
humanity: the battle against inequality, the elimination of all unjust
discrimination, and the control of the global environment and the global
climate in particular.
In
principle, all people are equal. Differences are only apparent, shallow and
meaningless: some people are white, some brown, some black, some are big,
others are small; some are fat and others thin; some are male, and some are
female; some speak English and others Polish or Chinese as mother tongue. These
are accidental human traits. It is a coincidence that some people possess these
and some do not. But accidental traits like these have no influence whatsoever
on and do not correlate with mental properties like motivation, time preference
or intellectual abilities, and they do not contribute to the explanation of
economic and social success, especially of income and wealth. Mental and
psychic properties have no physical, biological or ethical basis and are
limitlessly malleable. In this regard is everyone, except for a few
pathological individual cases, equal to the other, and every nation has made in
the course of history a contribution to civilization of equal value or would
have done so, if only it would have gotten the same chance. Seemingly obvious
differences are solely the result of different external circumstances and
education. All differences in income and achievements between Whites, Asians,
and Blacks, women and men, Latins, Anglos-Saxons and Thais as well as
Christians, Hindus, Protestants, and Moslems would disappear, if only equality
of opportunity would be established. If instead it will be discovered, that all
these different accidental groups are unequally represented in and distributed
across different levels of income, wealth, or professional status, some are
richer and more successful than others, then this demonstrates unjust
discrimination; and such discrimination must be counterbalanced through
appropriate, targeted affirmative action on behalf of the state, in which the
discriminators have to compensate the unjustly discriminated.
And
the studies of the leading and best paid social scientists have clearly shown,
who, above all, are the discriminators. The people in question are first and
foremost white heterosexual males and the institution of the traditional,
patriarchal organized family. It is, therefore, most notably this group of
people and this institution which must compensate all other groups and
apologize to all other forms of social organization.
But
this would not do. The reparations to all disadvantaged, to all victims of
inequality and discrimination, require likewise strong governmental support of
multiculturalism. The highly developed and white male dominated countries of
the Western world have obtained their wealth at the expense of the inhabitants
of all other regions of the world and are caught in a disastrous and prejudiced
particularism and nationalism. This situation lends itself to be overcome
through the promotion and systematic incentivization of immigration of people
from different, foreign countries and cultural environments, in order to ensure
that the foreign immigrants could finally unleash their full human potential
and simultaneously replace the Western parochialism with an authentic cultural
diversity.
And
with the victory over the disastrous particularism and nationalism through a
systematic policy of multiculturalism is one finally able to turn to the
crucial stride toward a solution to the undoubtedly biggest global, borderless
and world-encompassing problem of climate change. Divergent particularistic and
nationalistic interests have thus far lead to the fact that the production and
the consumption of non-renewable energy sources were left mostly unregulated
and worldwide uncoordinated. And that is why, as the leading and best-paid
climate researchers have undoubtedly proven, is the whole globe threatened by
unimaginable catastrophes: floods, strong and sudden rising sea levels and the
emergence of fatal ecological disequilibria and instabilities. Only through a
worldwide, concentrated action by all states, and ultimately the establishment
of a supranational world government under the leadership of the USA and an
enforced systematic regulation of any production and consumption activities,
can this life-threatening danger be avoided. “The common good comes before the
individual good” – this is above all, what the problem of climate change shows,
and it is on the states and especially on the USA to permanently implement this
principle.
Now, I tell you no secret when I admit
that I hold this for a massive pile of rubbish, for complete nonsense and a
highly dangerous one at that – but I also do not belong to the
leading and best-paid economics and social scientists, and of climate research,
I understand nothing at all! Except that I know, for example, that a global
climate warming is no global problem, but one that affects people in different
places of the globe entirely differently, a curse for one is a boon for the
other, and insofar downright forbids a global solution.
Question: who are we to thank for this
nonsense, whom does it benefit, and how is it that we are fed daily with it by
the official media?
Here I
want to hint at the answer only very briefly. It has two parts. One has to do
with the institution of a state, and especially of a democratic state, with its
occupants and representatives. And the other has to do with the intellectuals.
The state is a monopoly of
legislation and law enforcement. In all conflicts, including those which it or
its representatives are involved in, the state or people appointed by the state
decide who is right or wrong. The predictable result is: the state is always
right, in everything that does. Whether robbed, plundered, killed, lied to and
threatened in the name of the state – or summarized in single sentence: when
force is exerted on other people and violence is used against other persons – everything
can and everything will be painted by it and its agents as just and assigned
with another, deceptive and attractive name. This makes the institution of the
state naturally attractive for all people who would like to rob, plunder, kill,
lie, defraud other people, that is, use violence against others. Above all, it
is these kinds of people who therefore try to infiltrate and take over the
institution of the state. And if, as under democratic conditions, the entrance
in and the occupation of the state stands free and open for everyone, that is,
when it becomes a downright competition for
votes between power thirsty crooks, then it is to expect, that the persons who
will get to the top of the state are those who possess the greatest talent of
rhetorically covering up their own predatory, treacherous and murderous
intentions and selling these as good deeds to the voting masses. In short: The
best demagogues, the best pied pipers, and corrupters get to the top.
Though
when one looks at these democratically elected politicians and members of
parliament, whom day by day impose their obvious megalomaniac will though law
or decree on millions of people– can one only marvel. Because these people are
as a rule not some kind of formidable, impressive alpha males or females, but
an epitome of mediocracy or merely a collection of losers, idiots and failures,
who have never in their entire life produced a product or rendered a service
which someone would have voluntarily bought with his own money.
