The Secret Knowledge

Metadata

The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations. — 69

We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation. — 93

The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere. — 100

One may extend Justice to the snail darter and cripple the Port of New York; and a legitimate aversion to racial profiling may not only inconvenience but mortally endanger the traveling public. — 107

My revelation came upon reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. — 109

The Government could do little with this product save waste it: it did not produce. It could tax or confiscate, but it could not allocate with greater justice than the Free Market;1 it could and should, then, provide only those — 118

For, certainly, my works do not please everyone. But I, discovering that which does not please, am free to chase the market, to persist as before, or to desist entirely. I am, in short, free to fail, which means I am free to succeed, and, if successful, to enjoy any particularities which such success might confer upon me. — 178

They gave me a book, and the book was White Guilt, by Shelby Steele. — 184

The answer to that question, I realized, was attempted in the U.S. Constitution—a document based not upon the philosophic assumption that people are basically good, but on the tragic confession of the opposite view. — 191

That culture which has discovered a beneficial adaptation is imitated by those cultures which perceive its worth—the possessors and nonpossessors of an adaptation do not compete on this basis—all may adopt the beneficial behavior and thrive. — 220

The grave error of multiculturalism is the assumption that reason can modify a process which has taken place without reason, and with inputs astronomically greater than those reason might provide. — 229

Sowell, in Ethnic America, points out that the behavior of ethnic groups in America predates their immigration (or transplantation) to this country; — 230

Thus, as Sowell writes, the communal culture is a real possession, available to all through the efforts of all, not only in the present day, but historically. This possession, as per Veblen (as above) is little different from the individual inheritance of an actual, material tool—though it is not material, it is a tool, and an inheritance. — 237

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible. — 243

These ideas are called Good not because their implementation has led to the betterment of life, but in homage to the supposed goodwill or intellectual status of their instigators. — 255

The millennia-long evolution of the human family as a means of dealing with the environment was discarded by my generation of fantasists, in favor of a concept not only artificial, but inchoate: “freedom”—the pursuit of which has led to misery. — 263

A Liberal Arts education is essentially a recognition symbol, which, as such might theoretically facilitate entrance into a higher class, were entrance awarded on the basis solely of that passport; but see the MAs in English bagging groceries. Higher Education is selling an illusion: that the child of the well-to-do need not matriculate into the workforce—that mastery of a fungible skill is unnecessary. — 295

Conservative reasoning asks, “What actually is the desired result of any proposed course of action; what is the likelihood of its success; and at what cost?” (The last, importantly, including the costs of possible failure.) These are, to the social tinkerer, unknowable, their sum being expressed, euphemistically, as “the law of unintended consequences.” — 304

And the terrified adolescent, abandoned by society, coddled by society, may, if unbalanced, turn to rage and (a) kill; or, if merely clueless, (b) hide in college, as he does not possess the strength to grow up and leave. — 310

Identity politics reduce the world to victims and oppressors. But is there another way of looking at the world? — 427

Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions. — 453

This is a pretty good example of Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. We gain status, he teaches, through the display of wealth. But there is only so much wealth one can display, and the rich, having accrued wealth too copious for their own individual display, must display it through leisure. — 476

Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. — 554

But for denial to replace fear it must be universal, and anyone suggesting notions contrary to those of the group must be shamed, killed, or otherwise silenced—these must be at the very least excoriated as evil. For, indeed, if the group knows neither law nor religion, nor technology, its only good (which is to say its only service) is solidarity. Individual initiative or investigation, thus, is destructive of the group’s essence, and so to them is evil. — 576

will be called Multiculturalism, Diversity, Social Justice, Environmentalism, Humanitarianism, and so on. These, individually and conjoined, assert their imperviousness to reason, and present themselves as the greatest good; but as they reject submission either to a superior unknowable essence (God), or to those operations of the universe capable of some understanding (science and self-government), their worship foretells a reversion to savagery. — 588

But the Left does not stop to consider that if we, the most prosperous country in the history of the world, choose neither to exploit nor to defend our property, someone else will take it, and if we announce, indeed, proclaim our passivity, we will only advance that bad day. — 665

Just as the Left, geopolitically, does not recognize enmity (other than on the part of the Right), it judicially does not recognize crime; or that which, historically, was known as crime (that is, behavior transgressive of those statutes enacted for the protection of society), calling it “error,” or the effect of “environment,” or searching for any artifice to free itself of the mature human necessity of choice and enforcement. — 670

