© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2011.
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Of course to obtain seating at these designated tables, one must follow the UNSOL’s handbook. And while this organization’s handbook isn’t really centralized, easy to find, or written clearly, the overall purpose of the organization is understood: eating safely for all those involved.

So one day, four prospective members sit at one of these tables and begin to eat the peas on their plates with a knife. Now, UNSOL states somewhere in its unfindable handbook that if members eat peas with a knife, they must do so with their pinkies out, to make sure that those wielding the knives would not be in a position to harm either themselves or those around them. UNSOL also believes that if people do not eat with their pinkies out, they must provide twenty-four hours notice.

Now the four prospective members are all eating without their pinkies out and without the proper twenty-four hour notice. All four are eating equally safely, but one of the four thinks that it is unfair for an organization to deny people the right to eat wherever and however they chose: this member has philosophical differences with them, but also knows that to make these philosophical differences part of a dinner conversation, they’ve first got to get to the table.

UNSOL, not finding this brash member all that tasteful (unlike the peas, which were cooked stupendously), decides to deny this member, named UN-UNSOL, for not giving twenty-four hours notice that they would not be eating with their pinky out. And yet the other three members, all guilty of the same breach of policy, were accepted into UNSOL.

UN-UNSOL is in an odd spot: they can either bow down and be christened properly by UNSOL, or they can stick to their guns and renounce the pseudo-legitimacy of an organization that has no right to claim dominion over those who do not wish to be under its reign.

What do you think UN-UNSOL should do? Or more importantly, what do you think should be done to UNSOL for this clearly enacted and premeditated injustice against a prospective member?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2010.
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The question I would like you to ask yourself as you read this piece is this: By what right do you have to throw a child into this world?

The Last Messiah

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

II.

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily- by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and has been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.

So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself- indeed, of his very being. Life- that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unraveled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happens arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother’s womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself- he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved- there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice- he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.

But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.

Such a feeling of cosmic panic is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective perservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

III.

Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living- because cognition gives them more than they can carry?

Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation’s hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.

The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.

Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life’, refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced- correctly- as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential. The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occuring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation.

By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engstrom: “One should not think, it is just confusing.”) A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on).

In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.

The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated ‘infantile bonding;’ the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘ephemeral’ as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. “In Autumn, I will attend middle school.” If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, ‘feelings of inferiority,’ over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.

Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among ‘decadent’ playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one’s life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one’s point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering causes (‘living lies’); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).

The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.

Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’)- and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.

The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.

Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer the segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences (‘disappointments’); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.

The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feelings and thoughts. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.

We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).

When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.

A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. “Mom, what am I to do.” A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: “What happens now?” The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the ‘high society’s’ tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine- made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.

The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.

A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.

Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent of feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to ‘die standing up’), i.e. a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases’ death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm- “it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat…”

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere ‘changes’, whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it- the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of ‘progressive optimism’ are removed by this major psychological law.

The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.’ And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one’s own inendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfillment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.

The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.

Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilisation is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it- anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from- betray- the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g. aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one’s ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.

The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.

The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation- they gain in significance thereby. Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.

IV.

Is it possible for ‘primitive natures’ to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul[1], subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.

And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.

Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind’s common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share.[2]
The current phase of life’s chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse to distraction (entertainment, sport, radio- ‘the rhythm of the times’). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable- all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts (‘corpses in the cargo.’) Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.

V.

If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.

And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.

Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“- The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
- The sign of doom is written on your brows- how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
- But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
- Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails. He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2010.
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Situation:

Dr. Pourhritch was perhaps the greatness social engineer to have ever lived, of this there can be no doubt. Today, all developed countries subscribe to his theories with great success. Sure, a few nay-sayers come along periodically to say that the whole process is unfair, but what does that matter if it gets results?

Briefly stated, Dr. Pourhritch’s idea was this: a certain group of individuals should be given almost no financial means to help better themselves. This will cause them to be un(der)educated and thus left with little hope to get better jobs or spend their little amount of money responsibly. There should also be another group who are given a vast amount of money and wealth. They should have so much money that they can throw it around however they would like. Since they have money for education they will know how to spend their money well and in turn will get more money for doing so.

These two groups, in honor of Dr. Pourhritch, have become known as the “Pourh” and the “Ritch,” respectively.

