The sanction of the victim
According to the introduction to this short article, the term is defined thusly: The “sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.
Follows, direct quotes from Rand herself, via her renowned John Galt character.
Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”
As is reliably the case with Rand’s stuff, the above snippet is profligately wordy and a bit roundabout, but nonetheless piercingly insightful, apposite, and indispensable just the same. This next one is very nearly shocking for its apparently inexhaustable relevance, particularly in light of, shall we say...recent events.
Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine. What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromises—all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.
The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities...It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities—not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Money is a great power—because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers. Yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility.
Gee, none of THAT rings at all familiar in the contemporary ear, now does it?
Thus is the inevitable question presented: Was Ayn Rand prescient, some sort of predictive genius? Or was she merely talented enough to recognize and expound (at great length!) on the fairly mundane, perhaps even puerile, conception of eternal ideals as the harbingers of eternal conflicts: between liberty and tyranny; between the meddlesome busybody and the independent-minded individual desirous only of being left alone; between over-powerful government and certain of its own subjects?
In each of those cases, the critical factor is the sanction of the victim. Throughout the ages, that is what determines the final outcome. Regardless of our sophistication, our astonishing technological advancement, and our societal wealth, present-day Americans cannot expect to be treated otherwise by history. Should the current melancholy trend of blithe disregard for the most basic natural rights in combination with sheep-like docility and obedience continue very much longer, the task of reclaiming those abandoned liberties and fundamental rights will go from “difficult” to “utterly impossible."
I only wish I could be as sanguine about all this as the esteemed and estimable Buck Throckmorton is.
There is such widespread disgust about the Covid excesses that there should be no expectation that the citizenry will willingly comply again. The scientific “experts” have proven themselves over and over to be partisan political frauds who fold, spindle, and mutilate actual science to make it fit their political agenda.
If there is once again widespread compliance with emergency powers in the name of “the climate crisis,” then there are not enough kicks from the mule to educate Americans on the destructive intents of those declaring emergencies. If so, we might as well give up on the concept of self-governance.
Also, and I’m sorry if I step on any toes, but it was a Republican President, Donald Trump, who was initially pushing Covid lockdowns. Trump empowered Fauci and Birx with incredible authority to recommend and compel compliance with outrageous Covid emergency powers. There will not be conservatives supporting another lockdown, because there won’t be a Republican president pushing lockdowns like Trump did.
If restrictions on our freedom are imposed under climate emergency orders, I believe that not only will people not willingly submit, but that they will enthusiastically defy them. And to be clear, I’m not talking about violent defiance, I’m just talking about what happens when a critical mass of people refuse to comply with prohibitions on how they live their lives.
When President Nixon (also a Republican, go figure) signed legislation enacting the national 55-mph speed limit, it also empowered virtually every police agency in the nation to harass people for doing what they’d always done. People did not take kindly to having their driving habits suddenly being criminalized. So they defied the law en masse. And they defied the police. And they defied the federal government that imposed this ridiculous law. Sadly for law enforcement, it took police a long time to regain the respect they lost for their role in the 55-mph era.
There is excitement and a newfound sense of empowerment among normal folks right now for how we have economically crippled Anheuser Busch as punishment for its offensive political activism, proving that America has a lot of fight in it right now.
I pray that he’s right, but fear that he isn’t. Although Buck is quite correct in his assertion that there have of late been signs indicative of a welcome rejuvenation in certain quarters of the old-time fighting spirit—of coded-in-the-American-DNA rebelliousness and resistance that has always been a universally-acknowledged component of our national heritage and character as Americans, in which our countrymen once took great pride— the overwhelming majority of us yielded to mask mandates, lockdown orders, and mandatory “vaccinations” way too supinely and meekly for me to be much encouraged about the likeliest response next time out.
And, as I’ve said so many times, we can be certain that there will be a next time, and that right soon. We must all fervently hope that when that awful day arrives, the general response will much more closely resemble the one postulated by Throckmorton and not the one I expect. There is no other issue about which would I be more jubilant to be proven wrong. We shall see, we shall see.
The great majority of the US population - and that of the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada - have been conditioned by at least 12 years of public education to be mindless and obedient, an easily managed herd of sheep - hence, the "sheepdog" role often referred to by law enforcement types:
John Taylor Gatto wrote: "Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." http://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
Television - and perhaps any form of video watching, including Youtube - continue and reinforce this conditioning: "Further research by Krugman revealed that our brain’s left hemisphere, which processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while we are watching television. The left hemisphere is the critical region for organizing, analyzing, and judging incoming data[4]. This tuning-out allows the right hemisphere of our brain, which processes information emotionally and uncritically, to function unimpeded.
In other words, we switch off our critical thinking abilities and just absorb anything thrown at us. We watch emotionally, not intelligently.
Further to this, psychophysiologist Thomas Mulholland found that after just 30 seconds of watching television the brain begins to produce alpha waves, which indicates torpid (almost comatose) rates of activity. Alpha brain waves are associated with unfocused, overly receptive states of consciousness (as with the left-to-right hemisphere shift). High frequency alpha waves do not normally occur when the eyes are open. In fact, Mulholland’s research implies that watching television is neurologically analogous to staring at a blank wall.[6]
Production of alpha waves and the subsequent receptive state are also the goal of hypnotists. They’re both present during the “light hypnotic” state used by hypno-therapists for suggestion therapy." https://sidawson.org/2011/03/tv-is-heroin-crossed-with-hypnosis
Ensure that most Americans know little or nothing about science or how it actually works, are conditioned to obey authority and go with the crowd - or herd - and you can easily scare the wits out of this "virtual herd of mindless consumers" and get them to swallow en masse whatever nonsense justification for whatever draconian "measure" you choose, such as mask mandates, lockdown orders, and mandatory “vaccinations”. Very few Americans - or citizens of the other countries listed above (although it's not nearly so bad in the Commonwealth countries) - have the knowledge of science to be able to discern good science from arrant nonsense. The way out, of course, is to break the conditioning...