Book:Achieving Freedom/2

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The Effects Of Ethics

A deep understanding of the non-aggression principle (NAP) creates a significant moral divide, with those who initiate the use of force on one side, and those who reject the initiation of the use of force on the other.

Those who initiate the use of force can rationally be called evil, while those who actively support the initiation of the use of force – who justify it morally – can be called corrupt.

It is also reasonable to accept that someone cannot be responsible for knowledge they do not yet possess. We can easily understand that while a modern doctor who does not prescribe antibiotics for a virulent infection is grossly negligent, a medieval doctor who had no access to antibiotics cannot be held to the same standard.

Between these two extremes lies a kind of “grey area.” When antibiotics were first being introduced and tested, it would have been irresponsible for a doctor to prescribe them for every conceivable ailment (as remains the case today) – however, after a certain amount of testing and verification had been completed, the balance tipped towards prescription.

Someone who has never heard the argument that taxation is force cannot be morally condemned for their ignorance. A baby is not “uneducated” – rather they are in a state of “pre-education.” I do not know Mandarin – this does not make me a fool, or ignorant in general, but rather it is merely the case that I lack the knowledge to speak Mandarin.

The same is true in terms of moral knowledge. I only came to a deep understanding and a consistent theoretical application of the NAP in my philosophy in my thirties – close to twenty years after I began to study philosophy. This does not mean that I was morally corrupt or evil in my twenties, but rather that I was in the pursuit of knowledge that I had not attained as yet. I did not have exposure to some of the more consistent moral arguments in favour of a stateless society, although I must confess that I did on occasion feel a certain amount of unease with the Objectivist approach to certain issues, particularly in terms of ethics.

It was through an acceptance of this unease that I began to develop more original approaches to the issues I found lacking in other philosophies. I certainly make no claim to originality in all these areas, all that I can say for sure is that these ideas were new to me, whether they were new to the world is not something I can really speak to, since I prefer the generation of new ideas to the comparison of those ideas with every other school of thought.

Someone cannot be considered immoral for failing to understand that taxation is force – the crux of the issue arises when they are first exposed to the argument that taxation is force.

This argument is emotionally trying. The fundamental alienation that spreads in the soul of a person who begins to understand that taxation is force is hard to bear.

When a powerful and foundational moral argument is introduced to a person in adulthood, the emotional recoil that they experience is really based upon what has been missing from the moral discourse of their society.

The Libertarian Division

Libertarians of all kinds are constantly making the basic moral argument that taxation is force, and that the government is a violent institution. As moral theories go, that this is not exactly quantum physics. Problems such as abortion, “lifeboat scenarios,” homesteading, capital punishment, and so on are all highly challenging and controversial – the fact that we pay taxes because we are threatened with jail is not.

Why, then, is this basic fact still so endlessly denied, evaded, fogged, and rejected within society?

One of the central problems with pursuing an illusory solution to a genuine challenge – religion, academia, political action – is that it avoids the necessity of elemental self-criticism.

In the business world, this process is called a post mortem, or a strict and stringent review of even a successful project, to create a list of “lessons learned,” and so pursue a program of continuous improvement. Unsuccessful projects are analysed in great detail, and improved practices are put into place to help avoid such catastrophes in the future.

Coming from the business entrepreneurial world, it is truly shocking to me to see the degree to which libertarians avoid performing any kind of post mortems on their projects. The same is true of academics and priests, of course.

The most astounding statements are made with no empirical evidence whatsoever – “Ron Paul can win!” “Educating the public will bring about political freedom!” “Religious beliefs are an essential component of human liberty!”

Even statements made in private, to me personally, are wild assertions – again, with no empirical evidence or reasoning whatsoever. I have been told that libertarians dare not speak about their atheism openly, for fear of alienating Christian supporters – on the assumption that such an alienation would be disastrous for the freedom movement. But how is this known for sure? What logical reasoning or empirical evidence is brought to bear on this assumption?

When I was a young man, I attended the National Theatre School in Montreal, Canada for two years, studying playwriting and acting. I had the juicy role of Cornwall in King Lear, and I vividly remember one rehearsal where we evil characters got news of a disaster. As dedicated method actors, we all turned our attention inwards, and thought about dead kittens and sad films. The director stared at us with shock, horror, and anger. “How the hell am I supposed to know that you have just received the worst news of your lives?”

