Notes from Underground

Illegal and Privately Owned

by Leave a Comment

11/30/02

There’s a story going around the Patriot movement, those folks who call Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush “phony conservatives.” Apparently, some hucksters have been passing around “paper money” from a private company, claiming that it’s worth something even though you can’t redeem it for anything real.

They call themselves “the Federal Reserve System.” Maybe you’ve seen some of their “greenbacks” floating around. Well, in case you haven’t heard it, here’s the story.

The Federal Reserve System has been around since 1913, when the U.S. Congress set it up to distribute money through the Federal Reserve banks. The money is printed by the (U.S. federal government) Bureau of Engraving and Printing, then sold at cost (around 3 cents per bill) to the (privately owned) Federal Reserve banks, which pay for them by buying U.S. government securities, that is, by making long-term loans to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Then the Federal Reserve banks loan their Federal Reserve notes to other banks at an interest rate set by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (the “Fed”).

If you get one of these notes, you can’t take it back to a Federal Reserve bank and exchange it for anything else, although they might give you a toaster for opening a new account. The only thing you can do with a Federal Reserve note is use it to pay your debts, and the U.S. government guarantees that your creditors have to accept it in payment. That’s why they print that statement on the front of all the notes: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Without that it wouldn’t be worth, well, the paper it’s printed on.

 

Alternatives

Throughout the United States, more than 30 currencies besides Federal Reserve notes are also circulating. Most of these alternative currencies are strictly local, such as the Ithaca Hours, which can be used only in Ithaca, New York. Most of them are also based on intangibles such as a specific number of hours worked. Only one is commodity-based and used nationwide, the American Liberty Dollar.

The Liberty Dollar has a “$10 silver base,” meaning that every 10 Liberty Dollars entitle the bearer to claim one ounce of silver sitting in a vault in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho.

These Liberty Dollars, in various denominations, look a lot like the bank notes issued in the 1800’s by state-chartered banks, with elaborate filigree artwork around the edges framing an image of the Statue of Liberty and a statement by the issuer. You can also get coins about the size of the old silver dollars but a little thicker.

Liberty Dollars are issued by NORFED, a nonprofit organization based in Evansville, Indiana. NORFED stands for the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code, and the ultimate purpose of this currency is to bring the Federal Reserve System crashing to the ground, along with its “collection agency,” the Internal Revenue Service. According to NORFED’s founder, Bernard von NotHaus, they now have over $300,000 in circulation.

So where are they? Bernard says there are at least 850 Redemption Centers around the country where someone will exchange your debt-backed Federal Reserve notes for silver-backed Liberty Dollars on a one-for-one basis. It isn’t that hard to find a Redemption Center nearby. The hard part is finding someone who will take Liberty Dollars in payment for goods or services.

Why would any business take payments with notes that aren’t “legal tender”?

The only way to answer that question is to visit some businesses that actually accept Liberty Dollars. According to Bernard, the best person in Indiana to talk to is a “flaming patriot” in Peru, Indiana, named Clayton.

 

The Agent

I arrive at Clayton house in Peru at around 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 19. The road to Peru is marked by fields and fields of unharvested corn turned brown by an unusually dry summer.

Clayton’s modest ranch house is easily located by watching for the huge, 20-foot diameter fir tree partly obscuring the front. I pull up a slight incline into the open spot in the worn gravel driveway in front of a divided two-car garage painted dark brown. A dirty gray 1993 Honda Accord is parked to the right. It’s adorned with bumper stickers on three sides, saying “I pledge allegiance to one nation under God,” “Pray for America,” and “American Liberty Currency.”

Hiding behind the fir is a narrow wooden-plank-covered walkway leading to the front door. I ring the doorbell and wait. A thin, gray-haired man answers the door.

Clayton is a spry 69-year-old with bifocals, balding, with slightly elongated ears. His wispy gray-and-white hair is combed straight on the right side, while on the left side a lock of gray hair curls down across his temple, and some shorter hair on the side flips up in a cowlick. “I combed my hair this morning, but you can’t tell,” he would later say.

Clayton is wearing a green t-shirt over an ivory oxford button-down shirt, open at the collar, one lapel sticking out a little. On the front of the t-shirt, block letters spell out, “ASK ME ABOUT THE MONEY BACKED BY GOLD & SILVER”; the back says, “DO NOT STEAL-THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE IRS DO NOT LIKE COMPETITION-BOTH ARE ILLEGAL AND PRIVATELY OWNED.” He’s wearing greenish-gray faded cotton cargo pants and brown leather shoes with black soles.

Clayton leads me through an unlit living room to a small kitchen. He motions for me to sit down at a round table, facing toward the refrigerator, while he sits down at the opposite side.

Clayton looks over a paper with a list of NORFED Liberty Merchants on it, planning our itinerary. Of the 13 on his list, 5 have been crossed off. Three from one family moved to North Carolina; another moved to Lasalle, Kentucky; yet another had recently died.

Clayton has been busy promoting himself as an independent candidate for Miami County sheriff, as indicated by a flyer on the table printed in block letters reading, in part, “RUNNING FOR OFFICE, NOT BUYING IT”. Clayton finishes the itinerary and goes back out through the living room.

As we leave, Clayton shuts the door without locking it, and leaves one garage door open. We get in his Honda, which has a NORFED brochure taped to the rear passenger-side window.

Noticing a Liberty Dollar on the passenger-side floor, I hand it to him and he casually tosses it on the dashboard, where there are a couple of envelopes, one of them an open #9 envelope containing a sheaf of Liberty Dollars. Some Federal Reserve notes are rolled up in a white plastic cup in the cupholder. An open bag of Starburst Fruit Chews sits between the seats.

 

The Contractor

Just after turning north out of his housing development onto State Road 19, Clayton turns sharply left down a freshly graveled driveway. At the bottom of a small hill down from the road, the area in front of an double-wide freestanding garage is filled with vehicles: an ATV, a small boat on a trailer, and at least four pickup trucks. Clayton pulls hard to the right behind a small one-story house with white siding.

