Joe Stack: The Rational and Insane

Read the following:

BBC report.

The Joe Stack Manifesto.

Finished? Good. You know what the real tragedy here is? I'll give you a hint. It isn't the suffering of this man, it isn't the suffering of those to whom he alludes, it isn't the destruction of property or lives, it isn't that the “left” or the “right” has allowed things to reach a point where this kind of reaction could be considered a rational response. It isn't any of that.

No, the tragedy is that this was futile.

Absolutely futile. An utter and total waste.

It's interesting to me that people can be so petty. They take what this man wrote and did and make it into a partisan issue. The left calls him a Tea Partier, the right calls him a socialist. The centrist elements of the media, not wishing to take sides, simply call him a criminal who wrote an “angry rant.” The funniest thing about it all is that elements of his writing might sound socialistic and elements might sound populist, but anger only appears sporadically. I get the sense that not one of the anchors speaking about him, not one of the journalists writing about him, actually took the time to skim the 3500 word document.

But what really strikes you when you read the Stack Manifesto isn't the bitterness (which is there) or even the anger (also there), but the dissatisfaction with the conclusion the author has reached and his distaste for resigning himself to it. And behind all that, even more significant, is the fact that the man is sane. He is rational. Strident? At times. He overstates his case in various points, and not merely for rhetorical emphasis. But disconnected from reality? I deny that.

Would an insane man write the following?

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers . . . I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.

If I recall aright, de Tocqueville wrote of similar phenomena. He wrote that in republics, "the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved." And if you ask me, that's a fair assessment of American "culture" even now. And if in writing that I should invite condemnation, or in writing in hopes of an honest (rather than prejudicial) examination of a murderer I should invite condemnation, then so be it. I further contend that only someone who had no knowledge of history or, failing that, had never experienced life outside of a very confined and isolated geographic area or socio-economic strata within American jurisdiction could believe the United States is not characterized by profound injustices.

The mark of the deranged man is distortion, the mark of the conspiracy theorist circular reasoning. The mark of the rational one? Drawing conclusions based on observable evidence.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

But, you say, the man crashed a plane. He hurt people. Destroyed property. Yes, hypothetical straw people, he did that. He committed an act of terror (since that is essentially what it was – lone criminal or not, the intent was to be provocative). So did the men at the Boston Tea Party. And how many loyalists were tarred, feathered, hanged, drawn, and quartered? And that for a far less grievous set of offenses than those committed by the upper 1% of our society today. Great Britain imposed less taxes upon the American colonies than upon their own people. The British pointed out that not one Englishman in twenty thousand was represented in Parliament, and this note of realism about what a republic means has ever held true. The colonists revolted anyway.

Today, we have an unsustainable debt. We have just survived one near-fatal economic blow and are courting the next. We allow domestic spying. We torture. We topple governments in South America and the Middle East. Our Supreme Court has just handed the elected portion of our government over to the corporate powers that be entirely. These are nothing short of incontestable facts, and can be recognized as such by anyone not indoctrinated into one of the pop ideologies of the day. In the 70s, in the 80s even, these types things would have and did provoke riots. Today, we accept them. We yawn, turn over, shut off the alarm clock, and go to work (if, that is, we can find work).

So what, precisely, is the objection to Stack? That he was a criminal? So was Thoreau. That he is a right-wing nut? That he is a left-wing nut? But is he really a winged nut at all? That he is violent? Yes, he was. But in all honesty, pacifism is not a philosophically sound doctrine. Living persons have an interest in their own survival and well-being. If one strikes you, it is only expected that you might respond in kind. The principle of reciprocity applies. If you choose to take “the high road” that is your own affair, but there is no moral law that demands you must. If justice is fairness, then what one person is entitled to do, you are also entitled to do, provided you are truly an equal and therefore deserving of fair treatment.

And in a civil society, what else are we but equals? If we are not, I would at least appreciate it if someone would make an honest announcement to that effect. Because it seems to me that being told we are all equals is all that people want. All they need, in fact. If there was an admitted nobility, we might already have stormed the Bastille, so to speak. It might have happened on January 22^nd, 2010. But no. We wouldn't do that. We don't have an aristocracy. We don't have a plutocracy. Forget that the distribution of wealth in this country is the most grotesquely skewed of any outside certain third-world autocracies. Forget that a number of our senatorial posts are for all practical purposes hereditary. Forget that social mobility as a fact of life is dead. Forget all of that. We are equals.