I tried to explain to him – and how earnest I was – that if I change my inward thinking, it will communicate itself to the audience in some magical and unconscious manner.

His lip curled in scorn, and he asked, “So let us say that I have paid twenty dollars to come and see this play, and I am in row two hundred in the theatre, how is it that I’m supposed to psychically commune with you to understand that your slightly drooping mouth indicates some sort of inner horror?”

All of us actors resisted this crass and coarse showmanship, preferring to imagine that some movie camera was virtually up our noses, and could catch the slightest change in our facial expressions. The next time we rehearsed the scene, again, we went inwards and summoned up visions of bad news in our distant histories. The director leapt up, grabbed the chair that he was sitting on, and threw it across the stage.

He whirled to us, and said: “Do any of you not understand that I am pissed off right now? If you were in row two hundred, would you still be able to somehow figure out that I am pissed off? I don’t care if you do cartwheels or start juggling, just do something when you hear, as these characters, the worst news of your entire fucking lives!”

Strangely enough, this advice followed me very productively into the business world. Whenever a disaster occurred – and troubles come not as single spies, but in battalions, in the entrepreneurial world – I would sometimes hear in my ear this director’s commandment that when something bad occurs, the important thing is to do something – in a way, it does not even really matter what, because anything is better than standing and staring. I suppose that I have brought some of this energy to the libertarian world, and constantly feel surprised – which itself is telling – that an intensely pro-business movement so studiously avoids criticism and the exploration of alternatives in the face of disaster.

It took me quite some time to really begin to understand what is going on in the world of libertarianism that inevitably produces this avoidance. I resisted for quite a long time the inevitable conclusions – the analysis that I talk about in this book – but then I basically thought:

“Okay, let us say that I the Chief Operating Officer at a big company, and I have a division called Libertarianism. This division has been making claims for decades about its ability to increase the size of its market share, to the point where it actually has a dominant majority in the market. However, when I look at the actual performance results of this division, I see that the market – government power – has actually gotten massively larger, while the market share – libertarian votes – has actually shrunk to near insignificance, relative to government power. “This Libertarian division has been sort of a pet project of a doddering CEO (his name is Christian, of course) for quite some time, and it has not been subjected to any of the rigours and disciplines of the free market, because it has received funding from Christian regardless of whether it even remotely achieves its goals. As the COO, I cannot overturn the decisions of the CEO.

“This Division is full of very, very smart people, with doctorates and masters, all sorts of connections and amazing writing abilities, and rich experience in marketing and advertising – so it is not a lack of intelligence or ability that has made this Division so wildly disastrous. This division is full of people who keep talking about how a lack of market discipline and consequences for one’s actions, end up creating lazy and inefficient organisations – so they even have the theoretical understanding of what has caused their own current state.

“Furthermore, this Division has ended up telling our CEO – Christian – whatever he wants to hear, because he is the source of their funding, not the market that they claim they are trying to take over.”

If I were a business executive faced with this problem, it is not too hard to figure out the best course of action.

First of all, I would do whatever I could to stop Christian from funding this Division, because if he continues to fund it, all of the energy and talents of these brilliant people will be entirely wasted, because people respond to incentives, and he who pays the piper calls the tune, and it is essential to turn the attentions of these employees to the actual market, rather than this doddering executive.

Secondly, I would continually remind the people in this Division that they had not in fact achieved any of the goals that they had set for themselves – or, if they had achieved them, there was no way of knowing, because nothing was being tested, measured, reported on, and there were no post mortems whatsoever for any of the failed projects.

As long as Christian kept funding this Libertarian Division, I would be fully aware that the likelihood of instilling any responsibility for the actual achievement of goals, and creating any initiative or desire to change tactics or existing approaches, would be impossible. There would be no point attempting to hire people with greater discipline and focus to join this group, because such people would simply be ignored, scorned, and protected from their own failures. This Libertarian Division, like everyone else, knows exactly on which side its bread is buttered.

I would spend some time trying to get this Libertarian Division to stop taking funding from Christian, by writing about how bad Christian’s business judgement was, and how his money was creating an environment of laziness, pontificating, self-congratulation – and utter futility. Of course, since I am a rational and empirical businessman, I would not beat my head against this wall for too long. After a certain amount of time, if no progress was being made, and if the heads of this Division simply stopped responding to my emails and phone calls, then I would take another approach – you could call it writing a book, if you like.

