X-Men: First Class

You forget something from this most recent film, which is that the issue now becomes the clear superiority of mutants. How are the puny humans going to outlaw the laser eyed deviants? How you gonna keep a mutant down? What’s Mill say when society decides something’s foolish, perverse and wrong but will suffer a category 5 storm or a mind-melting screech if it decides to do something about it?

In keeping with this analysis, race and sexual orientation are the obvious allegories, but don’t seem to match up, because of the differential in ability. It seems like there might be two other allegories that are more fitting. In one, the highly intelligent take the place of the mutants. In the other, the highly influential/rich take that position. In the first, Magneto’s group represents the mid-century Eugenicists and the X-men are the “technocrats/meritocrats” of the late-century. In the second, Magneto’s group are the traditional self-interested oligarchs, and the X-men represent the old “noblesse oblige” aristocracy. In both of those interpretations, the X-men are arguably in a better moral position than Magneto’s posse.

I am not sold on the idea of philosophy as telepathy. Abstract ideas in books only become powerful if they become widespread and accepted, and that spread is a long series of filters. Which ideas eventually become powerful is really as much or more a function of the filters than of the power of the originating mind.

It’s Hobbes again, basically. King aren’t kings because their eyes shoot the most powerful lasers, and Mill isn’t influential because his balding forehead is the highest. They are only where they are because enough people let them, because a social structure was formed around them.

It’s quite funny since the film is clearly structured to give Erik an “Anakin Skywalker moment” where he literally and figuratively adopts the mantle of genocidal supervillain. The fact that he still comes out as sympathetic, contra Xavier’s ridiculous posturing, just highlights that it isn’t a very good script.

It is perhaps unreasonable to call the registration act “clearly necessary” — I personally know several scientists of various sorts with the access and expertise to subvert their research to create horrible weapons (to speak to a viral epidemiologist is to be scared out of your mind), but they’re not registered or policed by giant robot sentinels. Besides, registration seems neither necessary nor sufficient: being on a watch-list wouldn’t stop Nightcrawler teleporting into the Oval Office; and enforcement by mutant-detecting killer robots would be possible without any registration at all.

Although race and sexual orientation seem to be the analogies most often brought up with regards to the X-Men franchise, I agree with F @ #3 that this doesn’t quite fit.

F @ #3, if I’m reading him correctly, suggested high intelligence as the closest analogue to a real-life superpower. Well, which ethnic group has (A) been traditionally noted for their high intelligence, and (B) has historically been the subject of terrible persecution? Answer: the Ashkenazi Jews. Considering that both Stan Lee, who created the X-Men franchise, and Chris Claremont, who revitalized and modernized it, are Jewish, I think this was likely a conscious or subconscious inspiration for the X-Men.

It is interesting to note that the short-lived Lee/Kirby X-Men series of the late 1960s played down the persecution of mutants. It occasionally appeared on-panel, but was generally shown as being the work of low-rent mobs and street bullies, not those in the corridors of power. And the X-Men had cordial relations with the federal government, including their own FBI liaison (Fred Duncan). But when the series was revitalized under Chris Claremont, things got much worse for mutants; Magneto got his backstory as a Holocaust survivor (never alluded to under Lee/Kirby) and the position of mutants stopped looking like that of Jews in 1960s America and more like that of Jews in Nazi Germany.

It’s likely that these changes were due to broad-based changes in Jewish and American culture over that time frame, as described by Peter Novick (The Holocaust in American Life). The emphasis on the Holocaust and the belief that Jews are eternally persecuted throughout all time and space are essential to post-1967 American Jewish culture, and the modern X-Men are inexplicable without understanding these beliefs.

Playing along with this thread for a bit, what if some of these new technologies do pan out? What about cognition enhancing drugs, brain/machine interfaces, or Gattaca style genetic engineering? These are far from scifi and need only an iPhone like breakout app to make the world realize how far the relevant fields have come. What then, when the wealthy/high IQ can translate their wealth into even higher IQ for themselves and their descendants?