Clayton opens the rear door into a cluttered enclosed back porch. Among the many coats hanging up to the left, a couple of camouflage hunting jackets stand out, and a piece of a hunting bow lies on the floor. He knocks on the inner door and a blond woman in a bathrobe appears through the curtained windowpane. Opening the door, the gaunt, bleary-eyed woman recognizes Clayton and shouts behind her, “It’s Clayton!”

As we step in, she returns to cooking breakfast at the stove to our right. Clayton steps to the right of the kitchen table as a burly man with short blond hair, somewhere in his 30’s, appears from the left and greets us. After shaking hands, Bill and I sit down at the table in the center of the room.

Over Bill’s shoulder, a giant boar’s head stares straight at me from the far wall of the living room, and I notice a bearskin splayed across another wall over the TV.

Bill and his wife have just gotten up, after coming home late last night from a funeral down in Kentucky. The enticing smell of bacon and eggs frying starts to fill the room.

Bill owns a construction firm and NORFED calls him a “Liberty Merchant” because he advertises that he accepts Liberty Dollars as payment for services. In fact, he has written a letter to the editor of the Peru Tribune urging other merchants to accept Liberty Dollars.

Bill says that a lot of people still don’t know about it, even though it has had positive write-ups in the local newspaper. To this, Clayton sardonically notes that the problem is that “50% of the county doesn’t take the local paper,” and Bill agrees.

Bill supports the Liberty Dollar because it’s backed by gold and silver, unlike the Federal Reserve notes. He would take them as full payment for a job, but he doesn’t think there are really enough in circulation yet. “The thing I had a problem with is most people only want the silver,” he complains. They trust the coin, an ounce of .999 pure silver, more than the paper; but people mostly want them as souvenirs.

Clayton interjects that about $3,000 of the silver is out in the county, as well as about $2,000 of the silver certificates, but not much of it is being circulated.

In fact, the only way a currency can be sustained is by constantly using it. In some places, merchants won’t accept the Liberty Dollar because they can’t use it to pay their own expenses. However, Peru has a wide variety of Liberty Merchants, including a hardware store, a grocery, a sub shop, a florist, a computer store, a furniture store, and a car repair shop.

The sizzling on the stove stops, signaling that it’s time to say goodbye.

 

The Hardware Store

Other Liberty Merchants are less enthusiastic about promoting the Liberty Dollar, as we find at the hardware store, the florist, and the meat market.

The hardware store, an older brick building fronting Peru’s main north-south street, is owned by Dave. After parking in the back alley and wandering among the crowd of customers and sales clerks for several minutes, we finally find Dave stocking shelves near a doorway.

Dave is medium-height, with a thin face and black hair receding from his brow. As he speaks to us, his face is framed by the bright light from the door behind him. Despite being listed by NORFED as a Redemption Center, Dave has nothing to say about Liberty Dollars.

Clayton stands quietly, looking down at the floor, while Dave explains tensely that he doesn’t really do much business in Liberty Dollars and doesn’t really know anything about them. Dave keeps looking down at something in his hand, then over at a silent, expressionless Clayton, then to me. He admits that he will accept Liberty Dollars, but he insists that he doesn’t really believe in them, doesn’t do much with them, and was reluctant to get into it in the first place. So, why does he accept them if he doesn’t believe in them or know much about them?

“Because of him,” Dave snorts, pointing at Clayton.

We thank him and leave. On the way out, Clayton remarks that the NORFED brochure disappeared from Dave’s counter awhile ago. Clayton had also recently asked a couple of clerks he didn’t know whether they took Liberty Dollars, and they had said no.

We go out to Clayton’s car parked in the back alley. Once in the car, we make small talk.

“For all I know, you could be CIA and setting me up,” he says to me at one point. I try to reassure him by telling him that I had once considered working for the National Security Agency, but I was too lazy to finish their 20-page application.

 

The Flower Shop

Clayton guns the engine as we zip around the corner, then down a residential side street to a florist shop, a tiny A-frame storefront beside a white-roofed greenhouse.

Inside, we make our way through a jungle of plants to a service counter with a cash register. Under the counter’s glass top are several informational items about gypsy moths. “Don’t give a gypsy moth a free ride,” one says prominently.

About ten feet back from the counter, a middle-aged woman named Tracy is bending over a large pot arranging flowers. She agrees to talk while she works. She first became interested in taking Liberty Dollars last summer, in 2001, after talking to Clayton.

Clayton later tells me how he had first learned about Liberty Dollars at an anti-tax rally in summer 2001, then he brought some back home to show people. The local newspaper, The Peru Tribune, featured him in a story about Liberty Dollars and named him as a distributor, even though he wasn’t at the time. But after the article, people started asking him about it, so he signed up. Tracy immediately shows her concern that accepting Liberty Dollars is seen as a tax protest.

“I think that more people would get involved in it if they wasn’t so scared of the IRS. I just finished up my audit last month, and it started last year.” The IRS agent had shown up unannounced at the shop just recently. “She didn’t look like no IRS person . . . they look pretty normal.” Clayton remarks that it must have been around that time that Tracy took the NORFED brochure and sample Liberty Dollar off her counter. After some more small talk, we say goodbye.

Later, I ask an economics professor, Steven H. Russell, if there is any tax advantage to using an alternative currency, or if it is even a viable tax evasion strategy. He said that most people trying to evade taxes do all their transactions in cash, and that they could do so just as well with Federal Reserve notes as with an alternative currency.

 

The Meat Market

Around the corner and down Main Street is a meat market, an unassuming white building with three soda machines out front. Inside, it is small, but clean and attractively lit. A meat display counter takes up most of the center of the store. Bill is middle-aged, with a receding black hairline and a fairly intense look as he portions out ground beef behind the counter.