I could scarcely criticise the heads of this Libertarian Division for failing to be self-critical and empirical, and continue to beat my head against the walls of their indifference and hostility. I would put my criticisms out there, and see what response came back – if those criticisms were ignored, and I were personally attacked repeatedly by employees of this Libertarian Division, then of course I would accept that reality is what it is, and take another course.

Since I was unable to stop Christian’s funding, and since I was unable to get the leaders of the Libertarian Division to review their failures and alter their course of action, I would take the next step in attempting to rescue the goal that we all supposedly share.

I would appeal to the greed of those who wish to spend their lives in pursuit of something which can be achieved, and who wish to add to the practical and achievable virtue in the world, and who wish to begin laying the foundations for a human liberty which can in fact be won.

If a friend who is eager for an enjoyable, productive, and positive work environment tells you that they want to join the post office, what would you tell them?

Surely, you would tell him that joining the post office is a terrible decision, because forty percent of post office employees are ex-military, a stifling and soul crushing union controls everything, there is no free market discipline or opportunity, and everything is politics, abuse, futility, and annoyance.

It is not likely that you will be able to talk people out of being postal workers if they are only a few years from retirement, or are heavily invested in their careers, or who actually do not want to have anything to do with the free market, but rather want to sit around on their unionised asses, eating doughnuts, and bitching about their supervisors.

Thus, to deal with this Libertarian Division, I would focus my efforts not on cutting off Christian’s funding, which is impossible, or on trying to talk long-time division employees out of ditching their over-funded privileges – but rather, the best thing that I could do for the company as a whole would be to try to prevent as many people as possible from acting under the delusion that joining the Libertarian Division would bring them any real happiness, or efficacy, or the contentment and self-esteem that comes from tangible achievement.

I would do my best to communicate to those who were looking to achieve something great with their lives that the last place they should ever go is the Libertarian Division. It is true that this Division continually talks about its grand plans, massive schemes, inevitable successes, and wonderful achievements, but I would continually point out the fact that these only exist in the fantasies of those trapped in the Division. I would continually point out the true facts of the matter, which are that the division constantly wastes money, wastes time, fails to achieve its goals, sits idly by and refuses to reform its approach despite the fact that it is eternally losing ground, gets carpal tunnel syndrome from continually patting itself on the back and publishing self congratulatory articles about its wonderful “achievements,” makes wild statements of both intent and achievement while either ignoring or viciously attacking anyone who dares to point out the basic fact that less than nothing has actually been achieved, and that making up achievements is a pitiful and delusional substitute for actually achieving something in the real world.

You cannot get people to quit the post office who are already there, but you can at least do your best to help people avoid the mistake of joining it.

That, really, is my goal in this book. I may not be able to convince you that the approach I suggest is the best one – and it may not be, for all I know. Like my director said twenty years ago, we have to do something, rather than nothing – and the first step to doing something is to recognise that we are in fact doing less than nothing.

To continue the above analogy, I may not be able to get you to become a self-starting entrepreneur, but if I can at least get you to not join the post office, I have certainly done something worthwhile.

Perhaps in the future people will look back upon the proposals in this book and call them foolish, mad, delusional, ridiculous – and that is completely fine by me! Perhaps all that will come out of this book is the understanding that what we are doing is not working, and that we need to begin to creatively assault the basic problem. I may not be able to prove that the world is round, but if all that I do is convince people that the world is not flat, at least we can begin exploring the alternatives.

The Presence Of Absence

When you tell someone that taxation is coercion, what is their response? Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, they will not deal with the simple fact that their government is a prison built upon a foundation of force.

Unfortunately, due to the three false approaches described above, libertarianism as a movement has never really tried to deal with the basic fact that its most simple argument is almost universally rejected.

When we compare the taxation equals force argument (TEF) to the theory of evolution, it comes up woefully short in terms of general acceptance. Fundamentally, the only reason that someone rejects the theory of evolution is because they are superstitious, and believes that God blew some dust and made a man in His own image, and that we are descended from that man – surprisingly enough, given that we have belly buttons, and we can assume that God does not, unless we need to start searching for His ancestry as well.

