#dim hypothesis

In September, 2012, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, a long-term associate of Ayn Rand from his teens until her death, published a philosophy book, The DIM Hypothesis, subtitled "Why the Lights of the West are Going Out." In that book, Dr. Peikoff describes three modes of thought, abbreviated D (disintegration), I (integration), and M (misintegration.)

Is the rapidly disentegrating nation of Iraq a perfect demonstration of the DIM Hypothesis? I say yes. Saddam, ISIS, and Iran are M2 totalitarians. (Solid subscribers to the "misintegrated" mode of thought, typified by religious fanatics and North Korea-style Stalinist dictatorships.)

Obama is a D2 skeptic nihilist. (D2 means a solid subscriber to the "disintegrated" mode, in which nothing is certain, and true reality cannot be known.) Bush, in my opinion, was a D1 skeptic; he was not tied sufficiently to any truly objective view of rights and freedom to understand Iraq, even in the wrong way. On the other hand, the D1 mode of thought allows a mixture of a belief that reality exists, and in many cases, it can be known, acted upon, and evaluated, and it was such objective knowledge of military strength that made it possible for US and other forces to invade Iraq, oust Saddam (not the "cakewalk" it was claimed to be), and set up an Iraqi army after a sufficient military "surge."

In a previous blogpost, I pointed out how US President George W. Bush supported a nation which had "Allahu Akbar" on its flag, and to which Americans politicians turned a blind eye when Christians were persecuted. It seems that the guys who shouted "Allahu Akbar" the loudest, the "terrorist" jihad network known as ISIS, has the real cakewalk when they invaded Iraq: the US-trained Iraqi army fled in terror.

According to The DIM Hypothesis, who understood what about Iraq?

Saddam: understood the Shia threat, the Western need for oil, and the use of violence to suppress those he ruled. He was, in essence, a fellow traveler of the Old Left, a remnant of the so-called "unaligned" nations of the Cold War.

ISIS: Its leader, whose name, by the way, is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, understands the principles laid down by Muhammad the warrior, reflecting Plato's vision of a philosopher-king, but substituting the earthly Dar al-Islam for Plato's idealistic World of Forms. His motto might well be: "Give me that old-time religion: it's good enough for me."

Obama: totally buys into the advanced skepticism of Postmodernism, which replaces Leninism with nihilism, a mindless but bogus utopian egalitarianism, and "identity politics." He abandoned Iraq because, well, why not?

Bush: in the mode of "Progressive" Republicans, whose ranks include Teddy Roosevelt and Nixon, Bush paid lip service to supporting American power, advocating some form of republic loosely based on a Western "democracy," but falling short of protecting individual rights. The army set up by the USA according to Bush's policy did not know what they were fighting for, and therefore they did not fight.

Last week I saw The Lego Movie with an adult daughter, and we both enjoyed it thoroughly. Then, today, I ran across this article mentioned in The Drudge Report and written by Neoconservative icon John Podhoretz, who attacked the movie for being anti-capitalist. Though of course there was the usual “Progressive” bilge in the movie plot (as in every shred of today’s American culture) I could not accept Podhoretz’ premise. The movie was not merely “Progressive” propaganda. That got me to thinking about Hollywood entertainment industry, and led me to a conclusion: Hollywood is not just a propaganda arm of the government; unlike, say, Newsweek, Hollywood makes money, hand over fist, all over the world. Were it not for capitalism, the Hollywood entertainment industry would degenerate to the level of, say, the National Film Board of Canada. In other words, Hollywood systematically bites the hand that feeds it. In other, other words, Hollywood is a crony private enterprise network in cahoots with the government. In Atlas Shrugged terms, Hollywood is James Taggart.

I have more to say about Hollywood cronyism, but let’s take a look at The Lego Movie. The villain was a man and his Legoland avatar known as Mr. Business. Perhaps his given name was Monkey, because he had nothing in common with a businessman, even a government crony businessman. His Legoland avatar was a mere tyrannical thug, and his human form was a control freak. Both wanted, intended, and tried to freeze all change and development in Legoland with super-glue, turning the whole world into a static, eternal “paradise” of their own devising. That sounds like Kim Il-Sung, former Communist dictator of North Korea, and his heirs, Kim Jong-Il, and the current incumbent: the one who sicced a pack of wild dogs on his conniving uncle, whose name is Kim Jong-Un.