What about Animal Liberation, anti-speciesism, all that; isn’t it the same sort of thing?

I don’t know of any animals that shoot lasers out of their eyes. Which is to say, it’s pretty well established at this point that animals do not pose the sort of potential threat to humans the X-Men style mutants could.

Btw, Josh G. and BenK hit it on the head – in fact, when Kitty Pryde (one of the tribe, despite a very shikseh name) runs for Mayor of Chicago, she explicitly references Nazi theories about the Jewish threat as a counter-argument against “mutants aren’t like other minorities – they’re dangerous!”

There’s no scientific term for what goes on in X-Men because it makes no sense in terms of real biology. So I’m not sure the details of actual human evolution have any bearing on it.

It’s also clear that in that world, mutants have vastly varying power levels. So even if everyone is a mutant, there will be some who are near-omnipotent and others who can do a parlor trick, or just look funny.

I’m pretty sure we’re the mutants and the animals (think of dodos, passenger pigeons, and, yes, tigers) are homo sapiens in this allegory. I’m pretty sure there’s a whale out there thinking, “Damn, if we had only known what they’d do.”

I’m pretty sure there’s a whale out there thinking, “Damn, if we had only known what they’d do.”

Hey, remember: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Basically, I have a very hard time believing that American mutants wouldn’t be lionized in the same way that our military is. The prospect of terrorist mutants is going to convince the people who would otherwise want the government to crack down on mutants that we need to make sure our mutants will want to work for us.

But there is something more philosophically authentic about the ethical contradiction at the heart of the X-Men franchise. A similar contradiction is found in Mill’s On Liberty. […] Mill argues that difference should be tolerated because it’s not likely to make a big difference. […] And that difference should be tolerated because it is likely to make a big difference.

This seems like an unfair reading of Mill to me. IIRC, Mill does not argue that all hedons are equivalent, the way that Bentham might have — Mill is explicit that there are better and worse pleasures, and that only the better ones count in the utilitarian social calculus. So if he argues that difference is not likely to cause significant harm in significant dimensions, and is likely to open the door to great value in significant dimensions, then his argument is perfectly consistent, because he’s open to the possibility of morally-irrelevant disutility. Sure, Archie Bunker might be totally freaked out by the Civil Rights Act, but as far as Mill is concerned he can go screw himself.

I was going to say, “Isn’t this where Rich Puchalsky usually chimes in,” and then I saw the Ur-OP. I’ve only seen the first movie, and read a bunch of the first issues of the comic 25 or 30 years ago when my brother was collecting them. But I think the problem is earlier than where John Holbo identifies it. The books, at least, as I remember them, appeal largely to teenagers who feel different [1], who feel they have gifts that aren’t appreciated, and are put under pressure by adults in their community to conform better. We don’t actually have institutions in our society that outlaw statistical outliers. That’s an exaggerated projection of the way a lot of young people feel. This part of the story doesn’t have direct applicability to our actual society. The film, however, did seem to turn this around, and take much more seriously, to the point of (let’s call it) reification, whatever caused those adults to put these teens under pressure: the sense that exceptionally gifted young people, who conclude from their exceptional gifts that they are exceptional, that the rules don’t apply to them, put themselves outside society, and almost necessarily will become its enemies, and will harm it. (I can only think of one, relatively poor, literary example, at the moment.) This has to do more with Hollywood than with the real world.

Once the story’s up there, of course it can appeal to gay teens, too. But the laser eyes and so forth make the X-Men qualitatively different from the primary audience almost as much as from gay and lesbian teens.

[1] (The after-school special about the white graffiti writer saved by true love and old movies came to mind, before I remembered his name was Erik.)

#22, This is the one respect in which mutants are like gays – coming from within families and so forth. And all that certainly didn’t stop rather severe antipathy towards gays for a good long time and sometimes still.

