Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Lacks Sense, Common or Uncommon

 

“It don’t make much sense

That common sense

Don’t make much sense

No more…”

                John Prine

                Common Sense

 

I’ve no patience for Glenn Beck.  There it is, out in the open.  The man claims to write a book “inspired” by Thomas Paine, one of our finest thinkers and propagators of Enlightenment thought and, as near as I can tell, really only managed to latch onto about two things from Paine:

 

1.  The title of Mr. Paine’s pamphlet, which was aimed specifically against a monarchy acting in a tyrannical fashion, and

 

2.   This sole set of sentences, out of hundreds he should have paid attention to, both in Paine’s Common Sense and other works:

 

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

                Thomas Paine

                from Common Sense

 

Borrowing (stealing?) Paine’s title, Mr. Beck gets to play a bit of propagandistic “look-at-me-wrapping-myself-in-the-flag” dress-up himself: He is hoping that most Americans remember that Tom Paine was a Founding Father who wrote a stirring pamphlet during the Revolution – this will add a veneer of legitimacy to whatever he says.  He is also, more cynically, betting that few have read or recall what Tom Paine actually said or stood for in the entirety of his career as a revolutionary – because, if people did recall, they would understand how completely out of place it would be to attempt to associate Paine’s ideas with anything we nowadays call American “conservatism.”

 

Complaining about Beck wrapping himself in the Founding Fathers, however, is the easier attack to make on his book and ideas (inasmuch as they are “ideas”).  The more difficult attack, and the more rewarding, is to cut the premises out from beneath his arguments – and the premises to Beck’s nonsense are contained in the two sentences from Paine cited above.  Summing them up, they are:

 

a) Government, all government, at best, is a necessary evil.

 

And

 

b) Government is the badge of lost innocence – there was a better and more paradisiacal state humans existed in prior to the invention of this “necessary evil,” government.

 

Implicit in (b) is an assumption that conservatives like Beck then run with: The less government we have, the closer we come to returning to paradise.

 

I intend to dismantle both of these assumptions, one at a time.

 

Yes, Thomas Paine was a formidable thinker, and yes, Thomas Paine did say in Common Sense that government, at best, is a necessary evil.  I think he’s wrong, if we take him literally, and I also have my doubts as to how literally he should be taken on this point.

 

Why not take him literally – as Beck and his ilk take him and every other written document they lay hands on? 

 

To begin with, Thomas Paine was a citizen of the British Crown; British constitutional monarchy was the only form of government he’d ever lived under.  His pamphlet was addressed to other citizens of the same constitutional monarchy, people who lived under the thumb of George III and his capricious parliament. 

 

Paine was attempting to stir up a discussion about independence from the British Empire – and his writing in Common Sense is a polemical tour de force.  He provided the common people with the rational arguments they lacked words to articulate; he condensed and clarified and made popular the more complex arguments of the other theorists of the revolution, who wrote for the educated classes.  In his work, he is explaining to the populace why their desire to rebel against the Crown is a reasonable desire, not simply an anger-based stirring excited by a pack of half-cocked malcontents.

 

In short, read Paine’s Common Sense in its context: If he thinks governments, even the best ones, are necessary evils, it might have something to do with the fact that he was living under what most people considered the best government of the time – the British Crown – and it was not all that one could have hoped for in a government.

 

Would Thomas Paine have said the same thing of the American Government formed after the Continental Congress ratified the American Constitution?  While the man certainly had problems with this and that political figure in the American Government, notably John Adams, I do not find that he wrote any pamphlets denouncing the new American form of Constitutional Democratic Republic after its inception. In fact, he returned here to live his remaining years after playing his role in the French Revolution.  And he was not a fellow who kept quiet when things were on his mind.

