Note: Behind the green door is a post about gay germs, a post about the purse fight between Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In the comments of my last response to Michael Anton, someone quoted a passage from one of Anton’s posts in our back and forth. For the sake of brevity, no doubt, the commenter clipped out some of the original text. There were a lot of good comments in that post, but that one stuck with me because of the bit about not wanting to be ruled without consent, which is a topic I have addressed in many posts, podcasts and even a speech I gave last autumn.

I rummaged through his post and found the exact passage. Here is what Anton wrote in the first part of that paragraph, “I don’t want to be ruled without my consent and I don’t want to submit to a fake aristocracy. Those are, in fact, among my chief objections to the present regime: it rules me without my consent, and it rules not for the common good but for the private good of a fake aristocracy.” That is a pretty clear statement of the ends he seeks with his natural rights arguments.

As an aside, what is a fake aristocracy? He never bothers to explain what makes one aristocracy fake and another authentic. The closest he gets is, “This points to a fundamental problem with hierarchy. The trad Right rejects nature as the standard for politics because, they say, nature is abstract, universalist, corrosive, etc. But for a hierarchy to have any meaning, it must be based on some evaluation of higher and lower, better and worse.”

Higher than what? Have meaning? Who in the hell is the trad Right? Note that he employs cognitively meaningless statements to illicit an emotional reaction from the reader in order to trick him into a false conclusion. You see, the bad men like fake hierarchy which is bad because fake is a bad word, so putting it next to the word hierarchy makes it bad too. This sort of linguistic guilt by association is clever, but it is what makes his writing so muddled.

Putting that aside, what about this consent business? Specifically, his demand to live in a society in which he is ruled only with his permission. That is, after all, what it means to consent to something. When you consent to something you are voluntarily giving your permission for someone to do something. Sure, you may have needed some convincing, but consent assumes you have a choice. To consent to something, you must voluntarily grant your permission.

When we say “consent of the governed” we mean the permission of those over whom some group of people will rule. That sounds good, because Americans have been conditioned to associate that phrase with positive ideas. It is right there in our holiest of holy documents, the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The goodness of government only flows from the consent of the people.

Now, before we go much further, we have to address the elephant in the room and that is the fact that the signers of that document were lying. Most of them owned other human beings and none of them bothered to ask the freemen in their employ about their decision to revolt against the king. When it came to forming a new government, they had two tries at it and never once sought the consent of the governed. It was a nice sentiment, but the framers were practical men.

That naturally leads to a question. Is such a society possible? Is it possible to have a society in which men are free of coercion? After all, that is what Anton is rebelling against in that post. Consent is permission for something to happen or a voluntary agreement to do something. The alternative to consent is coercion, which is the use of force or the threat of force to obtain compliance. How would one structure a society in order to eliminate coercion?

Here is where we must notice something important. A consensus is not the same thing as majority rule. If ten people get together to decide on where to get lunch, the consensus is the place everyone can accept. The final choice may not be the first choice of anyone, but it is on the list of acceptable choices. If six people pick the lunch spot, pull guns on the other four people and force them to go along, then that is coercion, even though the majority voted for the lunch choice.

In other words, if you put things before the people and ask them to decide, you will most likely have some people who oppose the majority decision. In fact, some of those dissenters may categorically reject the choice of the majority. No amount of persuasion or enticement will change their minds. If the choice is where to go to lunch, no great shakes, but if it is how much to pay in taxes or whether to go to war, the dissent becomes a serious issue.

Right away we can see two problems. One is that a society of any size is going to have irreconcilable disagreements. Anyone who organized a lunch order knows how hard it is to reach a consensus. In the end, dissent must be overruled. The other problem is that putting matters to a vote will always result in coercion. The majority will force their preferences on the minority. Since in every vote there is a minority and the composition of that minority changes, everyone is subjected to coercion.

No matter how much consideration the rulers give to the opinion of the people, no matter how hard they try to get the consent of the governed, some people will simply refuse to give their permission. The choices at that point for the majority, as well as the rulers, are stasis, anarchy or coercion. No society larger than the Dunbar number can operate without some coercion. At any given time, some people will be compelled by the rulers to do that which they would prefer not to do.

