David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

What did the SDS fear? The tendency of a person in a covenantal relationship to think rationally, thus, morally. They, like all radical groups, sought to subvert the conscience.

How to turn the nice middle-class boys and girls of my generation into the Killers of the Weathermen? They begin by exhorting each other to betray the one covenantal relationship they knew and respected—to sell out their sweethearts.

After that, everything is moot, for the betrayer has chosen his new community and they all must now abide by the same laws or suffer the shame of a degraded conscience. 83

The first rule of tinkering is, of course, “save all the parts.”

But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time. Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best of reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative action); the essential mechanism of societal preservation is not inspiration, but restraint.

The two children with the pie will work it out, their only alternative is calling in an adjudicator, a parent. But the adult can only call in Government, control of whose own desires merely moves the problem to a less manageable level. For this new entity has to be provided for in some way, and it, or its assigns, either through good intentions, through corruption, or through the world’s favorite process of elaboration, will eventually get all the pie.

31

BREATHARIAN

Countries, like any organism, come into being, and mature, decay, and die. Any successful life form attracts: adherents, exploiters, imitators, sycophants, and parasites, as life can only live on life.

Bernard Cavanaugh was a mountebank in 1841. He claimed the ability to exist on no nourishment other than pure air. At his request he was imprisoned in a cell, and survived there, ostensibly without food, for a period of several months, after which he emerged healthy and having actually gained weight.

The effect, contemporary magicians tell us, is not difficult. Food may be secreted in or around the body, in clothing or actually woven into the cloth from which the clothing is made. It may be formed into the bricks, paint, plaster or bars of the cell, or passed by a confederate.

The only difficulty in the effect’s performance is the secretion and disposal of excrement.

The Socialist vision, similarly, is a trick. Man cannot live on air. He must live on food, and the other goods and necessities of life produced through the physical effort and thought of him and his contemporaries.

As civilization progresses and population grows, new and more productive methods must be developed to deal with both foreseeable scarcities and unforeseeable disasters and progressions.

Each of these new methods is, originally, the inspiration of one or a small group of individuals who think differently from their fellows.

Not all of these inspired visions are effective or effectible, so the various visions must compete—no government organization is wise enough to determine in advance which of a number of equally strange visions will succeed.

In order to compete, these visions need private funding. 84As many of these inspirations originally seem impossible to accomplish, or, indeed, insane (the airplane, the radio, television, the automobile, the computer), the funding must come from those with sufficient disposable wealth to engage in what is, in effect, gambling. The competition between these competing visions eventually benefits all—if unfettered it will eventually discover new foods and methods of cultivation, of travel, new fuels—as it has throughout the history of free enterprise. For the potential reward of success is enormous—this incentive is the engine of progress, and its absence or stifling leads to stagnation and decay.

The Government can neither invent the automobile, nor, indeed, actually oversee its effective and economic production. It has bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, and this subvention will be seen to be not only an abrogation of the rule of law (the cancellation of obligations), but a vast waste of funds; for just as the camel is a horse put together by a committee, actual “government cars”,—should we devolve to that—cars put together under the supervision of a board of majority government appointees, will be neither fish nor fowl, nor sufficiently safe, efficient, attractive, affordable, durable, or fun. How could they be? They won’t be made by automakers—that is, by those in love with either cars, gain, or a combination of the two, but by apparatchiks. Who would buy such cars? 85

The Government can make work, in the main, only by appropriating those jobs already created by private enterprise, and doling them out less efficiently. A perfect example is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, which, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, was merely giving twenty thousand shovels out to do the work which could be accomplished by fifty bulldozers. Why not then, as he suggested, enlarge the paradigm, and replace the shovels with three million teaspoons? Government intervention in private enterprise is the death of private enterprise (cf. East versus West Germany; Havana versus Miami; Palestine versus Israel). Has the case not already been settled?

Government intervention is, in fact, a form of savage or precivi-lized thinking, as if a primitive tribe looked at the man who invented the wheel and reasoned that he was depriving an entire contingent of the tribe, the Bearers, of work, and so killed him and burnt his supposed improvement.

Let us note also that the ever-hungry politician, Socialist though he may be, when possessed by the urge for higher office, applies first and always to some combination of the Interests he will, with a wink toward them, eventually denounce. He must —for where is the money he runs on going to come from save from those who made it?

The stifling of free enterprise by Government, whether wholesale, in Communist Cuba, China, East Germany, Russia, et cetera, or piecemeal, under the New Deal, led at best to shortages. 86Under totalitarian regimes, it eventually led to famine and slavery, as governments insisted upon the continuation of the destructive and absurd failed systems, and instituted speech and thought control to stifle consideration, and to ban utterance of the most obvious conclusions.

These totalitarian states kept—and keep—their citizens enslaved, imprisoning those who oppose and shooting those who try to escape their Socialist utopias. These totalitarian states must eventually embark on war as the only way remaining to feed their starving masses—through the accession of the land and goods of the more productive. These states, in preparation for war, habitually indict the more productive as “enemies of the People,” “colonialists,” or “oppressors of the Weak.” See the UN’s continual denunciation of Israel, the Arab bloc’s insistence that Israel is an aggressor state; and the reiteration of peaceful Nazi Germany’s simple pleas for “Lebensraum.”

But, unfettered, we human beings are capable of fulfilling each other’s needs and of prospering thereby. Our prosperity will be in direct proportion to our ability to fulfill the needs of others. The Scare Words of the Left—Greed, Exploitation, Colonialism—are identical with those employed by totalitarian states to indict the more prosperous whose goods they covet and whose successes they must indict to divert attention from their own monstrous behavior.