 

Maybe, in hindsight, Paine might have written that, up to that point in history, governments, at best, had been necessary evils – but after the establishment of the American Constitution, something better was to be seen in the way of governments.  In any case, even if Paine did not write it that way, Glenn Beck, from the vantage point of 2009, has no business pretending that times and governments and their functions did not change after the 1770s in the West.  That’s being a bit disingenuous, to be extremely charitable.  Even if Thomas Paine could get away with saying “all government is, by definition, evil” in so many words, he could only get away with it because of his limitations of time and place in history.  Glenn Beck does not live under a non-responsive monarchy, under a capricious parliament, or under colonial laws that render his citizenship “less equal” than if he lived in the Empire proper.  Paine and his fellows had these problems when Paine wrote his version of Common Sense; Beck has nothing to whine about that vaguely compares to that situation.

 

But I’ll go further:  The idea that “All government, by definition, is evil” is wrong.  First off, Paine introduced (or repeated) the notion of a “necessary evil.” I’ll argue the contrary – there is no such thing as a “necessary evil;” if something is necessary, it is not evil.  “Necessary” means “it could not be otherwise;” “for this state of affairs to exist, this thing (whatever it may be) must exist.”  Hold that thought and we’ll return to it in a moment.

 

Thomas Paine begins his work by extolling, and rightly so, the superior virtues of society – people voluntarily cooperating and living together peacefully.  But in the next breath, Paine makes his fatal error – he defines government in a wholly negative fashion, as something that “curbs our vices,” and “punishes.”  Society gives and is free; government limits and withholds.  This is why he says government is, essentially, “evil,” though “necessary” – it restrains us, which is allegedly “bad,” but it allows society to function in peace, which is necessary, as no functioning society has ever existed without some form of government.

 

I think this is muddled.  If civil society cannot exist and flourish without government and law to curb and guide the irresponsible and the violent and the untrustworthy – if some ethical values have to be enforced by law, in other words, and if some rules must be agreed to and arbitrated by a disinterested force in order for a society of free people to even exist at a minimal level, then government is not “evil.”  It is necessary, yes – for humans cannot live fully as humans outside societies.  But “evil,” no, not necessarily. 

 

Is government sometimes an evil?  Yes, just as a society can be cankered and corrupt, run like a con game by predatory criminals to fleece the common folk, a government and its laws can be used to prop up a corrupt society or even to corrupt an otherwise healthy society.  Such was the case with the British Empire in America. 

 

But can government sometimes be good?  Yes, it can.  A government might not only protect me from the violent criminal down the street with his arsenal of weaponry.  It might also recognize that: if I am poor, I need to be paid enough to live on by the company I work for; if my health is in danger and a simple drug or doctor’s visit, out of my price range, would cure me, steps need to be taken to assist me in obtaining what I cannot on my own through no fault of my own; if I am born to a family that does not care about education or cannot afford it, it should make open public schools for my learning; and so forth.  By doing these things, government is not only in the business of “restraining” and “punishing” but of actively promoting the common good and strengthening society.

 

People such as Beck still see these things as “punishment” a.k.a. “socialism.”  “Why should I have to pay for some other guy’s kids to get an education?”  “Why should my tax money be spent on some welfare cheat’s health care?”  “Why should my business be forced to pay any worker a minimum wage – let the market sort it out!”  To my ears, it sounds an awful lot like a murderer complaining that the state won’t allow him to kill indiscriminately – what makes the murderer think he has a right to kill indiscriminately to begin with?

 

Similarly, I’d like to know why the person who “decides” she doesn’t want to support universal public education has any right to deprive would-be students of knowledge; or why the person who “feels” he doesn’t owe his workers enough to live even if they work a full day at hard work has any right to actually deprive them of the means to live; or why people decide that they have any right at all to decide who lives and dies by perpetuating a health system that discriminates against the uninsured and underinsured or people with chronic illnesses?

 

It is the responsibility of a properly functioning society to see that working people are adequately rewarded for work, that people are kept healthy, and that all have access to an education; this means all able members of a society are responsible, whether they feel like it or not, to participate in providing these things to all other members of the society who require assistance.  And when the society cannot or will not do this voluntarily, it is the legitimate role of government, not simply to restrain people and keep them from being vicious, but to cause people to occasionally participate in endeavors we could call virtuous.  Law sometimes may ask us to do good things, not simply keep us from doing the bad – especially if the society in question is so morally disoriented it has forgotten many of the reasons societies exist in the first place.

