SLAVE NATION

1st May 2002

Last week’s Budget saw the Chancellor increase by several billion pounds the money he takes from the workers. They hardly a murmured a complaint. Socialism has such a hold on the minds of this country, they don’t even recognise when they are being made slaves.

For that is what unpaid labour is. 40% of all the wealth earned in this country is taken in tax, and so 40% of the time, people are chained to the Chancellor’s bandwagons: social security, the NHS and education. The average man does not spend anything like 40% of his time either on the dole, or in hospital or at school. And yet he does not revolt.

This is even more surprising when statistics and common sense show that government-run enterprises offer a pitiful standard of service compared with private ones: pension payments are derisory and uncertain compared with long-term stock market investments; the NHS literally kills people with its drug rationing; standards in schools and university are measurably dropping notwithstanding the crooked scale of state assessment tests. ‘Customers’ of these government ‘services’ cannot go elsewhere because their purses are emptied before they start ‘shopping’. So why don’t the people of Britain stand up, demand their money back, and call a halt to Attlees’ continuing mass robbery?

Because their moral certainty has been destroyed by 20th century philosophy. This cemented the ideas of Plato, Descartes, Hume and Kant with nihilism, to achieve one clear idea in people’s minds: morality is social.

The man in the street has not read any of these writers in the original, but he has heard the catchphrases of their admirers in newspapers, books, TV and film. In the absence of a rational alternative, he has embedded them in his brain where they govern his moral decisions. e.g. ‘rights bring responsibilities’ , ‘the stakeholder society’ , ‘every culture is equal’ , ‘selfishness is evil’ , ‘there are no absolute moral standards’ , ‘everything is subjective’.

In fact morality is individual and absolute. It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions – the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life. But what is life? A process of self-sustaining, self-generated action. Human beings cannot sustain themselves by acting subjectively. They must apply their reason to reality in order to determine and extract values from it. But whose life are we talking about? Who is it that undertakes actions and ultimately pays the price for them? Society does not live or die unless its individuals do. Who is it decides what action to take to achieve values? Society has no mind, only the individuals that make it up do. If some men follow the decisions made by others, whether under threat or by default, the ideas still come from some individuals e.g. Gordon Brown.

Modern philosophy denies all this. It claims that individuals must sacrifice their own selfish choices and values for those of society. It claims that only society can determine what is right and wrong. It claims that without society to look after them, men could not survive. In fact the opposite is true: society would not exist without the individuals that make it up, and their reasoning ability is not enhanced by being made slaves.

The doctrine of society as the decider and beneficiary of moral action amounts to the denial of individuals’ lives and minds, and acts as a screen for the use of force by some men against others.

If philosophy were to change, so that it promoted the sanctity of the individual mind; if philosophy acknowledged each man’s right to decide the course and actions of his own life; if it declared that a man should not sacrifice his values to others nor force others to sacrifice theirs to him, then people would revolt at Gordon Brown’s effrontery.

His government effectively determines for you: what goes into your children’s minds; what medicines go into your family’s bodies; and who the life-blood of your hard earned wages goes to sustain.

Surely it is time we withdrew our support from such base slavery. Unchain the taxpayer and free his mind.

 

Richard G. Brooke