Friday, March 08, 2002 The Apocalypse By Diana Hsieh @ 9:49 AM Peggy Noonan apparently thinks that cloning will bring on the apocalypse, as she indicates in the second section of this piece. As she says "God is not mocked." Strangely enough, it only gets worse. And, just for fun *pbbbbbt* to God! Link / Noodles / Trackback Smart and Evil or Good and Dumb By Diana Hsieh @ 9:38 AM Larry Elder has an interesting op-ed today on Gore's alleged intelligence versus Bush's alleged stupidity. He makes a good case that, even if Gore is smarter than Bush, his school records show failure after failure to apply that intelligence. Like Elder, I'll take the hardworking less-smart guy over the lazy more-smart guy any day. But intelligence, although important in the president, isn't nearly as important as moral character, particularly commitment to constitutional principles. If our presidents did adhere to the constitution, the job wouldn't take much more than a 120 IQ. They would be able to nap for most of the day. They would be able to work two or three days a week, at most. The job of the president just shouldn't be so taxing! (The jobs of citizens shouldn't be so taxing either, but that's another subject.) Link / Noodles / Trackback Thursday, March 07, 2002 Evil Evil Evil By Diana Hsieh @ 9:40 AM In today's OpinionJournal, a German doctor who worked in North Korea for two years has a great piece on the horrors experienced by the people of that country at the hands of their power-hungry dictator, Kim Jong Il. He writes: What I witnessed could best be described as unbelievable deprivation. As I wrote last March, "In the hospitals one sees kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler's Auschwitz." Essentially, he is defending North Korea's inclusion in the axis of evil. Towards the end of the article, he says: President Bush has rightly identified North Korea as a prison state that uses terrorism against its own people. Moreover, his "axis of evil" has sent a strong message to the North Korean people that they are not forgotten--and they are listening. Every North Korean defector I spoke to over several weeks was delighted by President Bush's words. For the first time in their lives they feel as if the outside world understands the hell they have endured. Moreover, they are full of hope that, like President Reagan's "evil empire" speech," President Bush's "axis of evil" speech will eventually lead to the collapse of Kim Jong Il's brutal regime. I'm sold! This article seems particularly timely given Will Wilkinson's indignant comments yesterday on North Korea as merely preferring their bread butter side down. Link / Noodles / Trackback Does Deception of Others Promote Self-Deception? By Diana Hsieh @ 12:18 AM One of the ideas I've been working on for my various lectures and papers on honesty is that deception of others promotes deception of the self. Here are some thoughts: Most habitual liars are also habitual self-deceivers. People usually believe their own lies. (Some people enjoy the thrill of lying, but I suspect those are a minority.) Is this connection between other-deception and self-deception merely the result of self-deceivers repeating their lies to others? Or does deception of others somehow pave the way for deception of the self? Certainly, self-deception makes lies to others more plausible and consistent. Believing your own lies immerses you into the networks of details and logical implications of the lie. So you have answers (although perhaps transparently pathetic ones to outsiders) for the likely questions and objections. You don't stammer and stutter when your friend says, "But how could you have known about the hole in the roof if you didn't see Mary before I saw Jim?" You also are much less likely to act like a liar by looking at your feet, hesitating, and so forth. But I seriously doubt that these purely practical considerations could motivate self-deception. They are merely reasons to spend more time and effort planning and scheming deceptions. So what might motivate self-deception? Guilt. A person might feel guilty about lying, about the harm their lie caused, or about the facts concealed by the lie. By falsely convincing himself that he actually told the truth, the liar's acute feelings of guilt and shame may dissipate. A woman who feels terrible for having said some nasty things about a co-worker might deny ever having said those things or having meant what people took her to mean. A person might also self-deceive by rationalizing the lie as justified for some bogus reason. She might deny having said these terrible things to others, while telling herself that the false denial was necessary to preserve her well-deserved reputation. People don't want to feel bad, so they deceive themselves about what they have done. (This is a bad but common strategy.) How might we convince ourselves of our own lies? The process of constructing and maintaining plausible lies requires us to focus upon the facts which seem to support the lie, while ignoring or explaining away the facts which contradict the lie. So a student who mostly copied his math homework from his roommate might pay attention to only the problems that he did solve, glossing over those he merely copied in explaining the similarity between the homeworks to the professor. Over time, the student might convince himself of this lie, because he is presenting the same skewed evidence to himself that he is presenting to others. By being lax, by passively allowing himself to accept that skewed data, the lie to others paves the way for the lie to the self. Also, a person with a impoverished sense of the standards of proof may regard other people's acceptance of the lie as evidence of its validity. So a teenage boy might be helped in his own self-deceptions about whether he beat up the new kid at school or just shoved him around a bit if his mother believes his explanation. The delusion of others serves "social proof" in one's own self-deceptions. Whatever the process to meld other-deception into self-deception, the motivation must be something very strong, like powerful negative emotions or a threatened sense of self-image. The people who are in the most danger, interestingly enough, are people who are generally committed to the principle of honesty. They have so much more reason to self-deceive because of their moral failure to be honest. Self-deception placates that cognitive dissonance of "I am an honest person" and "I just lied." But of course, self-deception is the most dangerous and least fruitful method of coping with moral failure. Link / Noodles / Trackback Wednesday, March 06, 2002 Surfing By Diana Hsieh @ 10:25 AM Jay Nordlinger has a new Impromptus out on National Review Online. Although he's definitely no libertarian, his commentaries are often amusing and astute. National Review also has a nice article today on why the push to sue handgun manufacturers has completely backfired. However, the article presents