So when Stack flew into that building, he was a terrorist. He was a white Osama bin Laden. It's easy enough to own up to that fact. It's the truth. Terrorism is terrorism. But if there was legitimate cause, and if Stack was not insane, then that ought to lead you to at least question your over-developed sense of security and stability. And I don't mean that in the sense of "oh my, something bad could happen to me." Let's cut through the bullshit once and for all: nothing changed on September the 11^th, 2001 – nothing changed. Americans are every bit as complacent and apathetic as ever. If we were not, would the military recruitment rate be so low? If we were not, would we have allowed the politicians to both execute an unjust war against Iraq and abuse our civil liberties in the bargain? No, all 9-11 did was create a heightened atmosphere of paranoia in which it became almost child's play for a corrupt, plutocratic ruling class to push its bloated, lethargic populace a few feet closer to the cliff. And the knowledge that that is true should be your source of discomfort.

Which makes Stack's cry -

I can only hope . . . that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are . . . but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

- the call of a revolutionary, not a madman (even if you can argue that there is as much insanity in leaping to the radical solution as there is in “repeating the same process over and over” and expecting the outcome to be different).

So in sum, I am willing to grant Stack all his premises. I am willing to accept his view of the world as correct. I am even willing to say that he may have been justified in doing what he did, adding only the caveat that this is a mere preliminary opinion and not a final judgment on the matter. Provisionally, I grant it all.

And, with that said, we come to the one point where everything falls apart:

But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

We are living in a country that is by no stretch totalitarian but is absolutely non-functional. And the thing is, no one really cares whether it is totalitarian or not or whether it is functional or not. No one cares. And because ours is the Age of Apathy, nothing will improve. It will only gradually decay as the various factions of the plutocracy and their appointed representatives fight it out on the floor of the capitol building. Mr. Stack did something - and I think the only thing that can finally be said of the matter is that, evil or virtuous, in a Kafkaesque nightmare such as our society has become, perhaps the only insane thing to do is nothing at all.

In any event, Mr. Stack will rally a few of the fringe loonies. His name will be thrown around in the media for a couple of months. And then the forgetful, bloated narcissists who fill every square inch of this nation will simply drop it from boredom and go onto the next popular buzz-debate. Maybe it will be something as profound as which week the fetus becomes a human being. Or maybe, and we can only hope, it will be how many inches of shoulder need to be covered on middle school girls to prevent their male classmates from being overcome with lust.

But fix any of our problems? No. The will to do it does not exist. Nor does the death of one man whom the media has so quickly and easily branded a wingnut lunatic (of one reductionist flavor or another) do anything to upset the balance that now exists. Say what you will about Stack, his actions were ultimately useless (maybe hysterical, but even hysteria can be an outcome of reason). The painful irony is that, if he was sane and rational, then acting on that rational analysis was the futile element in his life. It's an anticlimax. Which is how everything goes and how everything ends. There is nothing sublime or triumphant about it. It's all a let down. Let down and hanging around, as the song goes:

Crushed like a bug in the ground

Joe Stack – His life was futile, and he died the way he lived.

Christianity, the Founders, and History

Or The Audacity of Truth

Recent article on the continuing efforts to Christianize America.

Any time you try to engage in a debate with someone, there has to be some degree of common ground. If your perception of reality is radically different than that of the other person, you'll have a difficult time doing anything other than incidentally agreeing and, more often, disagreeing. Vehemently. When it comes to faith and rationality, if a man believes something on faith, then rationality can only persuade him insofar as his faith is mutable or else already agrees with your positions. A liberal Christian is therefore not necessarily more rational than a conservative one (unless his faith is weaker), the principles of his faith, the central, core values, may simply be of a different kind.

But there is one point where neither rationality nor faith hold, or at least should hold, any sway: the domain of history. History, you see, is about the truth. And what is “truth?” Truth is, to quote myself, the artifacts, the remnants of what is real, and the story that those things tell us, the interpretation to which they lend themselves. History, therefore, is the archaeology of truth. It doesn't matter what your faith or philosophy, it matters that your explanation of things be consistent with the things and events themselves. Nothing more than this!

Who was it that said history is the world's court of justice? Never mind, onto the main event.

There are those who want to rewrite the history of the United States to include its Christian influences. Doesn't sound very bad, does it? After all, this was Western civilization of the the late 1700's. Almost everyone was a Christian, or at least nominally one. Ancient Greek philosophies, some of which had provided non-scientific bases for atheism in the classical era (those of Anaximander, Empedocles, and Epicurus), were academic subjects with no social force. Buddhism had yet to influence the western hemisphere. Confucianism and Taoism were exclusively Eastern phenomena. Darwin had not yet provided a scientific explanation for the origins of life and intellect which would be seen to “legitimize” atheism to the Christians of the time (not that it does, but facts are irrelevant to perception). I could go on, but my point is that non-Christian, and specifically anti-religious forms of thought, were not powerful forces at the time.