What would be a reasonable response to a human speciation event in which a growing proportion of the population were genuinely superior to the rest? On the plain of the real that may not be a very pressing question since it’s a bit hard to imagine a scenario in which such a thing occurred, but it is a serious issue in imagination-driven politics. A fair number of anti-Semites, for example, believe in the intellectual superiority of the Jews and argue that they are fighting for the continued existence of the unevolved part of the human race. I guess they think of themselves as the Neanderthal self-defense movement.

@ Jim Harrison: Really? Tell them I’m flattered.

Almost no superheroes eat enough to avoid violating the first law of thermodynamics

I never saw it, but was there not a short-lived television adaptation of The Flash in which the eponymous hero did in fact need to mompf down, say, a dozen roasted turkeys, 50 lbs. of mashed potatoes and a gallon of gravy after doing one of his sprints?

As for that guy who shoots lasers out of his eyes, IIRC the energy comes from Another Dimension; his retinas are some sort of gateway to that dimension. So, no 2d Law violation! In our world you might call it hand-waving, but in the comic-book world, Another Dimension is nearly as important a scientific explanation for stuff as are Unstable Molecules.

Rowlings’ wizards are the paradigm example of a good-guy super-gifted minority that cannot, in an English context, possibly be Jewish.

Why not? We do have Jewish people in England, you know. (Also in Scotland which is where Rowling is actually from and where most of the Harry Potter books are actually set.)

I never saw it, but was there not a short-lived television adaptation of The Flash in which the eponymous hero did in fact need to mompf down, say, a dozen roasted turkeys, 50 lbs. of mashed potatoes and a gallon of gravy after doing one of his sprints?

It was the Flash movie in the Eighties, if I remember correctly. What this thread needs now is a diversion into discussing the impending complete DC Universe reboot.

42: granted; I’m just wondering why it’s so obvious that Rowling’s wizards “cannot, in an English context, possibly be Jewish”.

Isn’t this the same argument that is sometimes used by proponents of a more or less unlimited right to keep and bear arms? That society, from their point of view, would be so much better (i.e. more libertarian) if everyone carried laser eyes concealed weapons.

Not really. They argue it would be better. I’m arguing it would in fact be fraught with new peril, requiring higher levels of liberal training so people tolerate people instead of lasering them. Whether that’s possible…

I don’t think you can claim these kinds of radical mutations really are a threat to Hobbes view of liberalism. While I agree that his theory “assumes that people are sufficiently similar in their mental and physical attributes that no one is invulnerable nor can expect to be able to dominate the others,” that is only if you assume that mutants would be able to find a place in that society at all. If the mutants are all pushed out, then the society is still just as liberal towards all of its members as before, but with a much have a higher level of intolerance towards outsiders than before.

I know this may seem a semantic difference when you look at racism or sexism in society and the denial of political power towards women or blacks, but these groups, at least after abolition, were always a part of society, they were just not treated as well as they should have been. They eventually found a way to mobilize and got a more equal position for themselves.

Mutants, however, are a different species and the power difference between mutants and humans is enough that they could put themselves above the law if they wanted to. This makes it impossible for them to be a part of society under Hobbes, so they aren’t.

And Magneto’s point, that you should start to question the social contract that puts you in as a member of that society once they consider registering you as an outsider and/or start getting giant killer robots to follow you around, is completely valid. His mistake is to assume that not being part of that society automatically means you are at war with it. Professor X’s response is to form a separate shadow group that is not at war (though not exactly at peace) with the larger society that mutants can no longer be a part of openly.

@Mrs Tilton 48: Like I said, one sinister conspiracy resembles another.

What, you mean…
the dark wizards would be a very odd fit – wealth, hierarchy, cruelty, obsession with ancestry, contempt for Muggles, ostracism of anyone who marries out
… wasn’t referring to Tories?

I would be shocked – shocked! – if a single mother living on social security in Scotland in the early 1990s ended up writing a novel in which the villains were thinly-disguised Tories.

