Thoughts on John Barnes and “Daybreak Zero”

This is mostly a reaction to reading a semi-leftist viewpoint of the novel:

http://opionator.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/daybreak-zero-by-john-barnes

You can’t trust international courts any more than local courts, in fact much less. The temptation of money and power is relentless on the human psyche, and trusting others to conform to rules for respecting individual rights is naive at best, and at worst makes one the “useful idiot” Lenin was talking about, like I used to be as a Communist. Trusting the totalitarian state to fade away when it’s no longer needed, as Karl Marx said it, is a stupid idea that too many smart people fall far (yep, even me).

I don’t know of even one libertarian who advocates castle feudalism along the lines of the ones John Barnes describes in this novel “Daybreak Zero“, and I know a great many of them. That kind of thing is more of a United Nations idea, a subtext in authoritarian world government. The United Nations’ advocacy of “human rights” is an oxymoron, as proven in the unanimous vote against Honduras in 2009, when its government (remember, legislatures and courts are also “the government” along with the executive, in republics) did the right thing and constitutionally removed a dictator and auto-coup president (Manuel Zelaya). And as proven in the chairmanship of their human rights advocacy organization going to Sudan, the genocidal regime that massacred two million Christians in South Sudan before the world took notice –of Darfur.

Libertarians know that trade without coercion is the path to prosperity for the most people possible and is best for the poor.

My beef with the novel is that almost all the speculation about Christians is the post-Tribulation “theocracy” stereotype. There are all too many of them today that feed that stereotype, and there is a Christian media establishment lock-down similar to the leftist lock-down on most traditional media. But there would be millions of unsung Christians that would be more visible in such disasters by rushing to help the hurting. They are more than the unfair caricature often painted out there. The obsession with the Torquemada type is a denial mechanism to divert from the Mother Theresa types and the Doctor Livingston types.

Another common flaw in almost all post-apocalyptic novels is the subtle idea in the background that civilization can only be “saved” by some political authority.

But Ron Paul has made Christian libertarians much more visible. We are nothing like Ayn Rand, who carried a brutal bitterness throughout her life apparently against God, and blaming God for the devil’s handiwork. And an Ayn Rand libertarian might well be in practice more like a castle feudalist in the kind of context of a post-Daybreak world.

The book is impoverished for that but John Barnes is a pretty good writer, in my opinion, communicating things as he sees them. To me his writing is more engaging than Clarke’s or Asimov.

The main flaw in almost all post-apocalyptic novels is the subtle idea in the background that civilization can only be “saved” by some political authority.

What is a liberal?

Some people are saying, like one in another forum, that Ayn Rand held the idea that only a very few hand-picked individuals have the ability to lead and we should turn the whole job of leadership over to them. He said that’s pretty much a Royalist point of view. Actually

Actually, in today’s political discourse, that is known as the “liberal” position.

But what is a liberal? Sometimes it gets weird reading von Mises and Hayek‘s writings, because when they use that word “liberal”, they are obviously using it to mean the philosophy of letting people run their own lives and make their own economic decisions.

I wonder when that got flipped 180 degrees in common usage, to mean the exact opposite of what it did before?

So I looked it up. Definition #4 fits von Mises’ use of the word, but there are others that can be stretched:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/liberal?s=t
4. favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.

Actually, “liberals” used to be the ones who advocated freedom from government, but then yes, “governmental protection” fits the modern demands that we need more government protect us from itself.

But wait a a minute, then they pointed to this quote from 1933 by Susan Sontag:

… liberal intellectuals … tend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that those in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the “establishment.” Read more at http://quotes.dictionary.com/liberal_intellectuals_tend_to_have_a#frkMjDL1loBJmTds.99

So, go figure… Um, wait another minute! That does figure! Today’s liberals do count on government to right every wrong, restore every loss, fill every need, and stop every scoundrel.

And then there is the definition by context, centuries old, as in the King James Bible:

The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself. (Proverbs 11:25)

And there, it means generous with your own resources.

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What is right in “Atlas Shrugged”, What is Wrong, Libertarians, and Charity

First a “disclaimer”: “Atlas Shrugged” is the only book by her I have ever read, including an insert in that book I read about “objectivism”, plus a few excerpts from her writings, plus summaries of her ideas by those who support them like the Ayn Rand Institute.

I agree with the “libertarian” parts of her philosophy, but sharply disagree with others. But in general, we agree on what a government should do.

Some who object to the libertarianism claim that her ideas are conducive to letting a few individuals lead, even using the word “hand-picked”.

But “hand-picked” is definitely not part of the ideas, quite the opposite. Nobody should be able to pick winners and losers was her point.

There were a few points that she wanted to make, although she made like they were part of the same package, although they are not.

The one that makes sense is that interference in the free market by government to make things “fair” end up hurting the people and the economy it is supposed to benefit. Tilting the field in favor of the less capable or less productive at any level only hurts productivity and hurts the consumer.

One I sharply disagree with is that charity freely given is wrong. Elevating selfishness as a virtue contradicts the other message and cedes “moral high ground” to the undeserving ideas, making it a virtue to let people just die who are caught up in disasters, for example.

Another I sharply disagree with even more is her irrational rant against God, about 100 pages or so. It was hard to slough through, but knowing that the book is a sort of Bible to some would-be elites (that’s true), I read it. The stuff she said about the Garden of Eden is totally irrational, no objective reasoning in it, and the denunciation of God totally ignored the realities of history. Ignoring the realities of history is a common fault of anti-Christian atheist writers.

The way that is justified by one executive at the “Ayn Rand Institute” is that no one person has any natural moral claim to anything that belongs to another person. That principle is true, but it misses the point that the moral imperative of genuine charity is not a claim by the recipient –that’s theft, opposite of moral– the question of morality or lack thereof pertains to the side of the giver.

“Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth [it] not, to him it is sin.” (James 4:17) That’s a principle most people intuitively believe in, along with not doing anything to anybody else that they don’t want done to themselves.

Now pay attention to the detail here, it is immensely important. Everybody has a problem actually doing either aspect of the Golden Rule, the passive side or the active side. To assuage the conscience for the lack of “do unto”, they go into philosophy.

To justify the act of selfishness, they restate the question to put it from the perspective of the recipient instead of the giver. But they have to do more than that, so they say that anybody who does give something for free like that is doing it for “selfish” reasons.

But they’re torturing the meaning of “selfish” when they say that, because in that sense, they’re just pointing out that people have their own reasons for doing something whatever it is, meaning they’re just stating a meaningless tautology.

I believe in getting government out of the business of helping the poor because the way they have to do it only hurts the poor. That’s my main reason, although another equally valid reason is that the government has to ROB some people in order to do this “helping”.

I also believe in getting government out of the business of helping the poor because they only get in the way and tend to stop the private activities that would actually help the poor.

Some of those activities by private parties include just natural free market activity, like putting people to work in productive jobs with the investment capital that is freed up by stopping the government theft of it.

Other activities include those that benefit from the availability of resources that result from a more prosperous economy. In the 20th century, people in the United States were by far, way far, the majority contributor to missions of all kinds to the poor areas of the world. Most missions, by the way, included lots of physical and material helps, like elementary schools, vocational schools, and the like. Salvation Army type works.

Usually those charities are Christian charities, motivated by the need to offer the Gospel of Love to a world that is starving for it.

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