He is too busy to talk, he says, and besides, he hasn’t taken any Liberty Dollars in six months. He took it for awhile, but it didn’t work out. Bill has the same tension in his voice that Dave had.

Clayton remarks that it was mainly Bill’s mother who took the Liberty Dollars, when she was running the cash register. I thank Bill for his time and we leave.

Outside, Clayton expresses skepticism that Bill has not taken any Liberty Dollars in six months, since he just redeemed 22 Liberty Dollars from Bill a few days ago. He notes that the meat market is important because it is the only independent grocery in town. Besides, he says, they have the best beef.

 

The Sub Shop

From Bill’s, Clayton drives east on Main, then south on Broadway, back toward the hardware store. At first noting that there are no parking spaces on either side of the street, he suddenly pulls a U-turn to the left and whips into an open space on the east side of the street across from the hardware store. Thankfully, I’m wearing my seatbelt.

“I probably shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “Although sometimes I’ll see a cop down the street and I just want to piss them off.”

The parking spot is directly in front of a sub shop, a narrow storefront with a haphazardly lettered sign above it. Inside, behind a long deli counter, we find Shirley, a short, round-faced woman. Her answers are terse but friendly, with just a hint of a smile over her calm demeanor.

Shirley has taken Liberty Dollars for almost two years. She does it because “they’re backed . . . and the Federal Reserve notes aren’t.” She occasionally walks across the street and uses them to buy trash bags at the hardware store. The hardware store is about as far as Shirley would go for anything, anyway.

We thank her and say goodbye. On the way out, I pick up a business card promoting Clayton’s campaign for sheriff. On the back it says, “Support the U.S. Constitution-Serve and Protect the People-No Interference from Outside.”

Clayton is running against a Republican and a former Republican who, spurned by the Democratic Party, is running as an independent. The Republican wins, and Clayton ends up with about 173 votes. Based on the cost of flyers and business cards, Clayton later figures he spent about 30 cents per vote.

 

The Furniture Store

Clayton drives south on Broadway to a furniture store. The sign on top is in disrepair, but inside the showroom floor is crowded with furniture.

We had stopped here earlier in the day, but they had been too busy. Now, Danny is just finishing with a customer. Looking around, it’s hard to miss several water-damaged ceiling tiles scattered over the showroom.

Danny’s mother, a late-middle-aged woman with blonde hair in an elegant wave, comes over to greet us. She engages in small talk with Clayton for a few minutes, but after casually remarking that the government is controlled by Satan, she looks straight at me and says self-consciously, “Now you’re probably thinking that this is the most conservative place you’ve ever been in.”

I assure her it isn’t, citing my familiarity with shortwave talk radio hosts like Alex Jones, who has a lot worse things to say about the government. It turns out that Danny is a big fan of shortwave talk radio, especially Alex Jones and John Stadtmiller.

Danny comes over, dressed in a green knit shirt and black dress pants, and we start a spirited discussion of various populist and constitutionalist topics. At one point his father, a small, gray-haired man who has been moving mattresses across the showroom floor, stops and tells Danny to keep it down while customers are around.

While we are talking, Clayton notices the time, then opens up a little black pouch on his belt. Taking out a finger-sticker, he pricks the side of his left forefinger, then holds a small glucose meter to the blood droplet. Clayton later tells me that he was diagnosed in June 2002 with diabetes.

Danny has taken Liberty Dollars since the summer of 2001, because “it’s the perfect currency,” since it’s backed by gold and silver. Once he took 90% of the purchase price of a chair in Liberty Dollars, from Jesse, who runs a car repair shop.

Danny is about six feet tall, with mostly black hair and a little gray, swept back, and he has a slight overbite. Occasionally when he’s talking, he’ll draw uncomfortably close and his brown eyes get very intense. After expressing his concern about the state of the world, he concludes by saying, “out of all this debris chaos, maybe we can get back to where we were.”

As more customers start to come into the store, we make our way to the front door, then thank Danny and say goodbye.

 

The Car Repair Shop

It would be another three weeks before I speak to Jesse, owner of an auto repair shop. By then the corn has been harvested, and the fields are full of broken brown cornstalks. Jesse’s place is south of town on State Road 19, in the middle of the brown cornfields.

On the way to Jesse’s place, Clayton had handed me a printout of an email from Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas’ 14th district. Clayton doesn’t own a computer, but a friend printed it out for him. Rep. Paul goes on at length against war in Iraq, the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, and of course, the Federal Reserve and the IRS. Rep. Paul is obviously not popular among Republicans, despite having the distinction of the “most conservative voting record in Congress,” according to a conservative watchdog group.

A similar disdain for the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act is found in an essay by Bernard von NotHaus, on the “Nazi-ification of America.” It is Bernard’s only writing on the NORFED website that briefly veers away from monetary policy, but curiously, there are no links to it from the home page. You have to search for it with Google.

Clayton pulls into a long gravel driveway running alongside a large two-story white house, then parks along the left side in the grass, just past a U.S. flag on a 20-foot flagpole. Walking toward the large double-bay mechanics’ garage, I notice the same 40-foot TV antenna tower that everyone else in this area seems to have. Yet, there is also a large satellite dish behind the garage.

We walk around a red truck parked in front of the open south bay. Its hood is up and a heavyset middle-aged man in a blue jacket is directing a taller, thin young man in forcing water through the truck’s cooling system.

No one acknowledges us as the older man hurries back and forth between the truck and the tool chests in the shop. The younger man, in worn, faded Carhartt jeans, busies himself over the truck. Finally the older man stops to talk with Clayton, barely glancing at me. He is about six feet tall, with a large pot belly covered by an IU t-shirt showing through an unzipped blue Carquest quilted jacket. His beefy face is topped with a faded gray striped Snap-On knit cap pulled down over his ears, and he’s wearing medium-sized chrome frame glasses.

