Evil Philosophy

Ever since the inception of human inquiry, there has been no short supply of radicals and lunatics attempting to pass off their whim-begotten absurdities as truth and profound insight. There are relatively few philosophers however, who could have been considered not just insane, but genuinely wicked. Among them, I would include both the political philosopher Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant. While Marx’s atrocious political philosophy has already been addressed in a previous post, his evil cannot be overstated. Any historical instance in which Marx’s political philosophy was put into practice resulted in catastrophe and woe. Because all individuals share a natural tendency towards self-interest, communism, as envisioned by Marx is a physical and epistemological impossibility.

However poisonous Marx’s philosophy, it pales in comparison to the heinous vomit spewed forth by the likes of Immanuel Kant. Arguably, Kant was the most despicable figure in all of human history; his philosophy was shot through with a twisted, spiteful hatred and his heart was an aggregate of rotten flesh upon which maggots gnawed and in which evil festered. A consideration of the way Kant lived would stand testament to his hatred of mankind and of life in general. He never left the town in which he was born (modern-day Kalingrad, Russia), and lived a dreadfully complacent lifestyle—following the same rigid schedule every day until he finally died in an advanced state of dementia at the age of 79. Having never truly experienced anything to warrant the slightest of interest, his writings betray the convoluted thoughts of a mind corroded by solitude and a bitter intensity of spite for his fellow man.

In his book Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant defined his quintessential  theory called The Categorical Imperative. The theory conjectures that an action is only considered moral if it could be set as a universal law for all humanity to follow. According to Kant, the consequences of an action are irrelevant; it is only the actor’s intention that determines an act’s ethical validity, not its outcome. Because all human beings act in respect to independent moral maxims (that which an individual holds as his own moral values), he believed that it is immoral to use another human being as a means to our own ends. To anyone with a modicum of intellect, the glaring lunacy of the categorical imperative should be self-evident.

Just in case it is not, consider the following thought-experiment. You are teleported back in time to 1970’s Illinois and the infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy is standing right in front of you. You have a gun in your hand. Given a priori knowledge of the depraved crimes he will commit, it would seem like a justifiable act to kill Gacy and thus prevent his future murders from taking place. However, if you were to apply Kant’s Categorical Imperative, killing Gacy, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Justin Bieber, or any other psychopathic monster would be wrong only because the act of murder could not be safely set as a universal law for all human beings to follow. Because killing John Wayne Gacy would be using him as a means to an end, Kant would have rather let him pursue his killing spree. The sheer lunacy of this logic should be obvious.

An adherence to the categorical imperative as a way of life would lead to the corrosion of individuality. Kant’s philosophy envisions a world in which all men are enslaved to one another—nobody would ever rise above a state of blind, castrated complacency in fear of using another human as a means rather than an end. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy epitomizes human stagnation in a moral sense, while Marx’s epitomized it in an economic sense. Both were vile and despicable and would best be disregarded altogether from the realm of legitimate philosophical discourse. 

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

What else can really be said?

On December 15, 2011, at the Age of 62, Hitchens lost his battle with oesophageal cancer. His contribution to academia and philosophy cannot be expressed enough. He was an inspiration to me as well as to many others; his writings will forever be immortalized as monuments to a great mind for as long as mankind is willing to think. The world has lost a truly valuable human being who will neither be equalled nor replaced. Thank you Mr. Hitchens, you will be missed.

Rest in Peace

The Ethics of Music Piracy

With the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), there has arisen much debate concerning the ethical implications of downloading music for free. Contrary to what record labels and some conceited artists would claim, filesharing sites like Mediafire and ThePirateBay are not in fact unethical. This is because there exists no finite amount of music files. It would be illogical for any company to expect customers to pay for an item of which there is an infinite supply.

