Posted 3:06 PM by extinct

Deep Thoughts About Deep Throat

{I should and probably will extend and revise these remarks in the near future.}

"I say, if you can't find a man with integrity, find a man with ambition." Such was the advice of the evil young future emperor Caligula to the evil old current emperor Tiberius in the old British TV-miniseries I Claudius. He was telling the old ruler how to find someone to overthrow the emperor's politically entrenched evil and now-renegade henchman, Aelius Sejanus, the de facto head of Rome's government.

I am reminded of this upon the revelation that the identity of Watergate's Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, and that he was, to some extent, a disgruntled employee of frustrated ambition (to be FBI chief).

This recognition of the decisive motivating role of one's sense of place in life leads to a deep thought on why I am of libertarian outlook. In the end -- or perhaps at the start -- we humans are out to secure our own individual place, and we guard and revenge it selfishly, violently, and with ruthless indifference to others, if not outright predatoriness. Even genuine heroic charitable nobility requires pursuing determinedly, sometimes to the exclusion of other worthy pursuits in life, one's place as a self-sacrificing, even loving, individual. (This is a good thing overall to pursue; I am not diminishing its worth by pointing out its self-actualizing psychological prerequisite and economic cost of forgoing other things.)

The Bible and Nietzsche agree on this point, with the former advising that we love our neighbor as ourself, thereby assuming as a given that we love ourselves. (But assuming we need a divine push to make that love turn extroverted.)

The pursuit of happiness would otherwise trample boatloads of corpses. And often does.

Now, amplify that unavoidable self-orientation in our nature with the violent power and communal legitimation given by government and all things of evil become possible: gulags, Jim Crow, Auschwitz (implicit Godwin's law violation, sorry), etc.

This is why government ultimately needs to exist at a middle, and limited, level. Not strong enough to dominate, but procedurally hindered by checks and balances; yet not weak enough to fail to check miscreants and/or outsiders who abuse others in their pursuit of happiness.

Such is done by maximizing the function of government as protector of a non-predatory pursuit of happiness. It does this through securing the liberty of all who are under its rule while not messing with others who do not mess with those it is called on to protect.