Eventually, satisfied with the younger man’s work on the truck, Jesse heads to the back of the shop, followed closely by an old white hound dog named Molly. He enters a tiny, 6′ x 10′ office, just wide enough to fit an old, green, steel desk pushed to the back. A Compaq Presario monitor and keyboard sit on the cluttered desk, with the CPU tower on a short file cabinet to the right. Above the CPU, hanging from a vertical pipe, is a sign stating, “We supported 4-H Livestock Sale-Miami County 4-H Fair.”

Jesse is poring over a computer printout showing hotels along the route from Peru to Frederick, Maryland. Jesse and Clayton discuss various options for lodging near the county fairgrounds, where a rally is to be held before a protest march in Washington, D.C. This is to be the grand finale of a cross-country “Freedom Drive” protesting the Federal Reserve System, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the war against Iraq.

Jesse asks Clayton if I’m going, and I shake my head no. Jesse turns to me and addresses me for the first time. He tells me to sit down, pointing to an open five-gallon paint bucket serving as a trash can. I hesitate, noting that it has no lid; not wanting to seem discourteous, I sit down.

Of course, now I’m lower than Jesse in his office chair, and I’m somewhat uncomfortable perched on the edge of the lidless bucket. Jesse looks directly at me with his broad face and steel-gray eyes and asks why I’m there.

After I explain that Clayton has the largest collection of Liberty Merchants in the state, Jesse seems satisfied. He says he has been taking Liberty Dollars for about one and a half years, because he wants “to try and eliminate the IRS.”

He tells several stories of his run-ins with the IRS, including one that details why they owe him $23,000 that he intends to get back. Jesse has various epithets for the IRS, including “scumbags,” “ruthless,” “evil,” and “the devil in disguise.”

Out in the open garage bay, a family of four shows up and asks Jesse for some coffee and hot chocolate. Jesse ushers them into a mini-mart attached to the garage. After the family leaves, I ask Jesse the price of a fountain Coke.

“Sixty cents,” he says. I hand him a Liberty Dollar. He gives me forty cents.

“We don’t collect sales tax,” he says, then goes back out into the shop.

Later, at the the sub shop, Shirley refuses to add state sales tax to the list price on a bag of chips. “Just a dollar,” she says. “A lot of people try to give me the five cents, but I don’t take it.”

 

The Economics Professor

Sitting in his cramped office at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Associate Professor of Economics Steven H. Russell is a little bemused by the story of the Liberty Dollar. He has never heard of it before, and he is surprised that it is legal, particularly with regard to banking laws.

Although NORFED specifically addresses questions about legality from the point of view of the Secret Service and the Treasury Department, it doesn’t refer to banking regulations. In fact, the promotional video that Bernard von NotHaus distributes to Redemption Centers shows him holding a sign saying, “Be your own bank!”

Of course the Federal Reserve banks are privately owned, but they supposedly return most of the profit from loaning out Federal Reserve notes back to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Steven Russell is also surprised that American Liberty Currency is not “fully backed,” that is, that $10.00 in Federal Reserve notes buy only one ounce of silver, or less than $5.00 worth.

“That aspect of it shocks me. I would think that if you were serious about trying to create an alternative currency, and your philosophy was, well, we want to have a silver standard or a gold standard, you’d want to have a currency that was fully backed.”

Of course, NORFED is doing more than just putting a currency into circulation; they are also lobbying for the repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code. Is that the only way to get rid of the Federal Reserve System?

“The Federal Reserve System was created by Congress, so it’s not in the Constitution (the Federal Reserve Act of 1913), so if Congress ever got sufficiently upset at what the Federal Reserve was doing, they could change the Federal Reserve Act or they could even get rid of the Federal Reserve System.”

He acknowledges that with a currency system that is not on a gold standard, inflation rates can be arbitrarily set by the Federal Reserve System. If the inflation rate were to get up to, say, 20%, a commodity-backed alternative currency might become very popular. Until then, he thinks it will be restricted to those who are using it for ideological reasons.

That includes Clayton, who believes that he can change the system from the ground up.

Magic Nativism

by Leave a Comment

10/22/09

From an undisclosed location in the southern tropics, I received the following communication, most likely composed on an ancient PC encrusted with fish entrails:

How do you argue with this kind of person?

I feel like she just wants to hate something and doesn’t want to know how to solve it?

Am I wrong?

Seriously, what is the solution?

My correspondent included a conversation with someone regarding “All of the people who came to this country illegally, use up all our resources, don’t pay income tax and refuse to learn the English language.”

I replied that I think it’s a case of being uncomfortable with other cultures plus blaming the wrong people.

The fact that some or all of them are illegal is irrelevant to the discomfort level. That’s just a socially acceptable excuse for disliking them. There are plenty of legal immigrants, naturalized citizens, and natural-born citizens who would probably be just as annoying to this person. I remember my own relatives going on about blacks and Hispanics in Chicago, not to mention welfare queens in Michigan, and probably none of them were illegal immigrants. If only we could all live in little enclaves of like-minded people, separated by mountains from anyone who makes us uncomfortable.

In my own experience, I’ve worked in a laundry room with a dozen Spanish-speaking workers and managers. They could all speak English, but they didn’t, because it was more fun to talk in Spanish so that the gringos couldn’t tell what they were saying. Sometimes they would tease me in Spanish, and that was really no different from being teased in English by some small-town punk in Michigan. I’ve also worked with jerkoffs in California who would talk about Hispanic workers in English, expecting them to not understand that they were being cheated or insulted. Living in the same place where you were born is only a guarantee that you can be arrogant toward visitors and get away with it; it doesn’t make someone deserving of any special regard.

My other experience is from having a car accident involving some illegal immigrants. I know they were uninsured and probably illegal because they begged me not to call the police, and they phoned a friend to negotiate with me in English. I accepted a really small amount of money for the damage they did, and that car was never fixed, since I found out it would cost five times as much to fix it. I should have filed a police report so that I could have filed an insurance claim with my own company. I don’t blame them for being uninsured; I blame myself for feeling sorry for them, when I should have let them deal with the consequences of being reported to the police and my insurance company.