Consider if I were to break into the Roadrunner distribution warehouse and steal a crate of a thousand Nickelback CDs (not that I would want to). This would indeed be stealing, and thus immoral. Because I am taking the CDs, I am in effect eliminating potential profit that would have been made by selling them. However, if I were to download a Nickelback album, (again, not that I would ever want to) I am not stealing any potential profit from Roadrunner because there are an indefinite number of digital Nickelback albums floating about in cyberspace and cannot be profited upon. The cost of producing an online file is zero dollars so downloading an album does not incur any financial loss to Roadrunner Records. Record labels are not satisfying any demand by selling overpriced plastic discs to those individuals who only seek to acquire the digital files therein. Likewise, websites like iTunes must believe their costumers to be imbeciles in order to pay money for something that is readily available for free. It is unfortunate that the US government is trying to shut down or castrate sites like Mediafire.com and ThePirateBay. These sites are not immoral because they are satisfying an economic demand more efficiently than iTunes or your record store do. 

It no longer makes sense to expect consumers to spend money on something of which there is an infinite supply. Just like a business would be unsuccessful in its attempt to get consumers to pay money in order to breathe oxygen, it would be just as unsuccessful in selling movie or music files. With the age of the internet, music has ceased to be considered a finite commodity like Televisions or Computers. Thus, The SOPA does nothing but attempt to enforce archaic and imbecilic ideologies. The fact that record labels are losing money is a result of their own flawed business model.

Unemployment and Minimum Wage

One contributor to large-scale unemployment in urban areas is the minimum wage law. Although it may seem like a benign protocol implemented for the sake of securing worker’s wages, it has a detrimental impact on employment rates. This law removes any incentive on the part of business to hire individuals who cannot justify the payment of a minimum wage. Sadly, in many areas throughout North America, this is the case. Assuming that someone’s physical labour is only worth a fraction of what the government demands that employers must pay them, a business would be employing this individual on a financial deficit.  Many unemployed persons cannot, despite their best efforts, find adequate employment because the skills they posses (or lack thereof) do not justify the payment of a minimum wage.

Consider the hypothetical case of some downtrodden denizen living in the inner city of Detroit. This person has never finished high school, is incapable of doing simple arithmetic, and possesses no employment experience at any legitimate establishment. Undoubtedly, this individual will have quite a challenging time finding employment because he possesses no skills for which to justify a minimum wage. Assuming that his service at a fast food restaurant or a gas station may only justify a wage of say, five dollars an hour, the minimum wage law prevents him from receiving this due payment, and subsequently from attaining a job. This is the case of many people across America who find themselves without a job; their labour is not worth the minimum wage, and businesses have no incentive to hire these people. A wage of five dollars an hour may seem dismal to some, but it is a more desirable alternative than living in a box beneath an overpass.

Some would argue that if the minimum wage were abolished tomorrow, then companies would start paying their employees at dirt-cheap rates. This however is an exaggerated fallacy. Because the work force is competitive, an employer who pays higher wages would have more potential employees seeking to work for them, and would thus be more successful. You, as a worker would have more incentive to provide your labour to a company that pays you better. Nobody with a considerable education would prefer to work for dirt-cheap if another business offered them higher wages.  This is just yet another instance in which the free market prevails over government intervention.

The Fallacy of Karl Marx

Around the world, adolescents have taken up picket signs in order to protest against corporate greed and inequality. These individuals feel disregarded by a system that does not take into consideration their basic needs and intrinsic human dignity. This of course is in reference to the Occupy Movement.  For many misinformed denizens the world over, the Occupy movement has become the new vehicle with which the clamour the downfall of capitalism. It has been rather difficult to criticize the Occupy Movement as a whole because of the ambiguous agenda of all its individual constituents, however many Occupy protestors have cited Karl Marx, among others, as their main political influence. Considering the left-leaning inclinations of many of the demonstrators, it is easy to see how his philosophy could have inspired the swollen aggregate of human flesh that is the Occupy movement. As influential as he may have been throughout the years, many disregard the fact that Marx was a racist, degenerate, anti-Semitic, envious piece of trash and that his ideas represented the epitome of human evil.