Now according to Dr. Pourhritch, there should be no reason as to why some are to be Pourh and others to be Ritch. There should obviously be more Pourh than Ritch and also people whose parents were Pourh are more likely to be Pourh and those who are Ritch remain Ritch. This is to establish the “Veshesh Cycle”* where people have no choice but to play the cards they were given.

And though it was once known as Pourhritchianism I think his theory now goes by the catchier name: capitalism.

*Rashithu Veshesh was another great man who saw the repetition of the world as a self-referential system which we periodical break out of to see. Thus, according to him, we mark the days and the months and the years, while all the while things just “stay the same.”

Questions:

These things have really gone off the deep end, haven’t they? More to the point, is this an adequate description of an aspect of capitalism? Is the divergence of rich and poor so easily accounted for by chance elements? Couldn’t the case be made that many rich people “deserve” to be rich and many poor people “deserve” to be poor? But what was that little bit about education? Should the fact that poor people are uneducated be taken into account at all? Why or why not? Is there a fairness to the rich and poor dichotomy? Is that even a relevant concern? If Pourhritch’s ideas aren’t the same as capitalism, what’s the difference? How could you tell if one were implemented over the other? What about Marx’s theory, is it better than Pourhritch’s? Why or why not? Does capitalism work? Is there a more just, fair, effective way to run a society? Does capitalism actually free people or does it confine them ever more to their descriptors, rich and poor? Is there any truth to the sentiment that “things just stay the same”? Is a self-reinforcing system better than one which stands on independent merit? If the rich tend to remain rich and the poor remain poor, can there be any progress? If there can, who is the progress for?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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You finally got what you want, you crazy libertarians, euthanasia is now legal. It’s legal and it’s regulated: they’ve got commissions, documents to sign, lawyers that need to be contacted, senators who bring up minutiae concerning the when, where, and how of the whole procedure, and about every hurtle you could throw at it including but not limited to contracts, forms signed in triplicate, no recognized loopholes, approval by a licensed practitioner of medicine, and more liability levied against everyone involved than you can shake a stick at. Go ahead, try to shake a stick at the liability. But there is one thing few of you planned on.

There are businesses that do it.

It was one thing to pose your hypothetical problems about “helping to ease the suffering of a dying grandma” but quite another to see the Happy-Go-Lucky-And-Kill-The-Dying Corporation snuff the mildly depressed knee injuries. Parents can even sign off on the euthanasia of their children, the ones too helpless to agree to kill themselves.

A lot of these Kill-Kill-Kill-Me Companies are run through the hospitals themselves. More people are killing themselves (or having themselves killed) than ever before. It’s a phenomenon unlike anything seen before: mothers deciding their kids don’t need mothers, husbands who don’t want to put up with their nagging wives, children not wanting to be bullied. Broken homes, shattered bodies, worlds turned to ash in the wake of Death, Inc. And it’s all legal.

Questions:

Happy now? Is this what you want? Does the tolerance of suicide make a society any freer? Does this increase the liberty of the people? Would this increase the happiness of the society? Is it the responsibility of the government to make people freer, increase their liberty, make them happy? If this isn’t their job, then what is? Should a government tolerate suicide? Can a government allow euthanasia? What can it do to prevent it? If it is legal for someone to commit suicide, doesn’t that imply it is legal to sell/pay for those services? Do you really feel comfortable with a business designed strictly for the self-destruction of its customers? Is there anyway this business could continue without government help? Should the government step in to help the Suiciders if it provides a valid medical option? Should the government be responsible for the health of its people? Why or why not? Does this imply that governments should step into the healthcare situation of its people? Can suicide ever be rational? Can paying for it, providing it, supporting it ever be rational? What happens when killing is the business and business is good?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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Barry didn’t post an Analog Dilemma last week. I really look forward to those things. He posted one every week, just like he said he would in his first post. I came to expect him to post one every week and yet, last week, there was nothing.

He broke his promise. Ok, maybe he didn’t break a promise, but there was an implicit understanding between us that he would provide such-and-such and such-and-such would be given to him in exchange. We entered into a contract–there really is no other term for it–and he opted out.

He’s got a lot to answer for. And he’ll probably just end up asking twenty questions.

