Freedom

Freedom is so often applied in the political and economic domains in terms of external freedom, such as in speech or action—things that a state can regulate, a boss can forbid, and a religious cleric can excoriate—that internal freedom is often overlooked. We live in a collectivist world of states, businesses, universities, and religious organizations so it is easy to overlook interior freedom. In viewing ourselves in terms of groups, we are subject to the artificial constraints of group-think. Individualism is often conflated with lawlessness and licentiousness.

The full essay is at "Freedom."

 

Texas School Policies Violently Enforced: Police in Schools

An organizational policy, whether in an educational, religious, or business organization, is not law. Accordingly, “police tactics” are inappropriately used on people who violate policies. The proliferation of off-duty police officers in retail in more than one of the U.S. states (and perhaps in the E.U. as well), complete with lethal weapons, renders the distinction between policy and law especially relevant and even pressing. To be sure, trespassing is indeed a crime, even though some municipal police departments in Florida have refused to recognize it as such, as, for example, when a property owner illegally enters a rented apartment, but in a store, absent a decision by a manager to have a person removed from the premises, store “police” cannot legally act violently against the public as long as no crime is being committed—even if a store policy is being violated.

Since the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, school districts in Texas “spent billions of dollars to station police officers” in every school.”[1] Crucially, the intent was “to protect students from similar tragedies.”[2] It is therefore more than unfortunate that school administrations, including local school boards, have allowed even elementary-school aged children to be subjected “to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office.”[3] A principal is the head of a school. “Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they would up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which [were at the time] prohibited in [Texas] juvenile detention facilities but allowed in public schools.”[4] Under those circumstances, parents could hardly be blamed for yanking their kids out of public schools, preferring private schools, religious or secular, instead. In one public school, a student caught with a vape at school was “smashed into a wall” by an “officer,” another kneed a student in the face for fighting with a classmate, and still another animal (i.e., “officer”) slammed a student “into a metal cart” intentionally.[5] Admittedly, the student kneed and the one slammed were in the midst of physically fighting with other students, so some physicality was justified in order to break up the respective fights; it is the excessive violence that calls into question to motives of the police in the school hallways. For instance, the intent to severely harm out of sheer anger and even the intent to instill a sense of guilt in the respective students can both be subjected to harsh critique.

In his text, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that punishment originally arose in ancient (and prehistoric) times so the punisher could feel pleasure from inflicting pain in another person, rather than to instill a sense of moral responsibility or deter bad behavior in the future. Nietzsche argues that this original intent, or purpose, was still in force among European parents in his own adult lifetime in the mid-to-late 1800s (before he went mad in 1890).  Kneeing a student in the face and slamming a student into a metal cart are so extreme that it can indeed be wondered whether the culprits (i.e., the “officers”) were not at least partially motivated by such pleasure. Nietzsche goes on to point out that if political, economic or any other kind of elite are getting away with the exact behavior that is subject to punishment if done by other people, no sense of guilt arises from such dogmatic inflictions of pain otherwise known as punishments. Nietzsche argues that if a criminal “sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, . . . all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends” then no sense of guilt will arise when those actions are punished.[6] The violence of the police in the schools in Texas de facto nullifies any intended message sent by that violence qua “punishment” that violence is wrong. In fact, it might even be that the students in physical fights at school may grow up to be hired by cities as police! As such, those kids, as police “officers,” could be expected to be unnecessarily violent precisely because the use of violence in school beyond the authority of the police stationed there nullified any “lesson” that violence is wrong and therefore violent people should feel guilty, for presumably none of the police in the schools felt ashamed of themselves, and punishment inflicted on them would not have had such an effect if those police could in turn remember violence having been orchestrated by their bosses and even the impunity that those officials received from political or judicial officers of government.

What then can we expect as to how the kids in the schools were affected by the police brutality? According to Nietzsche, “Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.”[7] None of those can be favorable to being open to learning, so the activity of the police inside the schools beyond stopping mass shootings is contrary and thus detrimental to the mission of a school, which is to educate by imparting knowledge from teacher to student. Incidentally, it can’t be that the teachers feel comfortable being in the schools in which police are body-slamming students for carrying vaping equipment (perhaps a student is having trouble quitting smoking cigarettes, in which case vaping should be encouraged when the student feels very tempted to smoke). The result of such violent over-reaches on kids in Texas can be expected to include no longer feeling safe in their respective school hallways—not just because mass-killings have occurred in American schools, but also, and perhaps even more so, because the police installed in hallways have over-reached so from their purpose being to guard and protect students from external physical threats.

That school principals and even school boards have either given their consent or ignored the over-reaches renders those officials culpable as well. Prudent parents who love their children would be justified in voting to replace entire boards, which in turn would presumably be disposed to fire school principals who would rather than their respective students beaten up by police even for vaping than have teachers send students to the principal’s office. Police have no business enforcing school policies because policy is not law, and human beings with the means of greater power over other humans are too inclined to use it.

As Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For an organization’s management to place police rather than unarmed security guards in a position of enforcing policies is to inappropriately tempt abuses of power that cannot be said to come rightly under authority. For power sans authority can be understood to be in line with Hobbes’ description of the state of nature prior to any social contract historically. As another saying goes, give a human being an inch and a mile will be taken. Or, give someone a few centimeters and a kilometer will be taken. Take your pick, but don’t over-reach even though doing so seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, which, after all, can be said to be human, all too human. Such an innate proclivity should not be tempted whether in a managerial decision or in institutional arrangements that allow for the exploitation of an institutional or personal conflict of interest.

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1. Claire Amari, Kristian Hernandez, and Asher Lehrer-Small, “At Texas Schools, Pepper Spray and Tasers,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Second Essay, sec. 14, p. 518.
7. Ibid, p. 517.