Resistance to the theory of evolution is clearly centred around religious bigotry – what have libertarians done over the past few hundred years to identify the source of the near universal rejection of the TEF?

You would think that this would be job one – there is no more important resistance to overcome for libertarians than the opposition to the TEF. If we cannot convince people that the government is force, the entire libertarian position becomes woefully incomprehensible – a random grab-bag of dislike of authority, hatred of outsiders, religious addiction, some crazed desire to return to a mythological past where the Founding Fathers could walk on water – the whole philosophy becomes little more than a nutty fringe element of incomprehensible resistance to – what? Without an understanding of the TEF argument, what on earth are libertarians obsessed with? What is the point?

The basic fact that the libertarian movement has never seriously attempted to answer the question – why do people reject the fact that taxation equals force? – is something that is almost incomprehensible, as long as we imagine that libertarianism is about getting people to accept TEF, which it is not – it is all about getting funding from Christians, and jobs for free-market academics.

If we wish to gain any kind of real traction in society – if we do not want to end up wasting our lives spinning our wheels, then we do in fact have to answer that most basic question: why are our simple arguments so universally rejected?

There comes a time in every person's life when they have to stop blaming other people.

There comes a time in any movement’s life where it has to stop blaming external circumstances.

It is hard to find where in the libertarian movement this most basic question is even asked, let alone answered. When I have brought it up, in various environments, I have gotten the most mealy-mouthed platitudes in return, such as, “Well, change takes time,” or, “People are dumb,” or, “It’s really not that easy a concept to understand,” and so on.

Again and again, in libertarianism, we see these blind assertions of arbitrary “facts” – without any evidence or reasoning whatsoever.

Naturally, this is associated with the exact same Christian habit, such as, when asking where the world came from, “God made it!”

Why People Reject The TEF Argument

As I said above, and as I have argued in more emotional terms in my novel The God of Atheists, the corruptions of the present can all be traced back to the initial decisions of the past.

The decision to ally itself with Christianity turned libertarianism from a social science into a mere mascot for religious bigotry. If libertarians had remained true to the methodology of their discipline, they would have scornfully rejected the financial bait of superstition. Every movement has its price, to be sure, but I do believe that a movement dedicated to rationality, liberty, and independence from arbitrary authority should have held out for more than a few thousand dollars and a bag of musty Bibles.

Once the decision was made to join forces with superstition, a key element became immediately scrubbed from the intellectual arsenal of libertarianism.

Psychology

If you do not understand at least some of the basic tenets of psychology, you will be largely unable to break repetitive and pointless patterns. Psychology is based upon the principle that there are unconscious and opposing forces or personas within the mind. When we look at the body, we can understand the purpose of each of the organs, given enough time and research, and there is nothing hidden within the body that prevents it from achieving its goals – or, if there is, we call it a visible disease, that we can see and hopefully treat.

In the mind, though, there is a kind of invisible cancer called avoidance, wherein thoughts which cause anxiety, fear, anger, or other kinds of emotional distress can be repressed or ignored.

There is a lot that is controversial about psychology, but three basic principles remain incontrovertible:

1. Early childhood experiences have an enormous impact on personality and brain development.
2. Significant aspects of the mind remain unavailable to our conscious ego (the unconscious).
3. Constantly avoiding or repressing your own thoughts and feelings results in bad mental health.

The relationship between repression and anxiety is very well documented, and the most basic defence against anxiety is dissociation.

Another well documented and well understood psychological phenomenon is that of projection, which is the habit of ascribing our own negative qualities to other people or things. One common example of this which most of us who have debated over the Internet are well aware of is the phenomenon of a man coming into a debate with highly provocative or insulting opinions, who then accuses everyone else of being mysteriously “aggressive.” Similarly, people who have an abusive “inner critic” will often project their experience of endless self-attacks into some external form, such as imagining that various people are out to get them, or obsessing over government regulations or currency manipulations, and so on.

If I were a therapist, and libertarianism were a patient of mine, the first question I would ask, as it lounged on my couch, is why it sees corruption everywhere it looks.

After a certain amount of psychological exploration, we would doubtless discover – as is almost always the case – that the corruption that libertarianism sees everywhere in the world (except itself!) is actually rooted in its own hypocritical decisions. This would actually explain why libertarianism fundamentally does not actually want to eliminate corruption in the world beyond, because that would be psychologically disastrous to most of those involved in the movement.