 

No, “doing the right things” because laws make you do them will not make you a good person, but restraining yourself from doing bad things for fear of legal punishments won’t make one moral either and we all see the sense in that sort of law.  What laws do is make sure the right things get done if that is the only way a society can be prodded into action – the laws and the government, at least, may be good.

 

*****************************************************************

 

Against Beck and his kind, I’ll call up the ghost of Thomas Paine again.  In his day, he wrote (in Common Sense) that America should be a place for refugees from persecution from all over the world – this flies directly in the face of Glenn Beck’s xenophobia and anti-immigration mongering; at the outset it is a different idea of what a free society is supposed to be than Beck’s.

 

And I will quote freely an Editor’s Note {Philip S. Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. I,  p. 242.} in Paine’s The Rights of Man:

 

“What Common Sense meant for the people of America in their struggle for' independence and democracy, the Rights of Man meant for all people everywhere struggling to overthrow oppression. As during the American Revolution, so during the French Revolution Thomas Paine brought home sharply to the people the most advanced thought of the age. Indeed, in some sections of this work Paine advocated social measures which were far in advance of his time and singularly prophetic of the future development of enlightened government.

 

“Paine boldly announced that it was the duty of the State to care for the indigent and the young, and declared that those who received such assistance were entitled to it, "not as a matter of grace and favour but as a right." These old-age pensions were to be paid for in part by those taxes to which every one contributed and in part by further exactions "from those whose circumstances did not require them to draw such support," and this program he defended as "not of the nature of a charity but of a right."

“Expenditures for public education, old age pensions, state aid to the youth, unemployment insurance and soldiers' bonus, he argued, were far better employed than in the support of useless royalty. "is it then better," he asked, that the lives of 144,000 aged persons be rendered comfortable or that one, million a year of public money be expended on any one individual, and him often of the most worthless or insignificant character?"

 

Equally interesting was his demand for the removal of all legislation restricting wages of workmen. "Several laws are in existence," he wrote, "for regulating and limiting workmen's wages. Why not leave them as free to make their own bargains as the lawmakers are to let their farms and houses? Personal labour is all the property they have. Why is that little and the little freedom they enjoy to be infringed?"’

Phillip S. Foner, quotes are from Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

 

None of this sounds like Glenn Beck or the conservatives or their version of “Common Sense.”  All of this sounds as if Paine himself, over the years, developed a solid notion that some uses of government could be good, not inherently evil.

"You pay for this,

but they give you that..."

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

The Black and The Blue

Thomas Hobbes, in his highly influential 17^th c. work, Leviathan speculated that humans once lived in a “state of nature” where there was no government – and quickly gave up their freedom and established government because, in short, the state of nature was a horrible, violent, war of all against all.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau took the idea and decided the state of nature was a state of innocence and invented the myth of the “noble savage.” His basic idea was that civilization and culture – and things such as government – corrupt the already perfect “natural man.” By definition, to move away from the “state of nature” was to depart from a sort of Eden into a world of artificial troubles.

One problem with these theories, if taken literally, is that they are not true. There is no evidence to support their suppositions and much to suggest the opposite.

We have never found evidence of any group of humans living that did not have some set of rules or laws to live by enforced by what can be called a government of some sort. Using Hobbes own ideas, when we have a group of humans that suddenly destroys the existing order of laws, such as in a disaster or civil war, chaos erupts and humans cannot live together – humans tend to become very effective at killing one another and stealing: civil society ceases to exist. What immediately follows is either everyone destroys everyone else, or some group or groups flee or resist the chaos, reestablish government and law for self-protection and to guarantee peace and safety.