Managerial Capitalism: Being and Becoming

At first glance, Friedrich Nietzsche’s pro-capitalist stance on private property and the process of accumulating profit (or wealth) may seem to extend a vote of confidence to the business manager as a type. After all, managers manage the private property of stockholders (which can include themselves) with a fiduciary duty to do so to increase shareholder value by maximizing profit. The notion of profit-seeking by maximizing revenue and minimizing cost is arguably too simplistic. Squeezing a workforce too much, for example, can backfire in the long term. Nietzsche was concerned about such a thing happening even though he claims that the vast majority of laborers must be kept to subsistence wages for culture to be possible. He castigates petty, short-sighted managers who do not look out for the spiritual and economic welfare of workers, and yet holds that those workers must be slavish in the sense of being exploited by employers so culture can emerge and be sustained by the rich. To be for such exploitation and yet against petty cost-cutting managers renders Nietzsche’s socioeconomic philosophy interesting as well as useful in terms of keeping a capitalist economy from being reduced to the mentality of its bottom-feeder producers. I first discuss the matter of exploitation and then turn to how Nietzsche addresses his wider socio-economic philosophy more specifically to human-resource management. Within the wider subject-heading of exploitation, very different approaches, or mentalities, to human resource management can be discerned. In dichotomous terms, there can be said to be a pathos of distance between enlightened self-interest and selfish, short-sighted greed.

Nietzsche claims that capital accumulation and economic inequality are necessary for adequate investment in culture, such that not everyone must be oriented to satisfying basic needs. Moreover, private property and accumulating money serve a more fundamental function in terms of human being and becoming, the latter being construed in terms of, growing. Nietzsche’s use of this term can be thought of in terms of Aristotle’s appropriation from the natural world for his philosophy.

It has seemed to me in life that some people may have a static orientation, whereas other people may be inherently oriented to change, as in self-development. The static orientation is based on being, whereas the default of dynamism can be said to be based on valuing becoming. It may be that people wetted to a static state of being feel threatened psychologically by change-oriented people because the latter typically want the former to work on themselves too. In a dysfunctional family in which most of the people value stasis, for example, the person who values development may ironically be scapegoated precisely because any change is rejected, even that which would make the family healthy. Translated into Nietzsche’s socioeconomic philosophy, possessing assets, or private property, applies to a person’s static nature, whereas accumulating wealth means that a person is dynamic—changing.

To Nietzsche, capital accumulations by titans, and those by wealthy people more generally, have permitted the advent of culture in terms of there being adequate investments in it—something that we moderns may take for granted even though much of human (pre) history our species was oriented to meeting survival needs. Regarding a society having some individuals rich enough to develop a cultural scene, Nietzsche insists that what Marx calls the surplus value of labor of the vast majority of workers must be transferred to the few—the capitalists—so they have enough money to invest in culture. A city benefits even though most laborers work for subsistence wages. Nietzsche relates capitalist enterprise to culture as follows:

“In order for there to be a broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in the service of the minority, beyond the measure that is necessary for the individual. At their expense, through their extra work, that privileged class is to be removed from the struggle for existence, in order to produce and satisfy a new world of necessities. Accordingly, we must learn to identify as a cruel-sounding truth the fact that slavery belongs to the essence of culture. . . . The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympic men.”[1]

Slavery here is in the sense that the laborers are held to such a minimum monetary compensation that they cannot free themselves from working so their basic survival needs are met. For the privileged class—the capitalists—to be removed from the struggle for existence is a late-arriving novelty for our species, and thus the advent of culture can be construed as a luxury rather than as an intrinsic aspect or manifestation of human existence. Put another way, even though the dominance of the capitalists over labor, which I submit is a better description than is the word slavery, “belongs to the essence of culture,” culture does not belong to the essence of our species. So even though culture raises the entire species from being oriented to satisfying subsistence needs, the scaffolding that is constructed to reach the rarified air can be viewed as artificial.

Neither is the exploitation that is necessary for culture natural. Landa argues that the relevance of Nietzsche for capitalism lies precisely in slavish exploitation. Even though Nietzsche claims to have “stood far above any strictly material concerns, the basic fact cannot be ignored that, if his ‘aesthetics’ necessitate slavery, . . . if the production of ‘culture’ means the ruthless material subjugation of the vast majority of people to the benefit of an elite, then a socioeconomic theory of exploitation is inscribed into the very core of his aesthetic theory of noble culture. And it precisely here, I argue, that Nietzsche’s pertinence for capitalism lies, in the dreary fact of exploitation . . .”[2] Although the economic elite undoubtedly benefit, however, it is the species that benefits from culture. Put in terms of socioeconomics, a city benefits by having some buildings devoted to culture rather than to the means of production. Although this point renders the exploitation somewhat better morally, Nietzsche’s criticism of modern morality means that he rejects the normative objection that economic exploitation is unethical. Considering that the benefits of accumulated wealth for culture benefit not just the rich and the exploitation (i.e., economic “slavery”) is spared a damning ethical verdict, it is not difficult to see why Nietzsche would be in favor of culture. Of course, apart from Nietzsche, the holding of the vast majority of a workforce to subsistence wages while an economic elite gets rich off the transferred surplus value of labor is ripe for ethical castigation. Even if we reject Nietzsche’s socioeconomic account of culture as a result, Nietzsche presents another rationale for being wealthy—one that is existential in nature.[3]

Private property and accumulating wealth correspond to being and becoming, respectively. As such, Private property and capital accumulation are “firmly established by Nietzsche as representing the rudiments of life itself.”[4] Nietzsche claims that “those who have possessions are of one mind on one article of faith: ‘one must possess something in order to be something.’”[5] Does this mean that the subsistence-limited worker bees do not exist? Surely not. Perhaps Nietzsche means to count as something rather than to be something. This interpretation is in line with the businessman’s value-set wherein to count as someone is a matter of how much one possesses (i.e., how wealthy one is).

The capitalists would perhaps be less familiar with Nietzsche’s rationale for the act of accumulating possessions, including money: “But this is the oldest and healthiest of all instincts: I should add, ‘one must want to have more than one has in order to become more.’ For this is the doctrine preached by life itself to all that has life: the morality of development. To have and to want to have more—growth, in one word—that is life itself.”[6] Here, becoming is put in terms of growth as a natural process of life.[7] The will to power is for Nietzsche the will to life, and strength is the self-confident embrace of the fullness of life in overcoming obstacles in order to feel the pleasure of power. According to Landa, Nietzsche claims that to “live truly and properly is therefore to Exploit, Possess and Accumulate . . . Under this light, the will to power reveals itself as the metaphysical extension of the will to money.”[8] But do counting as something in virtue of having material possessions and growing as a plant does count as metaphysical? Moreover, what use did Nietzsche have for speculative metaphysics? Rather than being grounded in existentialism, Nietzsche’s view of being and becoming may bear a family resemblance to Heidegger’s claim that a person as a dasein, or one that is, comes to realize oneself hammering in an open field; only in action does a person realize oneself as one is as a that (i.e., an entity). The action to which Nietzsche refers is only open to the capitalist, however, in accumulating wealth, for the worker bees are enslaved to meeting their subsistence needs and thus are cut off from becoming in the sense of growing.