If we lose the ability to project our negative traits onto some other person or entity, we actually experience the anxiety, fear, and rage within ourselves.

When libertarians decided to take Christian cash, they automatically and unconsciously decided that theirs was a movement that was going to be entirely hostile towards psychology and any depth of self-knowledge.

The reason for this is that all religion is profoundly anti-psychological in nature. The simple reason for this is that God himself is such a primal projection of human nature – fears, desires, and self-importance – that in order to preserve the fantasy that God exists somewhere “out there,” religion has to virulently and endlessly oppose the exploration of the self and an understanding of psychology.

One of the main components of achieving deep self-knowledge is the differentiation between “self” and “other.” This sounds ridiculously simple, but it is actually quite complex. I can only really touch on the surface of this journey, but to give a simple example, when we look at a sports fan painting themselves in silly colours and madly cheering some team, we can easily see that such a person clearly has invested their ego, happiness, and fears, into the uncontrollable actions of others. This is an example of confusing the world, and the people in it, for yourself. Similarly, when someone gets all choked up and dewy-eyed when a flag is raised, or a song is played, then clearly they are mistaking their own personality and values for some external symbol such as a piece of cloth or some notes of music.

It is really impossible to genuinely know yourself if you keep confusing yourself for people in costume, or people playing a sport, or pieces of cloth, or strains of music, or a race, or a language, or a geography – or an imaginary God.

Self-knowledge requires a strong and clear differentiation between who you are, and what everything else is. You cannot accurately identify a cow if you keep thinking that a cow is a “country,” or a “noble soldier,” or “loyalty,” or your “hope for victory,” or a “Jewish zombie who flew up to heaven and eternally judges your brain.”

The growth of psychological and emotional maturity is the slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is.

Again, this sounds ridiculously easy, but it is very often blindingly difficult. Most people wander around the world with highly reflective sunglasses on – but pointing the wrong way – so that they are only seeing a distorted reflection of themselves, rather than the world itself. Religion is the most primal projection mechanism of all. We are alive, we possess rational consciousness; the universe is not alive, and does not possess rational consciousness. We are born, the universe is not. We worry about our virtue, the universe does not. We bring truth into the universe, the universe does not bring truth to us. The degree to which religion facilitates the projection of anthropomorphic characteristics into a dead and empty universe is truly staggering when you begin to really see it.

The pursuit of self-knowledge is in many ways the end of religion. By aligning itself with the primitive superstition of psychological projection, libertarianism entirely walled off its access to one of the greatest insights of modernity, which is the discovery and exploration of the unconscious.

It is in the unconscious that we find the answer as to why people consistently reject the simple and obvious argument that taxation equals force.

The unconscious is an enormous aspect of the mind that processes empirical information with staggering rapidity, and provides value-based responses in the form of emotional reactions.

The causal chain of processing that occurs in the unconscious is unavailable to the conscious mind without a great deal of introspection and self-knowledge. What cognitive psychologists call “core beliefs” only occur to us consciously as feelings. Feelings do result from cognitive associations – a species of logical reasoning, so to speak – but those associations are not easily available to the conscious mind.

We fully understand that if we stick our hand into a fire, a lack of knowledge of neurobiology will not prevent us from experiencing pain. In the same way, a lack of conscious understanding of our core beliefs will not prevent us from reacting emotionally to those beliefs.

In fact, the less we consciously understand our deepest thoughts and feelings, the more those thoughts and feelings have “the ring of truth,” so to speak.

For instance, if we do not understand that patriotism is a collective delusion – the theft of the pride of virtue through the accident of geography – then the warm glow that we feel in the presence of patriotism remains unquestioned for us. As a consequence, when we are evaluating information related to our country, our unconscious tendency will be to automatically accept that which is most favourable to our delusional emotional state, and reject with hostility that which punctures the vanity of our fantasy attachment.

However, once we realise that our attachment to a mere concept (“America!”) is empirically invalid and emotionally hollow, we can begin to deal with our emotions as they really are, with regards to ourselves, and our own personal history, and we can begin to uncover our core beliefs, which are generally formed very early in life, up to the age of five or so, as a result of our early childhood experiences.

Such a process, of course, scarcely benefits those who profit from patriotism.