Now, the few remaining libertarians will no doubt chime in and say that a libertarian or an anarchist society would be free of coercion. After all, all human interaction would be voluntary and individual. While such an arrangement would be free of coercion, it would also be free of all of the things we associate with human society. It is just random humans living in walking distance of one another. It is why there are no libertarian or anarchist societies outside of East Africa.

To be fair to Anton, let us assume he knows this and what he really means is he wants a society with the least amount of coercion. Humans are not perfect so what we create will always fall short of perfect. The societies we create will therefore be as flawed as the people who make them. The question then turns from how to create a coercion free society to how to reduce coercion. How should one organize society in order to reduce coercion to the minimum?

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, is that nature provides us with the answer to this question. Evolutionary biology tells us that people are most cooperative with those who are closest to them genetically. If you populated an island with Michael Anton clones, they would operate like a multi-celled organism. Each member would intuitively know the preferences of the other, because they would have the same preferences, due to their genetic sameness.

Obviously, that is not possible, but luckily nature provides us with lots of close examples to use as a proof. We know that the first human organizations were kin groups and that larger human societies were built on related kin groups. Ten thousand years ago related kin groups began to settle around stable food sources in order to defend and exploit those food sources. We also know that within these groups men would die for two brothers or eight cousins.

At first blush it might not seem that inclusive fitness has much of a role in reducing coercion in human society. What does your willingness to die for your people have to do with coercion? Well, consensus and cooperation require sacrifice. It does not always require you to sacrifice your life, but when you volunteer to cooperate or you agree to a compromise, you are sacrificing something in order to do it. It is the glue that binds the two sides in the transaction.

In other words, it is not just like-mindedness that fosters cooperation through sacrifice, but it is like bloodedness. This is what nature tells us. If you are looking to increase cooperation and therefore reduce coercion, you want to decrease biological distance between the members. Put another way, the key to being ruled with your consent is to live in a society populated by and governed by your people or people who are no more than distant cousins. Diversity is the death of consent.

Interestingly, Anton seems to know this. In the essay that made him famous, he wrote the following, “Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.” Note he used to argue from tradition and now he argues against tradition.

When you go back and read the Flight 93 essay, you cannot help but note a difference in tone and substance. Assuming Anton knew his own mind when he wrote that essay, he certainly knew how the phrase “third world” would be read. His deliberate use of the phrase “no taste for” makes clear that Anton thought at the time that non-European people were unfit for a society based in European values and traditions. There is no other way that can be interpreted.

So, what changed? That passage quoted at the start offers a clue. Here is the second part of that original passage. Anton wrote, “I still think whatever you’re planning won’t work; or, to be more precise, I don’t think you’ve done much planning at all. I don’t think you’ve even begun to think through how you’ll organize your new post-natural-rights society, which is why I expect it either to be a mess or else to revert to natural rights without admitting it.”

Let us unpack those two sentences. Anton says he is sure that what I am planning will not work. Then he says I am not planning anything at all. In fact, he says I have not even started planning, but he is sure that when I get around to planning, it will be a mess or I will end up planning whatever he is planning. This is the content of just two sentences written by one man, but it reads like the work of a committee of people not on speaking terms with one another.

Putting that aside, I think we have a clue as to why he has issued a fatwah against me and those on this side of the great divide. It is not that he disagrees with the point I made at the start of this exchange. It is that he thinks it should not be said. He prefers to prattle on about elves carrying natural rights because that is less likely to get mean words from the people who control the moral framework. In other words, he feels he must submit to their moral coercion.

In this post responding to Paul Gottfried’s argument in favor of the Anglo-American tradition, he notes that he and Paul are not Anglos. Anton is Mediterranean and Gottfried is Jewish. Here is what he wrote, “Neither of us, therefore, is Anglo, and neither is related by blood to any of the men who founded the United States, or even were Americans at the time of the founding. It seems to me, then, that neither of us can be, strictly speaking, heirs to the Anglo-American tradition.”