Lest it be concluded that Nietzsche’s view favors business managers, including executives, rather than stockholders who are oriented to the long-term value of their stock, Nietzsche spanks down the typical managerial primacy of immediate profit: “No doubt, the wide-ranging, multi-faceted perspective of the philosopher, as compared with the narrow view of the standard market-apologist intent on immediate gains, endowed the former a much more flexible class position. . . . Since the preservation of the class hierarchy and the prevention of a comprehensive socialist alternative was the foundation of Nietzsche’s social vision, he was at times perfectly willing to criticize naked exploitation of labor when that meant dangerously exacerbating class enmity to the point of imperiling the overall stability of the system. As in the following example: ‘What we now refer to as justice, is from this point of view a highly refined usefulness, which does not take into consideration only the present moment and exploits the opportunity, but rather reflects with responsibility on the lasting consequences, therefore taking care of the well-being of the worker as well, of his physical and spiritual satisfaction, in order that he and his descendants will continue to work for our descendants, and will be available for a longer period of time than a single individual’s life. The exploitation of the worker was, as one now understands, a stupidity, a ruthless enterprise at the cost of the future, which endangered society. Now we have before us almost a war, and the price for achieving peace, for sealing contracts and wining trust, will at any rate be very high, since the foolishness of the exploiters was great and long-lasting.’”[9] A company’s management that can be characterized by the short-sighted, petty greed of its managers is sub-optimal from the standpoint of maximizing stockholder wealth in the long-term, and thus is not in line with being and becoming. Even in terms of the wealth of non-stockholder executives, cutting labor benefits that are already trivial so as to boost next quarter’s bonus detracts from being able to retain workers whose efficiency can “grow” the company, and whose sons and daughters may decide to work for the company. In short, to the extent that the manager as a type cannot master (i.e., overcome) the instinctual urge of greed manifesting as short-sighted, selfish pettiness, Nietzsche’s pro-capitalist philosophy is not in favor of managers of such a pathetic mentality of weakness. The philosopher’s (amoral) approbation is reserved for managers who apply enlightened self-interest to management of stockholder wealth concentrated as a company by looking after non-supervisory employees in order that they will (and their offspring, if hired) continue to produce such that stockholder wealth can grow like a tomato plant on a vine during a warm, wet summer.

It is ironic that it is a philosopher who “chides economic liberalism on strictly pragmatic grounds and promotes, against the irresponsible zeal to maximize profits at the immediate present, the contraceptive measure of a ‘highly refined usefulness’ whose purpose is to ensure that the very principle of profit will survive on an enduring basis. To the extent that the ruthless practices of economic liberalism, by over-exploiting the worker, become themselves a potentially destabilizing factor jeopardizing the future, Nietzsche is willing to show his teeth to the masters as well, and recommend what one commentator readily celebrated as ‘an enlightened labour policy.’”[10] Nietzsche’s esteem for the will to money as possessing and accumulating goes not include the greedy zeal to maximize profits without adequate attention being placed on resisting expedient measures that are oriented to temporarily boosting quarterly profits and the stock price.

Beyond taking away employee perks such as complimentary gym memberships even though exercise can elongate how long an experienced employee can work, managers can detract from the long-term monetary value of a company (and stockholder wealth) by being petty with customers. When grocery-store companies decided to charge customers for paper bags, customers rightly perceived the managers as petty. When petty managers of airlines figured out that they could boost revenue by charging customers for seats with extra leg-room and for checked luggage—even applying a weight-limit to each suitcase—the business judgment was that any business lost in the long-run from customers feeling “nickeled and dimed” by a greedy management would be made up for by the more immediate revenue gained from the fees. An example of a viable substitute in the long-term in North America could be high-speed trains.

In contradistinction to banal, incrementalist managers, Nietzsche’s esteem for self-confident strength, which says in terms of its natural rather than contrived, self-interested generosity, what are the parasites to me? A person having an overflowing surplus of power (and wealth) and is oriented to life can be contrasted with the new bird of prey—the weak who seek to dominate by petty cruelty. Whereas the self-confident, strong business titan is oriented to the pleasure that is obtainable from a large, successful business deal, the weak manager greedily clutches at cutting costs budget-item by budget-item. Whereas courageous titans can be likened to the Greco-Roman conquerors whose nature it was to gain land and captured slaves, petty, control-obsessed managers can be likened to ascetic priests whose weak nature it is to inflict “Thou Shalt Not!” as a weapon to beguile the self-confident strong.

Managers who market themselves as leaders rather than managers while actually micro-managing subordinates are nonetheless innately weak rather than strong. The “leadership versus management” dichotomy itself may be a guise wherein petty managers seek to rebrand banal management as something that is enlightened in terms of self-interest. To be sure, Nietzsche points to the possibility of such self-interest being adopted by managers in order to meet the spiritual and (basic) material needs of workers so the best of them do not leave. Indeed, such economic self-interest should extend to take into account generations of workers.

Therefore, even though Nietzsche’s philosophy can be regarded as pro-capitalist because private property and accumulating wealth enable a sense of being and becoming, respectively, it cannot be said that the philosophy lauds the business manager as a type. Rather, it depends on the underlying mentality of a particular manager and even of a company’s management. Organizational culture can play a large role in forming and maintaining managerial values, norms, and practices. The culture of Enron was dramatically different than that of Ben and Jerry’s, for example. Just because Nietzsche’s philosophy can be reckoned as pro-capitalist does not mean that he would support any management. In fact, capitalism itself need not be defined in praxis by its lowest common denominator. Nietzsche’s philosophy can be utilized to keep that from happening, or to raise an economy based on private property and the market-mechanism above the squalid mentality of its bottom-feeder producers.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Greek State,” in On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 178-79.
2. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 28.
3. This is not to say that Nietzsche was an existentialist. The Leibniz scholar, Patrick Riley, once asked me whether I thought Nietzsche’s philosophy falls under existentialism; he didn’t think so either. Neither is the philosophy nihilist; Nietzsche asks, “what is nihilism today if it is not” being “weary of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 480.
4. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 28.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Fabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 77.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p.  77.
7. Here Nietzsche is in line with Aristotle.
8. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 29.
9. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 30. Translating from Friedrich Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbanden (Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), Vol. 2, pp. 681-82.
10. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 31. Landa quotes from Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker—The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 91.