By “Shakesville” I presume shakespearessister.blogspot.com is meant.

For the record, Rowling is careful to mention a variety of ethnic last names among minor characters to show that magic abilities are not the property of any one population. She includes Jewish last names. It’s tokenism, but it’s meant to forestall any unpleasantly racist parallels readers might be tempted to draw. In the comics, mutants likewise are not really a new species because they get born into random non-mutant families from all over the world. They are not the product of an isolated population.

I think Rowling’s Dark Wizards are Tories, but more generally they are any oligarchic, self-congratulatory, exclusive aristocracy.

which schools are in reality affiliated with the established state church (which is not Judaism), with non-Anglican students nevertheless required to attend compulsory chapel, for example

I think your information’s out of date. Certainly this is not the case at the independent school my son attends. (No compulsory team games, either.)

Chris, Holbo’s right, if you want physical plausibility, don’t bother with superheroes. Hasn’t been on offer since the original model, Superman. What’s more interesting is that the genre doesn’t even have the consistency of most fantasy. The Marvel Universe is not like the Tolkien one. It was never thought out, but consists of a bunch of improvisations conceived independently that people have tried to stitch together after the fact. That to me is part of its delight. Norse gods and androids side by side, despite implying contradictory world views. In fact, I noticed the Thor movie went out of its way to make clear that Thor was not actually a god, but a sort of alien. Is this something that the Marvel Universe stitchers decided on to try to make the whole thing more consistent, or was it a pander to pre-empt Christian objections? I suspect the latter. If so, I guess we’ll never get a Dr. Strange movie.

The result is that Marvel is like a city in the “city is not a tree” sense. Rather than being the work of one mind, it is a site where many minds creatively clash to create an inconsistent world. IRL, we don’t in the city get Norse gods alongside androids, but we do get extropians alongside biblical literalists. The contradictory world views are there, just not actualized. Marvel literalizes these contradictions.

The collage element also goes into the stories. One writer writes Black Bolt as doing certain things, and another takes over and doesn’t like those choices: hence that Black Bolt was actually a Skrull. Fiction and drama, especially melodrama and comedy, are full of imposters, of course, but the authors know they are imposters when they write (regardless of whether the reader/audience does). In a comic, a writer can write something intended to be the genuine expression of a character, or a conclusive event (like a death), only to have another writer change the meaning retrospectively. There is an exquisite cadaver flavor to the thing, though sometimes more cadaverous than exquisite (bletch!).

On the post specifically, I would say that superheroes are an elitist concept, so it’s pretty strange to expect them to further the message “we – as good liberals” would want them to regarding equality. In fact, maybe this is why the classic Marvel comics, written during the Cold War, have so few major Soviet villains AFAIK. The Red Guardian, but he kind of flopped. Black Widow, but she turned. Instead, it was madmen bent on world conquest, common criminals with uncommon abilities, or conspiracies like Hydra of opaque ideology – largely goons, Nazis, and aliens, tarted up. I guess the interesting case is Dr. Doom, because he ruled over a country with a name suspiciously like Latvia, without being overtly communist beyond the dictatorial bit. Perhaps, the anti-individualism of Communist ideology made it an incongruous breeding ground for superheroes or villains. If anything a communist villain might be something like Borg from Star Trek, but maybe that didn’t occur to them at Marvel or didn’t escalate to the majors.

As for the elitism of superheroes, their unreality is their saving grace. Sure if people were as grossly unequal in abilities as the more powerful mutants are from the rest of us, this would pose a real problem for egalitarianism. But showing a grossly unrealistic situation where egalitarianism is seriously problematic tends to undermine the notion that egalitarianism is problematic in the world in which we actually live. To make it seriously problematic, we stipulate characters like Cyclops and Magneto whom we are extremely unlikely to actually encounter. This suggests (though it does not, of course, prove) that reaching a serious problem with equality requires taking a serious departure from reality.