And
faced with these tragic figures, who grandiosely claim to be “our” highest
representatives, the question then arises, whether such light-calibrated people
are even in the position of conceiving by themselves the entire nonsense which
they tell us every day, and furthermore, whether they have what it takes to
come up with the diverse justifications and rationalizations for this nonsense
which they everywhere feed us.
There
one surely has a considerable doubt! And that leads me directly to the second
part of my answer to the question of the originators and beneficiaries of the
above described “politically correct” view of the world and the nature of
things: the intellectuals, or put more precisely, those intellectuals who
occupy themselves with social, economic and philosophical question and
problems, and their connection to the state and its leaders.
As in
the case of the politicians, so is there in the case of the intellectuals
hardly a person who through her intellectual work, her writings and speeches,
for these are what she produces, that could secure a comfortable livelihood and
income. The market demand for such products is low and is furthermore subject
to large deviations. Only a small number of intellectuals would succeed in
making a profession out of their writings and speeches. The vast majority of
actual or alleged intellectuals would be advised to conduct their scientific
interests as a mere inner vocation and to earn their livelihood elsewhere, by
the practice of a normal civilian profession. But this naturally contradicts
the feeling of self-esteem of an intellectual, and all those who view
themselves as such. The intellectuals are convinced of the importance and value
of their work like no other group and are accordingly resentful when the
alleged appropriate high social recognition fails to materialize.
What
is then left for them instead? They are usually not suitable for politics, for
they are typically too honest and wonkish, too shy, awkward, introverted and
particularly antisocial. And for this reason, they mostly lack the desire for
power, which is precisely what makes a politician.
But the intellectuals are
naturally smart enough to know that even if they are not made to be
politicians, they nevertheless need the politicians to get the money required
for a comfortable living. And they obviously also know what they must offer as a service in return so to
get the biggest possible cut of their pillage: namely well-sounding
justifications for continually expanding the powers of the state, and “bold”
visions and programs with noble, well-intentioned goals, for example, that of
“equality of all people” which cannot ever be
achieved, no one can ever achieve, but
precisely because of this one never has to give up on, but can repetitively
revive and ceaselessly renew.
And
so it comes to an unholy alliance: that of the early, monarchical times between
church and crown, and that of today, in the American age, between democratic
politicians and intellectuals. The result? Never before were there so many
politicians and above all so many alleged intellectuals as well who live and
indulge in luxuries at the expanse of an ever-decreasing number of productive
persons. And never before, in order to stay among the intellectuals, have the
numerous and large universities, as the publicly funded and supported citadels
of intellectual power and influence and the breeding ground of future
politicians and intellectuals, produced so much horrific intellectual nonsense
and contributed to the misleading of the public as in our times.
In light of this fact, what can one do? I am afraid that
not much – except to repetitively and openly call out the whole hoax. This
means that for one thing, to recognize and describe the politicians for what
they really are: a band of liars, crooks, robbers, murderers, and associates to
murder; and treat them accordingly with contempt, scorn, and ridicule. But also
their intellectual masterminds and assistants, without whom the politicians
could never carry out their evil work, must be targeted, and as the first step
toward a return to normalcy and sound human understanding, to common sense, it
is imperative to push for the financial draining of the universities. Not only
should all centers for Blacks, Latins, women, gender, and Queer-studies, and
everything else that there is of this then unheard of exotica, be closed, but
also the social science departments altogether, starting with political science
and history, through sociology and up to economics and social and economic
statistics (whose statistics also serve the goals of uncovering ever new
“inequalities” and to call for redistribution or reeducation!) And likewise
should the profession of the academic literary studies and criticism and, as
much as it hurt me to say, the profession of the academic philosophers as well
be thinned out. And the people who believe, that they know how one controls the
climate, one should issue them a certificate of illness and send them for
treatment in a psychiatric clinic.
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This
does not mean that one should have anything in principle against the work of
political scientists, sociologists, economists, statisticians, literary
critics, philosophers or climate scientists, or wish that they should cease to
exist. Without a doubt, there will be people who genuinely occupy themselves
with questions and problems of all disciplines. And that is good and necessary.
But surely would the number of such scientists be much smaller. But quantity is
not the same as quality, and the reduction in the number of tax-funded social
scientists of all kinds is by no means tantamount to an intellectual descent.
Completely the opposite. Freed from the intellectual pollution which is
currently produced by the universities, appear once more the possibility of a
rise of a class of new and better intellectuals, characterized by firm stance
and authentic understanding of reality.
Yet
all of this lies, if it is even possible to arrive at, in the far future. But
thank god one need not wait for it any longer. For in the niches of the present
madhouse, totally apart from today’s universities and schools and the ongoing charade,
there is, in any case in Vienna, around Vienna, and all around Vienna in the
German-speaking region, still – or even better: once more – a place in which
though one cannot earn any professional credentials or governmental
certificates, but in which man can acquire real education and learn and
practice critical thought and argumentation: Rahim’s Scholarium.
Reprinted with the author’s
permission.
Hans-Hermann
Hoppe [send him
mail] is distinguished fellow at the Mises Institute and
founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society. His books
include Democracy: The God That Failed and The Myth of National Defense. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2019 Hans-Hermann Hoppe
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/04/hans-hermann-hoppe/on-the-american-ideology-and-its-proponents-and-beneficiaries/