Rousseau and his followers grossly underestimate the complexity of what he calls “noble savages.” Indigenous peoples have complex societies and cultures, taboos, rules, laws, ethics and methods of self-government. They do not live in a state of nature like tigers or crows or some other animal – they have highly developed societies and forms of government to protect and further their chosen forms of life, just as much as any European. By the 18^th c., Europeans for the first time were coming into close contact with groups of people in the Americas that had forms of life and culture that were different from their own; it was all too easy to mistake “different” for “innocent” or “natural” or “pure” or “completely free.”

Thomas Paine was influenced by ideas such as those of Hobbes and Rousseau. This is forgivable given Paine’s location in history. However, it is again unforgivable for anyone professing to be a thinker in the 21^st c. , and Glenn Beck is professing to be a “thinker” of some sort by writing his book and associating himself with Paine.

The fact is, where we find human life, we find societies, and where we find functioning societies we find some sort of functioning government. Humans, to live as humans, require societies; and societies, to function well, require laws and a disinterested agency to make and enforce the laws.

So, the notion that humans at some time lived without either society and law is unsupported by anything except fantasy. If we think for a moment this will be more clear. If humans at some time wandered around as unassociated, atomistic individuals, totally free to do as they wished, how were children ever born? How did the human race survive?

“In the beginning,” men and women had to associate with one another in groups in order for pregnancies to occur and for children to be cared for while those caring for the children were provided for and protected. Rearing children is an inherently cooperative venture, especially for humans living in the wilds.

Moreover, there had to be a set of universal ethical principles at work – people associating together (in a rudimentary society) had to be trustworthy, had to value rearing children, had to avoid killing one another for no good reason, had to avoid stealing from one another, and so forth. And when some members of the society arose (inevitably) who could not follow these basic ethical principles, laws and rules had to be in place to state what happened to the violators to protect the society, and a means to carry out the sentences (law and government).

People such as Glenn Beck and many of his Libertarian brethren are laboring under a spectacular delusion. Their fervent belief is that, if we weaken government or dismantle it to the point it barely exists in 21c. America, we can have a functioning society without a functioning government. Paradise is at hand. Hallelujah.

The Founding Fathers understood that government was always supposed to be limited – in other words, the business of government was to stay out of what is properly my own personal business. For example, my religious opinions are my own – it is not the business of government to tell me which opinions to have or to force me to support any belief over any other. And it is the business of government to protect my right to have my own religious opinions and to keep groups from assaulting me for my beliefs on the subject.

But the Founders also recognized that each citizen was responsible for the support of her society. The watchword of the American Revolution, if one reads the Founders carefully, was not “Liberty” and nothing else, it was “Liberty AND Virtue.” The maker of the statement that “the government that governs best is the one that governs least” was counting on citizens who, without being told what to do by a central authority, would choose, on their own, to do the right thing and recognize the rights of their fellow citizens. “Less external government” could be achieved ONLY if the citizenry had strong internal government in the form of a strong rational code of ethics, the virtues. Read the writings of Thomas Jefferson – he is explicit on this subject.

The belief of the Founders did not include what seems to be the libertarian/conservative daydream: Government should be minimized in order that citizens should do as they damn well please with their freedom. Beck and others seem to propose that government should be shrunk to a miniscule size so they can hole up into private fiefdoms and hermitages while “natural forces” such as laizzes-faire capitalism go to work rewarding the cunning and industrious and punishing the stupid and lazy; and if the wealthy are so inclined, they might share some of their gains with the less well-off – who better scrape and bow for the privilege of receiving their occasional crust of bread so they might live another day.

Political Libertarians advance from what is a reasonable premise: “All ethical principles cannot be legislated without a descent into tyranny” to a more extreme and less reasonable claim: “Forcing me to do anything I don’t feel like doing is tyranny.” The Founders believed in the former statement. Our modern Libertarian usurpers believe in the latter statement. There is a difference, a huge difference between the two positions. The Founders most certainly believed a) there are some universal moral principles that apply to everyone, whether they like it or not (virtues) and b) some but not all of these principles must be legislated and enforced by a government to support and protect society.

