Obey Your Ethnic Masters: A Simple Message for Stale Pale Folk
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of infallibility and the promise of certain knowledge. Singer Neil Young keeps on searching for a heart of gold. I keep on searching for certainty. Or rather: I search for more of it, because there is an infallible system of certain knowledge. It’s called mathematics and I think it’s mankind’s greatest intellectual achievement. Among much else, mathematicians can say with absolute certainty that prime numbers never run out and that we can never square a circle with straight-edge and compass.
The Infallible Tyrant
But here’s a curious thing: mathematicians don’t claim infallibility. Except that it’s not curious. Mathematicians don’t need to claim it: they have an objective way to prove their ideas. “Infallibility” is an ideological claim, an assertion of power and dominance (actual or desired), not something that a true system of knowledge ever needs to wield. As Bertrand Russell pointed out: “Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.”
What’s true of theology is also true of politics. Here is Leszek Kołakowski, the great Polish philosopher and intellectual historian, in Main Currents of Marxism (1978):
A particularly blatant example of aggressive Stalinism was the ideological invasion of the natural sciences. … [I]f we take a panoramic view of the history of those years we may perceive a certain gradation of ideological pressure, corresponding roughly to the hierarchy of the sciences established by Comte and Engels. Pressure was almost zero in mathematics, fairly strong in cosmology and physics, stronger still in the biological sciences, and all-powerful in the social and human sciences. (Op. cit., Vol. III, “The Breakdown,” ch. 4, “The Crystallization of Marxism-Leninism after the Second World War,” pp. 131 and 139)
Stalinism was aggressive because it claimed infallibility, as Kołokowski notes: “When the party is identified with the state and the apparatus of power, and when it achieves perfect unity in the shape of a one-man tyranny, doctrine becomes a matter of state and the tyrant is proclaimed infallible. … Lenin had always been right [and] the Bolshevik party was and had always been infallible” (Op. cit., pp. 4 and 93). Marxism is, in effect, the marriage of politics and religion, mixing the psychology of the latter with the secular concerns of the former. Where Christianity has an infallible Magisterium or an infallible pope, Marxism has an infallible dialectic and a succession of infallible leaders. Read more


the last time you walked through an American airport, particularly one that is heavily domestic. Who were the pilots in uniform you saw strolling down the corridors pulling their leather flight bags?