We could blame the illegal immigrants for not getting their paperwork straight if they wanted to work here, but I think if I was desperate enough I would probably take the same risks. We could also blame the federal government for not being tough enough, but the feds are doing exactly what they are told to do by the business interests.*

If there was no demand for cheap labor in agricultural, construction, custodial, retail, factory, warehouse, and restaurant work, there would be a lot fewer illegal immigrants. I worked for a painting contractor who said he hired lots of illegals because they were willing to work for $9.00 an hour and they usually showed up for work, unlike most of the soft, arrogant, pampered, overfed, whiny little white boys in the wealthiest county in Indiana. I’ve also worked as a day laborer for temporary services that could not get unemployed white guys to come out of the welfare office and load freezer trucks for $8.00 an hour.

With all that said, I agreed that the bottom line was that the other person just wanted to hate something, and you can’t solve that by arguing.

* “All You Americans Are Fired.” Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and Jeremy Singer-Vine. Buzzfeed.com (1 December 2015). http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/all-you-americans-are-fired.

Some Cutting Remarks

by Leave a Comment

3/25/15

From an undisclosed location in the northern tropics, I received this message, most likely typed on an iPad encrusted with fish entrails:

    What do you think of this essay? I’m curious of your opinion.

My correspondent included a link to an old essay, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” written by British philosopher Mary Midgley.

Midgley is a philosopher known for criticizing scientific reductionism and encouraging the use of moral philosophy to define ethical purposes, rather than merely to justify ethical means. She believes that religious sentiment is intrinsic to humanity. She has promoted and rationalized the Gaia Hypothesis.

This version of her essay is from a textbook edited by Christina Hoff Sommers, which coincidentally I read in an ethics class I took in 1987. The electronic file linked to was hosted on the site of Iranian transhumanist and human rights activist Sam Ghandchi, linked from a list of human rights articles written by others. Midgley first published the essay in her book, “Heart and Mind” (1981).

The essay criticizes the “moral isolationist” who refuses to exercise moral judgment against others. This is a reference to the isolationist stance before WWII, which was official US policy up until 1941. Isolationism as foreign policy was associated with conservative Republicans and southern Democrats in the US, based on a tradition of non-interventionism in foreign conflicts.

Midgley described her critique in more detail in the introduction to “Heart and Mind” and in the 1987 essay, “The Flight from Blame.” She attacked analytical philosophers for promoting a cowardly approach to ethics that led to a kind of post-modern refusal to judge anything  as “wrong,” that is, moral relativism.

Midgley’s example (the inspiration for the title) is taken from an obscure and perhaps apocryphal Japanese custom of justifying the random street killing of a commoner by a samurai, by claiming that the samurai was merely testing his new sword. The Japanese term is tsujigiri, which literally means “crossroads killing” and may denote merely a street assault or a person committing such an attack. The practice was said to have been banned under the Edo regime in 1602. In practice, although the samurai had a formal right to kill a member of the common (or “non-human”) class of people for any discourteous conduct, most officials would probably have discouraged it. Even if the samurai was punished, the punishment depended upon the relative social standing of the attacker and the victim, although a victim was technically allowed to defend himself.

Most new samurai swords were actually tested on the corpses of executed criminals. So, really, my mysterious correspondent wanted me to comment on an ethical speculation about a foreign culture, where the main question is whether we have a right to judge the mythical practices of that culture.

It seems to me that the more interesting question is whether we have the right to moralize about other people based on mythology, speculation, and ignorant generalizations about them. I say, of course we do, since our ignorant opinion about them is also meaningless if we do not actually hold any power over them. We are free to pointlessly moralize about other countries and cultures, just as we are free to pointlessly moralize about national politics, sports, magical crystals, and the cosmic interrelatedness of ravioli and dung beetles. And everyone who doesn’t want to join us in our outrage has the right to ignore our ignorant generalizations.

So, on that issue, I suggest that we are free to moralize about anything at all, as long as there is no consequence. If an issue is consequential, that is, if our opinion will lead to an action that will affect others, then we are obligated to moralize about it.

Another interesting question is whether it is better to justify killing someone because they are lower status and personally offensive (a social reason), or because the weapon’s effectiveness needs to be proven (a pragmatic reason).

The obvious answer for a sociopath, such as a serial killer, is that the pragmatic justification of testing weapons or methods is preferable. Quality assurance, efficiency, and practical effectiveness are the hallmarks of the sociopath. Anyone with experience in the military, retail, industrial, or corporate world can verify this.

Normal, well-socialized people prefer to justify killing based on the low social status of the victim, along with pointing out any of their behaviors that might have provoked an attack. My research suggests that this was true most of the time in traditional Japanese society, as well as in traditional European society, and is still true today everywhere, including in the US.

Anecdotally, I’ve been physically attacked only by higher status males who thought they were enforcing some perverse social order, but not by any lower status people. (No, I’m not counting my brother and sisters.)

In conclusion, I suspect that samurai felt free to punish any commoner for any reason so as to maintain social order, even if it included killing them. Among themselves, they probably snickered about how they were just testing their swords. I don’t have any problem denouncing both practices.

The War Against Errors

by Leave a Comment

9/15/05

On a hot, humid July day, I discovered the park squeezed in between Washington Street and the IUPUI campus near downtown Indianapolis. I had driven down University Boulevard hundreds of times without trying to find out where those joggers were going, the ones who occasionally drifted by on the south side of the campus. That day, though, my daughter and I ventured boldly across the lawn alongside the National Institute for Fitness and Sport. All of a sudden, the river appeared across my view, stretching west along an undeveloped south bank. Then, to the east, I had an uncharacteristically stunning view of downtown at the end of a broad cobblestone walkway. Dropping away from the walkway was a baffling maze of concrete steps, manicured grass, huge stone blocks, and rectangular pools and waterways. A set of stone benches terraced six high in a quarter circle simulated the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, like those at Ephesus in Turkey. Far off to the southeast was the marshmallow-topped building formerly known as the Hoosier Dome.