The random distribution of abilities and ambitions, which has allowed human beings to thrive and communities to grow, and which gives to the group strength and to the individual the possibility of achievement and, so, happiness in the approbation of the group, is derided by the Left as nonsense. To them, each child is born a blank slate, and any difference in subsequent individual accomplishment, status, or wealth, must, thus, be due to some maleficent influence, which is to say, to exploitation.29 — 680

To the Left it is the State which should distribute place, wealth, and status. — 696

(As Thomas Sowell writes, “Are we to say of two babies, born on the same day, that one is born owing something to the other?”) — 702

Proverbs informs us that the poor will always be with us; that, just as one may not, as a judge, favor the rich, neither can one favor the poor, but must do justice according to the law—that is to say, that one must judge whether the law has been transgressed, a consideration in which the state of the offender (past his mental competency) must play no part. — 707

The tragic view recognizes that it is possible to obviate the necessity of choice only by surrender of responsibility (worship of a dictator, or charismatic figure, guru, politician, or theory)—that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus moral choice means a choice between two evils. — 722

The necessity of making distinctions is the essence of freedom, where one not only can but must choose. — 739

The sea was not the path to freedom, the sea was freedom. The essence of freedom was and is choice. — 745

We are not only wrong, but most often wrong. The treasured values of one generation (slavery, phrenology, lobotomy, physical discipline of children, women as property, et cetera) are seen now not only as vile but as absurd. As, eventually, will many of the cherished ideas of today. This is tragic, but inevitable. — 865

fixation on natural resources blinds one to the worth of human resources: We live in and are designed to exploit (which is another word for “use”) the natural world. The Socialist vision constrains — 1057

What is Big Government but the Executive’s cocaine dream, an activity devoted solely to jockeying for position, in which he may find license for malversation, and may take the company treasury and direct it toward those people who will support his continued incumbency—it is within the law. Its street name is “earmarks,” but it is theft. Of your money and mine. — 1117

Planes were made (as Nevil Shute observes in Slide Rule) largely from wood, with canvas-covered wings; — 1144

Should such reductionism result in any actual social change, the adolescent intellectual is immediately supplanted by the Man of Action (the Tyrant), as observed by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer. — 1243

For just as the con man capitalizes upon the reluctance of the mark to ascribe evil motives to a chance acquaintance, the Jacobin, his motives limited to pursuit of power, easily supplants, and, traditionally kills, the fool dreamer who thought he was creating a paradise. — 1245

For, at least, one could say of Hitler and his assassins, that they enjoyed their anti-Semitism. But the Left proceeds, from day to day, in a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony. — 1254

The decision to allow a thirteen-story Islamic Center to be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero may be defensible under the rubric of law; but it is a cultural obscenity, allowable only if the State, the Left, or the individual asserts that every decision must be adjudicated according to the new understanding of the anointed. — 1535

We scoff at the hereditary Mandarin positions as “Keeper of the Buttonhook,” or “Strewer of Rose Petals in the Back Garden,” but what else is “Associate Professor of Gender — 1814

“Build me a Son, Lord,” it ran, “who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid,” et cetera, closing, after the conclusion of the recipe, with, “And then I, his — 1837

Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both. — 2009

The Right sees an erosion of marriage (evidenced by sex education, cohabitation, homosexuality, single motherhood, abortion), and understands it as a moral affront. But it is additionally, and, perhaps, more basically, an attack on property. — 2020

The Jews in America, — 2098

The assimilated Jews, raised as immigrants, in families, which, for whatever reason, ceased Jewish observance, retained their cultural love of Justice, but were ignorant of the historical methods of its pursuit. — 2138

Sympathy to the wicked, we were taught, is wickedness to the just. (Meiri, on the Talmud); — 2159

and endeavor to create rules of his own, based upon his reason, which is and can only be (to a child) a conveniently self-excusatory name for his desires: copulate freely, do not marry, do not respect, but mistrust all authority, demand governmental support, base political choices upon feelings rather than experience, do not bother to learn a trade, et cetera. — 2346

The magicians say the more intelligent the viewer is, the easier he can be fooled. To put it differently, the more educated a person is, the easier it is to engage him in an abstraction. — 2738

The Rabbis teach that the road to Glory (redemption) must begin with shame, and I ratify their insight in this case; for nostalgia and wistfulness can only intensify through time. — 2969

But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change. — 2971

Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. — 3193

Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. 1952. Preface. Robert Novak. Washington, DC.: Regnery, [1987]. — 3210