Andrew Klavan, with some thoughts on the invisible (and voluntary) versus the very visible hand of the Left, as most recently demonstrated by L’Affaire Chris Dorner:
The left has never bought into the central revelation of the Enlightenment: things are made to work perfectly fine without much control from above. This Enlightenment insight was inspired by the earlier work of Isaac Newton who discovered that God didn’t have to move the stars around in the sky or cause the apple to fall to earth. The Big Dude had cleverly put machinery in place that worked pretty much on its own. The economist Adam Smith translated this insight into economics when he pointed out that individuals working in their own interest frequently promote the interest of everyone as if by an invisible hand. The founders translated the idea into politics by creating a system in which individuals could act without too much government interference. These geniuses didn’t trust in individual goodness, not at all. They trusted in the handiwork of the Creator — that is, they trusted the overall human system was built to work without kings and aristocrats — or a democratic mob — forcing people to do what they wanted.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founding saint of modern leftism, rejected that Enlightenment wisdom. He hated the modern world and thought humanity had been better off in a state of noble savagery. In that state, Rousseau believed, men were truly free because their laws naturally followed the general will. If people in the corrupt modern age violated the general will, they had to be “forced to be free.”
The logic of Rousseau led to the guillotine.
As it led to the deaths of tens of millions over the past century. And of course, it is one of the reasons (but of course by no means the only one) that they don’t want us to have guns. They assume that they are as willing to kill for their ideology as they are, and we (or rather, they) can’t have that.
[Monday morning update]
More Huffpo readers who support mass murder. See, he’s got a grievance, so it’s perfectly understandable why he’d kill innocent people.
Adam Smith was suffering under the same misunderstanding: that something called “the common good” exists and that we should be concerned about it. Many people who believe in “rights” buy into this fiction and will happily talk about Smith’s invisible hand of the free market as something positive, and will happily start to question the rights of free people if they’re later convinced that the economics don’t work out.
Mr. Dorner still merits his day in court, but to all appearances he is 1) crazy, at least in a behavioral if not clinical sense, and 2) his grievance is primarily with the police and their family members about his firing.
But to the extent that his manifesto expresses leftish views, do you suppose that part of his “platform” is, indeed, one of gun restrictions?
Do you suppose that part of his twisted politics behind the violence is “Hey look how much terror I can inflict with common semi-automatic weapons (and my military and police training) — how about restricting gun ownership?” So in that sense, violence is recruited in service of liberal-left political goals and the skittishness of the media to disclose as much follows from this?
I also want to point out that it took days for the image of the bullet-ridden truck of the two newspaper delivery women to make it on TV, only the briefest glimpse was offered of the truck as background of noting in passing that “6 police officers are placed on administrative leave.”
So the suspect is this really muscular black guy so the police shoot these two little old Hispanic ladies? And then they shot at this skinny white guy in a truck? Is this, like, to prevent racial profiling?
And what is with all the holes in the tailgate of the one truck? I thought that the modern ROE of the police is that they shoot you if you were an imminent threat, but this business of “shooting out the tires” or “shooting someone in the leg to stop them from fleeing” went out more than 50 years ago?
By the way, I did a Google search on “bullet holes in the tailgate.”
I came up with a post a Free Republic saying that Officer Dorner was (once) “a good guy” in that his firing may have had to do with being a whistle blower on excessive force or corruption of fellow officers. The Daily Kos is entertaining conspiracy theories that more bullet holes were put in the newspaper delivery truck after the fact, perhaps relating to the questions I raised.
Do you suppose that we are all missing the story, you, me, NBC News, everybody? Do you suppose that the real story is that there is something terribly wrong with the LAPD that pushed this one man over the edge?
Think about it. The Chief of Police said on TV that he was “reopening the case” of Dorner’s firing. Why would he even start with that? Is it a ploy of “suggesting amnesty” as a tactic to get Mr. Dorner to turn himself in? That is something I would try — one has to try anything (lawful) to get this man off the streets. Or is there something rotten about the firing, and the LAPD’s moral responsibility in this deepening catastrophe is deeper than we think?
I mean first Rodney King, then the botched O. J. Simpson investigation, and now this — maybe there are some serious institutional and cultural flaws with the LAPD?
There is no doubt that there are serious institutional problems with the LAPD, and have been for years. That doesn’t justify anything that Dorner has done.
C’mon, Rand, what in anything that I posted suggested in the least part that there is any justification for ambushing and killing three people?