Statehood for Canada: Hardly a Merger

The U.S. Constitution includes an open invitation for the accession of Canada into the U.S. as a state. The invitation was made before Canada spread across from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. So, were Canadians to seek statehood in the American union of states (i.e., the U.S.A.), they would have a good argument for Canada being split in to a few states rather than just one. This is qualitatively different than a “merger” between the two countries; the latter ideological conjecture is predicated on a category mistake. Such a mistake would say, for example, that Singapore and China are of the same genus politically even though the former is a city-state and the latter is on the (early modern) empire-scale. Just because both Singapore and China have foreign policies and are member-countries of the UN does not mean that a city-state is to be treated more generally as if it were the same as an empire. By “empire,” I am referring to China itself, rather than any territories it might have beyond mainland China. The Qing emperor Kangzi expanded mainland China to include some central Asian kingdoms, thus making China an empire (of kingdom-level/scale subunits). Similarly, the U.S., as well as the E.U., are empire-scale/level polities of (kingdom-level) polities, whereas Canada does not have enough such polities to qualify as being on the empire-scale, for an empire contains many kingdom-level polities.

When the U.S. federal constitution was written, Canada consisted of Lower Canada, which was French-speaking, and Upper Canada, which is present-day Ontario. There were also maritime colonies to the east. It makes sense, as Ontario hardly stretches across the continent to present-day British Columbia, that the American delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 would naturally view both Upper and Lower “Canada” together as being equivalent to an American republic being represented at the convention, both in terms of population and extent of territory. However, that Upper and Lower Canada were so culturally different, with different languages being predominant in each, had I been at the convention, I would have urged the other delegates to offer statehood as two states rather than just one. Different states having different languages is of course well-known in the E.U., and even in the U.S., German was just narrowly—by one vote—voted down as the official language of Wisconsin by its legislature. Even today, “brats and beer” have a cultural meaning in Wisconsin (e.g., grilled on the lakeside terrace just outside the Rathskeller bar at the University of Wisconsin) that simply does not exist in Illinois, even just miles from the northern border. Imagine if German were the official language of Wisconsin; the cultural differences between the two American republics would be even greater; but I digress.

When U.S. President Trump broached the idea that Canada could join the U.S. as the 51^st state, some government officials at the state level in the E.U. displayed their abject ignorance of what the U.S. was and is by correcting Trump by insisting that Canada joining the U.S. would actually be a “merger” of two sovereign countries. Actually, each of the states in the U.S., as well as those in the E.U., are semi-sovereign and hold residual sovereignty (whereas the U.S. and E.U. have only delegated, enumerated powers/competencies). Neither Texas nor France is a sovereign country anymore, for both have agreed to delegate some governmental sovereignty to the federal system represented by federal governmental institutions. So the presumptuous, dismissive tone used was actually like primped arrogance on stilts during a flood, and in a Nietzschean sense be viewed as a manifestation of the will to power from resentment rather than as a factual statement.

So, when the prime minister of Canada visited the White House in October 2025, Euronews lied that the “US president even made a joking reference to a ‘merger’ between the two countries.”[1] He would not have used the “merger” to refer to Canada becoming a state. The European journalist was writing as an act of power to reduce the US as if it were equivalent to an E.U. state. Canada is not a united states; neither is Mexico. When an official from the British consulate of Chicago spoke at the University of Wisconsin in the 2000s, before Britain had seceded from being an E.U. state, I asked him about how the possible accession (not merger!) of Turkey would affect the European Union. He replied that it would be like Mexico becoming the 51^st state. He was implicitly rejecting the view that Mexico would merge with the U.S., even though Mexico had incorrectly adopted the nomenclature, “The United States of Mexico.” France or Belgium or Germany could call itself a united states, but those republics are nonetheless states in the E.U., which is equivalent, as an empire-scale union of states, to the U.S.

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1. Malek Fouda, “Trump Says There Is ‘Natural Conflict’ with Canada as He Hosts PM Mark Carney at the Oval Office,” Euronews.com, October 8, 2025.

National Absurditas

Words can be stretched, or even abused, in the service of a self-serving ideology that is utterly unfair to other people as well as stubborn facts. Nietzsche theorized that ideas are the stuff of instinctual urges tussling for supremacy in the human mind. Against Kant’s love of the fixed laws of reason for their own sake, I submit that Nietzsche’s tussle of ideas can bend even the laws of reason, like the gravity of large masses can bend space (and thus light) and time. The basic framework of the universe is not static. Neither, I believe, are the rules of reason, and reasoning itself. Intense power, such as that of an ideology, can warp both the basic framework and process of reason. This can explain why ideologues can be seen by others to suffer from cognitive dissidence: holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time. A defense mechanism of ideology can block awareness of one of the two. Self-serving applications of the word, national, is a case in point.

An article touting small towns in the U.S. as worthy tourist attractions stresses the importance of “small towns and communities that have long formed the backbone of the nation.”[1] The article features the best small town in every U.S. state, though the importance of small towns is in terms of the nation. The gravity of so much consolidated power at the level of the Union may be behind the bending of the spotlight from the state to the federal level. The towns were selected on the state level and yet they form the backbone of the nation. Cognitive dissidence is present in the tension here. Indeed, the term national can apply to the states, as the U.S., like the E.U., sports a federal system of dual sovereignty. In both empire-level unions[2], the member-states have retained some governmental sovereignty as well as any residual not delegated to the federal level. Also in both unions, cultural and even political-ideological differences exist from state to state. The U.S. state of Vermont differs significantly from the state of Kansas, for example. The E.U. state of Denmark differs significantly from the state of Spain. An empire must have many culturally distinct states (or kingdoms, historically).