So you can say that America was founded a “Christian nation” in the sense that Christians were the dominant religious group. But by the same token, Nazi Germany was a “Christian nation.” The Soviet Union was founded a “Christian nation.” America was also a “white nation.” That won't be true for much longer, now will it? Besides which, the people who controlled the direction of the country at the time – Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Adams, etc. etc. etc. – were even less traditionally religious than the average American.

Quoth Jefferson: “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”

You know what a Unitarian is? I hope so, but it's not what you'd call an explicit term in any case, so I'll put it simply: a Unitarian is one who denies the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Thomas Jefferson was also, as it turns out, the guy who cut up his copy of the New Testament to remove all references to divinity, miracles, or anything else that he judged not scientifically possible. The same Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence. The anti-government, anti-business Jefferson who wanted us to be a nation of farmers. One of our few and perhaps our only genuine Enlightenment philosopher. Jefferson himself, however, was a deist. He certainly admired Christ, but he did not worship him, nor was he a Christian in any recognizable sense of the word.

But he was only one man. What of the others?

Washington? Attended Church, but supposedly either rarely or never took communion, wasn't huge on prayer, and was speculated by Jefferson to have been a deist (as Jefferson himself was). Washington was a firm believer in the idea that one's metaphysical notions are a private affair. The only thing that can be said for certain is that he was hardly a fundamentalist. Go ahead and look up his writings. I won't bother to peruse them and selectively quote them for your benefit. I will, however, summarize my impressions. Washington didn't expressly demand that a man avoid religion entirely, even in public life, but he did believe that a man's religious tenets should not bar him either from protection of the laws or from holding even the highest offices in the land. (Which means that even if Obama was an atheist or a Muslim, it shouldn't be any mark against him. But how many of you seriously believe Obama could have won if he'd campaigned as an “open” atheist or Muslim?)

John Adams, the second president of these United States, was also a deist who denied the divinity of Christ. Quote he: “Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” Seems...pretty...clear...

James Madison? Officially an Episcopalian, writings indicate deism.

Are you picking up on a trend here? In fact, past Madison, most US presidents didn't much care about religion one way or another. Lincoln, in fact, was probably every bit as deistic as Jefferson, perhaps even more so. The trend towards religion only started to get pronounced in the 20th Century.

Now, were there Christians in our highest echelons? Sure. Were they the people who drove our history? Not necessarily. They were there because, as a matter of statistics, they had to be. Most of our founders were Unitarians at best, and that, again at best, is Christianity Extra-Lite. Were our founders influenced by Christianity? Sure. Even today, that much is virtually unavoidable in this country. I am an atheist who admires the morality of the Romans and recites passages of Nietzsche to himself when he gets bored, and I still act in ways at least nominally consistent with the secularly Christian culture which nearly eighteen centuries of Christian rule has produced. I am modest (perhaps not in my writings...), I am chaste, I am sober, I am honest. But to return to the point...

That point is, essentially, that our founders drew on an Enlightenment philosophy, not a Christian doctrine, in the creation of the United States (and if you want to emphasize the Christian elements, then you also have to emphasize the disbelief in Christ's divinity and the material egalitarianism which pervaded their conception of it). Was Christianity a part of that? Inevitably. But Christianity was also a part of Nazi Germany. Christianity was a part of the communist utopian movements that predate Marx and Engels. Christianity was a part of the Inquisition (a rather large part). Christianity was a part of the Crusades (also large). Christianity was a part of the burning of heretics (both Catholic and Protestant depending on who ruled the country at the time). The uses to which Christianity is put depend infinitely more on the man than the doctrine itself. After all, so many of our CEOs and Chairman of [X Company]'s Board of Directors are Christian, and didn't Jesus say something about renouncing worldly possessions and camels passing through the eyes of needles?

The problem is that these are historical facts. Without the Enlightenment, there was no American Revolution or French Revolution. There was no Rights of Man, Cicero notwithstanding. And these philosophies emphasized secularism, the idea that religious thought was not only not the sole good in life but in fact needed to be separate from other areas of it.

Now, as a side note, the idea that “a wall of separation between church and state” is not built into the Constitution is retarded. (It's okay for me to use that word. You see, it's satire. Actually, I think the term is “sarcasm” or maybe “contempt” but I digress from my digression...) Conservatives and Christians like to argue that because the wording does not appear in the Constitution, because the phrase only appears in a letter to the Danbury Baptists by Thomas Jefferson, that the concept is not built into the law of our land. Like I said, patently retarded. You see, in that letter, Thomas Jefferson was explaining the first amendment to the Constitution. You know, the one that reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Now, tell me, what do you think of his explanation? Ah, the pain of contradictory and inherently anti-factual thought...

