I have been somewhat recently enamored of the Rothbardian perspective. I would like some clarification, and will also offer an argument which I hope to see discussed.
It seems to me that Objectivist literature offers somewhat little explanation for the ‘why’ of a person’s or nation’s base epistemology. Jared Diamond, or Karl Marx, at least had this materialistic world view in which natural conditions provoke ideological responses from the people affected by them.
It often seems that Objectivists assume that a person’s philosophy is a given; perhaps some evolution of thought in their education brought them to this point, but there is no explicit correlation between their held philosophy and the conditions that provided it to them. Once a person possesses a given philosophy, they are then thought to inevitably act one way or another. This can be extrapolated out to explain the behavior of nations. (Some pseudo-objectivists trot around the ‘free will’ Platonic argument that our ‘self-evident’ free will is what determines whether we choose to think or not, and some have ‘better’ free wills than others)
When two philosophies oppose, the parties holding them engage in a brute force battle of ideological conquest - winner takes all. There is no other recourse. The only option for an individual possessing objective morality is to wait out the mutual self-destruction of peoples possessing false ideologies.
Is this an extreme mischaracterization? I note that The Objective Standard recently (as has been the position of ARI for some time) called for the elimination of the Iranian and Saudi regimes based on the notion that both possess ideological constructs which support and encourage islamic terrorism. As if ideology and flawed epistemological constructs are the sole source of the violent behavior, and eliminating the intellectual sources will make the ultimate difference - regardless of the broader consequences.
Which leads me to argue that ideology is in fact much more a product of material and social conditions than a historical starting point. I don’t suppose I can offer a specific reference for ‘my point of view’, so I will have to define it, and broadly. I do think that most human behavior is in fact genetic, and as a consequence social. People are first motivated to trigger phisiological reward mechanisms in the brain, and then more outwardly be appealing to the opposite sex via a competitive standing in the social hierarchy. Like I said, most human behavior, I think, is governed by these simple mechanisms. However, that behavior alone leaves man with little more than a hunting-gathering lifestyle can provide. Even then, his developed capacity for reason does require a basic set of conceptual tools to even survive. Ayn Rand goes on to make the next argument better than I ever could.
Where I perhaps disagree is that I think that humans engage in an incessant rationalization of their genetic and animalistic impulses, integrating these behaviors into their broader conceptual understanding of the universe. Emotion, I think, is a concept that fits this category very well.
With that qualification I can explain how I think humans can live as rational beings according to a conceptual framework, who are also primarily irrational regarding the majority of their behavior.
This speaks to the importance of any given ideology - not as a pure epistemological guideline - but instead as means of qualifying man’s inherent rationalization of his irrational behavior.
I think that any man - across human history - is ultimately equal to any other in that all ultimately rely on rational thought to make gains, and all ultimately rely on non-rational genetic programming for basic behaviors and values. What does vary is: the social and material environment, and consequently the nature of the rationalization of reason vs. instinct.
So what am I really saying?
In the context of this thread, I’m saying that Imperial Japan and the US weren’t in a situation where conflict was ‘definitely inevitable’ nor in one in which unconditional surrender was a necessary outcome. Instead of reviewing an endless list of historical counter-factuals, I’ll just rely on two related examples.
The first is that of WWI. This was a war, not so much about democracy or European bragging rights, but about Empire. Fundamentally, it was motivated not by ideology, but by the nature of the State. These entities had grown to exist for their own sake. They were concentrations of power against power, and their purpose was to accumulate more of it. It was much more of an organic political development than any response to the ideology of the people. The only consideration of the individual person was perhaps that of fear. Fear of attack from whomever might be the enemy State.
Given the conditions of an individual European’s life: the minimal influence he might have on political outcomes, the role of history in shaping territories and tongues, the leverage his rational pursuits had on real improvement in his life within the context of his local environment, the ease with which large groups of people can organize if they rely on shared basic instincts such as tribalism, and so forth, what could the European hope for with war except that it might one day exhaust the capacity of the nations to war, and that he would still be alive? It’s not as if his personal, or even national, ideology had any bearing - in a conceptual sense - on the outcome of geopolitics. People rationally rallied around: all for the State. And the State was the only share ideology.
One of the most important, but least recognized, resources in economics and social organization is information. It’s extremely costly, and enormously valuable. The cost of information is why it’s cheaper to respond to a disaster than to prepare for one.
Consider, then, Iran. Although the youth have been raised on a radical ideology, just a generation ago the people of that country were not nearly as radical. It is easy to envision a near future where these youth grow tired of the failed promises of a false ideology. This happens all the time. In order for there to be a sustained commitment to a mad ideology, there must be some rational motivator that leads a person to continue to accept a poor rationalization of lunacy.
America overthrew Iran’s government in 1953, ostensibly to fight Communism, but nevertheless scored incredible oil contracts out of the coup. When the soviet’s counter-coup failed a decade or two later, it was because the Iranian people - tired of foreign interference in their national politics - were willing to accept a mad ideology. I think there is a very good argument that a radical Shia cleric is more predictable and rational of a choice, from the Iranian perspective, than any number of constantly changing imposed foreign figureheads.
In response the US overthrew Iraq’s government, put Saddam in power, encouraged a devastating war in which chemical weapons were employed (and in some cases supplied by the US), only to later overthrow Saddam after sanctions which resulted in tens of thousands dead.
With Saddam and Qaddafi dead, and Egypt overrun by radicals, what rational evidence is there - from the perspective of an informed and perhaps liberal minded Iranian - that the US wouldn’t do the same thing in Iran? It’s not so much that he favors the clerics, but the fate imposed by US action on Iran would be entirely unpredictable. As we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most direct of interventions have resulted in no clear or predictable futures.
My overall point is that the actions of the Iranian regime, and the interplay between that regime, the people, and the ideological rationalizations employed by all, are in fact governed by an over-arching rationality more so than irrationality. If you include the concept of information scarcity into any hypothetical rational calculation of a typical Iranian, you find that their ‘irrationality’ is in fact a comparatively rational response to decades of American foreign policy.
And that is why I have come to favor the Rothbardian perspective. I think ideology responds to acts of agression - favoring the irrational as a defensive reaction. I think the lack of aggression can in fact encourage the rational.
When it comes to aggressive actors - if you can personally deter them from harming you, and proportionally respond to their aggression so as to disincentivize it, then they will direct their aggression elsewhere. Their aggression is the result of an inconsistency in their ideology - a ‘kink’ in their social and cultural rules. Inevitably, their aggression will wear them out. You can only steal from someone once. At this moment of desperation, an olive branch from a rational, trading, society is much more likely than stern counter-aggression to inspire ideological shifts in the majority of people invovled.
I find it inaccurate and also foolish to see the world as a cut-throat battle between all-or-nothing ideology. This is the influence of Platonism that has crept into modern Objectivism - I perceive (I intend not to accuse, but to debate). I see Rothbard as influenced much more by economic thought - observation and conclusion - than ideology. Whereas modern Objectivism feels somewhat scholastic. The basic conclusion of Objectivism - morally and politically - is that reason should govern interactions within a society. When one interacts with a force of individuals acting according to non or irrational impulses, strict violent defeat is not the immediate rational conclusion. The rational conclusion is: “whatever preserves our liberty while most probably inspiring and rewarding rational thought on the other side.” That can be violence, but not always.
Sanctions are not equal to an act of war in a legal sense, but they probably shouldn’t be included in a rational foreign policy that aims to avoid war. So sanctions=war in a causal sense, which makes the statement essentially true. If you engage in sanctions, you must be willing to possibly go to war. And that’s the difference between sanctions and any generic act of diplomacy.