Questions:

What does it mean to break a contract? What makes a contract legally binding and a promise only a minor moral quibble?  When we say we are going to do something are we actually saying that if we don’t do it there should be consequences? Are all contracts the same? How do I know if I enter into a contract? How do I know when I can consent to enter into a contract? Are contracts that can’t be consensual really contracts? Is there, along that line, really any such thing as an ‘implicit contract’? When I go to Starbuck’s and I order a cup of coffee and the bill comes out to be $10,000, did an injustice occur somewhere? Don’t our expectations factor into our decision to make agreements and come to terms? If every explicit term of a deal cannot be thoroughly explicated before the participants engage in it (for instance, when I purchase a cheeseburger from MacDonald’s I assume too much to be written: they’re not going to kill me, hurt, rob, maim, question, suntan, wax, insult, love me), what does need to be said? And how would you know? What does it take to enter a contract? Did Barry enter one with his claim that he would do an Analog Dilemma every week? Why or why not? If you didn’t even know that Barry violated this contract, has he really harmed you in any way?  Could Barry have written this post if he had written another last week? Is lying the breaking of a contract? If not, is it okay to lie in a libertarian world without consequences?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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Two lovers in a park. Children swing on swing sets, others play with their dogs. Parents look on. Two lovers on a bench in a park. A public park where all are allowed in. A couple of “bums” (they are homeless, however, the current vernacular labels them as bums) are digging through a trash can, probably in search of cans, maybe food. They aren’t bothering anyone. Neither are they: the two lovers kissing each other on a bench in a park.

They are not just kissing each other. It started out that way, but then the one on the left (my left) bit deeply into the lip of the one on the right (my right). Blood starting trailing down their chins. Blood and saliva. The one on the right then went in for the cheek of the left. Took a big chunk out of it. Sinewy musculature and generally unseen teeth on full bloody display, the left goes for rights neck, right for left’s shoulder.

Blood and saliva and flesh drip from the two lovers on a bench in a park. They pause for a moment. Right take’s left’s index finger and bites off the first two digits. Left does the same.

They continue, biting each other, tearing flesh from bone. Blood and saliva and flesh and viscera pour off their bodies. The children have stopped swinging. Parents look on. The bums have stopped rummaging through the trash.

Questions:

Damn it, Barry, does any of this make any sense? Why would any two people consent  to do this to each other? Isn’t the very implausibility of this scenario the very answer to every single one of these questions you’re about to pose? Couldn’t you just respond with “Does that matter?” I mean after all, isn’t this series supposed to be about all the things we simply don’t think about? Well then, what could possibly be the point of considering two people eating each other in public? Is it supposed to show us that even in the most public of places, there are limits on the actions of people? In fact, isn’t because it is in public that we find it objectionable? Would we allow this in the privacy of the two lovers’ homes? Is cannibalism…ok? Or rather, in what contexts is cannibalism permitted? Is it allowable in the throes of passion? Why or why not? What about under dire circumstances such as the situation involving the Donner Party? What is the connection between the two? Should cannibalism be banned outright? Is there anything wrong with eating the consenting? Is there anything wrong with eating the non-consenting (such as animals)? Is consent relevant when it comes to eating other living things? Why or why not?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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Evolution is a true theory. Homeotherapy is pointless. There are no UFOs. Man has landed on the moon. One man shot JFK. There is no 9/11 conspiracy, just psychopaths and heart break. There are no psychic phenomenon. Ghosts aren’t real. Tarot cards is an expensive form of Uno. Dianetics is pointless and harmful. As are the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. The earth is round and solid. The only thing that can be read in tea leaves, is possibly what kind of tea had been drunk. The flying spaghetti monster isn’t real. There is no tea cup around Pluto.

Many people, however, believe the exact opposite of each of the above statements. Many make it their whole life’s work to prove that each of the above sentences is wrong. What they are doing is devoting their lives to utter lies and trying to convince others of their truth. You have argued with a few people on a few of these points and tried to make them see the truth, but they just retort in the end to “well, you have your opinion and I have mine.”

You feel what they meant was “truth” instead of “opinion.”  