It was 86 degrees and I was sweating as we walked faster down the cobblestone walkway. Walking parallel to us in the grass were several people carrying clipboards. We passed them as we went toward downtown, with the RCA Tennis Championships on the north side. Before reaching the oversized green plastic frog sitting on a bench facing the NCAA Hall of Champions, we turned in to the park. A set of red pawprints made a trail on the concrete, leading from a rectangular pool over to the NCAA. This was supposed to be the trail left by the Indians’ mascot, Rowdie, after he fell in the water when a stray baseball hit him on the nose.

Defying the civil engineers who laid out the park’s sidewalks east-to-west, we cut south across the lawn to the Dr. Frank P. Lloyd Visitor Center. Once around the building, we saw the west entrance to Victory Field framed by the overarching exit sign for the park. After crossing the street toward the stadium, we passed a man and a woman just standing on the street corner. The man was talking into a cellphone, saying, “Yeah, we’re here on the corner of Maryland. Are you in the parking garage?”

At first I was intimidated by the throngs of people headed for the stadium and the long line at the ticket window. Then I found out that our online tickets enabled us to walk right up to the gate, where no one was waiting. An attendant scanned the barcodes printed on the tickets and we passed through the turnstiles. Our seats were right across from the gate, in the “party terrace.” Behind us, a British man explained baseball rules to his wife.

The date was July 19th, two days before the near-bombing of London on “7/21,” which was two weeks after the notorious “7/7.”

The concession ring wasn’t too crowded, so I went to stand in line for popcorn, wavering between the $1.50 box and the giant $3.50 tub. An older man in front of me turned and said, “I always pick the slowest line.” Then a younger man, carrying a clipboard, walked up and offered him money; the older man refused, and the younger man left. I bought a box of popcorn, then went over to the lemonade vendor, who was crushing beer cans and saving them. I bought a lemonade for only $2.75.

The white-uniformed Indians were in the second game of a four-game series against the black-uniformed Syracuse Skychiefs. The Skychiefs were unable to mount any kind of defense that day, usually striking out quickly. The frustration of their batters was reflected in the time one accidentally splintered his bat, sending a piece flying down the third base line.

The Indians started out scoring in the second inning with a home run by Brad Eldred that went flying over the left field picnic area. As the Indians kept scoring with increasing frequency, the Skychiefs called several timeouts to discuss strategy. Their befuddlement was mocked by a sardonic announcer who played an old Buffalo Springfield tune: “Something’s happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear / There’s a man with a gun over there…” Well, I don’t think he intended to play that last line, unless he was also trying to make a political comment.

Eldred ended up being walked twice, then he scored another home run, clinching his eventual callup to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ty Wigginton also got a home run, but not before “missing” a homer early on. Wigginton had struck out in the first inning, then in a fit of rage tossed his helmet and bat onto the field, where a batboy dutifully retrieved them.

The serenity of the baseball field had been accented an hour into the game by a subtle moonrise, framed between the second and third smokestacks of the massive Citizens Thermal Energy plant to the south.

Afterwards, we walked back through White River State Park along the wide cobblestone walkway. It was nearly 10:00 and the temperature had dropped to about 76 degrees, just enough so that a slight breeze made the humid air drift away for a moment. In the dark, the trees alongside the path framed a line of antique-style streetlamps, and then we came up over the rise to find the river stretched out in front of us again.

Suddenly I was struck by the thought that this was like being in London, looking over the Thames River. In the spring of 1978 my family had visited an extravagant theatre in London that had been converted into a cinema, where we saw Star Wars, that operatic paean to Taoist philosophy and two-handed swordfighting. Around the same time, I bought a record album that included the Star Wars musical score, along with theme songs from British science fiction shows I had never seen, such as The Quatermass Experiment. This was during a time when IRA bombers and Palestinian terrorists were much in the news, and the line between good and evil seemed pretty clear to any comic-book reader. Every time I listened to that soaring, martial music from Star Wars, I knew which side I wanted to be on.

Coming shortly after the revival of The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars story tapped into a deep longing in the general public for Manichean fantasies, in which the forces of absolute moral good face off against the forces of absolute moral evil. What made both sets of stories interesting is that you couldn’t objectively tell who would win, because the evil forces seemed so much more powerful. You had to believe that the good guys would win purely because of their intrinsic moral superiority. Both series eventually gave strangely introspective warnings about the error of trying to power up meek good guys enough to defeat impossibly powerful bad guys, but they started out with the assumption that the universal principles of good and evil were roughly equal in scope. Manicheanism depends on the fallacy that the creator of the universe is not the master of it, but merely a spectator who is betting on the guy in the white hat. That’s why it used to be called “heresy,” although later it was called “moral clarity.”

I left the riverside to drive back through the protective ring of working-class neighborhoods, past the men hanging out by the liquor store at 22nd and Illinois, to the sterility and tedium of the suburban fiefdoms. The Indians had decisively shut out the Skychiefs (13-0) not because of their intrinsic goodness, but because they played a better game.

The Crowd Is Always Wrong

by Leave a Comment

I would not endorse participation in a mass protest because it is pointless. As a political act, it communicates the fact that the government is not literally in control of each person, which is comforting to some people who are compliant and unhappy, while it is terrifying to some people who are compliant and happy.

Now, the political effect of every mass protest is to impel government action to either appease the crowd  or to destroy the crowd, because the crowd is irrational. Appeasing the crowd may be dehumanizing and destroying the crowd may be inhumane, but both of these are normal functions of government (appeasing a group of people under its jurisdiction or destroying a group of people under its jurisdiction). The only thing special about mass protest is that it is a public spectacle. It allows leaders to justify their actions, to pretend that they are not responsible for what they do, since “the people demanded it” or “the people were out of control.”