In the same way, once we understand that there is no God, we go through the natural disorientation and emotional emptiness that our former hysterical “worship” was designed to cover up. In a very real way, this is the inevitable withdrawal that comes when you stop taking a mind-altering drug.

All of the thoughts and emotions that formerly were invested in the fantasy projection of a god now collapse back into the personality, and can be dealt with as self-generated phenomena – not stimulated by some external deity, but created in the personality through personal history and prior decisions.

This is the process known to Jungian psychologists as individuation, or the recognition that all internal emotional states are generated by internal phenomena – not by externalities like stained glass, near-naked bleeding weeping gods, bits of stained cloth, or strains of music. The incredible value that results from the difficult process of individuation is an understanding and mastery of one’s own internal state. No longer are you like the hysterical sports fan whose happiness trembles on the spot where a leather ball may – or may not – land. No longer are you like the brain-addled patriot, who takes wild existential pride in the proximity of certain dirt to their mother’s womb. No longer are you the desperate and fearful religious addict, who begs for the favours and fears the punishments of a God that really “lives” deep within their own brain, in their own amygdala and hypothalamus, shouting up from the invisible caves of early childhood.

When you ally yourself with an organisation that profits from keeping people in a state of psychological retardation, which flourishes only by provoking the most dangerous and infantile aspects of human consciousness, and which grows only as the self-knowledge of its members shrinks, you are not building a bridge to the future, but rather voluntarily throwing yourself into a chasm of prehistory.

Libertarians know this – unconsciously, of course – and that is why they worship a time before the rise of psychology – the golden days of the Founding Fathers, stirring writings and noble paintings, when the Constitution was written with fiery words on the tapestry of history, and a new nation was forged out of the blah blah blah...

On a much smaller level, of course, this is why so many libertarians turned against my show – Freedomain Radio – when I and my listeners began to really talk about psychology and self-knowledge.

This is an indication of the astoundingly rapid processing that occurs in the unconscious. The moment that my show began to turn towards early childhood experiences, practical self-knowledge, emotional defences, and the necessity of withdrawing emotional projections from the world, all the former support I had in the libertarian community mysteriously dried up.

Unconsciously, a sequence flashed with enormous rapidity through the minds of most libertarians, which went a little something like this:

• ZOMG!
• Stef is talking about undoing emotional defences and psychological projections!
• Religion is based on emotional defences and psychological projections!
• Libertarianism is based on religion!
• Thus Stef is talking about undoing libertarianism!
• I need a pay cheque!
• ZOMG!

The fundamental reason that libertarians have never asked the basic question – why do people reject the TEF argument? – is that the answer lies in the unconscious, and in deep knowledge of both the self and of other people.

In other words, the answer lies in that which unravels religion.

Since libertarianism relies on religion, and religion survives by opposing psychology, libertarians had no choice but to oppose an increase in psychological understanding.

Because libertarianism is so opposed to psychology, it cannot ask any questions which involve the unconscious. As a result, it is stuck in a blind repetition of earlier mistakes, like anyone who resists self-knowledge. It cannot examine the resistance that society as a whole has towards libertarian arguments, because that resistance is unconscious – and so it has to make up empty-headed stories to explain away its endless failures – thus guaranteeing their repetition.

Psychological, emotional, and intellectual maturity demands that when we do not know the answer to a question, we state with direct honesty: “I do not know.”

This is not an approach that has ever been part of any religion – in fact, religion is a endless cluster of deluded attacks on every reasonable question under the sun!

This is why no post mortem has ever been performed on a libertarian project – because such a post mortem would reveal an appalling ignorance as to its failure. Since libertarianism is full of enormously intelligent people, it would not take very long for them to begin to figure out why they were so abysmally ignorant – which was that they had been avoiding the question.

Once they figured out that they were avoiding the question, the next question would be: why?

And so, step-by-step, down the magic staircase they would go, to the roots of their own evasions and emotions, their fears and greed, the dark side that is in all of us, and all those other difficult and messy aspects of humanity that scare so many “rational” people.

No, no – much easier to just cash in all those juicy Christian checks and go write another useless article about the Federal Reserve.

Withdrawing Projection: An Example

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has been called the “Rashomon war” – a reference to a Japanese play where everyone has wildly divergent views of a theft in the woods – due to its ever-changing justifications. None of the “factual” claims advanced to support the invasion held up to any reasonable scrutiny, even before the war began.

