Art and the Left Wing

Near the end of the nineteenth century, when the rest of the western world’s academics first began seeking ways to trade in the responsibility of individual freedom for bigger governments and existential despair, art was desperately struggling to resist the bureaucratic reach. Painter Edouard Manet and the poet Baudelaire resented the arbitrary and oppressive standards of official Paris Salon and started the Salon Des Refusal in protest. The uncensored Salon Des Refusal left the production of art up to the artists, and therefore open to greater innovations and competition. Napoleon III admitted that he could see “little difference between those pieces rejected, and those accepted” for the official Salon.
Artists have always fought for their right to be the artists they choose to be, to support ideas they choose to support, and to form the types of expression that they’re inclined to express, even if they aren’t mainstream or even socially accepted. These are noble individualist tenets to which nobody can form a credible argument against, based on humanity’s natural right to exist as freethinking and self-generating.
However, the artistic community no longer views the oppressive Salon as bad for art. In fact, like everyone else involved in a mixed economy they coo for its affection, believing it to be the only viable path in achieving their aims. And in following this tragic logic, the artistic community mistakenly links the lack of taxpayer support to the “inevitable demise of art”, and to their inability to freely create, even going so far as to claim the lack of funding as an implied censorship. They’ve clearly deluded themselves into believing that the right to freely express, or more specifically the right to freedom of speech, entitles the means of that expression to be provided for. The artists right to public funding negate other citizens’ right to freedom of choice. Isn’t the negation of one group’s rights for the privilege of another group is immoral? The right to freedom of speech entails one only to the right of that expression without the threat of coercion. It doesn’t guarantee the means of developing that expression or providing the soap box on which to stand. The type of guarantee, and this is important, which provides the means to produce can only come at the expense of someone else’s natural right to exist as a free individual.
The irony is that artists throughout history have always defended individualism. They were the first to know that only individuals could create, and the Salon’s approval or disapproval was inconsequential to the process. Instead the Salon was a repressive regime that only stifled art’s advancement. Artists had to be allowed to create unconditionally, but unconditional freedom can only come at the expense of unconditional responsibility. But now artists, once again, have rejected the responsibility of being individuals, in favor of collectivist propaganda, believing that creation and production can only be achieved at the expense of someone else. It’s a creed that further erodes individual freedoms in all spheres of society, for their individual gains, a mixed economy creed that stagnates artistic development and alienates the art from the people that are forced to support it.
Locally, the new Salon is the Alberta Arts Foundation. On its website it brags that “Albertans enjoy an enhanced quality of life through their opportunities to participate in the arts”, largely due to the 19 million dollars of support it receives annually from the provincial government. It is a claim typical of all bureaucratic institutions, implying that art would not exist without their altruistic support. Whose quality of life is enhanced by the Alberta Arts Foundation? Has the life of the rejected artist that must sell more shoes, fix more engines, or wait more tables to support the government-supported artist been enhanced? Does his having to work longer hours for the purpose of supporting some arbitrarily chosen artist allow him to create unconditionally, or even enhance his chances of becoming a successful artist? Or does his coerced support rob him of the valuable time, energy and financial stability required to develop his own purposeful art? The enhancement of certain artists’ careers comes at the expense of other struggling artists, other working citizens, and art itself. The government forcing citizens to allot some per cent of their earned income towards artists that they haven’t chosen to support is intellectual tyranny. Intellectual tyranny, or forced artistic support fosters the lethargy, ambivalence, and distrust that dominate the contemporary artistic scene and the general public’s approach to art as a whole. When support for a movie, book or painting is forced, resentment and distrust are far more likely to be the response than appreciation and excitement. Just ask any Soviet playwright.
And I know right now there are many still clinging to their collectivist doctrines crying that it’s society’s duty to expand the intellectual capacities of its citizens. In response to the immorality of altruism I’ll argue with a specific instance. Historically, the arts have mostly been the pursuits of the affluent upper classes. So why should the lower classes who have more immediate concerns, such as food, shelter, and education be required to designate any portion of their income to supporting productions enjoyed primarily by the wealthy? Is the lower income family’s consciousness expanded by their forced support of books they don’t read or by art they don’t appreciate, at the expense of their more basic needs? What type of morality is?
The Alberta Arts Foundation is comprised of a four member executive branch and an eight member board that is essentially in charge of determining which artists, art institutions, and film productions are worthy of the province’s support, and which are not. Armed with 19 million dollars, this 12 person committee is responsible for determining the cultural path of over 3.5 million people. Is this type of prediction possible? What criteria is used to determine the worthiness of each artist? Is this subjective criteria dependable enough to forgo the rights of the rejected artists, and the province’s other citizens? Is it possible that art, culture, or maybe even all types of social planning are beyond the abilities of a 12 person board? And that the board’s domination of artistic standards, combined with coerced support for these standards only destroy the artist’s credibility?
Ultimately it’s art that suffers. Designating portions of our incomes for the state-chosen purchase and production of art doesn’t culturally unite Canadians; rather, it alienates art and its community from everyday citizens who just might prefer the principle of choice.