It follows that the United Kingdom is not itself an empire. Formerly an empire and later a state in the E.U., the UK post-secession (not post-divorce, as the UK and the E.U. are not equivalent because the UK was a state in the E.U.). Culturally, the Scottish, Welsh, and English regions (and Northern Ireland, whose residents tend to identify themselves as English culturally) are much more similar than are the E.U. states of Greece and Sweden. In fact, were the regions of the UK really nations, they would have been separate E.U. states. Those regions only have delegated power in the UK, and are thus not semi-sovereign, so the regions are not nations. Indeed, the British Parliament could stop the Scottish region, for example, from even applying for E.U. statehood, whether before or after the secession.

Even so, the British refer to their regions as nations. For example, the Church of Scotland “is a Presbyterian church and recognizes only Jesus Christ as ‘King and Head of the Church’,” according to the Royal Family’s website.[3] If this sounds familiar, this may be because Israel before the kings recognized Yahweh as its sole ruler (assuming this is a historical fact used in the faith narrative). Yet someone had to interpret Yahweh’s will. Similarly, according to CNN, the Scottish Church is “entirely self-governing, represented at the local level by ‘kirk sessions’ and at a national level by the General Assembly.”[4] The Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is a human being. The Queen annually appoints someone to “maintain the relationship between the State and the Church,” according to the Royal website in early 2020.[5] Although occupants have been from the Scottish region, members of the royal family have also been appointed. In January 2020, the Queen appointed her grandson, William. Hence the Crown is over the Church of Scotland, albeit not as explicitly as in the case of the Church of England. This contradicts the self-governing plank of the Scottish Church, and, more to the point, the claim that the General Assembly is on “a national level,” meaning that Scotland is a nation.

Here, cognitive dissidence and a warping not only of the word national, but also of reasoning itself, can be seen. In the relation between Church and State, the latter refers here to the UK rather than Scotland, and yet the latter is “a national level.” The warping of reasoning itself and the law of reason that mandates that equivalents are equivalent are evident in the further contention that the semi-sovereign U.S. states are not nations while Scotland is. Two contradictory uses of the same word violate the logic of equivalence and invoke cognitive dissidence. In short, the British should not apply national to both Scotland and the United States. That this is done suggests the underlying presence of a questionable motive.  

Moreover, Europeans and even Americans typically treat an E.U. state as equivalent to the entire American union rather than to a member-state therein.[6] I suspect that few Americans even realize how the language is being used, and why. In the case of the Europeans, the ideology seems to involve a self-serving overstatement of the importance of a former or current E.U. state and a diminishment of an empire-level union elsewhere. Power can fuel both the self-aggrandizement and passive aggression. In fact, the latter is definitely present in angry reactions against the few people who try to restore the application of equivalence as if doing so is irrational and haughty! Such is the power of ideological defense-mechanisms manifesting in the political domain.

Although I resist the linguistic reductionism in 20^th century analytical philosophy (e.g., Wittgenstein’s claim that no awareness of an object can precede a word being given to that object), I readily admit that human beings can use language in order to get pleasure from having more power. The fixity of the rules of grammar and of the definitions of words can be mere parchment constraints up against the instinctual urge for power.

---

[1] Lissa Poirot, “Every U.S. State’s Best Small Town,” Far & Wide, January 10, 2020 (accessed January 26, 2020).

[2] Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire (2017).

[3] Amir Vera, “Queen Appoints Prince William to New Role amid Royal Shakeup,” CNN.Com, January 25, 2020.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Skip Worden, Essays on Two Federal Empires: Comparing the E.U. and U.S. (2015).

Putin Likened Protesters to "Weak Birds"

At the conclusion of the 2012 Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Russia, the host president, Vladimir Putin, likened the birds that had been following his motorized glider south one day to the Russians who did not follow him--in other words, the protesters. “Only the weak ones,” he quipped, "didn’t follow me.” Elaborating, he added of the birds, “not all of the cranes flew, and the leader, the pilot, has to be blamed because he was too fast in gaining speed and altitude and they were just lagging behind; they couldn’t catch up.” It is interesting that he was blaming himself as well as referring to the lagging birds, and thus protesters, as weak. Was Putin really blaming himself though? Furthermore, doesn't blaming the protesters contradict the notion in the transformational-leadership literature that such leaders build up rather than push down their followers?

Putin could not have been entirely objective on the protests against him.      

Source: Democracy Chronicles

Putin stated that “during certain circumstances, when there is strong wind and bad weather, the pilot has to lift very speedily—otherwise the vehicle, the flying machine, could overturn and capsize.” In other words, Russia would collapse were he to have relaxed or compromised on his agenda for change. 

Is it really the case that a political leader’s transformational paradigm must be implemented quickly or the government, economy or society will collapse? Is a glider stalling and falling really comparable to a government slowing down on reform? I contend that the latter is oriented to graduations, whereas a stall in the air happens all at once (i.e., a qualitative change). 
Was there really the political, economic or social equivalent of “strong wind and bad weather” facing Russia at the time? In the 1990's in the wake of a collapsed Soviet Union, governmental and economic transformation was clearly needed as soon as possible. In fact the rise of the suddenly rich Russian oligarchs can be taken as an indication that the government did not produce adequate economic laws soon enough. In 2012, it could be argued that Putin was applying “leadership in a crisis” to “leadership in the status quo” in his own time. In the midst of a tsunami, for example, there is not time to question or debate the directions from a leader; people must get to higher ground as soon as possible. Russia was not facing such a massive wave in 2012. Therefore, Putin's argument that he had not been at fault because he was avoiding stalling so the economy and/or government would not collapse is valid. 
Had Putin been willing to take some responsibility for the protests, he may not have characterized the protesters as weak. According to the transformational leadership literature, doing so undercuts a leader's ability to transform an economy, government, and society. In Transformational Leadership, James Burns defines transformational leadership in terms of developing the capacities of followers, which presumably includes the followers being able to become leaders themselves. Nietzsche would beg to differ, claiming that the weak cannot be weak; they are simply not constituted to be strong. The strong too, cannot be but strong. I suspect that Putin would agree with the nineteenth-century European philosopher. In the transformational leadership literature, leadership is portrayed as stronger than followership because a leader can encourage followers to develop their own inner authority, which in turn can be used in becoming a leader. Plato's notion of justice, wherein reason is in control of the passions, is consistent with the notion that inner authority (i.e. self-discipline) can enable a person to be a leader. A just polis, Plato claims in The Republic, is one in which a government uses reason to control the passions in society. 