Those who do not understand or appreciate psychology will forever root around the surface justifications for such genocidal murders, and remain perpetually baffled and disoriented in this ever-shifting hall of mirrors.

If none of the reasons advanced are the real reasons, how can psychology help us?

If we recall the three fundamental psychological axioms – the enormous effects of early childhood experiences, the existence of the unconscious, and the dangers of repression – some possible sources for the drive to war become much clearer.

George Bush reports that he asked God whether or not to invade Iraq. As long as George imagined that he was communing with some vast interstellar intelligence outside his own skull, the “answer” that he received had the ring of an omniscient absolute.

If George knew even a little about psychology, he would understand that he was not in fact praying to God, but rather “submerging” a question into his own unconscious. Psychology fully supports our general experience that our personalities are composed of more than a single “voice,” in that we often debate with ourselves, experience contradictory impulses and ideas, experience nightly dreams that can be utterly at odds with our conscious values, and so on. In fact, it would be impossible to explain the phenomenon of creative writing – with its varied and believable characters, all coming from one mind – without accepting the reality that our personality is a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than a single and unified dictatorship of the ego.

Thus George cannot be praying to God – since God does not exist – but rather he is asking a question of himself.

When the “answer” comes back, if George is at all interested in self-knowledge and the withdrawal of projection, he will understand that it is not God telling him to invade Iraq, but rather it is an expression of his own unconscious desires.

With this understanding, George can then begin to examine why he himself wants to invade Iraq, rather than operate under the delusion that some eternal and omniscient ghost is telling him what to do.

Once George can begin to examine his own motives for invasion, he can begin the journey of self-discovery, where he will end up exploring one of the potential scenarios below – or another one, which remains obscure:

1. As a result of being abused as a child by his mother, George has grown up with a deep hatred of his father, who did not protect him. This hatred is utterly unacceptable to him – and so, when Saddam Hussein threatens to kill George’s father, Hussein is actually expressing a repressed murderous wish that lies deep in George’s unconscious. By attacking Hussein, George is actually “attacking” his own desire to kill his father.
2. George’s political ambitions are driven by deep feelings of personal self-hatred, resulting from his early maternal abuse, alcoholic self-medication, and general feelings of invisibility and worthlessness. Deep down, he truly hates the American public for enabling these hollow ambitions, and so takes out his rage against them by committing them to war.
3. George’s antisocial tendencies were early expressed by his childhood habit of blowing up frogs – childhood cruelty towards animals is a clear sign of sadism. These expressions of inner torture were really cries for help, which went unheeded in his family, and in his society. His inner horror continually drives escalations of sadism and violence, with the purpose that someone, somewhere, will understand, and empathise with his psychological agony. Unfortunately, rather than empathise with this pain, the American public rewards him by giving him the power of life and death over millions. Since he has developed a habit of acting out violence as a cry for help, he initiates war as the ultimate expression of his truly apocalyptic self-hatred.
4. When George was a child, his mother was all-powerful, and abused him emotionally and physically, scratching him violently and screaming at him. Thus George understood that power is always associated with the abuse of the helpless. Furthermore, George’s mother would veer between affection and abuse. Saddam Hussein was a “friend” of the United States, and then became an “enemy,” just as George did with his own mother when he was a child. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was essentially helpless in the face of US military power, and so George re-enacted the principle “attack the helpless person who was formerly your friend” by invading Iraq.
5. Due to the mechanism of projection, George was able to project his own sadism onto Saddam Hussein – which meant that he experienced Saddam Hussein as extremely dangerous. His own increasing murderous rage – which would in fact trigger a war – was projected onto the Iraqi dictator, and so George genuinely felt that Saddam was “about to attack” him – when of course the complete opposite was true.
6. The murderous rage that George experienced from his parents was re-enacted against the Iraqi children, half a million of whom died as a result of the US and UK led sanctions against Iraq – started by George’s own father after the Gulf War. Once George continued his father’s role of “destroyer of children,” he could no longer escape the role of “parental abuser,” but could only escalate the murderous destruction of others.

None of the above explanations may be valid, of course – the purpose is merely to highlight the self-knowledge that can be attained when we look inwards, into the myths that have created us, and that we have created – rather than stare into the empty heavens and dream of conversations with dead constellations.