Killing Philosophy

How Philosophy Destroyed the University and Fostered the Development of the Left Wing.

He’s the brooding young man sitting in a coffee shop drinking lattes and spouting off aloof and inconsistent ideas. He proudly says that he’s an anarchist, and yet with equal vigor he declares that we also have a moral duty to help the rest of the world with increased aid, oblivious to the contradiction he supports. He believes corporations enslave man and are the root of all evils, ignoring the fact that his coffee shop is a business, his clothes were made at a factory, his Birkenstocks are composed of petrol, and his measles were cured by the wonders of science and capitalism. Further entrenching this hypocrisy is the fact that his first seven years of an enlightening humanities education was heavily subsidized by those same corporations and the people working for them. He says that trade destroys culture, pretentiously eliminating an individual’s ability to decide for him or herself what their culture is or who they want to be as people. And when this self-proclaimed rebel is pressed into argument, his retorts are based on an innate spiritual awareness that we, the establishment can’t understand, or strong perceptual images meant to derail conceptual arguments and support pragmatic methods. And yet, he still commits to action (aggressive protest), even when his only fully consistent, logically understood ideology is in fact anti-ideology. The commitment to action without a conceptualized agenda, other than being a frustrated and terrified part of a confused mass leads illiterate children to fight vehemently against something only ever expressed as the “system”, not realizing that they’re its most predictable and obedient servants.
Young people attend universities to gain the theoretical knowledge needed to guide their practical actions throughout the rest of their lives. But today universities have no interest in such methodology. They in turn teach the countries most impressionable minds that it’s impossible to say anything positive about reality (metaphysics) as “true reality” is distorted by our senses and tainted by our biased mind. And because all knowledge is relative to environments and minds, this serves the purpose of making it all equally relevant and thus ultimately, irrelevant (epistemology). This logically leads earnest students to their predictable conclusions: knowledge is subjective and biased towards social-economic background, which makes ethical (ethics) statements naïve, as they’re the extension of this flawed knowledge. Finally political (politics) statements, are nothing more than the culmination of these individual subjective whims and simply put “whose to say what’s right”! A mind trained with this type of philosophical foundation characterizes the university’s most inquisitive and conscientious minds. The activist is only expounding on the doctrines he’s been taught, treatise which eventually produce the expected existential temperaments of fear and depression, conditions which typify the apologists of relativism, collectivism and existentialism. These doctrines, the consequence of the abandonment of reason characterize the last half-century’s intellectual climate.
Kant and Hume weren’t the first ones to refuse the notion of individual reason, but they were the first to achieve widespread and enduring respect for their break from it, ironically by using reason itself. It was Kant that first explained so artfully that which is known to us about the world is only known through the filters of our senses, thus leaving us unable to say anything about nature’s true reality. The inability to know or be able to say anything substantial about the real world, amounts to metaphysical nilhism, or said differently existentialism, which, for the sake of its own epistemology, states, that since all knowledge is flawed and relative, the only relevant truth is man's own subjective truth.