I haven’t seen this new X-Men film, but an interesting analog to the X-Men movies is Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel). In X-Men you have an ultra powerful group of homo-superior with lasers shooting out their foreheads and so on; you get to see mankind’s predictable bumbling attempts at fighting and exploiting them.

Well, that’s just it – they aren’t all that ultra powerful. Unlike, say, a certain Kryptonian in the DC universe :-) When you combine that with very few numbers, you just don’t get Rule by Homo Sup. Yeah, sure, having laser eyes makes you more formidable than the average citizen. But by the same token, you’re not that much more formidable – you’re at about the level of a company at best. A platoon would be more like it.

But what happens when mankind has to deal with a group of, say, homo-inferiors – human beings just like you and me but who have been cloned solely for their organs.

Some would say that in the U.S. at least, we already live in that society. This isn’t a new problem; it’s a very old one, dating back almost to the discovery of agriculture according to some.

This suggests (though it does not, of course, prove) that reaching a serious problem with equality requires taking a serious departure from reality.

One need not regard himself as a superhuman Overman to reject egalitarianism. One could simply look to the consequences of accepting or rejecting egalitarianism. If you reject egalitarianism, then a mass of egalitarians will attempt to coerce you into accepting it, by subjecting you to hell. They will render you an unequal and then remake their offer of equality. Certainly equality is better than being tyrannized by egalitarians. If you accept egalitarianism, then you forsake whatever dreams you had your sights on that might have accrued in an unequal world. Of course, the egalitarians will tell you that you never would have realized those dreams, but they may in fact be wrong. Their egalitarian vision is just as utopian and ridiculous as your dreams of individualized success. So, the problem with egalitarianism is egalitarians: the choice they give to non-egalitarians is (1) renounce your dreams of individual success or (2) be tyrannized by us. Egalitarianism never spreads by rational discourse and deliberation; it spreads by coercion, in particular, by singling out exceptional individuals and subjecting them to psychological torture.

“psychological torture” – Examples please
Also, I am curious what your defenition of egalitarianism is.

Egalitarianism: everyone must be rendered equal in all relevant terms. Any natural difference in talent, ability, or luck must be rectified by balancing through the mechanism of the state or social organization promoting justice. This formulation is not so different than the Wikipedia entry: “Its general premise is that people should be treated as equals on certain dimensions such as race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, economic status, social status, and cultural heritage. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status.”

Psychological torture: Consciousness-raising, incessant protests, critical distortion of utterances, and other control of the social environment that amounts to “thought reform”. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1806208/

In other words, egalitarians harass you, seek to change your thoughts, seek to make you quiet, and expose you to pain until you throw up your hands and agree with them. That is the same way secret police in regimes led by totalitarian dictators coerce citizens to confess to crimes they did not commit.

Gordon, why should treating people as equal in some respects – i.e. egalitarianism, per the Wikipedia entry – entail ‘rendering them equal in all relevant terms’? (HINT: it doesn’t.) Also, one of the greatest positive effects of freedom is, precisely, that people are able to ‘seek to change each others’ minds about stuff’. If that sort of thing bothers you, you are going to have to fight a two front war against both liberty and tyranny. And for what?

John,

The Wikipedia entry does not say “treating people as equal in some respects”. Certainly, the respects to which the Wikipedia entry suggests people ought to be treated as equals are those that are relevant to a theory of equality — so stating that “rendering them equal in all relevant respects” is not a distortion. “All relevant respects” and “some respects” refer to the same class of attributes. If your problem is with the distinction between “treating” and “rendering,” my problem is that one would think I should describe in pleasant terms unwelcome “treatment” that is foisted upon me. “Equal treatment” sounds nice; “re-indoctrination,” as Henri puts it, does not.