That is an interesting passage for a number of reasons. As far as this topic, it may explain why he has reverted back to the banal civic nationalism that he seemed to reject in the Flight 93 essay. Even though the logic of his own arguments leads to something like Yoram Hazony’s ethnic nationalism, this creates a problem for the people in charge and that creates a problem for Michael Anton. Instead he is looking for a way to argue within the prevailing moral orthodoxy.

That explains that muddled passage about what he thinks of my plans. He is not arguing against my reasoning. How could he? His arguments from Straussianism arrive at the same place as my arguments from evolutionary biology. It is that he assumes that I will soon realize that saying these things out loud is bad for business. In other words, he is projecting his own fears about his position within the conservative industrial complex onto me and the empirical right.

That horse left the barn a long time ago. It turns out that I am far less tolerant of coercion from “fake aristocrats” than Michael Anton. In fact, the starting place for understanding dissident thinking is the assertion that conservatism failed because it was supposed to fail. The men in it traded their souls for expensive homes, fancy suits and the company of people they must treat as their betters. The dissident right is the rejection of that form of politics.

In closing, I will return the favor and offer Mr. Anton a bit of advice. The project to achieve conservative ends within the neoliberal moral framework has been tried by smarter men than either of us. That project began when Buckley capitulated on race back in the last century. It is why conservatism has been a failure. When you accept the moral claims of your opponents, you inevitably accept their conclusions, which is why conservatism managed to conserve nothing.

The reason Michael Anton and his cohorts in the conservative ecosystem feel the need to address dissidents directly is they are losing control of the narrative. Every day more and more people wake up from the 20th century. Much of that awakening is driven by demographic and cultural reality, but another part is the realization that the causes of these problems are not political or economic. They are systemic. The system is failing because it rests on false assertions.

Even though Anton has hurled a lot of invective my way, I bear no ill will toward him, now that I have reconsidered his position. The fatwah he has issued against me will be up on the wall next to other fatwahs. In fact, I wish the entire crew the best of luck, even though Chris Buskirk and Ben Boychuk refuse to reply to my e-mails. When you live in the valley of the damned, you get used to such behavior. After the revolution, I will see that you get sent to a good camp.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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Back during the Cold War, specifically in the Reagan years, the media used to love reporting on military boondoggles. The format of the story required a few budget items that would strike the normal person as outrageous. Perhaps it was a hand tool that cost tens of thousands of dollars. This tool was part of a weapons system budget that was being criticized for its cost. Perhaps it was a mundane items like a toilet seat or a hammer that would cost thousands of dollars.

The main reason for these stories was to promote the charade that the two parties were locked in serious opposition. The Democrats pretended to be against the military, while the Republicans were pro-military. In reality, both parties were fully owned by the military industrial complex, but the demands of the Cold War required the two parties to maintain the aura of a lively democracy. The free world was open and debated things, while the Soviets were closed to debate.

We no longer see stories like this, despite the fact that for the last thirty years America has spent over a trillion on war per year. Officially the war budget is a trillion a year, but no one seems to know how much is really spent. There never has been an official accounting of the Afghanistan debacle or the war in Iraq. America technically has a budget, but no one knows what is in it. At this point, it is an abstract concept even to the people who vote on it Congress.

Those old stories about military contractors ripping off the taxpayer also served as a distraction from larger issues. America had shifted after Vietnam away from fielding a military to fight a large scale war to a military built for small wars. That meant a change in the tools of war. Instead of inexpensive machines that a recruit could be quickly trained to operate, the machines would be complex and require years of training, but they would be unusually lethal.

A simple example is the tank. In the Second World War the tank was the symbol of the opposing armies. America produced massive numbers of Sherman tanks that overwhelmed the technically superior German tanks. The Tiger was superior than the Sherman, but not better than a swarm of them. The Abrams tank, developed in the 1980’s for the new army, was a technological marvel. It is big and complicated, but unusually lethal in the right hands.

Another way of putting this is the American army was transitioning from the shotgun approach to war to the rifle approach to war. Instead of firebombing cities, the American military will hit the military targets in the city. Instead of indiscriminately attacking the enemy positions, it would hit key points with pinpoint accuracy. This would require new weapons that pushed the edge of military technology. The new smart military would require new smart  and expensive weapons.