the NRA as a defender of gun rights, when really they're a bunch of compromising weenies. (The Gun Owners of America, in constrast, does take a principled stand towards gun rights.) Link / Noodles / Trackback Tuesday, March 05, 2002 Thoughts on A Life of One's Own By Diana Hsieh @ 10:42 AM I'm in the middle of David Kelley's short book on welfare rights, A Life of One's Own. For some silly reason, I haven't ever read it before. It is sheer delight. For example: In the opening pages, DK contrasts our personal to our public sense of each person's responsibility for his own life. In our private lives, we see supporting ourselves as our own responsibility. We have to find a job, show up on time, pay our bills, feed our children, and so forth. In contrast, as a matter of public policy, we expect the government to provide these good and services for everyone. The world does not owe us a living, but the world does owe everyone a living. DK then goes on to show that similar contradictions crop up in our personal versus public views about helping those in need. (Sadly, that summary does not come close to doing the introduction justice. The point is that the introduction lays bare a very interesting and common contradiction between what we expect of ourselves and what we expect of others.) In general, the book exhibits the same patience and fairness found in most of DK's work. He clearly separates his discussion of the content of the opposing ideas from his evaluation. He presents those opposing views in their most plausible form. His analysis is slow and painstaking, but crystal-clear in the end. It was this patient and fair method that first caught my attention in reading Truth and Toleration (now The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand). As I said: sheer delight! Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, March 04, 2002 Re-reading Ayn By Diana Hsieh @ 11:26 PM I've been re-reading Ayn Rand's fiction and philosophical essays in preparation for teaching the six-lecture Objectivism 101 course at the 2002 Summer Seminar of The Objectivist Center. It's been a while since I've read Ayn Rand's writings in full. Usually I'm just looking up particular paragraphs here or there to find a quote. So it's been particularly delightful to re-acquaint myself with her work. I particularly enjoyed reading The Fountainhead again after so many years. It has a light touch, giving it much more psychological realism than found in Atlas Shrugged. But perhaps AS is simply more direct, more blunt than TF. Given what I regularly hear on talk radio and read in advice columns, people's thinking is often so much worse than we tend to charitably assume. For example, check out the second letter in this Ann Landers' column. The woman is feeling guilty over modest punishment for her son's stealing and wondering whether to return the stolen property. That's silly enough already. But then Ann Landers' suggests fixing the problem by lying, by telling the store manager that her son "took the cards by mistake." (The phrase "to take something by mistake" indicates confusion about whether you were in possession of an object or had paid for it, not stealing!) Call me crazy, but lying just doesn't seem to be a good remedy for the problem of theft! Confused thinking indeed! Link / Noodles / Trackback Preventing Horror By Diana Hsieh @ 4:22 PM After a lengthy discussion on Saturday with Paul on whether the horrors of the Soviet Union could have been prevented, he recommended the quick World War II alternate history Triumph in which Churchill assassinates Stalin during the war. Although competently written, the possible changes in the timeline precipitated by Stalin's early death are merely hinted at rather than explored in depth. If we must make common cause with an evil regime (like the Soviet Union) in order to defeat a even more evil regime (like Hitler's Germany), the least we can do is be honest about the compromise being made. To sell a ruthless dictator as "Uncle Joe Stalin" is an unpardonable sin. But given FDR's politics, perhaps Stalin really was an ideological uncle of sorts. Link / Noodles / Trackback Intellectual Fraud By Diana Hsieh @ 4:08 PM The fraudulent scholarship of Menchu, Bellesiles, and company is a rather interesting case study in the importance of honesty in professional life. As Nathaniel Branden points out in his discussion of honesty in The Basic Principles of Objectivism, fraudulent scholarship brings about the very opposite of the desired ends. Intellectual frauds want their work to be noticed. Without notice, they will neither advance their cause nor become famous. Of course, by attempting to achieve these ends dishonestly, they risk damaging their cause and reputation. But actual detection is not their only problem. The mere possibility of detection frustrates the lying scholar's goals because popularity of his work engenders scrutiny. The very same attention to the ideas which motivated the original deception becomes a threat. The attention of other scholars must be avoided, because such attention risks exposure. Who doesn't pose a threat? People too dumb to understand the ideas. People who are too lazy to investigate them. People who are too dishonesty to care whether they are true or not. What a pathetic crowd of admirers that would be! Link / Noodles / Trackback The Lying Left By Diana Hsieh @ 3:51 PM Yesterday, I stumbled upon this 1999 article "I, Rigoberta Menchu, Liar" by David Horowitz summarizing the lies and deceptions multicultural darling and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchu. I wonder whether her book is still being taught at universities. I hope not but suspect so, given the left's lack of concern for truth. The Amazon reviews are worth reading in and of themselves, as a case study in opposing views on the importance of truth. Those who like the book gloss over the lies, using bland words like "inconsistencies" and "a composite version." Critics of the book, meanwhile, are merely "nitpicking" and "hairsplitting." David Stoll's book Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans apparently originally exposed the book as dishonest. Don't read one without the other! Link / Noodles / Trackback The First By Diana Hsieh @ 3:11 PM My first post to my blog ought to be something particularly exciting. But alas, it is rather mundane. Let me at least introduce myself: I am an active writer and lecturer on philosophy, particularly on issues of practical ethics. My major philosophical influences include Ayn Rand, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. I earned my B.A. in philosophy from Washington University in 1997 and will be pursuing graduate study in philosophy this fall. I live on a small farm in Sedalia, Colorado with my husband Paul, as well as two horses, two dogs, and three cats. I can be reached via e-mail to diana(at)dianahsieh.com. Link / Noodles / Trackback

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