John S. Bolton © 2006
No one wants to be skinned alive in order to become more open; so how can openness be honestly held to as an ideal? When Paris was declared open city in 1940, as a tyrant's forces approached, wasn’t that immoral? Couldn’t they have had less openness, more courage and be called more idealistic for it?
If openness were a worthy goal; consider how many impossibilities would follow. Every living thing could be utterly open and yet not be killed. Every border could be open and never be invaded. Every house could be unlocked and lose nothing. All valuables could be left out in the open and not be stolen. Indeed, everything could be out in the open and not be damaged.
It may often be said that we should admire the idealism of someone who could ignore all the facts that show his goal to be unworthy. Yet ideals are also subject to negative evaluation. It is not enough merely to say that something is good. If this last statement were not true, then those who wanted to set up killing fields as the ideal could not be criticized morally. Those who believe in openness-as-an-ideal would have to be open to the worst or contradict themselves.
Openness-as-an-objective has a tendency towards openness to bad things rather than good. Openness to lethal infections brings on disease, but openness to health (or medicine) does not establish health. Openness to aggression creates victims, but openness to non-aggression does not establish peace. Openness to mysticism makes for irrationality, but openness to rational ideas does not create rationality. Openness to immorality creates evil, but openness to virtue does not make a person moral.
Openness to low aesthetic standards makes for bad taste, but openness to inspiration from the best art does not establish high standards of taste. Openness to illogical conclusions destroys standards of logic, but openness to logical arguments does not make a person logical. Openness to damaging things causes damage, but openness to security from damage does not establish an undamaged state. Openness to parasite attack results in parasitization, but openness to an unparasitized condition does not bring it into existence. These observations indicate that openness-as-a-value sets up a bias towards damaging conditions. Evils may be adapted to exploit any openness that would let them in, but value has to be built up, not just be allowed in.
For openness to be set up like a real standard of value, it is very inadequate to have exceptions and limitations placed upon it. It can be proven that limitations placed on openness-as-an-ideal would completely liquidate its meaning, making it even equal to its opposite. Consider such definitions as ‘openness to the truth’ (or ‘openness to the good’) as meanings for openness-value. Would the most fanatical religionists have any objection to openness-as-a-value, with those limitations? In general, the most closed systems, the most closed societies and the most closed minds could all enthusiastically accept openness-as-a-value, if it means only openness to the truth (or to the good), or to what is already contained in the closed system.
Openness-value, to be meaningful, has to signify openness to what is not the true and the good (in our view), but to what is diverse from these. Valuing openness then would mean something like diversity-value and trying to value the false and the bad, not in spite of, but because of, our considering them to be untrue or wrong. That is a contradiction-in-terms, though: it is the same as saying ‘good equals bad’ or that ‘false equals true’.
There has been a tradition of openness in science and technology and of information sharing in general. This tradition is contradicted by other values (such as privacy, national security, and property rights). How, then, can such contradictions be avoided, if openness is set up as an ideal? When an item, such as openness, is called a value, the impetus is all towards saying that more of this is better. Then, to avoid conflict with such values as privacy, property and military security, there must be a way to limit the openness-value. If openness-as-an-objective is limited, it no longer exists as an ideal. For example, if it is said that openness is a value except when national security is involved, or when someone’s property stands to be damaged, or when your privacy is about to be compromised, where is the field remaining for openness-value to exist.
Those who are for openness do have a point if they say that information can be shared without losing value to the same extent as other objects. Whatever is shared tends to lose some value to the extent that it is shared; even information will tend to lose value to the extent that it is shared too widely. The good effect of limiting the sharing of information is shown by the great economic progress of the countries which have long honored property rights to information (such as patents and copyrights) in comparison to the wretched poverty elsewhere. The pro-openness, who have been saying ‘information ought to be free’; have been against the copyrights, trademarks and patents, which have given us productive industry, commerce and the success of publishers.
So much is likely to be lost if openness-as-a-value were allowed to proceed as if more openness would be better. Proliferation of weapons information has already happened in the name of openness. This process has involved the use of espionage and treason to get horrendous weapons into the hands of bloodthirsty dictators, yet there are still scientists who pretend that there is no evil out there that can exploit the misvaluation of openness. What would be next beyond this, giving smallpox weapons to terrorists just because more openness was called better?