Over the last thirty years this approach looked smart. In the first Iraq invasion the American military attacked and destroyed a big army in the desert, without suffering any serious losses. Smart missiles knocked out their air defense system and smart bombs destroyed key infrastructure. The smart air force pinned down the Iraqi army while waves of Abrams outflanked them. By any measure, it was an amazing display of the new smart army versus the old dumb army.

The thing no one bothered asking is whether this new smart military would look good against a more serious opponent. Instead, it has been thirty years of applause as the American war machine beats up on hand picked opponents. Launching cruise missiles from destroyers that hit targets in Baghdad is not the same thing as hitting targets in China from the South China Sea. Destroying tanks in the Donbas is a different task than strafing them in the Iraqi desert.

The war in Ukraine is giving as a clue on this front. In theory the West is about to send main battle tanks to Ukraine. Whether this actually happens is questionable as it takes a long time to train a crew on an Abrams or Leopard tank. It will take months to get the infrastructure in place just to operate them in the rear, away from Russian drones, artillery and missiles. The Pentagon thinks they can get Abrams in the field by 2024 but they are not making any promises.

The thing that no one really wants to say, but is painfully obvious, is that the smart tanks are not much use without smart operators and a massive technological infrastructure to sustain and control them. In fact, the Abrams tank may not be suited for the fighting in the Donbas for the simple reason it is too fragile. This is a high intensity ground combat and this tank is simply unfit for these conditions. In other words, it is more of a show pony than a workhorse.

A similar story is unfolding with other weapons. The Russians have been using their missiles to knock out Ukrainian air defenses and utility systems. The West has promised to send new air defense system, but it turns out that they are so expensive and complicated that few of them actually exist. The lead time to make new missiles and their launchers is years. In one case, the lead time for a single missile is close to three years.

It is not just the wonder weapons that are in short supply. Land wars are about the industrial capacity of the combatants. In land war, both sides will use massive amounts of ammunition in an effort to degrade the opponent. Some estimates say that the Ukrainians expend five thousand artillery rounds per day in some areas, while overall the total is twice that number. Reliable reports say the Russians currently outgun the Ukrainians by a factor of ten.

The problem for the West and specifically America is there is nowhere near enough military industrial capacity to meet Ukraine’s demands. The Pentagon is asking for bids to build new capacity, but that will take years. The Ukrainian army will be history long before it happens. Putting that aside, the new capacity is a fraction of what an army would need in a land war. Instead of spending billions on the F-35 program, the Pentagon should have been making artillery shells. Whoops.

It turns out that the logic of the new technological army rested on Francis Fukuyama being right about the end of history. The trillion dollar whiz-bang army would never have to fight a serious opponent. Russia would be parted out and China would be flying the rainbow flag of diversity. The new technological army just needed to look good in shorts, not actually perform on the field. It also had to make the friends of the imperial government obscenely rich.

Like so much that has happened since the end of the Cold War, the American war machine is something of a scam. It was built on the assumption that the narratives the ruling class was spinning were a reflection of reality. Instead, those narratives simply secured their position atop the new world order. They had little connection with the reality of what was happening in the world. As a result, the imperial war machine is unfit for the task of defending the empire.

The irony here is that it proves Pat Buchanan was right. As he heads into retirement, he is seeing his warnings come true. The great de-industrialization of America has turned the country into a paper tiger. A century ago, America was the arsenal of democracy, but now it is unable to make much of anything. Like so much about the last thirty years, the military industrial complex is just another grift. It is a trillion dollar boondoggle, a great con on the American people.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines is from Henry VI. The pretenders to the throne are plotting and a character named Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. The line has been interpreted many ways within the context of the play, but most people remember it at face value. In order to get anything done, you must first get rid of the hairsplitters, gainsayers and schemers that have always defined the legal profession. It is a lovely thought.

