Comes The Dawn
10. Are You Out of Your Mind?
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?
So many people who think they have a tender heart have only a soft mind.
—JACQUES MARITAIN
Are you out of your mind? This is a question each of us well might ask that individual he sees in the mirror. Who me? Yes, everyone! Why this confrontation? For a very good reason: It is impossible for anyone to be quite sure how much or how little knowledge there is in his finite mind. Self-blindness leads to overassessments, and all overassessments—notions that we know more than we do—are out of mind, not in. This common affliction ranges from slightly out of mind to nearly all out of mind.
Reflect on those who are only slightly out of mind, the ones who do acknowledge mystery in all things. Mysterious is the single atom; more so are the 30 trillion atoms which could be placed on the period at the end of this sentence without overlapping; and so much more mysterious are the octillion atoms—1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—which compose one’s body. Nearly everything is mystery, from a blade of grass to galaxies receding into outer space at the speed of light. But even those persons who bow so low and humbly before Infinite Intelligence are unable to escape some overassessment of what’s in the mind. After all, man is imperfect—no exception.
At issue here, however, are those who so greatly overassess the contents of their mentality that they are really out of their minds and, not at all surprisingly, are unaware of the fact. Each of these is remindful of the shaman, or medicine man: “a man supposed to have supernatural powers of curing disease and controlling spirits.” But such purveyors of spells are to be found everywhere, and not only in primitive tribes!
I recall medicine men at the county fairs when I was a lad in the early years of this century, their horse-drawn vans loaded with this or that bottled “life saver” claimed to cure every disease and ailment. What spellbinders—word charmers—they were! And awe-struck audiences, all that could crowd within range of their bewitching voices! Furthermore, those medicine men as firmly believed their incantations as do witch doctors. Out of their minds!
Who are today’s medicine men? With rare exceptions, they are individuals so far out of their minds that they use or advocate coercive force as a means of casting the creative lives of the millions in the image of their infinitesimal selves. Such medicine men are to be found among those elected and appointed to public office, among those who preside over classrooms and religious congregations. Labor union officials are prone to such abuse of power, and so are business and professional men and women. Indeed, there is not an occupational category that is free of these perfectly absurd dictocrats.
Observe how similar are today’s medicine men to those of the past. They actually believe that they have supernatural powers, enabling them to direct the creative activities of other people better than those folk can direct themselves! Most of them are artists of the spoken word. The awe-struck audiences flock around, not by the dozens, but by the millions! Today’s medicine men believe their incantations to be truth no less than did the witch doctors of yore.
However, medicine men today differ from witch doctors and those of my boyhood in one striking respect. The salesman of the “magic elixir” from the rear of his horse-drawn van had a single trick to cast his spell over small audiences: to charm them with words! Contemporary medicine men? True, they include verbal hocus-pocus but they are not satisfied with the few who might be seduced by that alone. So, what do they add? Coercion! No freedom to choose whether to buy their medicine or not? It’s do as they say or else!
Before going further, let me emphasize the point of this thesis: the extent to which anyone, in or out of political office, uses or advocates coercion to get his way, to that extent is he a modern medicine man—out of his mind!1 Wrote Herbert Spencer:
That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another’s desires.
That brilliant author of The Man Versus the State, and many other books—hard-headed and plain spoken—used coercion, a term rarely written or spoken in his or our country today. I had to refer to his nation’s The Oxford Dictionary to find the explanation:
As the word has, in later times, a bad flavour, suggesting the application of force as a remedy . . . it is now usually avoided by those who approve of the action in question.
The action in question? Any one of countless proposals to obtain special privilege by law: legal edicts backed by physical force—the constabulary. Every aspect of the planned economy and the welfare state falls in this category. These range from compulsory seat belts to food stamps; from minimum wages to maximum hours; from tariffs, embargoes, quotas to all restrictions of competition and freedom in transactions; from government education to getting paid for not farming or not working; from social security to medicare to—you name it! That is, if you can live long enough!
Bear in mind that the advocacy of force—whether from classroom or pulpit or wherever, whether against neighbor or neighborhood or country—is no less a part of “the action in question” than the actual practice of force. Advocacy is cause, practice is effect. Merely estimate the number of us who “labour under coercion to satisfy another’s desires” and there will be the extent of slavery in the U.S.A. today. It defies calculation!
Very well! Why “the bad flavour” of coercion? There is hardly a person among the millions who advocate or practice “the action in question” who cares to think of himself as that kind of a culprit. Personally, of course not! However, let the action be not in one’s own name but camouflaged by a collective label—society, government, democracy, or whatever—and a false absolution comforts all who are out of their minds, who “think” how hunky-dory all would be were all the likes of me!
Is it any wonder that the term coercion is avoided like the plague! “Bad flavour,” indeed! And that’s precisely the “flavour” it should have. Why not call coercionists by the right name? And that should include ourselves, if the term befits us!
“So many people who think they have a tender heart have only a soft mind.” What a wise observation not only of our times but of every devolutionary period throughout history! This is to say, be kind to those in distress, not with one’s own loaf of bread, but with bread coercively taken from others. In these cases, the hearts are tender enough but the minds are soft. Out of their minds and out of other people’s pockets—by coercion! When one’s heart is tender and the mind not soft, what is the behavior? He shares his own, not someone else’s loaf with those in distress. Judeo-Christian charity is actually extravagant when the concern for others is not pre-empted by coercive practices!
Were legalized coercion to receive its support only from its true believers, that is, from such open and proud exponents as Karl Marx, Earl Browder, Norman Thomas, and the like, that absurd way of life wouldn’t have a “ghost of a chance,” as the saying goes. Who then supplies the drive? The exception makers! I am for the free society but in education we must have compulsory attendance, government dictated curricula, and the forcible collection of the wherewithal to pay the bills! But we must have wage and price controls! But people would starve without food stamps and social security! Buts on and on and on!
To cite an example, the best freedom devotee in all of Austria once said to me, “I find myself so emotionally committed to the Vienna Opera (state owned) that in this instance I must make an exception.” In a word, Austrians—even those who care not one whit for opera—must be coerced into paying for those who adore opera. This example by my good friend inspired me to write an article, “Sinking In a Sea of Buts.”2
Based on a wide acquaintance all over our country for many years, it is my guess that not less than 99 per cent of adult Americans have one or more buts. Here lies the source of the mess we’re in—millions out of their minds, more or less. My counsel: Watch your buts, buddy!
A word of encouragement: but—this is my but—the situation is less hopeless than it appears to be. Why? Thank heaven, this out-of-your-mind malady is not a numbers problem. Were it a matter of a majority coming to themselves, attaining a realization of how little really is in the mind—no chance!
The requirement? Let only a few, a tiny minority, see the utter nonsense of coercion as a means of satisfying one’s own or another’s desires—making slaves of all—and the medicine men will become impotent. No more than a small beam of light will put coercionists to shame, a bright glare they will fear to face. To whom should you and I look for this restoration of common sense? To that only person for whom you and I are responsible: the one viewed in the mirror!