Opposition to egalitarianism does not imply a hatred of liberty. There are plenty of libertarians who would consider themselves staunch defenders of liberty, but reject egalitarianism. In fact, many political theorists have noticed a trade off between liberty and equality. It is liberty and equality that have traditionally been at odds — with the right favoring liberty and the left favoring equality. Part of my point is that some of the methods the left uses to advance its vision are tyrannical. As for my aversion to someone seeking to change my mind, I provided a link to a respectable psychiatric study on Communist methods of “thought reform” for a reason. There is a difference between respectful discussion and an attempt at actual coercion. My objection is not to liberty, but to egalitarians who use unethical methods to force others to agree with them. Not because they are exercising liberty, but because they are tyrants.

Also, more relevant to X-Men: First Class, there is a question what equal treatment even means. If equal treatment means treating groups as of equivalent value, that requires a judgment about what constitutes a group. But you have multiple groups of mutants with different sets of powers and divergent viewpoints. There is no collective mutant identity to set apart and treat as equal. (You could create one, but that would be coercive.) There is also the problem of ignoring that some mutants simply do not want to be considered “mutants,” which is part of the problem of the Registration Act. If your mutant power is simply speed-reading and perfect memory, why should you be forcibly associated with other mutants, the ones who can blow up buildings with laser eye-blasts or telepathically enter other people’s dreams? Why can’t you just be a human being who has a slight advantage over other humans, without having to take on “mutant identity” and all that means? Rooting equality in group identity itself is oppressive, because the benefits of egalitarianism are a property of the relation of the socially constructed groups to each other, rather than tangible properties that individuals own and control. Why can’t the non-dangerous mutant simply be left alone, unidentified and unmolested, to live life as he sees fit? There is no justification for bothering this person, let alone re-indoctrinating him, no matter how carefully crafted are your paeans to equality.

“Everyone must be rendered equal in all relevant terms” implies that basketball hoops must be lowered so as to not give an unfair advantage to tall people; smart people must wear a dumbing down device so as not to have an unfair advantage over stupid people; and ballarinas must wear heavy weights when they dance to render them no more graceful than anyone else. I think you have read “Harrison Bergeron” one to many times.

There are in fact many people who think smart people have an unfair advantage and the United States is a deeply anti-intellectual country. (Maybe you don’t remember the charges of elitism and sexism used to defend the Harriet Miers nomination.) There are also plenty of people who resent athletes for their physical prowess and ability to enrich themselves with it and they carp about athletes all the time. (And plenty of people want to raise taxes on the rich precisely because of their antipathy toward athletes, Hollywood stars, and celebrity socialites.) It’s not as if the public policy impact of these views is fictional.

I was afraid that that is what you meant. So let me get this straight, if someone criticizes you, disagrees with you, perhaps merely rolls their eyes at you, you are being oppressed. Ironically, your solution seems to be that society should lower its standard of allowable debate to the level of its most thin skinned citizens. Whose the ‘egalitarian’ now Beyotch?!

No. Criticism is not the same as critical distortion. Disagreement is not the same as thought reform. Rolling of eyes is not the same as control of social environment. I cited to a respectable psychiatric study on Communist thought reform for a reason, and the content of that study is not about “the rolling of eyes”. Is that what equal treatment means to you: casually disrespecting other people?

Mr. Henderson,

When I read boilerplate denunciations of egalitarianism like yours I always wonder if their venders actually think that the world is full of people proposing some of radical philosophy of arithmetical equality. The people I encounter who are concerned about inequality are obviously on the defense: the division of society between haves and have nots, after all, has been increasing since the 60s with consequences that are worrying from a Madisonian point of view since enormous wealth buys legislators, regulators, and judges. No need to be excessively theoretical about an evident evil, granted that depending on your point of view, what is a bug to a small r republican is a feature to a big R Republican.

The whole rhetoric deployed against the purported menace of egalitarianism is pretty funny and not just because of the hint that so much of it is based on repeated viewings of Red Dawn. Yours is a comic performance, rather on a par with a very fat man claiming that he only eats two buckets of KFC a night as a preventative measure against the prospect of anorexia nervosa. “It’s a mild case,” he explains, “I’m fortunate it can be controlled by diet.”