Like all humor, it is funny because it contains a kernel of truth. Lawyers, given enough time, can fashion an argument for or against anything. You see this in the recurring debate about the trillion dollar coin. This is the claim that the executive can get around Congressional spending and borrowing limits by minting a trillion dollar coin. The mint would strike a coin whose value would result in one trillion in seigniorage . This is the difference between the value of the coin and its cost.

The wiki page on this topic is both amusing and informative. Normal people would naturally assume that the government cannot invent out of thin air a trillion dollar coin, but the lawyers have found a way. At least they have found a legal justification for conjuring such a coin. The mechanics of how this would work are a bit sketchy, but lawyers never let practical reality get in the way of a good idea. We will be hearing lots from them during the coming debt ceiling debate.

The basic argument here is that the mint has the legal right to sell bullion coins, circulating coins and numismatic items. That means they can take gold and make a gold coin and sell it. They can also make collectors items and sell those. They can also buy and sell circulating coins at a profit. Since the mint is charged with striking circulating coins for the Treasury, they also make a profit from this. These sales pay for mint operations and profits go to the Treasury.

The claim here is the mint could create a trillion dollar coin that has the cost of the materials and the labor to make it. Since these are tiny, relative to the face value of the coin, the seigniorage would be roughly one trillion dollars. This would then be handed over to the Treasury to spend on government. Congress is cut out of the process, as they do not control the mint. That also means the Treasury could bypass the debt limit as they would have a trillion dollars.

If this sounds insane, you are in luck. It is insane. When the mint strikes a novelty item for collectors, they actually sell it to collectors. They price the item based on estimated demand and the cost of production. Like any business they are seeking to make a profit from these sales. The reason buyers are willing to pay more for a novelty item than the value of its base metal is they think it will fetch more on the secondary market because of its limited production run.

Another way to think of it is the trading card makers. They will create a special limited edition run of cards. They use the same paper and the same images as other cards, but these cards are limited in number. Maybe they have a special imprint or these days a holographic stamp on them. Collectors will pay a premium for these cards on the assumption that they will be worth more in the future. Of course, card collectors also buy for their own collections.

Who will pay a trillion dollars for a coin? The answer is no one. Markets can only work if there are buyers and sellers. Who would be the trillion dollar buyer? The only plausible buyer is the Federal Reserve. To do this they can liquidate assets from their balance sheet in the open market, then use the proceeds to buy the coin. There are two problems with this idea. One is the banks would be taking a trillion dollars out of the economy and flooding the market with various assets.

The other problem is the central bank could not plausibly list this new coin as an asset as the coin has a market value of zero. Again, a thing is worth what someone will pay for it and in the case of a coin with one possible customer, the value of the coin must by definition drop to zero when the customer acquires it. In effect, the Fed will have handed the mint a trillion dollars for nothing and the mint would then turn that trillion over to the Treasury as a profit.

There is an old joke that goes something like this. A rich man is traveling in Europe and finds himself in a small town. He needs a place to stay, so he goes to the one inn and asks for a room for the night. He slaps down a thousand euros and tells the innkeeper that he wants the best room he has to offer. The innkeeper takes the money and tells the man that he can take any room he likes. The man goes upstairs to look at the rooms and the innkeeper leaves to see the grocer.

You see, the innkeeper owed the grocer a thousand euros so he wanted to pay him off before the grocer cut him off. The grocer is happy to be paid. He takes the money and immediately heads off to his landlord to whom he owes back rent. He pays off the landlord with the one thousand euros. The landlord, who has a taste for prostitutes, takes the money and pays off the madam. The madam then heads off to the innkeeper to pay him for the use of his rooms.

Meanwhile, the traveler comes back down and tells the innkeeper that he does not find any of the rooms satisfactory and demands his money back. The innkeeper is happy to refund him the one thousand euros, as he just got them from the madam. The traveler leaves, but everyone in the town has been made whole. The innkeeper paid his debt to the grocer, the grocer paid his landlord and the landlord paid the madam, who then paid off the innkeeper.