Karl Marx, a racist? Indeed, from observing his private correspondence with friends and family members, one could conclude that Marx was an ardent racist and anti-Semite (although Marx himself was an ethnic Jew). Marx’s racist views have been brilliantly summarized in Nathaniel Weyl’s 1979 book Karl Marx, Racist. Concerning the adherents of the Jewish faith, Marx had once said “What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money”. In regard to one of his contemporaries, Marx wrote "it is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a nigger”. Although by no means does this ad hominem attack discredit his philosophy, Marx’s bigotry paints him in a different light than the ardent lover of the people as he is so often portrayed.

His diverse opinions on human nature set aside; his philosophy itself is the greatest testament to Marx’s lunacy. Essentially, he conjectured that one day in the unspecified future, the proletariat would be fed up with the unequal wealth distribution and topple the establishment of the evil bourgeoisie. From this point forward, the proletariat would be free to recreate a presumably more wholesome means of existence, free of their greedy brethren. Marx’s ideal state would function on the principle that everyone would work according to their ability and the wealth would be pooled and then distributed according to everyone’s needs. However, Marx’s idea of from each according to his ability to each according to his need contains some of the most destructive undertones to human development. It is fundamentally irrational to reward individuals on a basis of need instead of what they contribute. Nobody would be willing to put forth their maximum ability into their work if they did not expect to be adequately compensated for that effort. A society which would be allowed to persist on such a principle would end up with a disproportionately high amount of people with needs versus those with abilities and would eventually become unsustainable. Karl Marx was envious of those who possessed genuine talents, and this twisted political philosophy was a manifestation of his hatred of successful men.

It is somewhat ironic that the term capitalism was defined by Marx and Engels—the very people who sought to destroy it. Capitalism never ceases to be misrepresented by those eager to point out all its glaring flaws and supposed moral bankruptcies. Socialists (like those of the Occupy Movement) revel in the romanticised notion of fat corporate tycoons sitting around the board room, conniving and elaborating new plots to undermine the core of human innocence. This is not an honest representation of capitalism. Capitalism has nothing to do with keeping down the proletariat, slavery, repression, or waging class warfare. The subsidies and bailouts given by the government to prolong the inevitable disintegration of big banks do not represent the ideals of capitalism either. Private ownership of means of production and a free market with minimal regulations are the two aspects that make Capitalism the most ethical and successful social-economic policy ever implemented in human society. Private institutions owning the means of production (for example, factories or textile mills) are forced to compete with each other for consumers and are thus forced to accommodate the interests of the public, increasing the standards of living for all. Those institutions that become successful do so by discovering new technologies, finding more efficient ways to do things, and providing cutting-edge medical developments. A socialist “utopia” like the one that Marx’s philosophy alludes to provides the public none of these things and would likely lead to gross technological stagnation if ever implemented.

 Capitalism has produced higher standards of living across the board ever since its inception. During the industrial revolution, those individuals previously destined to lives of peasantry and destitute were given menial jobs in the industrial sector. Those already enjoying middle-class employment were provided with luxuries and amenities for which no prior generation could have ever dreamt. Sure, some kids died in some coal mines, but that stuff happened in communist countries too. Any man is better off working at the assembly line in an auto factory than he would have been dragging his knuckles across the forest floor in search of berries and kindling.

On a final thought, a government has no obligation whatsoever to supply its citizens with employment. It is an expectation of many Occupy protestors that the government ought to magically ensure the employment status of all its citizens. However, it is the personal responsibility of the individual to develop the skills that are in demand by the job market and will thus result in a sufficient living. Those who choose to attend college in order to study obscure topics and pursue useless degrees are ultimately the ones who ought to stand accountable for their own lack of employability in the end. It is not viable to give somebody a job if they have no skills or abilities worth paying them for (women’s studies is not a skill). The individual must develop the respective skill-sets appropriate for the line of work to which they aspire to pursue. It is thrust upon the individual to achieve his/her maximum potential through their own respective efforts and values. A job is not a right. Instead of adhering to Marx’s idea that it is society’s responsibility to accommodate people’s needs, the individual must accept that only he ought to provide for his own needs. This is just common sense.