It is possible that Putin's comment regarding the protesters actually reveals Putin as weaker. According to Nietzsche, the truly strong feel no need to dominate as they have a surplus of self-confidence and pleasure from exercising power to go after protesters. "What are these parasites to me really?" such a political leader would say. "Let them have their protests; my sights are on turning my transformational paradigm into reality."  In fact, the strong are not stingy in giving away the surplus; they have more than enough. The best source of such power, according to Nietzsche, is from the inner strength to master an internal intractable instinctual urge. Doing so gives the strong such pleasure from power that they are not motivated to be cruel to an opposition even as it protests. Put another way, in trying to snuff out threats to his power, Putin demonstrated a lack of self-confidence and strength.

Source:

David Herszenhorn and Steven Lee Myers, “For Putin, a Flight of Fancy at a Summit Meeting’s Close,” The New York Times, September 10, 2012.

On Nietzsche applied to power in business, see On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management (available at Amazon)

Free Speech in the E.U.: Criminalizing Denials of Genocides

While the world continued to look on—like an impotent rich man who cannot afford Viagra—as a genocide was taking place in Syria (i.e., the systemic killing of a group—in this case, of pro-democracy demonstrators), France’s state senate approved a bill on January 23, 2012 criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides, which according to the state includes the Nazi Holocaust and the Turkish killing of Armenians beginning in 1915. In the twenty-first century, fining people and putting them in prison for not wanting to remember things so horrible evinces the same kind of nationalist thinking that had led the twentieth to be the bloodiest century. In contradistinction to that decadent century, turning a new leaf following the Arab spring in the twenty-first is a far better strategy.

Beyond the obvious matter of free speech, which admittedly is not absolute even in America, it should be asked whether law is an efficacious means of barring or changing thoughts. On the day of the vote, a study was released at the Bundestag in Berlin reporting that twenty percent of that state’s population was still anti-sematic. I don’t believe penalizing that prejudice itself (i.e., as a belief apart from any conduct) by the state’s police power forces any change at that level. At most, people would simply hide it—and how would such repression burst out in conduct? I submit it would be better simply to ignore the thoughts and concentrate on conduct.

Europe has had a tendency to codify thoughts as if they belong to the state. In America, that realm is province of the “thought police” that sprang up (as self-appointed) during the 1990s as “political correctness.”  At least with political correctness (such as in saying humankind rather than mankind, and Native American rather than American Indian), the self-appointed enforcer can be told to go to hell. The natural reaction to being accosted in such a presumptuous and pernicious way is to say precisely that which is not desired by the aggressor. Adding the police power of the state to enforce certain beliefs by penalizing others is dangerous not only for society itself, but also for individuals in terms of our quality of life free from anxiety. The over-reaching may even be immoral; it is certainly weakness.

A person may be able to control one’s own conduct more than one’s ideas or beliefs. Besides the futility of law in going after a person’s interior mental life, that domain is inherently beyond the unwanted control of another person. The French law would include up to a year in prison and a fine of about $58,000 for anyone who denies an officially-recognized genocide. Is the reach of the law limited to public speeches or published writings, or are people of France to feel anxious at private parties in their own home? In terms of general anxiety, the law could cost the state’s entire population. Is effectively adding the Turkish killings nearly a century before to the German Holocaust worth this in France? It is not as if that E.U. state borders Turkey.

Therefore, behind the 127 to 86 vote is a rather basic category mistake with respect to jurisprudence. Taking the law beyond its native domain to enforce one’s agenda using the police power of the state undercuts law itself, and thus contributes to the downfall of its legitimacy, even in its proper realm. In other words, in over-reaching, a government can wind up with even less influence over its people through even criminal law.

Additionally, a refusal to respect another’s inalienable right to have certain ideas or beliefs is to treat the rational nature (i.e., thoughts or beliefs) itself as merely a means to one’s own designs, rather than as an end in itself. According to Kant, this is immoral because of the value that is rightfully in reason because it is the assigner of value and thus has absolute value. Treating that which has essentially undefined value (as the source thereof) as having value only in so far as it fits with one’s own ideas or beliefs is wrong.

Might it be, Nietzsche would surely add, that modern moralizers are immoral rather than what we take ourselves to be? Who are the aggressors—les esprits méchants et perniceux? Might it be that human beings are far too presumptuous in what we think we know to venture into any other man’s head with impunity? Am I understood? This medicine is not meant for the weak, Nietzsche warns, who nonetheless have an uncontrollable urge to dominate. These new birds of prey are not entitled to dominate, and yet they somehow convince the strong—through thou shalt not—to be ashamed of those thoughts come out of their innate, self-confident strength. Be ashamed of who you are. The strong self-overcome their most willful instincts in order to experience the pleasure of power that naturally goes with their strength. The weak who seek to dominate, on the other hand, are driven by their instinct to overcome the resistance of others by passive aggression (owing to the weakness of the instinct, which they can’t seem to resist anyway) and cruelty (including genocides). Hitler was weak, but so too is the presumption to punish others for their beliefs in retaliation. Birds of a feather, these new birds of prey most certainly are. It is amazing they can even fly.

“By aiming at more [in pride],” Augustine proclaims in City of God (bk 14, ch.13), “a man is diminished.” Pride, by the way, is not self-confident strength, for self-overcoming is blocked by self-idolatry. Perhaps expressing the belief in over-reaching, which is an idea of the immoral and weak, should itself be punishable by a year in prison. This would probably only strengthen the belief, which in turn would weaken the believer even as he or she presumes to be more moral as a self-denying martyr. Lest the advocates of victims become ourselves victimizers (e.g., the Crusaders), it is a good policy for a general population to keep an eye on us too, for we can get quite carried away as moral zealots without realizing how we are affecting others (i.e., rational nature of others). That there have been (and will be) victims of horrible things in the world, does not give anyone the right to punish others for their thoughts or beliefs, for such intangibles are our inner castles, not to be treated like sand by pushy waves.

Fortunately, good sense prevailed and the French Constitutional Council struck down the law that would have criminalized the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks. “We consider the annulment of the legislation by the Constitutional Council as a step that complies with the principles of freedom of expression and research, the rule of law and international law in France,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said after the Council’s decision. This statement is ironic, given that the accession of Turkey into the E.U. had been held up in part out of concern in Europe that Turkey was not yet sufficiently ensconced in Western values. Perhaps it should have been asked whether France should be a state of the E.U.