The joke is the economy works just fine as long as the money keeps flowing and there is always some new money from outside to prime the pumps. As soon as we run short of outsiders with the extra cash, the system locks up. This is what the trillion dollar coin idea amounts to in the end. The Fed artificially increases the balances of member banks so they can buy assets from the Fed. Those banks then become the man looking for a room in that old gag.

The coming debt limit drama and the inevitable howling from the crazies about the need to get around this problem with crackpot ideas like the trillion dollar coin mask a much deeper problem. Washington famously said, “The last official act of any government is to loot the treasury.” That is what these debt limit fights are about when you examine them without the lawyers present. It is just a debate about how best to continue looting the treasury before it all comes crashing down.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about the reboot of the children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo and the Sunday podcast. Since there is interest in it, I will be doing a weekly post on the happenings in Ukraine. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Lost in all of the squid ink Michael Anton has been emitting over this post, is the fact that his argument in favor of natural rights contains logical flaws and irreconcilable contradictions that he does not understand. That last part is not obvious, as he surrounds his argument with so much extraneous text that the reader is naturally distracted from the defects. Maybe the wordiness is deliberate or maybe he simply does not understand his own argument very well.

His argument in the original exchange with Paul Gottfried is that natural rights are a timeless universal concept rooted in nature. Because they are rooted in nature, they are the best basis for the politics of the New Right and society. My post pointing out the obvious flaws with this argument elicited a long ad hominin attack, pock marked with nonsense clams about human nature. His original argument did not get any better, it simply got longer and more vituperative.

The place to start in order to see the problems with Anton’s argument is something called non-contextual reality. This is the claim that objects exist in space-time regardless of whether we observe them. You walk into a field and see a giant boulder. You accept that even though you just saw the boulder for the first time, it existed as an object in space-time before you happened upon it. When you turn your back and no longer see the boulder, the boulder is still there in the field.

In fact, the existence of space-time is assumed to be non-contextual. At least that is what much of our science claims to be true. The starting assumption of the human sciences, and all science for that matter, is that human senses evolved to gain a more accurate perception of reality over time. The reason humans sit atop the food chain is we have superior perception of non-contextual reality. Reality exists and we humans get better at understanding it over time.

This may come up a bit later, but the case for non-contextual reality is coming under increasing pressure within theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics seems to contradict local realism, which is shorthand for two principles. The principle of locality says the cause of a physical change must be local. The principle of realism states that objects exist independent of our minds. Experimental results indicate we do not live in a universe controlled by local realism.

For the purpose of this topic, we will assume non-contextual reality. Now, going back to that boulder in a field, you come upon it and you see it, but you also have the ability to remember it. That is because your senses process the inputs from the physical world to create the image of the boulder. Your eyes process light waves. Your ears process the movement of the air as sound. Your sense of smell may process the chemicals in the air to add more context to the image.

This is how your brain perceives reality. Your sense organs process inputs to create the image of the boulder, the sound of the birds, maybe the smell of the grass and other things that help your brain complete the picture. It is also possible that your brain will make a mistake and imagine you see birds, because you hear birds chirping and your brain takes a shortcut and places a bird in the picture. It is why two people can see slightly different things. No two brains are the same.

These small differences in perception are the basis for optical illusions. Two people are shown the same image, but they see different things. Maybe one person sees vertical stripes while the other person sees horizontal stripes. There used to be a form of dormitory art that played this sort of trick. You looked at the poster and it was one image, but if you kept staring at it you saw a different image. Some people would not see the second image at all, even with help.

It is also why one man can create an image of Middle Earth while another man cannot conceive of such a thing. The former read the books or saw the movies, so his brain has the material to create the imaginary land. That last bit is the important bit. The world Tolkien created does not and cannot exist. The latter person did not read the books or see the movies, so this concept does not exist in his brain. This figment of Tolkien’s imagination was not transmitted to him.

The same tools the human brain uses to perceive objects in space-time are used to conceive of things that do not and cannot exist as objects in space-time. Our brains can create contextual reality because we can perceive non-contextual reality. In fact, damaged brains can create things that will appear to be more real to the user than the things that actually exist as objects in space-time. Our lunatic asylums and grievance studies programs are full of such people.