But here's an example of that contradictory and inherently anti-factual thought...:

“I consider myself a Christian fundamentalist,” [McLeroy] announced almost as soon as we sat down. He also identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago. He went on to explain how his Christian perspective both governs his work on the state board and guides him in the current effort to adjust American-history textbooks to highlight the role of Christianity. “Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,” he said. “But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

Right, so I'll skip the geology and the background cosmic radiation of the universe and the requisite horrified screaming at the knowledge that this man has any authority whatsoever over public education.

The men who wrote the Constitution, as I've shown and as every educated person ought to know or be able to find out for themselves were not Christians. They did know the Bible. I know Bakunin's work, but does that make me an anarchist? I also won't even touch the idea that the free-market system is Christian. I mean, the very idea of capitalism seems antithetical to what Jesus taught. Gaining possessions as opposed to giving them away, I mean.

Now, the thing that really irks me is the notion that “individual rights” comes from the Bible. I'll skip over my typical anger at the idea of “rights” in general and get straight to the point. The idea of a “right” is a legal concept, it is a thing that one is entitled to given the letter of the law. The concept of “natural law” is a metaphor which we have reified because nature appears to operate by certain principles, just as societies do, and so nature can be said to have “laws” (this analogy only works if you believe there is a deity who authored these “laws”). Thus, if nature has laws, perhaps nature also has moral laws, which brings along with it the concept of “natural” rights. This began with the Greeks, not the Hebrews, and certainly not with Christ or Paul or any of the others. Cicero had something akin to the idea fairly early on, and the Stoics believed in a sort of natural justice. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the Christians tried to blend pagan (mainly Graeco-Roman) philosophy in with their own. Natural rights were never a Christian concept in and of themselves. The Enlightenment philosophers then drew on the idea (Hobbes, Locke, et al) and the modern notion of “human rights” was born.

So objectively, America was not founded as a Christian nation. The United States fought a war to escape the authority of an empire that was Christian, one where the ruler was both king and pope at once. To say that Christianity was bound up in its genesis is to state a truism, but if our only basis for calling something Christian is that it evolved in a Christian environment, then Christianity must also take responsibility for Nietzsche, for Marx, for Cesare Borgia, for Machiavelli, for Himmler, for Heydrich, and for Elisabeth Bathory.

But here's the real and fundamental flaw underlying the idea that warping history in this way is acceptable: if the founders did something, it must be right. Get that? Yes, it's blunt, but I'll repeat it: if the founders did something, it must be right. See? Yes, on further reflection, it seems a bit insane. After all, in the 1700's, physicians were still using a book called the Chirurgia Magna, written by a Frenchman named Guy de Chauliac around 1360, or just slightly after the Bubonic Plague. But hey, if leeches and breeches were good enough for Washington, they're good enough for us, right?

Thankfully, no one accepts this view. I don't accept this view. The conservatives who intend to “show” that America is a “Christian nation” don't accept this view. What they are doing is trying to convince secular- and liberal-leaning average Americans that the people whom they revere are on the conservative Christian side of the fence. Quoting the Bible doesn't automatically make you an executor of God's Will on earth anymore, but “quoting” Washington makes you close enough inside the borders of our Union. And it's entirely disingenuous. But hey, I'll make modern conservative Christians this offer – I'll play by their rules on this one issue: if you guys abandon Jesus, I'll adopt the non-interfering, personality-less, Aristotelian “prime mover” that our deist founders believed in as my God.

Ultimately, I think I'd get the better deal. You guys stop believing in sin and redemption and purity and salvation and heaven and hell, whereas I just play a semantics game and go on believing pretty much precisely what I already do.

So sure. Why not. Let's impose the personal views of our founders on every American.

Doesn't. Bother. Me.

A couple of Christians came to the house of a friend of mine, a Canadian philosophy student, and this was the conversation he related to me:

Them: Do you ever wonder about the state of the world today?
Me: What do you mean?
Them: Well, do you ever wonder about the way the world is?
Me: Wonder in what sense?
Them: Like, you see all the suffering and pain, like in Haiti. Do you think that will ever be addressed?
Me: If people address it, yes.

And there you have it, as the song says. This secular, materialist view encompasses what our founders believed. It encompasses what most rationalists believe. It is also an essential truth. And the twisting of history for religious and political purposes (and the Christian right has blended those so thoroughly that it is inherently un-American, in the original sense of the word), a sickening offense against us all, is something that only people could do, and it is something that only people can fix. But to that end, the necessary resolve must exist, and, from what I've seen, all the resolve has gone out.

So it goes.