In other words, “Mr. Business” in The Lego Movie was a socialist.

After a considerable amount of “Progressive” claptrap about how an unimaginative Everyman becomes a hero who saves the world, or at least Legoland, the payoff turns out to be the power of the human mind. That’s right, the mind as man’s (and plastic cats’) means of, if not survival, at least resistance to tyranny. Not a bad message, in my opinion.

So where does that place The Lego Movie on the epistemological spectrum? In Peikovian DIM Hypothesis terms, I believe that The Lego Movie scores a D1: a mixture of Kantian “unknowable reality” poison with enough bootleg Romanticism nutrition to be able to coax money from a paying audience, including me and my daughter, who, as I said, had a good time.

In fact, in my opinion, The Lego Movie is a pretty good concretization of Immanuel Kant’s epistemology. It plays fast and loose with the Law of Identity, just as Kant did. The Bad Cop villain of the movie becomes a Good Cop merely by swiveling his head, until Mr. Business erases Good Cop’s smiling face with nail polish remover. That one scene merges Kant with the Hegelian Dialectic, and also with the Marxist version of the same, Dialectical materialism. Wow!

Now back to Hollywood. Just as The Lego Movie concretizes Kant’s epistemology, Hollywood concretizes Kantian politics of cronyism, or as Ayn Rand preferred to call it, the Aristocracy of Pull. Yes they get support of powerful politicians by pandering with the “Progressive” altruism, collectivism, and mysticism, but they depend on real people for money.

When an oppressive state apparatus threatens to crush individual rights, is it enough to engage in a flamboyant act of defiance? Of course not. Nevertheless, flamboyant acts of defiance are all the rage these days.

Last spring, former technical contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the extent of the Obama apparatus’ spying on electronic data transmissions by Americans, spying which began under Bush in reaction to Islamic jihad, and which seems to have greatly expanded under the Obama “Democrats.”

As I write this (things may change fast), Snowden is under the protection of Putin’s Russian state apparatus (hey, savor the irony) while Obama and his attack dog Eric Holder are trying to get their hands on him.

Snowden is loosely associated with the loosely organized “hacktivist” organization Anonymous, itself loosely associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is (in my opinion) not-so-loosely associated with Obama, because the movement is reportedly funded by the Tides Foundation, among whose big contributors is the wife of the current Secretary of State, John Kerry.

So there you have it: the underdog fights back, or so it might appear.

The issue in my opinion, is not whether whistleblowers like Snowden are good guys or bad guys, but whether the ideas floating around Snowden’s head are good ideas or bad ideas.

The “hacktivist” movement, which I might characterize (loosely, of course) as a “hipster anarchist” movement, uses as their icon the Guy Fawkes Mask, a stylized facial portrait of the sixteenth-century activist Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up one of the Houses of the British Parliament with huge kegs of gunpowder.

The gunpowder was discovered before the Big Bang, and Fawkes was executed in 1609. He was sentenced to being disemboweled, castrated, and cut up into four pieces after a light hanging, but he managed to jump off the gallows and died before the rest of the sentence was carried out.

So, is that cool, or what? Well, I’m almost tempted to buy a Guy Fawkes Mask myself in solidarity with the Guy, but a mask is just that, a mask. It’s what’s behind the mask which counts. So I googled Guy Fawkes and learned stuff.

Guy Fawkes, you see, was a Catholic, who was fighting a battle which began with king Henry VIII, who defied the Pope and turned England into a statist enemy of the Vatican. Fawkes’ faction was on the side of the former Queen “Bloody” Mary (the only world monarch, as far as I know, to have a cocktail named after her.) Mary got the Bloody nickname because of the ruthless persecution of Protestants under her orders, after which the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I dished out revenge on the Catholics, and the current Protestant King, James I, was imposing fines on avoiders of Protestant religious services.

So you see, in DIM Hypothesis terms, the whole thing was M2 vs. M2. Hey, nobody ever accused either Protestantism or Catholicism as being the “Religion of Peace.”