But that there is no justification does not mean that there isn’t any provocation. Firing someone can be a provocation to violence as there is a long, tragic history of people becoming unhinged upon being fired, “Going Postal” being part of the modern lexicon.
But suppose it wasn’t just a matter of being fired, suppose Mr. Dorner was fired unjustly, suppose he was fired corruptly (to cover up actions of others). None of this justifies ambush killings of anybody. But it speaks to provocation, and it spreads moral culpability beyond the boundaries of Mr. Dorner’s conscience. It is starting to look like the Chief of Police very publically reopening the case of Mr. Dorner’s firing is an admission of this, or at the least, an admission of the appearance of same.
So we have a fugitive who allegedly ambushed and killed three people and wounded two others in pursuit of righting some moral wrong, and we have “the good guys” shooting at three people, seriously wounding a 71 year old woman righting the moral wrong of the one guy righting a moral wrong. This whole situation is spinning out of control fast, but there is a lot more to the story that there is a Left wing nut on the loose. The MSM doesn’t seem to want to cover this story, but I am wondering if we have a superficial narrative of this as well.
We almost always have a superficial narrative when it comes to the mainstream media, particularly when the story becomes politically incorrect.
The problem is that too many people these days — apparently mostly on the Left, judging from the commentary — see provocation as justification.
The day the story broke I commented that Hollywood writers were almost certainly pounding out a script, and Denzel’s agent was probably already getting calls, and that if he started fighting crime and corruption outside the law, LA culture would cast him as a real life Dark Knight. Sure enough, yesterday Drudge linked to stories of all the leftists calling him the Dark Knight. He’s acting out their fantasies with a rifle and righteous anger.
When I first heard the story, someone remarked it was like a Hollywood storyline. They were thinking The Fugative, because they probably were unaware of Dr. Samuel Sheppard. However, the more I hear about Dorner, I’m thinking this is more like Sam Jackson’s character in The Negotiator.
Denzel? You mean Jamie Foxx…
I was thinking Denzel because of the film Training Day, but the more I think about it, the more Dornan sounds like Dirty Harry, at least if he hadn’t given shout-outs to Jennifer Beals, Charlie Sheen, and Larry David, which makes him some sort of Dirty Harry/Richard Simmons hybrid and ruins the whole vibe.
Jammie Fox is a little two thin to play him, but perhaps Eddie Murphy in a fat suit?
Are you trying to make a comedy or an unintentional comedy?
The question is how many Hollywood writers are glued to the CNN newsfeed waiting for the answer to that same question. ^_^
Will it be a Dateline special, a big-screen drama, a TV series, or tragi/comedic farce?
Can they somehow establish contact with Dorner and feed him some of their best lines and pet peeves to he’ll use them, allowing the final production to boast “This is a true story”?
They started with love-beads and flower-power, and will reach their apogee with bayonets, bullets and bludgeons. The Peace-Love-and-Brotherhood crowd gets supplanted by Cuffy Meigs. (Look him up.)
Despite the human lives lost in this fiasco, some good will come of this sad affair. What we are now seeing is a live demonstration of how local police departments will fare against a motivated guerrilla shooter in the event of a federal gun ban.
The verdict: not very well.
Dorner is a moral reprobate and an intellectual dummy, yet he has managed to hit his targets and fade into the brush, which is what guerrillas do. And he has done so against the combined manpower and technology of the entire SoCal law enforcement community at all levels. If a moron like this can paralyze the Law all by himself, imagine what a hundred intelligent, motivated gun owners could do.
Or a thousand.
Or a hundred thousand.
Dorner is a murderer and an anti-White bigot, but his killing spree is providing excellent real-world intelligence data to those who will resist the federal government in the event of a gun ban. You may be certain that responsible parties among the Molon Labe folk are taking careful note of how their potential enemies are observing, orienting, deciding, and acting in response to the Dorner affair, and are planning to use this knowledge should the proper circumstances arise.
Should a gun ban come, the streets and highways and hills will be crawling with Dorners, most of whom will be better and smarter than he. The laws have to know that. When the time comes for gun confiscation, I suspect we will see a marked lack of enthusiasm for enforcement among the local badge-wearers who will be tasked with collecting the people’s arms.
The misery this White-hating loser has inflicted upon the innocent so far is regrettable, but the chance to watch the enemy respond to him is not. If only we could have had the manhunt without the loss of lives! As it is, I hope some responsible gun-owning citizen blows him full of more holes than a wax-dipped Emmental.
Excellent insight, B. Thank you.
μολὼν λαβέ, indeed…