The hugely ironic thing here is that right wingers routinely denounce the elitism of their ideological opponents. They sound like high school kids denouncing the smart kids they resent—the campaign against Gore in 2000 was a perfect illustration of Nietzsche’s remark: “It isn’t the presumption of merit that is resented, but merit itself.” And has there ever been an intellectual or political movement prouder of the ignorance and human mediocrity of its members than the Tea Party?

It would doubtlessly require a relentless campaign of force and intimidation to genuinely level the condition of all people, which is a large part of the reason so very few people outside of Conservative educational philosophers propose such a thing. Thing is, however, it also requires force and intimidation to artificially increase the difference between the situation of people and there are lots of people eager to do that. It’s not just that this sort of thing has a long history. At a first approximation, history just is keeping the niggers down. As you may or may not be aware, for example, the governor seldom sends in the troops to shoot the mine owners.

Speaking of rhetoric: Thomas Jefferson was a much better propagandist than a philosopher in announcing that all them are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, not only because the probable non existence of a Creator but because whatever rights we all enjoy are constructed and maintained by agreement among ourselves. Political and legal equality and measures to avoid the drastic material inequality that would make political and legal equality impossible are contrivances by which intelligent men and women establish a humane sphere in which we can live better lives than we could under previous institutions of violence. The wager is that this approach leads to a world with less force and fraud in it than less egalitarian systems. You’d really rather live in Mississippi than Denmark?

Is that what equal treatment means to you: casually disrespecting other people?

I believe in egalitarianism (not your definition) and I reserve the right to casually disrespect anyone I damn well please even (shudder) you.

I am still waiting for an example of liberal “psychological torture”, real or imagined.

I am still waiting for an example of liberal “psychological torture”, real or imagined.

There are many in the study that I cited to and you did not read.

I have never met this particular species of liberal in all my life and I have met many. Funny that.

You’re right. There are no extant people on the planet that you have not met. You have met everyone in the world who exists.

Gordon, I have now read your linked article. I repeat, can you provided one example of thought reform (not Chinese style “more commonly referred to in the west as brainwashing” to quote the article) practiced by liberals here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.? Just one.

Correction: Some of the linked article. Life is short.

Other responses to GH: your experiences of USA != other people’s experience of the world. “Egalitarianism” as a concept is surely not just limited to Things In Your Life Which Annoy You.

“Egalitarianism” as a concept is surely not just limited to Things In Your Life Which Annoy You.

If I were referring to mere annoyance, I would not have cited to a reputable psychiatric article in a respectable journal on Communist “Thought Reform”. Here is that link, again: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1806208/

Also, you have no idea how much first-hand experience I have with totalitarian regimes.

Also, you have no idea how much first-hand experience I have with totalitarian regimes.

True, but my comments did not presume to such knowledge. I just said that given my conversations with my friends, I found your choice of words or analogy risible. I didn’t say they would find it risible; I’d have to ask them.

It also helps, I’m told, to be funny.

Sorry, this is too vague for me to understand. And it offends my friends who live in Rwanda.

John,

My criticism of Egalitarianism, up above, makes clear that my problem with egalitarianism is egalitarians, and some of their methods. You could quote Mill, saying that coercion is a no-no, but my precise issue is that, in reality, egalitarians deviate from this and in fact coerce by various means.

I also did not criticize Western liberals or American liberals or Think Progress. I criticized the Left. Egalitarianism is a movement on the political Left; Communists are both on the Left and also egalitarians. So, when asked to provide an example of those on the political Left who are egalitarians and use methods that are coercive, I gave an example of egalitarians on the Left who use coercive methods. The citation I gave could not be more probative. I’m not sure why it matters that the egalitarians I cited to are Chinese; I would hope that you would agree that humans from China are humans.