The reason you will not bump into an elf with an armful of natural rights on your walk to see the giant boulder is the elf and natural rights are not objects in space-time, so they do not exist in non-contextual reality. They exist in contextual reality, which means they are figments of our imagination. From the perspective of the universe, the elf and natural right are equally fictional. If humanity is wiped out, the concept of the elf and his natural rights are wiped out too.

This is Anton’s first error. He seems to think natural rights are objects in space-time, when they exist only in the imagination of man. He confuses what we observe about human behavior, what we often call human nature, with the concept of natural rights and then claims natural rights are as real as a rose bush. This is false. What we observe about living creatures, including man, exists in non-contextual reality while the opinions we draw from those observations do not.

This brings us to the second fatal error in Anton’s world view. He assumes subjective observations about nature can be an objective moral authority. In his initial response, he takes issue with my statement that natural rights are no more real than lust. He writes, “Does Z-Man think the sex drive itself is a ‘figment of the imagination’? Or is he rather saying that there is no difference between lust and the sex drive, that the sex drive is lust and vice versa?”

Most people would have read that part of his post as a deliberate lie in service to a straw man argument. The word “lust” has two meanings. One is the intense desire for something. A lust for life, for example. In normal usage, and clearly the way I used it in my post, lust is an inappropriate desire, usually for sex. The former is descriptive, while the latter is prescriptive. If someone respected Anton’s intellect more than most, he would assume this error was deliberate.

This confusion is not deliberate. Anton writes, “These questions go directly to the heart of the issue under consideration. The denial of lust and of human rights stems from a denial of human nature, the ground of justice and of all human good.” Right there we see that Anton thinks that what he imagines to be human nature, can be the foundation for normative claims about “justice” and ‘human good”. He thinks what we observe in nature can be a moral authority.

In order to fully grasp the staggering ignorance of this assertion, we have to first clarify our terms. Moral philosophy has imbued the word “right” with magical properties, but a right is simply an entitlement. If your health club says that gold members have a right to park near the building, you know they are entitled to park near the building. If they say that gold members are entitled to park near the building, you know they have a right to park near the building.

Who decided this? What is the authority for this claim? The answer is the people who run the health club. No sane person would argue that nature entitles you to park next to the building of your health club. Even if you are the sort who argues that all societies are hierarchical, you are not going to claim that nature or nature’s god dictates that gold level members get to park next to the building. That entitlement is man made, a creation of the people who run the health club.

This is true of all entitlements. They are decided upon by an appropriate authority, which is always the creation of man. Your right to park near the building is the creation of your health club owner. Your right to a jury of your peers is created by society. Nature is descriptive, moral claims are prescriptive. This is why Locke had to rely upon God as the authority for his natural rights argument. Nature alone was not enough, he needed nature’s God to be the ultimate authority.

Now, Anton tries to cross the tines of Hume’s fork by arguing that natural rights are inspired by observations about human nature. This is logically invalid, because nature does not come with entitlements. Just because you, as a living thing, seek to preserve your life, the universe is not obligated to respect the moral right of self-defense. All that matters to the universe is if you pass copies of your genes to the next generation. The universe cares about one thing and that is fitness.

This explains why this concept of natural rights does not appear in other cultures around the world. They exist in contextual reality, which means they only exist when we observe them. There is no oral tradition of natural rights among the Bantu, because this concept does not exist in their brains. China lacks the language for natural rights, because in the reality of the Han, this concept does not exist. Natural rights are culture specific, because culture is people specific.

Interestingly, Anton tries to explain the localism of the natural rights concept with the claim that not all people have discovered them. You see, the Bantu would pile into the Straus buggy if someone explained natural rights to them. No doubt the ancient culture of the Chinese would be overturned in a minute if someone just translated Locke into Mandarin for them. Once that elf and his arm load of natural rights makes his way to Bangalore, India will be the new Athens.

Even though natural rights theory is invalid as a matter of logic and science, this is not the biggest problem with Anton’s argument. Let us pretend that natural rights are a naturally occurring phenomenon as Anton insists. That means they are subject to the laws of nature, like everything else. That would also mean that nature can tell us something about his claim that natural rights theory is the best foundation for right-wing politics and the politics of a human society.