Sources:

Scott Sayare and Sebnem Arsu, “Genocide Bill Angers Turks as It Passes in France,” The New York Times, January 23, 2012. 

Scott Sayare, “French Council Strikes Down Bill on Armenian Genocide Denial,” The New York Times, February 29, 2012. 

Westboro Church's Anti-Gay and John Galliano's Anti-Semitic Opinions: The U.S. and E.U. Contrasted

The First Amendment protects free speech in the U.S. even if it is as hurtful as signs at a Marine funeral proclaiming "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on March 2, 2011. The Westboro Baptist Church celebrated the death of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Iraq with signs such as "God Hates You," along with anti-gay messages at his funeral in Maryland in 2006. The late Marine's father sought damages for emotional distress. An appellate court had reversed the $5 million award granted by a district court, and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred with the appellate court's decision.  The Wall Street Journal notes that "Chief Justice Roberts nodded to the wrenching set of facts in the case, writing that 'the applicable legal term— 'emotional distress'—fails to capture fully the anguish Westboro's choice added to Mr. Snyder's already incalculable grief.'"  Crucially, however, the justices of the majority opinion would not fall to the temptation of acting on the emotion that naturally follows hearing of such harm.

Interestingly, on the same day as the American high court's decision, the designer John Galliano was being fired by Dior's CEO and investigated by the French police (for inciting racial hatred with anti-semitic statementsm, which is illegal in at least the French and German states of the EU) for having made anti-semitic insults to a couple with whom he was arguing late at night in a trendy bar (cafe) in Paris. There, the emotions got the best of both the designer and those who reacted to the video posted of his comments (albeit showing only a part of the argument). Perhaps a grieving father at his son's funeral reading signs that thank God for dead American soldiers can be likened to a Jewish couple at a bar hearing that they are lucky their grandparents or parents were not exterminated by the Nazis. It is difficult for the rest of us to know how either feels, or how to compare the pain.

In any case, that any human being would want to hurt another so much is truly a sad commentary on our species that otherwise vaunts itself as being in the image of God. Perhaps the question is what kind of God is being envisioned here. A vengeance is mine, sayth the Lord sort, which Nietzsche condemns in his writings as already discredited on account of having such a sordid divine attribute as vengeance?  The deed is done, according to Nietzsche.  So too, the pain has already been inflicted on the grieving parents and the Jewish couple.  The rest is merely mopping up. 

I contend that the impulsive reaction in Europe to the fashion designer's drunken anti-semetic slurs is inferior to the majority opinion of the American court in the Westboro case because the tolerance of reason is more in keeping with a free society than is vengeance or retribution against a disliked opinion. Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that speech on public issues (of which gays in the military is one) "cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt," USA Today reports. Roberts pointed out that the jury at the district court level of the case had been told that Westboro could be held liable for the intentional infliction of emotional distress if the picketing was "outrageous." The chief justice argues that that test is "highly malleable," which is to say, it can change according to what a given person happens to think is outrageous. An old man might think noice in an apartment hallway at midnight is outrageous while a few college students down the hall might simply assume that the party has begun. In such a case, outrageous may have a physiological determinant and thus be innately different depending on the person. Quoting the 1988 case of Hustler Magazine v. Fallwell, Roberts said that liability cannot be imposed on "the basis of jurors' tastes or views, or perhaps on the basis of their dislike of a particular expression." Rather, reason must trump passion in such matters. Regarding the Synder case, Roberts said that the small Topeka-based church's messages "may fall short of refined social or political commentary," but discussed "matters of public import," such as the nation's morality and gays in the military and thus are protected by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees free speech.  A free society is only really free to the extent that we protect even the opinions of those we loath. Otherwise, society reduces to a primitive matter of excluding those we don't like. Such banal convenience is too decadent for a vibrant republic and society. Reason tells us this. The question is whether we have sufficient impulse-control to proffer the degree of tolerance that is requisite. So actually, the matter pivots on us--Americans and European generally--rather than on Westboro and Galliano. They can make us stronger in spite of themselves if we permit ourselves to rise to the occasion rather than satisfy our immediate gratification.  In the end, it is up to us, not them, what kind of societies we have.

In terms of federalism, the chief justice noted that states can regulate the time and place of the protests, and the church was already contesting some as too restrictive. As of the date of the court's decision, forty six states had enacted laws to minimize picketing near a cemetery during funerals. In terms of federalism, it might be that the states' respective Supreme Courts might have been the proper venue in interpreting the U.S. Constitution in such cases. Generally speaking, if there can be fifty different sets of regulations on protests, there can be fifty different decisions interpreting free speech. It would not be like fifty different foreign policies. As it is, even with fifty different regulations, the final decider is centralized in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sources:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559604576176323629295598.html?KEYWORDS=first+amendment+protects

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/04/john-galliano-dior-brand

Joan Biskupic and Kevin Johnson, "Westboro free-speech ruling has its limits," USA Today, March 3, 2011, p. 2A.

Nietzsche on Bank of America

The positive correlation between incompetence and unethical conduct at companies is striking, for, theoretically at least, a person can be talented or smart and of questionable character. Of course, it could be that cutting corners is a survival strategy of people who are not competent. However, shirking seems to reflect a sordid character, which, like personality, is relatively constant throughout one’s life—though character flaws could manifest more when times are tough (as in when incompetence has eventuated in a dire balance sheet). One might investigate, moreover, whether a firm’s culture can become more tolerant of unethical conduct when the finances are going south—or do unethical cultures tend to be like fixtures in organizations irrespective of financial condition?

The full essay has been incorporated into On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, available at Amazon.

Paper Tigers: Firewalls Forestalling Institutional Conflicts of Interest

Structural, or institutional, conflicts of interest are of great significance in applied ethics, even though they often play second fiddle to the conflicts centered on a person’s particular interests. An organizational or institutional conflict of interest, whether within one organization or in the arrangements between organizations, is not any less unethical than a personal conflict of interest.  Therefore, when we take the claims of vested organizational interests that their internal firewalls are more than just paper tigers at face value, our foolhardiness can really be at our detriment. I present a few cases to suggest that “firewalls” in an organization to prevent it from a conflict of interest are, in general, insufficient and thus ought not be relied on. Instead, the public (or government regulatory agencies) should insist that one of the two interests in an institutional conflict of interest be given up.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon. 