Interestingly enough, 167 years after Guy Fawkes’ botched execution, another bunch of Englishmen did something extraordinary in defense of both Catholics and Protestants: they declared independence against the statist Crown of England leading in 14 years to the establishment of a secular state, in fact thirteen of them. There are now 50 of them, but the Constitution, which is what keeps them secular, is barely, if at all, on life support.

So, yes, Guy Fawkes masks are cool, and flipping the bird to the fascist who hijacked the White House is cool, but existence still exists, and A is still A.

Ayn Rand asked the question in a book title, Philosophy: Who Needs It?

In the past few days, Egyptian secularists have won a spectacular battle against a religionist regime, ousting the Muslim Brotherhood dictator from office with the military support of the Egyptian Army. Within the past month, Turkish secularists have risen up against another religionist regime, that of the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but unlike the Egyptians, they appear to have lost that battle. Finally, although Barack Hussein Obama poses variously as a Christian and a secularist, his use of power in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and against Roman Catholic institutions indicate that he too is an Islamist; the alleged opposition party (the Republicans) for the most part are avoiding a confrontation with Obama’s Islamism.

Ayn Rand wrote,

“the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism”

By that she meant secularism (I will define and explain it below) combined with a belief in the validity of knowledge based on the evidence of senses and the formation of concepts, was the key to the Enlightenment philosophy that informed the American founding. Secularism is enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”

which is immediately followed by the Free Exercise Clause:

“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

These two Constitutional clauses, in my opinion, clarify the two fundamental principles of American secularism, which is, in my opinion, the bedrock of freedom of religion, speech, and thought:

Freedom from religion

Freedom of religion

Combined, those two principles are as good a definition of secularism as any.

I split secularism into two kinds: personal and political. Concerning the latter, I follow the thinking of the Founding Fathers.

Personal Secularism

In my view (and I believe the Founding Fathers and Ayn Rand would agree) the individual has the right to believe anything at all about theology, without initiating force on behalf of those beliefs, completely free of government interference. He might believe in one god, many gods, or no gods at all. (Note that secularism is not the same as atheism.) He might believe that God’s name cannot be uttered, that God’s name is Jehovah, that God’s name is Allah, or that God’s name is Beelzebub. He may try to persuade others (without using force) that his beliefs are correct, and, yes, he may mock the gods and prophets worshiped by others, as long as he does not initiate force. He may change his mind as many times as he wants over his lifespan, and he may worship in as conventional, as private, or as bizarre a way as he chooses, again, as long as he does not initiate force or perpetrate a fraud.

As I have done with other blogposts, I will refer the reader to Leonard Peikoff’s book The DIM Hypothesis, this time as a guide to secularism. Peikoff designated hard-core religionists as M2, regardless of whom they worshiped, and he added Plato to their number (as the original template) and also Soviet Marxists, whom he considered M2. Those who use an M2 mode of thought are not secularists; in Peikoff’s language, they are “religionists” and/or “totalitarians.”

However, Peikoff described a category, designated as M1, of “worldly supernaturalists.” An M1 can be a secularist; in my opinion, the US Founding Fathers and most American conservatives are M1. The Founding Fathers may have been Christians, but they were secularists to the core.

Political Secularism

This topic is a little more complex: I subdivide it this way.

Freedom from State interference with worship.

Freedom from State interference with the functioning of religious organizing and organizations.

Freedom from State interference with organized public expression of religious opinions and beliefs.

Freedom from State interference with the creation, production, and use of religious materials, including books, garments, and ritual objects.

Freedom from State interference with religious dietary laws.

All of these freedoms are based on the premise that initiation of force may be stopped legitimately by government intervention. Thus, political secularism does not include a right to behead infidels or to burn heretics at the stake.

However, as with any behavior (such as flag-burning and Koran-burning) there are borderline cases which will be contested in the courts. I will not address these here, except to add this:

Bryant Neal Vinas, Long Island Catholic Boy Scout who chose Jihad over Nihilism.

Revealed by none other than the New York Times, two other young men, born into Muslim families, and seeking their fortune in the USA, made the transition from the D2 culture of their academic mentors to the M2 culture of radical, death-loving Salafist Islam. Unlike Nidal, Tamerlan, and Dzhokhar, these young men were captured by police before they killed Americans.