David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

Further thought would reveal that once government is the only business, the final opportunities for failure to be corrected will disappear—whatever party is in power. If the state has assumed all power to distribute funds, its apparatchiks become the one Party, which will never allow itself to be cleansed and corrected by failure. Funds will, finally, be allocated, whatever slogan is used to obscure the process, according to the need and desires of the politicians. How could it be otherwise? 98

Successful politicians look forward to their retirement plan, which healthy plan is their transmigration into the favorite daughters and sons of those businesses they may have pretended to regulate during their years in office, the most flagrant Socialist then becoming, magically, a fan of capital.

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SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH

He ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable; and he ought to have announced that determination in such a manner effectually to quiet the anxiety of the new proprietors, and to extinguish any wild hopes which the old proprietors might entertain. Whether, in the transfer of great estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual possession, after twenty-five years of possession solemnly granted by statute, after innumerable leases and releases, mortgages and devises, it was too late to search for flaws in titles.

—Macaulay, The History of England (on Ireland), 1848

The basis of American Democracy is stated as a self-evident truth, that all men are created equal. If that truth is not self-evident, which is to say, if it is not held as dearly as any other moral imperative, there is no American Democracy.

One of the great wrongs of our democracy was the Dred Scott decision. Here the highest court in the land asserted its right to contravene the Declaration of Independence, and assert, as self-evident, that there existed two classes of human beings, the Black and the White, and that the Black was not entitled to protection of the Law.

How does this differ from Affirmative Action?

The motive of Justice Taney in Dred Scott was, like those wishing “Distributive Justice,” based on an incontrovertible view of the universe. That the chief justice’s view was the upholding of Black chattel slavery, and that of the contemporary Left an “equal distribution of goods” is beside the point; each is based upon the absurdity that there are two classes of people and that they may be distinguished by the color of their skins.

Lincoln wrote that if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

It is self-evident that a racialist view of the world must result in injustice. That that injustice may be calculated to benefit members of a group which may have been previously oppressed may stand as an explanation for immoral behavior, but it does not excuse it.

Shelby Steele was asked, by a good-willed White person, “What can we”—by which the speaker meant the Whites, and/or the American Government—“do for the Blacks?” He responded, “Leave us alone.”

Who is wise enough to model human behavior? No one.

Our country has created the most effective and beneficent, the most productive and the most just civilization in the history of the world, by forming laws based upon that shared truth: compassion no less than greed will, in the hands of the State, cause misery. It is not the job of the State to be compassionate, but to be just. Should the State provide a safety net for the needy, and the afflicted, to care, in the words of Lincoln (the words of the Torah) for the widow and the orphan? Of course, but it must not legislate upon the basis of classes of people, judging their entitlement to state benefits by gender or race. Such a view is both immoral and absurd. The Dred Scott decision (in 1857) accelerated and ensured the Civil War.

Our new Justice Sotomayor has declared that Hispanic women are more compassionate than White men. This should disqualify her from sitting on the bench. Why? Is it true? Who can say. Some Hispanic women are probably more compassionate than some White men, but who would want a justice of the Supreme Court who held this belief? Must it not indicate that she would, in a close case, credit the claims or arguments of a Hispanic woman over that of a White man? One would think so, if her belief, unfounded in anything other than her experience, is so strong that she felt, as an officer of the court, safe in proclaiming it.

Further, and more importantly, does one want a Supreme Court justice who feels it important to dispense compassion? Is not her job, rather, to dispense Justice , which is to say, to rule, blind to the attractiveness of the litigants or of their claims, upon the applicability of laws made previously and held to be fair, by legislators ignorant of the identity of litigants?

In the days of the acceptability of corporal punishment of children (well within my memory), the old parental phrase, whilst searching for the strap, was, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” The parent may have believed it, but that did not make it true, and it did not matter that the parent administered the strap in the—in his mind—cause of love; a legal and a moral test would have been for the child to respond, “Fine, then let me whip you.”

For how would the compassionate new justice respond to a White Male who asserted (with equal right or lack thereof), “I am a good judge, as White males are more compassionate, as is well-known, than Hispanic females”?

Here the case is shown, in its enormity, as congruent with that of the slave masters who considered themselves beneficent, and the slaves better off than freed men and women. To which Lincoln responded, yes, but I do not see any slave owners offering to trade places with them.

The human mind may be worshipped, but it cannot be trusted. This is why we have laws. Gene Debs said, “Even if I could, I would not lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.” I thought this a rather flat and obvious epigram, as a youth. But I don’t think so now.

Moses was debarred from taking the Jews into the Promised Land. This could be considered a blessing, as he was to be spared the charade of their behavior in his absence. He got his reward on this side of the river—he was assigned a task, and worked ’til he saw his work completed.

Everything, indeed, must have an end, which is another way to look at the story—that the Five Books end with the Jewish People set free, not only of the authority of Pharaoh, but of that of Moses. If Moses had lived, their history beyond the Jordan would have been one with their history in the Wilderness: revolts against authority and sinful blunders followed by pleas for intercession. With Moses gone, the Jews had nothing between themselves and the word of God, and were free to obey or disobey at will, reap the rewards, or suffer the consequences. If Moses had led them in, someone else could have led them out.

Demagoguery is the attempt to convince the People that they can be led into the Promised Land—it is the trick of the snake oil salesmen, the “energy therapists,” the purveyors of “health water,” and, on the other side of the spectrum, the politician and that dictator into which he will evolve absent a vigilant electorate willing to admit its errors.