Questions:

Should people be allowed to believe such dribble? Shouldn’t people be interested in the truth, rather than a truth? Don’t we necessarily rely on people to be factual and truth based in their opinions? What happens when our fellow citizens/friends/employers believe in such falsities? Well, is there a truth “out there” or is all truth simply the human interpretation of the world around us? Who am I to “know” what the “truth” is? What makes me so high and mighty to think that what I think is right and what others think (if it should happen to not align with my own thought) to be wrong? But don’t we all do this? Don’t we all think what we think is right is right? If we didn’t, what would be the point of thinking/supporting that thought at all? Would any of us really wish to believe ideas that we know to be false? If not, then why do so many people believe the “wrong” things? Why don’t we want to believe falsehoods? Why are we so concerned with what we think of as “the truth”? Is there something intrinsically valuable to the truth or is it merely a “useful” sort of value? Why does anyone care about why we care about the truth? Why are these questions being asked? What’s the point of asking questions? What’s the point of asking “what’s the point of asking “”what’s the point of asking “”"what’s the point of asking…

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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It’s all the rage. Skin. Human skin. Being worn by people, not their owners. I believe it started with hand skin gloves shown at an underground New York fashion show last winter, though many contend it was a chest vest from Dolce & Gabbana’s spring line that started the trend. In any case, it’s all the rage. People wearing each other’s skin.

It’s all consensual. That’s what they say anyway. People, mostly poor ones, sign a contract saying that they’ll give so and so this much of this part of their skin once they’re dead (the government has stepped in and said it must be postmortem, but it is clear that many are not content to wait and spend more for “living” skin).

As with all trends, with time these skin fashions have grown bolder: toupees of scalps, necklaces of necks, whole skin suits, masks of faces, and recently male and female genatalia have appeared on the scene, much to the chagrin of the “moral majority.”

It seems, though I am far from an expert, that the growing trend is toward more and more the wearing of human skin and less toward the clothes we used to wear.

Questions:

What? Should we be allowed to wear the skin of our fellow human beings? What if it is consensual? If we can, can we wear them out in public? Is it any different than showing more and more of your own skin? Should there still be laws against showing the breasts and genatalia of the skin you’re wearing? Should there be actual crimes against fashion? And what about the majority of people selling their skins being poor? Is it fair that the rich can, in essence, purchase the poor? Is dire economic circumstance a form of coercion? Why or why not? More importantly, isn’t this too disgusting to even consider? If this would never ever happen, then what is the point of even asking? Better yet, why do we have such a visceral reaction to asking such a question? Why is our skin and the skin of others so important? Why do we cringe at the thought of wearing another person’s skin, but perhaps delight in the idea of walking around naked or seeing other people naked? Do we really rely on the idea of “someone being ‘in there’” so heavily in determining how we treat other people? What role does our consciousness of another’s consciousness play in determing how we treat them? Is it because we know certain animals can feel pain and also have some rudimentary form of (self-)awareness that we refrain from torturing them? But don’t we still take their skins?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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The world no longer experiences pain. Stub your toe, skin your knee, bump your head. You won’t feel anything close to what you would have called pain.  You’re also pretty sure the world doesn’t experience anything akin to the normal psychological pain it once did. Threats of violence seem laughably impotent.

This is because the people no longer have bodily destruction either. Cut off a toe, rip the skin off your whole legs, cut off the top part of your head. It’ll all grow back. Instanteously. Bam, ploop, there it is again. Shoot someone in the face and even before the smoke clears, there’s their face again.

People only die natural deaths. Old age, perhaps a few cancers. There’s was once a claim that someone choked on their food and died, but this seems unlikely as recent studies have shown that thanks to the new situation of the world, tissues (such as lung or heart or brain) don’t die the way they use to in people. In short, humans can no longer kill other humans.

Questions:

Does this mean we get to “harm” others, now? If I can cut off your hand painlessly and literally before you could even blink, your hand is whole and there again, do rights against bodily harm go out the window? Assuming I could, what if I stabbed you through the chest and left the blade in you, is this some how worse than if I stabbed you and taken it out? Is it better? Am I invading your property in any meaningful sense? Are bodily rights actually utilitarian in nature? That is, is pain and the limitedness of the body the necessary and sufficient conditions for dealing with all situations pertaining to it? What about rape? Would there be such a thing as rape? What does consent even mean if no one can be harmed? Does psychological harm account for something? Is it then alright to rape those people without the ability to suffer from psychological harm such as the mentally handicapped? If no harm can come of it, what is wrong with rape? Are bodily rights just natural rights? Where do they come from? Who gets them and who doesn’t? For instance, why do human beings get these rights and not animals? Can wars now be fought for fun in our world if, when bombs are tropped and napalm sprayed, no humans are harmed? Is it depressing to think of a happy war in which no one is hurt or exhilirating? Since people don’t drown (they don’t drown do they?), will they move into lakes and oceans to live? Will they scale the highest peaks to escape the wars now fought with the glee of a summer water fight?

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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