Many Libertarians seem to operate on the basis of what is called ethical subjectivism – all ethical principles have their origin in what I desire or feel is right. Ethical principles are not objectively real. If I feel like spending the rest of my life doing nothing except being submerged in an orgy of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, then that is good FOR ME. If I feel like living as a Puritan and abstaining from cursing, drinking, smoking, movies, and live my life by an extremely rigid interpretation of Christian scriptures, then that is good FOR ME. Read the Libertarian Party website – it pretty much advertizes this approach openly.

Regardless of how many Libertarians – such as Ayn Rand and her followers – protest their ethical system is “objective,” the reality is, it is radically subjective. To believe that, in order for an ethical value to be good someone must desire it is the very hallmark of subjectivism – there are no universal moral values that every rational person should recognize, in other words. Ayn Rand and her sort attempt to get around this by claiming “selfishness” is a virtue – self-interest is A or THE universal moral value. Absolute freedom to pursue my selfish vision of what I want my own life to be, whatever that is, is therefore moral and government has no business stopping me from doing this by whatever means I choose.

Government may not tax me to support things I don’t personally believe in. Government may not ask me to assist people or programs I don’t feel like assisting. To make a long story short, Government, for Beck, Rand, and all Libertarian/conservatives exists to do two things:

1. Protect my absolute right to be selfish,

And

2. Protect a completely unfettered free capitalist market system, with no regulations whatsoever.

Glenn Beck could have avoided wasting several pages of ink by summing up his entire career with those two sentences.

I would argue that, aside from being, at base, a childish vision of the world, one fit for someone locked at the emotional level of a toddler, this is an intellectually bankrupt set of beliefs that cannot adequately defend itself if attacked properly. Reality, adult human reality is far more complex than this, and moral reality is far too important to reduce to as simplistic a principle as selfishness.

People like Ayn Rand – and Beck, to be certain, is influenced by her – when asked about morality, instantly counter “whose morality?”, as if each person makes up his or her own ethics. Rand asks this question incessantly in her writings and pretends she has scored some great intellectual point by doing so. In reality, all she has done is reveal her own subjectivist bias: the assumption that someone invents genuine moral principles from her own self-interest or desires.

To be certain, some people do pretty much invent their ethics ad hoc, in an inconsistent fashion, as the winds of their wants and desires blow them. However, this does not answer the question: Is there anything that is morally right and wrong for all humans, regardless of what anyone thinks about it, regardless of what we feel or desire or want?

Are genuine moral principles things that arise because we want them, or are genuine moral principles things we should strive to learn to habitually desire and put into action because in some way, they pre-exist us and we need them?

Rand, Beck and American conservatism presently think wanting something badly makes it right and nothing should stand in the way of obtaining their wants nor should anything external ever guide their wishes, whatever they are. I, on the other hand, defend the other position: Some principles are good for all humans, some principles lead to us becoming good at being human if we follow them, and we cannot, as a community, live good lives if some moral principles are completely ignored or left to become matters of pure choice.

We have evidence there are universal moral values – discovering some of them is easy enough, oddly. They do not come from holy books and scriptures about which people fight incessantly; we can see them by reason alone.

For example, no human society can exist without some sort of prohibition on murder. In every society, there is some class of people defined as “innocent” who cannot be killed without some sort of just cause. Each society and culture may differ in their interpretation of the principle – of who is innocent and what counts as just cause – but there are no societies or cultures that exist that allow the random killing of any and everyone inside their own ranks. We may judge different cultures by how justly they apply the principle – Nazi Germany did a horrendous job of it, for example – yet one cannot find a culture, even Nazi Germany, that simply allowed any and everyone to be slain by anyone on a whim.

The reason for this is obvious if we consider it: Prohibition on murder is a prerequisite for humans to live together. It isn’t that people got together in a society and then decided, “OK, no more murder.” Instead, in order for any society to exist, its members must not murder one another. This applies to any people anywhere who wish to live together with other people. The people do not invent this, it does not erupt because people desire it. Instead, it is what must be done of people are to live together and it is what must never be allowed if people are to remain together in peace. It is an objective moral value, it applies to all people. One may decide one does not believe in it all day long, but it still applies – and other humans may justly hold one accountable for violating it.