Though many conservatives and libertarians are Hayekians, I am neither a conservative nor a libertarian. Hayek was in favor of universal healthcare of a sort; many modern conservatives and libertarians oppose Obamacare. So, even if I were a conservative or a libertarian, which I am not, it would not follow that I must be a Hayekian. And even if I were a modern conservative or libertarian who cited to Hayek with approval, that still would not mean I agreed with Hayek on all things. I’m not really sure why you’re citing to Hayek, because, in reality, Hayek has absolutely nothing to do with any of my arguments.

Egalitarians can be tyrants. In reality, many egalitarians are.

As to you calling me Mao, if I agreed with Mao in all things, I never would have seen X-Men: First Class, because it is not state-approved art that serves only political purposes. It is far more likely that if I were an adherent of Mao, I would have avoided seeing X-Men: First Class, but then discussed it for propagandistic purposes on my blog.

I’m not really sure why you’re citing to Hayek, because, in reality, Hayek has absolutely nothing to do with any of my arguments.

You are a human and Hayek was a human Q.E.D.

And another thing: Egalitarianism is not a movement on the political left. That is about the worst choice of two words you could put together. In the US, at least, egalitarianism as a sentiment is decidedly shared by most right-wing and conservative leaning people. That’s how you get Sarah Palin! It may be felt by some on the left too, including liberals, but it’s not exactly the same thing. Don’t make us responsible for her please!

I read Gordon’s link. It’s about Communist China and was published in 1961. It talks about methods used by interrogators on prisoners – keeping them off guard, good-cop-bad-cop-&c. Just for context there – Gordon’s problem with egalitarian Leftsists and their coercive coercion is backed up by a study of Western prisoners who were interrogated by the Communist Chinese in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Because they are exactly the same, or at least similar enough for a nineteen page link to be “relevant”.

Anyways, since it is a beautiful Monday morning and I am in a great mood – let’s take Gordon’s allegation seriously. That the current “lie-beral biased media enabling egalitarian leftsist conspiracy to coercively force bigots into teh closet” or wev he is warning against is somehow similar to 50’s Communist China, something his link describes as probably the most thoroughly controlled and manipulated
group environment that has ever existed. What do we get? I bet Gordon’s WRNOG,,,

Is penal “thought reform” foolproof? Fortunately, it is not. Milieu
control, although thorough, can never be absolute; and the operations do not always proceed as smoothly as my composite data and schematic analysis might suggest. The process is limited both by its ovcr-amibitious goals and by the remarkable adaptations and rcsistances which human beings can call forth under scvere stress. It does almost invariably succeed in one of its two major aims-the extraction of a luridly incriminating
confession of guilt. But it falls far short of its second, the “reform” of the Western prisoner.

IOW, “thought reform” doesn’t work. According to Gordon’s link. Awesome cite there Gordon! What was your point again?

But all of that, I suppose, is besides Gordon’s “point”. Here it is, I suppose:

You could quote Mill, saying that coercion is a no-no, but my precise issue is that, in reality, egalitarians deviate from this and in fact coerce by various means,,,Egalitarians can be tyrants. In reality, many egalitarians are.

Firstly [citation needed]. SRSLY dood, your contention that many egalitarians are tyrants is based on 50’s Communist China. I suppose that numerically speaking there were a lot of people in 50’s Communist China, but I don’t think even that supports your contention that many egalitarians are tyrants as the overwhelming majority of those Chinese weren’t the tyrants. Anyways, reaching for a totalitarian regime and saying, aha this one’s Leftsist therefore Leftsists are coercive – is a neat trick. It’s like saying this Gordon is a self-important ass therefore Gordon Henderson is a self-important ass.

It’d be pretty easy to come out with counter-examples of non-Leftsist authoritarian regimes – I’m going to hope that you’d concede that there are plenty of coercive and tyrranical systems that could not be even remotely considered “egalitarian”. Thus the correlation between “egalitarianism” and “love of coercion” is not one-to-one. So we get back to the original question – can you provide evidence showing that “egalitarianism” leads to coercion, authoritarianism and tyrrany or even suggest possible methodologies by which this would occur.