Either way, the leaders do whatever they want, and the people in the crowd are not treated as individual persons, but more like animals. Groups of animals may be fed, sheltered, and comforted, or they may be confined, exploited, and killed. No one asks them for a political position statement.

Mass protest against police violence doesn’t really solve the problem of police violence. It just pushes the government to either appease the crowd or to use police violence to make the crowd shut up. Either feeds the paranoia of the individuals in power. The more they treat people as crowds, the more the people in crowds act like crowds, which makes the people in power more paranoid.

Is a crowd “wrong” because it is made up of poor, ignorant, sick, lawless, or ill-bred people? No, the type of people in a crowd does not make it necessarily wrong. From the point of view of someone who believes himself to be above a crowd of different-looking people, exercising authority over a crowd of lesser people, or protected from a crowd of unruly people, it may seem like the main problem with crowds is that it takes so much pepper spray and riot gear to clean them out of public parks and streets.

The crowd is wrong because joining a crowd means giving up personal responsibility. Even if a crowd were motivated by good feelings and accomplishing good purposes, it would still be wrong. It would still be a group of people who don’t want to act like persons because as persons they don’t feel powerful enough.

But even if a crowd of self-righteous, highly educated, wealthy, law-following, taxpaying, property-owning people all decide to be upstanding individualistic heroes, they are still a crowd. They still follow stochastic patterns of group behavior; they still appropriate stupid ideas as dogmatic ideology; they still respond instinctively with paranoia when their tribal symbolism is desecrated; they still savage anyone who deviates from unspoken norms; they still immerse themselves in thoughtless, indifferent violence; they still lie, cheat, and steal under cover of anonymity. Their crowd doesn’t have to gather on the street, in the open, because they own the street.

There is no justice in crowds. The crowd seeks a palliative, a sedative or a release, not justice. “Mob justice,” like “crowd control,” is final because it can never be questioned or evaluated; it can never be justified because it has no principle of reason.

Random Signals

by Leave a Comment

Nowadays, it’s kind of ordinary to be able to immediately read, hear, or watch some communication from anywhere in the world. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the easiest way to get foreign news was to listen to shortwave radio.

While living in Germany, I could listen to English-language news from all over the world, including the USSR. While living in the US, I could listen to German-language news.

One of my favorite things to do was compare the different versions of a story broadcast by the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Deutsche Welle, the BBC, and other broadcasters. Later, when I was studying journalism, I mentioned to a professor how I liked listening to shortwave radio. His face contorted with disgust and he sneered something sarcastic. After that he would occasionally direct contemptuous remarks at me in class.

Eventually I figured out that because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the development of the World Wide Web, a lot of shortwave broadcasters got their funding cut in the 1990s. So, most of the stations that could be easily picked up in the US were not broadcasting international news and cultural programming, but rather religious, political, or fringe-culture programming produced within the US, as a kind of alternative media outlet.

Apparently, from the point of view of my journalism professor, shortwave radio had changed in character:  from a pluralistic forum that demonstrated the virtues of liberal democratic societies as against totalitarian societies, to an annoying cacophony of shrill, narrow-minded ideologues and fanatics. In other words, it had become just like talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet. The Internet loomed especially large as a bogeyman for journalists, since it had indirectly destroyed his career at a major newspaper, along with the careers of dozens of his coworkers.

This theme of desperation and frustrated idealism was expressed by professors and textbooks in all my journalism classes as an explicit longing for the supposed golden age of newspaper journalism, which existed for them in a sweet spot sometime between the end of World War II and the proliferation of interconnected microcomputers.

They were totally baffled by the general public’s abandonment of mass-market print journalism as the authoritative source of news. More importantly, they were deeply wounded by the outright rejection of the model of society presented by newspaper and TV journalism during the golden age. That model consisted of an ideal liberal polity where a couple of public-minded media behemoths in each market, maybe three or four in large cities, defined all the issues worth discussing, filtering out minority or fringe views and trying to lead everyone to standardized notions of patriotism, good government, civic religion, public education, popular science, consumer culture, fine arts, and great books.

I know there wasn’t actually ever unanimous agreement on what made a good society, and my teachers didn’t believe that either. In fact, that’s why the newspaper cheerleaders were so confused by the fragmentation of the mass media. They thought that their model was a perfect way to create a peaceful society unified by liberal ideals, by including as many rational voices as possible while stifling any notions of radical or reactionary change.

As it turned out, the development of moderately-priced individualized mass communication devices totally destroyed the old dream of molding society strictly through the control of information. Information still gets filtered and funneled, but for now, the filters operate according to the choices of each individual reader, viewer, or listener. And the media corporations that have the most control over information (such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) benefit from the persistent fragmentation of the market, as long as they are able to keep aggregating producers, consumers, and sharers of information to themselves.

Those who produce content now have less potential for control, however, since the media landscape no longer supports a winner-take-all strategy. It wasn’t as if there were many actual information monopolies before, except in small markets or within the domain of sovereign governments; but everyone followed a monopolistic strategy anyway, with the goal of commanding attention long enough or broadly enough to definitively influence an issue, a region, or a genre.

In the end, the ineffectiveness of monopolistic media strategies is a cause for outrage from many different kinds of people. Yet they all want some kind of superficial unity, a consensus on some ideal that can be shared among everyone in society. If their personal ideal can’t find perfect agreement in their broader social world, they feel that chaos looms and life is hardly worth living. The random signals coming from the real world of autonomous microcultures seem to them to foreshadow an apocalyptic end to civilization, a descent into the madness of free will and individual preference.

To me, though, the whole world has always been filled with random signals from societies that are foreign to me. My upbringing taught me to regard every human society as temporary, conditional, and limited; and so any particular presentation of human society is nothing more than a curious cultural artifact.

Outside the Box

by 2 Comments

As long as you restrict your reading to the same echo-chamber garbage day after day, you will always be a very small, very sorry person.