Consider this statement. “Natural rights are the best foundation for society.” Now consider this statement. “Invisible leprechauns farting pixie dust are the best foundation for society.” Without addressing the issue of whether natural rights or invisible leprechauns exist in non-contextual reality, there is only one thing we can say about these two statements. Both cannot be true. If natural rights are best, then leprechauns cannot be best and vice-versa.

Now, it is tempting to start by asking which one is more likely to be true? Surely nature will be more friendly to the more accurate statement. Most people would be tempted to pick the first statement, solely on the grounds that they think natural rights are more likely to exist than leprechauns. Most people would be wrong. It turns out that nature, in fact the universe, is not concerned with accuracy. What drives the whole of the universe is fitness and fitness beats truth.

For those who enjoy a technical explanation, here is the paper using evolutionary game theory to support the claim that fitness beats truth. Just as important, fitness is the universal principle of the universe. It applies not just to living creatures, but to the things we conjure with our minds. It applies to language, culture, religion, medicine, politics and the sciences. A solution to a problem, for example, evolves over time as new variants come along to compete with the current solutions

The reason that we no longer see human societies ruled by men who claim to be gods is that form of government died out. It died out for the same reason that the saber-toothed tiger died out. It failed the fitness test. Better ideas came along and out-competed the god-king concept. The reason doctors no longer follow Aristotle’s advice on medicine is those ideas failed the fitness test. Current medicine has passed the fitness test but in time will be replaced as well.

If you are going to make appeals to nature, as Michael Anton does in defense of natural rights, you better be prepared to address the fitness question. So what does the fitness test tell us about those two statements? Unless someone can find a society that based its moral code on invisible leprechauns farting pixie dust, the only thing we can say is nature has not rendered a conclusion. To paraphrase the libertarians, real invisible leprechauns have never been tried.

That is not true for basing a society on natural rights. Athens had a short run of success, but was eventually conquered. Their love of debate also brought them to the brink of extermination in the Peloponnesian wars. Comparatively speaking, the first example of a society based on something close to natural rights did not make it long. The concept did not make a return for over a thousand of years when it suddenly popped up again among the English speaking people of the West.

The framers tried to found their political order on natural rights and the mostly did it after some trial and error. In less than a single generation the northern states wanted out of the scheme. The Hartford Conventions would most likely led to secession if not for the War of 1812. Then we get the Civil War and the end of the Republic as conceived by the framers. Anton would no doubt claim this was not the end of the natural rights experiment, but the completion of it.

Even if one accept the claims of the Straus cult on this point, no one can deny that the whole natural right regime melted away in the 20th century. Exactly no one in the ruling class respects the rights of the citizens. In fact, it is integral to their identity now to oppose the very idea of rights in any form. This is true across the West. This very Western concept of natural rights, which was the basis for our moral order, has lost the fitness test and is now extinct.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but nature has not been kind to natural rights. Like the giant panda, natural rights exist now only as an exhibit. Michael Anton is the zoo keeper tending to this concept that has failed the fitness test. Like the panda, natural rights should have died out a long time ago, but people are sentimental, so keeping the idea alive has become a profession. It turns out that the invisible leprechauns farting pixie dust are the better choice, as they have yet to fail the fitness test.

When you put it all together, Anton’s natural rights argument is illogical and in direct contradiction with its claimed authority. He keeps insisting nature is the authority for his moral claims, but nature can never be the authority for moral claims. What nature tells us is that this bit of contextual reality has failed the fitness test. If you want some inspiration from nature, that is the place to start. Avoid embracing contextual reality that has failed the fitness test.

In the end, Michael Anton’s antiquarianism is just escapism. He loves to rant against tradition and historicism, but he and the other natural rights proponents are the ones trapped in the past. He thinks we can pull long dead ideas out of the museum storage closet and apply them to a people who find these ideas as alien as the leprechauns farting pixie dust. Like everyone in that scene, he simply cannot accept that the solutions of tomorrow are not in the past.

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