Corporate Analogies: Money-Making as War-Games as a Sign of Boredom

What to do when analogies go over the top. As an aspiring writer, I was chastised by more than one writing tutor for mixing analogies. The device can add color to otherwise drab prose to be sure, but too many colors at once can be daunting to even a captivated reader. Consider, for example, the following passage from Larry McDonald about the management at Lehman Brothers:

“In a way, Lehman was run by a junta of platoon officers . . . I think of them as battle-hardened, iron-souled regulars”[1] (p. 89). Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ former CEO, was “our spiritual leader and battlefield commander . . . surrounded by a close coterie of cronies, with almost no contact with anyone else. . . . I suppose that was fine so long as the place was chugging along without civil war or mutiny breaking out, and continuing to coin money, which is after all the prime objective of the merchant bank.”[2] Fuld “worked within a tight palace guard, protected from the lower ranks, communicating only through his handpicked lieutenants.”[3] 

The full essay has been incorporated into On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon. 

1. Lawrence McDonald, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Colapse of Lehman Brothers (2010), p. 89.

2. Ibid., p. 90.

3. Ibid.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul on Civil Rights and the BP Explosion

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), was the Tea Party candidate who challenged the Republican establishment to win the party’s Senate nomination in Kentucky on May 18, 2010. A day later, he publicly criticized a plank of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Specifically, he said in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC television that he supported the sections of the Civil Rights Act that applied to public accommodations but had concerns when it came to its applicability to private business. He had raised similar concerns earlier in the day about the Americans with Disabilities Act in an interview on National Public Radio. Asked by Maddow if a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people, Mr. Paul replied, “Yes.” In so answering, the new senator failed or refused to distinguish private property that is open to the public from private property, such as a person's home, that is not. 

In citing the rights inherent in private property, Mr. Paul, an eye surgeon, was refusing to recognize the “publicness” in a business being open to the public, as distinct from someone’s house, which is not open to the public. In other words, Mr. Paul was ignoring the qualification to private property that comes into play as soon as said property is opened to the public.  Such property is quasi-public precisely because it is open to the public.  Hence, society, through its government, has a right to dictate the obligations going with that element of publicness.  Mr. Paul would have been on firmer ground had he limited his statement to private clubs, such as country clubs, which do not receive public money and are not open to the public.  However, even here, if people associate in a way that hurts others by intentionally excluding them, there might be an argument in favor of subjecting them to the Act, though such an argument seems weaker than those for freedom of association and on private property not open to the public.

Rand Paul also said on ABC TV that President Barack Obama’s criticism of BP in the wake of the Gulf oil debacle sounds “really un-American.”  Paul said that the president’s response is part of the “blame game” that’s played in the United States. The game, he argued, leads to the thinking that tragic incidents are “always someone’s fault” when sometimes accidents just happen. Sen. Paul was ignoring that BP overrode Transocean in directing its employees not to use “mud” to maintain pressure in the well as cement “corks” were being inserted.  Also, managers at BP claimed to have the technology to stop any leak or spill when no such technology existed. In short, the managers at BP put the Gulf at risk in order to cut corners so as to earn more profit (as if $2 billion a month was not sufficient).  Rather than go after the mentality of shirking amid a “more, more, more” mentality wherein nothing is ever enough, Paul went after the representative of the victim–society as a whole.  That is to say, he added insult to injury by going after the victim rather than the culprit.  In so doing, he ignored key elements of the culpability.

Listening to the candidate on the Maddow show on MSNBC, I was more concerned by the way he chose to evade questions than by his failure to take “being open to the public” into account in his view on civil rights law. At one point, Rachel Maddow asked him, “yes or no,”  on whether he would exclude private businesses from the Civil Rights law.  He replied that he was against the violence that took place in the 1960s in association with Walgreen’s lunch-counters. Beyond not answering the question, Mr. Paul seemed to be continuing with what he wanted to say–ignoring the question entirely as a mere interruption to be dismissed. I noticed a few times that after Maddow did indeed interrupt him, he simply picked up with what he had been saying.  Could his ignoring the questions be related to his ignoring the “open to the public” qualification and the risky shirking of BP?  In other words, might it be that Mr. Paul simply does not see what is inconvenient to his world view?  If so, I contend that this character trait is far more alarming than even his evasions and his over-simplified view on private property and the oil spill.  If you have ever tried repeatedly to tell someone something only to have your statement ignored as the other person continues on with what he or she was saying, you know what I mean. Sadly, I suspect that Rand Paul didn't notice it. This character flaw is by no means limited to him. Nor is this an invitation for partisan aspersions on the Republican Party.

Rather, I suspect that not answering questions--even asking one's own instead of given any answer to a question outstanding--is a growing attitude in modern America. I have witnessed it myself in emailing people I don't know on matters involving an actual or potential commercial transation. Does the computer come with Office 2007? Reply: When you would like to come by to look at it?  But what about Office 2007?  Or take apartment hunting:  Are utilities included in the rent? Reply: Call me to make an appointment to see the unit. Nietzsche would have a field day with such a mentality that vaunts itself as superior by "virtue" of its own assumed dominance. The basis of Rand Paul's non-answer, in other words, could have been an attempt to dominate beyond his place on Maddow's show. In other words, his non-answers could have been refusals rooted in a will to power that was biting off more than it could chew on someone else's show.

In terms of having a will to power based on strength, many of the stations or offices in modern society that we view as being entitled to dominate are in fact weak.  Nietzsche points to the modern moralist's thou shalt not as an attempt by the weak to dominate beyond their innate weak constitution. He also points to the attempts of the modern manager to dominate in such terms (and the priest as well). In watching various personalities giving non-answers while being interviewed on television, I find myself wondering if they know they are doing it. If they do, they are indeed rascals; if they do not, their stygian pathology is much deeper than I am equipped to investigate. Perhaps the modern illness is malignant narcissism to such an extent in a personality that the delimited perspective eclipses even awareness of what oneself is doing.

Sources: 

1. The Rachel Maddow Show. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37273085/ns/politics-decision_2010/

2. Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, "Tea Party Pick Causes Uproar on Civil Rights," The New York Times, May 20, 2010.