I learned this early on when I realized that even though I could spell better than most people, I could also learn algebra. For some reason, most of my classmates either hated English or hated Math, if they didn’t hate every subject. When I was 14, I experimented with poetry and I experimented with deriving a progression for prime numbers that would enable me to quickly calculate square roots. I started getting really irritated by kids who would whine about how a certain subject was “impossible” for them to even make an effort to understand, not based on ability, but on their choice to stay comfortable in their little box.

Eventually, I developed an unconscious habit, perhaps even a dangerous obsession, of reacting to everything I learned by seeking out its opposite. Since I was taking advanced German, I also had to take advanced Physics. Since I was reading John Stuart Mill, I also had to read Friedrich Nietzsche. Since I was reading Robert Anton Wilson’s books (ground zero for 1980s psychedelic anarchists), I also had to read the monthly American Spectator (ground zero for 1980s paleo-conservatives).

This absurdist intellectual fantasy blew up when I chose to enroll in engineering college, even though I was a better writer than mathematician. I found myself knee-deep in math, so much so that I once had a vivid nightmare about a ten-page derivation of a single equation for a class in electromagnetic fields. (The assignment was real; that’s why I had a nightmare about it.) I was going to class and trying to pay attention, but then I would go back to my dorm room and read philosophy or stay up all night talking about theoretical physics, instead of doing homework. By the end, I was failing everything except German class.

The year before they actually kicked me out of school, I got a warning from my academic adviser. He asked me why my grades were so bad. I didn’t tell him how I was wasting my time instead of doing homework; I just said that I wasn’t sure why I was there, that I wanted to know why we were working on certain kinds of problems. He stared at me incredulously for a moment, then said, “David, engineers don’t ask ‘why,’ they just do it. Maybe you should go somewhere else and study philosophy.” I was amused and slightly offended, because everyone at engineering school knew that liberal arts majors were idiots.

A year later, I was a liberal arts major. At least I didn’t have to major in journalism; all liberal arts majors knew that journalism classes were for people who weren’t smart enough to do serious scholarly work.

Since liberal arts majors are generally encouraged to look at contradictory points of view, I was a little more comfortable. For example, I was able to get an A on a paper arguing against affirmative action by using Marxist theory. However, I wasn’t any less arrogant, so I failed freshman English three times (twice for the first semester, once for the second semester).

When it seemed to me like I would never actually graduate from college, I took a job in a machine shop while I finished writing a 2,500-word analysis of literary themes in a contemporary German novel. That job in the machine shop was the first of several low-wage jobs in factories, warehouses, restaurants, and retail stores over the next ten years.

I decided that it was really stupid to not specialize in one thing that I could do well, because then I basically looked like every other unskilled laborer. This was driven home to me when my manager at one company, in an effort to help me get promoted, told me how very important it was to create “distance” between me and the “lower” workers if I wanted to be perceived as worthy. So, just as I had done in a previous job, I did my manager’s work of documenting another employee’s incompetence and then confronting the guy to fire him. I somehow thought that would give me credibility to ask for raises for the other employees, but when I did, the assistant vice president sarcastically explained to me that it was not a good idea, because “they’ll just waste it on food and beer anyway.”

Finally, at around 32 years old, I realized that no one cared about what I could possibly do or why I did anything at all. All they cared about was whether I could actually do something better than someone else. I realized that there was only one thing I did better than most other people, which was reading academic papers. That skill transferred to editing college textbooks, but the textbook publishers wouldn’t hire someone with a German degree: “Uh . . . we need you to edit in English. Sorry!”

So, I went back to school to get a master’s degree in English. However, all the classes looked really boring, so I was going to take a bunch of electives from Journalism, but I had to get their permission. The Journalism Department persuaded me to just major in journalism instead, so that I wouldn’t have to take boring classes. That was fine, until I found out that papers for journalism classes don’t typically use rhetorical analysis or textual analysis, since those are unapproved “liberal arts” approaches to media studies. Also, journalistic assignments don’t encourage questioning a source’s credibility or presenting multiple viewpoints, because that just confuses the reader. There should be only one “government” viewpoint, only one “scientific” viewpoint, and only two “political” viewpoints.

Also, interviewing people who sincerely believe in religion or gun rights scares the crap out of the typical politically liberal journalism student. I had some fun presenting my investigation of right-wing anti-government groups that were active during the George W. Bush administration.

During this time, I was proofreading and editing textbooks for a subcontractor who didn’t care whether I had an English or Journalism degree. I did a lot of technical textbooks, mainly because they often get edited by a copyeditor, that is, someone who actually goes through the entire book, line by line, checking for consistency and accuracy. A few times I was assigned a textbook specifically because I was the only person who knew what a calculus equation was supposed to look like, or who had ever seen the inside of a machine shop.

Textbook proofreading and editing was a good idea until the publishers decided to stop editing textbooks, since “fact-checking” didn’t really matter to most people anyway, and it was cheaper to just send the manuscript from the author over to China to have it printed. That publishing approach didn’t last long, but by the time the textbook market rebounded I had gotten a full-time job in academic publishing.

The main reason I got a full-time, permanent position as a scholarly editor was because of my varied background. Most of the people with adequate academic credentials don’t have practical publishing industry experience, and most of the people with practical publishing experience don’t have adequate academic credentials. Most people who have both are successful as full-time freelance editors, so they don’t want to be constricted by working on-site all the time in an institutional job.

Of course, I made about half the income of most people my age with equivalent education, and I broadened myself so far that I was not even suited for a corporate job in commercial publishing anymore. A few years ago I applied for a copyediting job at a major publisher. After looking at my resume, he said, “I notice you’ve worked on a wide variety of books for different publishers and using different conventions. You know that we only publish one line of books at this location, right? They all have exactly the same style. I’m not sure you would be able to do it the way we need.”

Ah, well. Just leave him to his little box.