Was Human Nature Suspended?

Governor Ron Desantis just signed a law to teach students that communism kills. He might also teach the little boys that swords and light sabers kill, and see if they want more or less of them. Or he could teach that guns kill, since he is planning to sign a law permitting everyone to carry concealed guns.

But that is because they are Constitutional idealists – sort of rational utopian philosophers like Aristotle or Pascal – not because they dream of killing. That is what they will tell you, and they may even believe it about themselves. Thomas Sowell in “The Vision of the Anointed” argued people are blinded by vanity that they are good.

But like they say about narcissists, it was always a facade of self-promoting lies. Like a psychological Edwin Hubble, Thomas Sowell observed at all times and in all directions, people weaving their own moral superiority out of lies. Just as people everywhere are wearing clothes, how they are seen, and how they want to be seen, softens the memory of what they are.

Most DeSantis supporters want to torture their political opponents, so that the words “shoot” and “hang” are banned in the comment section of their favorite website Breitbart. The Florida legislature is willing to hurt a business and lose money to punish Disney. DeSantis himself wants to punish me, as I have detailed in a federal lawsuit.

My friend is serving life without parole in a Florida prison for a crime that was invented with lies and fake evidence. If I point out that police lied or faked evidence, and do it as a standard practice to round up and torture the unpopular for show, I often get called a “marxist” and people threaten to shoot me. Many call me a liar, zero of those who do will debate the facts.

It is human nature to desire the death and torture of strangers. Children were supposed to somehow be taught not to torture and kill their neighbors, that it is no longer appropriate or beneficial in modern economic systems. But even though most Floridians will eagerly celebrate the pain of some neighbor, people seem to have forgotten, or believe their own lies, about their own nature.

When I moved to Florida from New York in the 1980’s, I saw a difference that people didn’t carry bats in their cars in hopes to beat someone to death. In “The Road to Serfdom” Friedrich Hayek spoke of a time in Europe when most people of good will came to take sides between communism and fascism, while they all hated classical English liberalism or tolerance.

It provokes a question: Are there times and places, or was there a time in the United States, when people had less of an impulse to kill and torture their neighbors? Are there conditions when this impulse fades, or is not provoked or cultivated? Is there an on-off switch for the nature of man, that gets turned on in times like the 1930’s or today?

An intellectual recently wrote a book where he argued that the personal experience of wealthy white people in the United States, causes them to misperceive the world and choose bad policies. Specifically, their experience that the black people they meet are not violent criminals, causes them to imagine that black people are not violent criminals.

Many intellectuals who write books live relatively cushy and isolated lives. They are deprived of the actual experience that everybody wants torture. And in many cases they have a sort of geeky set of values like libertarians, and assume everyone shares these values. These are the sort of aloof “people of good will” that Hayek spoke of.

Other intellectuals, such as Hitler in Mein Kampf and Ann Coulter, argue that a specific race or demographic is flawed and dangerous, and advocate for the elimination of that group. Some wealthy and intellectuals seem to have completely forgotten the true nature of man. And others are deluded that it does not apply to themselves or their own faction.

The system which minimizes people’s desire to torture their neighbors, is one in which their neighbors have minimum effect in their lives. People must be kept separate and alone and not interfere with one another. We must return to a system where people wish the government cared and did more, and wish people had some more interaction and more collective enterprises.

Today, cops pull over car after car after car, and bully the occupants, with the claimed justification to save someone overdosing on fentanyl. More of those people need to be left to choose to die from fentanyl. The same with domestic violence. Women who are attracted to violent men, need to be left to suffer at their hands.

Man is clumsy and violent, and the more clumsy and violent the more ambitious and invasive his collective enterprises. Whatever the claimed purposes, man’s institutions will succumb to the tragic flaws of government, and will embody and provoke his own nature. Like a snake provoked to swallow its own tail, man’s nature is provoked by his own institutions, in a cycle of destruction and natural selection.

The law signed by DeSantis is to remember the victims of communism. But can we not also remember the perpetrators? The perpetrators were their own neighbors, not the evil manipulative men who ran to the front of the parade, or whom their neighbors chose to elevate, and not the ideals they clothed themselves in. The children of Ron DeSantis will desire to kill and torture. Communism, like a gun, is just a tool to do it.