And we’re surprised that a worldview like this, one in which uncertainty and instability is our usual state, produces citizens filled with neurosis, panic, and insecurity, clinging to collectivist agendas for their dear lives. Reason as a means to fight back has been choked by the philosophical traditions stemming from Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Comte, Dewey, Camus and Chomsky, and today, professors, students, and the left wing in general are all slavish products of this original fatalist philosophy.
Professors lecture under the hip banner of pragmatism. They stake their iconoclastic rebellion on the fact that they take no moral stands, are unwilling to express any viewpoints, and endorse teaching methods that consist of leaderless “group discussions” with the epistemological justification that “there’s no such thing as truth, man”, and “its wrong to judge”. They ignore the idea that a university’s goal should be to equip its students with the ability to judge and evaluate, instead adopting a anti-philosophical base that renders all paradigms of thought as useless. This succeeds only in frustrating and depressing the most eager minds, condemning them to an endless maze of contradiction, hypocrisy and inconsistency, with little chance of discovering any solutions. It’s a tragic situation, worthy of Shakespearean consideration, that students were smart enough to understand the necessary outcomes of what they had been taught, but not independent enough to reject the theories themselves.
These intellectual values have left students without any resources in which to counteract the unknown, for their only resource, the mind was disavowed by their vacuous mentors. Reason is man’s mechanism for comprehending his complex reality. The faculty of reason separates man from common animals and thus is his metaphysical reality: a rational animal, and not one fooled by perceptual knowledge on a consistent basis. Using reason lets man form complex conceptual relationships about reality (perceptual data), allowing him to make objective and abstract conceptual models about reality. Understanding this rationality, man knows his true individuality lay in the fact that he makes his own choices. This inherent individualism declares he’s a sovereign individual able to make rational choices for himself, which leads to logical respect for other human beings as other rational sovereign individuals, thus affording everyone certain inalienable rights: the right to exist, to be self-sustaining and self-generating. The logical belief in individual rights eventually takes on a political meaning when the question of organization arises. The belief in and respect for individual rights rationally leads to laisser-faire capitalism. Capitalism is the only political system that consistently rewards reason and punishes irrationality. It guarantees freedom and equal opportunity. It bars force from relationships, as all actions are contractual and voluntary. It was capitalism that abolished the aristocracy, eliminated the caste system, and ended slavery. North America is not free by chance, but by choice. This type of philosophical system produces confident minds able to discriminate between fact and fiction, valuing self-determination over other imposing, corrupt and inefficient forms of organization such as socialism and mixed economies.
Instead our intellectuals academics and teachers refute this logic supporting a philosophical base that teaches students, as Ayn Rand once said “existence is an uncharted realm, an unknowable jungle, where fear and uncertainty are man’s permanent state, where skepticism is the mark of maturity, and cynicism is the mark of realism, and above all the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.”