There are many other such values. We must value raising children – it is a prerequisite for humans being here and flourishing in the first place. We must be honest under most circumstances – this is a foundation for communication and trust and all social structure. We may not steal except, perhaps, under severely limited circumstances – else one or one’s group cannot plan for the future. And so forth.

None of these moral values exist because anyone invented them or desired them. They exist like the air: The air exists first and then this allows certain forms of life to evolve and emerge. Objective, universal moral values pre-exist us and our desires and make possible certain forms of human life. The trick is not to invent our own morality and seek to live out a life of purely subjective, selfish desires. The trick is to use our reason to identify and refine our understanding of what is moral and what is not, and then further use our reason to construct our own individual lives and the lives of our community and the laws of our government in such a way as they are supported and vivified by these moral principles.

Glenn Beck whines, essentially, “No one should be able to tell me what to do with my life.” I answer by saying, “Morality, objective, universal morality should tell you what to do with your life, and when you fail to use your reason to seek out what is virtuous and avoid what is vicious, then, within strict limits, society can and must guide you by use of government and law, whether you like it or you don’t – if not for your own benefit then for justice, to make certain that each person gets his or her objective due, whether you feel like recognizing such exists or you don’t.”

There is nothing “immoral” in this position. Beck thinks he has an absolute right to “freedom”: freedom from government intervention in his life at all. But that was never the American idea of freedom. Freedom is not an absolute value, it is a relative one. If we have “freedom from” external control, it is only so that we can exercise “freedom for” taking responsibility, on our own, to do the just and the good voluntarily.

There is no such thing as “freedom from” external control to have “freedom for” whatever I please to do, regardless of its lack of rational value in relation to a good human life. People who misuse their freedom to do immoral things – and freedom can be abused – are no longer truly free in the first place. They are slavish – they have become slaves, moved around by external things worth much less than their own value as a human being. They are overcome by their desires for pleasures of one sort or another, or for power and money, or for fame, or they take the wrong steps to cheaply obtain something that should only be sought by paying the proper price in time and effort and sacrifice.

A people who decide that “freedom” means “the freedom to sell themselves into slavery and abandon the welfare of their society” are no longer a free people. They are irresponsible. They have no care for whom they hurt, how their actions affect the lives of others or the future. They are utterly irresponsible. What people like Glenn Beck truly desire, in their heart of hearts, is freedom to be irresponsible – this is the “state of nature” they fervently think they will “return to if only “government” would get out of the way. They are wrong.

Imagine a society of selfish individuals who only do what they voluntarily decide. They will, since they, by definition and self-proclamation, only do things from which they get a benefit. They abolish most of the functions of government except the military – which they propose to pay by voluntary taxation: if you feel like paying for it, you will; if not, you won’t.

First off, in times of peace, how many of these self-interested people are going to decide to plan ahead and fund a military for the day when they are needed? They might ante up when we’re in danger, but by then it is too late. Even in times of danger, many of these selfish people might decide to do a cost/benefit analysis and decide how much profit would be raked in by selling out the country and becoming turncoats to save their own skin and assets.

Where are the soldiers going to come from? If the pay is bad or fluctuates because taxes are never steady from year to year – and they wouldn’t be – and if their families are having to have bake sales to buy body armor and state of the art weaponry for the soldiers, how many people will volunteer, and for how long? What’s in it for the soldier? If she’s supposed to be selfish and self-interested and make her decisions on that basis alone, how are we going to field a military – unless we are going to build this paradise of selfishness on the backs of hard working suckers who are not mainly selfish?

Can you imagine an army in the hands of hardcore egoists? When would they use it? You’d never get a consensus unless you could find a circumstance in which everyone got a direct or indirect measurable benefit, probably monetary. And if they did use the military and half the army walked off the field because they didn’t personally feel they were getting anything out of the exercise, who’d tell them they shouldn’t? On what grounds? Are the folks back home supposed to be self-interested while soldiers surrender that right? On what grounds would one say, as a libertarian/conservative, that individual soldiers must surrender that right – other than by admitting that libertarianism cannot act as a glue to hold a society, such as the military, together in the first place?