discrimination of progressive taxation

There can be no doubt liberals and leftwing academics agree virtually unanimously on the mixed economy model of a progressive tax system. The usual model correlates an individual’s tax rate proportionally to his or her earnings. Liberals generally view the taxation policy as justified morally on the grounds of altruism, but if the socialist was pushed to be more specific as to whom the system benefits I believe he would answer that graduated tax systems benefit wage earners more than professionals. His arguments imply the wage earners higher degree of dependence on the welfare state relative to the educated professional, combined also with his equally implied lower earning potential over the course of a life time. An model like this is based on the misassumption that wages and earning potential stay consistent over the course of a lifetime, which is true for the educated professional (the liberal ha ha), but untrue for the ambitious wage earner, the person most hurt by this discriminatory socialist tax policy.
In order to make high wages
Industry has always traditionally been subject to market extremes, known as boom and bust cycles, the boom associated by high wages and ample opportunity, the bust with the opposite. While doctors, lawyers, and teachers will be affected by these cycles they are less affected than other workers, due to the fact their skills are a service, and thus not directly affected by market forces. For example, when the demand for oil is low, the doctor’s income may slightly fall, but not dramatically, as health would still be high on the value lists of most citizens. The people most affected by boom and bust cycles are private industry wage earners. Cycles, the result of market forces, make them hard to predict, both regionally and world wide, as they are affected by many variables, such as quotas, technology, investment, foreign relations, resource supply and access. This makes the wage earner more dependent on his high wages when there is a boom cycle as he’s always preparing for the possibility of a bust cycle and unemployment. The progressive taxation policy pretends that there is no such thing as a bust cycle, predicating itself upon the myth of consistent earning potential, which professionals have and laborers do not.
If a worker is lucky enough to live and be employed through a consistent boom period he will then be subject to another factor of wage fluctuation and thus progressive taxation discrimination. Industry work is hard, lonely, and dangerous. Loggers are injured and killed by runaway logs every year in B.C, Alberta’s oil patch can lose up to 15 good men in any year, and everyday fisherman lose fingers in outrigging equipment in the throes of Atlantic ocean climates. And besides the obvious danger, the physical nature of the hard work also wears out backs, knuckles and knee joints. Combined with the danger and physical wear is the individuals desire to be closer to his family, as high paying industry jobs are most often found in remote locations. The results being that the vast majority of industry careers are over after 10 years. Consequently, the worker is faced with a much shorter period of peak earning potential. It is during these 10 years a laborer can match the salary of a doctor, but when his body begins to show wear and when he’s forced to leave the demanding trade the graduated tax model truly fails the working man.
Compare the laborers short peak earning potential with doctors, lawyers and engineers that are guaranteed a high salary long into life. Professionals work successfully into there 60’s, making them less affected by excessive taxation on peak earnings. There is little doubt the doctor unjustly feels the sting of socialism when his $130,000 salary is reduced to $70,000, but strictly from an economical standpoint he will be guaranteed high a standard of living based on his forty years of high earning potential.
A progressive tax system presumes workers earning potential remain consistent throughout the course of a worker’s life when clearly this is not the case. This mistake is most destructive to the individuals the flaw doesn’t take into account: namely workers that have careers where incomes are prone to fluctuation. Regardless of what amount of tax was paid when income levels were high, the benefits aren’t transferable to the times when his earnings are restricted. A time when he’s faced with switching careers and the possibility of low wages none of his “boom” paid taxes will be redistributed to him
Taxing the roughneck close to 45 per cent during the years of his highest wage levels restricts his ability to develop his capital the only time in his life he has it. It’s these years that a roughneck needs to pay his house off faster than other workers, organize enough capital to start a business, or save enough money to afford post secondary instruction. Yet it’s during these exact years that a progressive tax system punishes the young ambitious worker most severely almost guaranteeing his inability to be financially secure when he tries to make the eventual move to working and providing closer to his family; a period where his earning potential is sure to dramatically drop, as he will have to learn a new trade starting as an apprentice.
Inherent, in the graduated policy is its inability to compensate workers when their incomes change for the worse, as compared to its precocious ability to punish them when incomes are high. A policy like this condemns the wage earner to mediocrity, by negating his capital advantages during the only times he has it, as compared to the lawyer’s lifetime consistent capital advantage, which makes progressive tax policies overtly discriminatory toward the wage earner.

Tolerance; The Canadian Ideal

Roughneck Philosophy

Recently I spent a night locked up in a Grande Prairie motel. The rig was landed and the boys were off to get drunk. So there I was alone, watching TV and drinking warm beer. But enough about me, the television is where this story starts. The channel eventually wound up on a CBC documentary that sought to define Canadian culture. The usual elites were rounded up and sat down to give their feedback on this controversial topic: the Atwoods, Suzukis, Ardens, Mansbridges, and Izzy Asper journalists, combined with a consortium of “democratic” opinions – these are coffee shop sitters, social activists and bus drivers. It was a Canadian spectacle! Everyone sat calmly in oversized Victorian chairs with warm light shining downward from outside the camera, lighting the speakers face, giving them credibility and wisdom. And true to form they spoke eloquently about Canada and it people. Our culture was anything but vague to our intellectual elites. We were defined by our tolerance, a sentiment repeated over and over again by every intellectual questioned. “Canada is recognized for its tolerance” or “our commitment to the virtue of tolerance is what separates us morally from the United States”.
The intellectuals and cultural elite sung a Trudeaupia’n gospel proclaiming tolerance as a defining Canadian value. What made Canadians Canadian was our common aspiration for increasing tolerance. First, let us examine other virtues that people claim or aspire too. If a country was defined culturally by its honesty, it would be a place where citizens would be consistently honest, regardless of the consequences. Spouses would tell wives when there dresses were unflattering and employees would have an uncommon knack for always being brutally frank with their employers. It would be considered a cultural atmosphere of frankness and honesty. For Canadians this defining virtue is tolerance, which equally means that we make our most sincere commitment to tolerance. Tolerance as defined by the Canadian Oxford dictionary: a willingness or ability to accept or allow without protest or irritation.
Before I argue against tolerance being declared our national identity, I want to discuss the opposite of tolerance; discrimination. Discrimination is the end result of an active process known as discerning. To discern means to judge the worth between competing values, and this is achieved through the mental process of comparison and value ascribing. For example, every individual must decide between career choices, education opportunities and even mating partners. At one point in history, through the innovation of fire, man chose to cook his food over eating it raw. This was achieved by weighing the pros and cons of the two competing values; eating raw food as compared to cooked food. Raw food was more efficient to eat, but caused more sickness compared to food prepared with fire, which tasted better and was safer to eat, but took more time, energy and labor resources to prepare. Though fire building was troublesome, most eventually chose to cook their meat, or said differently discriminate against uncooked food. The ability to discern between abstract values is what separates man from the lower animals and to the extent we properly discriminate is what separates successful humans from not successful humans.
Claiming tolerance as Canada’s defining virtue says what makes Canadians distinctively Canadian is our refusal to discriminate or judge. Claiming the refusal to discern as a virtue is in effect an attack against the practice of holding values in the first place. It makes holding values naïve and foolish when your moral base is biased against ascribing higher conviction or more significance to certain values over others. Tolerance seeks to dismiss the human practice of using our minds to judge and quantify. Tolerance, as a virtue, says there’s no difference between good and evil, that there’s no such thing as right or wrong. It seeks to destroy the importance of the individual mind. It says the mind is incapable of making rational objective judgments, that people are unable to use reason and debate to cooperatively fix human problems, so we must equally tolerate all ideas and things. Making tolerance our moral base makes being Canadian synonymous with believing in nothing; a docile complacent beaver.
Now I know the liberals and activists out there are mired in a huff and I’ve probably been labeled as a racist, bigot and reactionary, due to my insistence at promoting discrimination. Their perceptually wired brains are awash giving examples of how discrimination affects people personally. They are saying “racists are in the business of discriminating, that discrimination only divides society, that discrimination was the catalyst for nationalism.” They say “the mandate for a progressive society is to rid itself of discrimination”. But this is untrue. A civilized man instead seeks to refine and sharpen his ability to discriminate. To discriminate better and more articulately, for instance I refuse to discriminate on racial basis, but in refusing to discriminate on the basis of race recognize that I’m still discriminating against racist values and the people that hold them. People that preach unabashed tolerance are only discriminating against values and the people that hold them.
And now the neophytes have circled their wagons and admitted that everyone discriminates sometimes, but that I’m taking the virtue out of context and confusing its real meaning, but I want to leave you with one final example of our cultivated tolerance manifesting itself practically. Liberals, during Trudeaumania created the philosophical bankrupt hippy doctrine of absolute tolerance, and yet just last election Liberals routinely called conservatives un-Canadian when they presented any alternative solutions to Canadian problems. Harper was scandalized as being un-Canadian without the merit of the issue even being tackled. Their tolerance, like all other values is in effect a preference, and that preference is for statist liberal values over conservative individualist values. Citizens, through the liberal propaganda of tolerance, have admitted the faulty in discernment, and consequently given the government responsibility over our powers of assessment. We’re a country which lets liberals think for us, and the liberals, so intellectually diverse, are a group that evaluates ideas on their origin instead of their merit. Liberal tolerance is an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology based upon the inclusion of faithful members and the exclusion of outside ideas. Our institutionalized tolerance has left citizens without confidence in values, and our entrenched absolute faith and reliance on government paternalism is more than enough proof in that.
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