And if it isn’t going to hold the military together without law and government to force the individual soldiers to do things they may not agree with, why would anyone think that civilian society will fare any better?

Somewhere, deep in here, is a mass of contradictions. The Glenn Becks and Ayn Rands of planet Earth want to have a society without being forced to take any responsibility for the problems of living together as humans – problems such as pollution, healthcare, education, adequate wages and working conditions – because they secretly count on some segment of the population to choose not to be selfish, to choose to be responsible, to choose to be virtuous and clean up the playpen behind them after they’ve made an unspeakable mess of things. Or they understand that, really, someone is going to have to be forced to play maid. Pure libertarianism and its political party is a con game: they think there will always be suckers to fleece to keep their selfish other-using lifestyles amped up and running at full tilt.

Ayn Rand, in her personal life and in her philosophy, was a user. Go and read Barbara Brandon’s book about her years with Rand and the “Objectivist” movement, how Rand conned her into allowing an affair between her and Brandon’s husband, Nathaniel, for many years on the basis of the argument that Rand was “the ultimate value” and that Nathaniel should show homage to her through sexuality. Rand used philosophy to gain an audience, fame, and money, to influence people in government (such as Alan Greenspan, who was her pupil).

But, in the end, Rand was not selling philosophy, real philosophy, real love of wisdom – she was selling the snake oil dream that one should be utterly self-interested in all one’s dealings with others and never take the needs or rights of others into account when they stood in the way of one’s desires.

She sold the philosophy of manipulation.

People like Glenn Beck are just selling the same snake oil in slightly different packaging with slightly different flavoring to appeal to a wider audience than Rand enjoyed. The end effect will be the same: We, your masters, will do as we please while you, our servants, clean up behind us in our paradise of selfishness; because we have the cash and will do anything to get it and you need cash and are probably limited by your morality that takes others into account when you make decisions.

This egoist’s paradise is not “the state of nature” of Hobbes, Rousseau, or even Paine. It is the paradise of “Social Darwinism,” the belief that the weak deserve to fall by the wayside and die while the strong are allowed to do anything to keep their place in the order of things; the strong may never be required to help anyone else, especially those weaker than themselves.

Oh, we are a far distance from Thomas Paine, friends, a far distance from the Enlightenment. Our Founders would not recognize this cobbled together piece of immoral trash as anything vaguely akin to what they had in mind for our country when they set it up. Glenn Beck and his brethren are talking about the “triumph of the will,” not about the triumph of reason.

Glenn Beck wants government shrunk and despised for one reason: It protects the common people against the wolves. He wants the common folk to give up their one means of leveling the playing field against oligarchs and plutocracy – who may as well be monarchs and aristocrats, as they represent the same spirit Tom Paine railed against in the 1700s.

The conservative movement is up to the one thing it always has been up to for decades: convince the people they will be more “free” with less government when the reality is, less government will leave the wealthy and the powerful more “free” to treat normal people any way they wish, to use them any way they desire, to put them in desperate economic circumstances and then require them to work harder for less and surrender, bit by bit, contract by contract, every opportunity for them and their families to ever rise far up the social ladder to threaten the power of the already wealthy.

At least when government is abusive, one may repair it. One may elect representatives to debate and rewrite the laws. Remove government and the power of societal control will NOT disappear – it will transfer into the hands of the wealthy, an unelected set of legislators. And once it is there, our de facto kings and dukes and baronesses will never surrender that power again.

Tear apart our government in the manner that people like Glenn Beck ask and one thing is certain: the Monarchs will return, not a paradise of “freedom.” And you will then truly understand in your bones why Thomas Paine wrote what he wrote and how Glenn Beck’s garbage so little resembles the spirit of the Enlightenment.

Richard Van Ingram

4 January 2010