Openness-as-a-value (that would have us share information) is contradicted by the facts of history, which show vast productivity gains in the countries that turn information into property, and bleak stagnation elsewhere. In theory, the generation of new and valuable information will be encouraged by incentives like property rights to it, and relatively discouraged in the opposite case. Against all this, the pro-openness say that information ‘wants’ to be just shared and will be choked-off otherwise. English-language authors, who luxuriate in unusually strong copyright protection, out-produce their unprotected counterparts by a great margin. Penicillin was left open for years while millions died, when it could have been closed-off by patent rights, and spared so many lives. Openness-as-a-value would result in negligible production of new and valuable information, thus strangling the progress of civilization, and causing millions of preventable deaths.
Open-mindedness also, in proportion as it is practiced by individuals, would cause devastation. Whoever approached the ideal state of open-mindedness would have to become more and more open to whatever messages, including commercial ones, which are out there. Lethally though, this would take up their time to the point that they would have to use ever more powerful stimulants to be open to the messages until they were killed or permanently incapacitated by lack of rest. If only a few pursued openness-as-a-value to the extent of crippling themselves, they could perhaps be taken care of by others. But, as the openness-value grew in its influence, there would be a point where those who had incapacitated themselves by means of openness could not be carried by the others, and would then be left to die.
Therefore,openness-as-an-ideal would be more devastating, the closer to its ideal-state, the population went. A value that causes more damage, the more closely it is adhered to, cannot function as a worthy goal. Therefore, openness-as-a-value cannot be a worthy objective.
Closedness is not a value either unless it means only being closed to what is not good, or not good enough by some standards. Where the anti-openness means that we have some standards, and do not pursue openness as if it were a worthy goal, that should be the universal policy. In this sense, all morality requires us to be anti-openness in some important ways. Where novelty-seeking preference exists, this functions outside of (or in defiance of) morality. A novelty-preference may aid the learning of children, but anyone old enough to conceptually determine better and worse will substitute value-seeking for novelty-seeking. In any case, anti-openness is as much closed against the worthless and old as it is against the valueless novelty.
Anti-openness, as against what is below standard, is not the absolute-ideal of closedness. But closedness-as-an-ideal versus openness-as-an-ideal cannot be shown to be more then a false dilemma. We have more alternatives than these, including openness to the true and the good only. This definite limitation on openness was shown to be very different from openness-as-an-ideal, i.e., without limitations and conditions. This still leaves two alternatives to the false dilemma of idealizing either closedness or openness. One side is openness to the true and the good, the other is anti-openness, but against what is not good enough by some standards. Those who say a dilemma exists have the burden to prove that it is not a false one. In either case, openness to non-openness is a contradiction in terms.
Openness-as-a-value for social occasions is also very questionable. Exclusivity is of the essence for certain relationships, and there is no ideal quality in opening these up, as the spread of AIDS in many countries would seem to prove. Morality actually requires us to be more exclusive and more discriminating than our emotions would have us be, not less so. The proof of this is the trouble that so many people get into as a result of not cutting short (or excluding from the outset) the relations that cause them to suffer damage.
Bad ideas need people to be open and undiscriminating rather than the reverse. Thus, a kind of selection-value, resembling natural selection, arises in favor of bad ideas that promote social and intellectual openness; which is the exact opening that they need. Is this plausibly a coincidence? If a sexually transmitted virus caused people to become more promiscuous, it would be obvious why this trait was selected-for. A cultural infectious agent, which carries only the information needed to get itself transmitted (e.g. openness-as-an-ideal) looks like the stripped down remainder of a larger message which has degenerated, like the organs of a parasite. The telltale degeneracy of a vicious parasite, which discards its transmitters, is a warning. In general, what would do us more damage needs us to be more open. If lethal sexual disease could speak, would it say that openness is ideal?
If a lethal infectious agent could get you to say only two words; would these be 'value openness', or some others? A damaging infectious agent needs to get transmitted, or be stuck with the damage it causes to its host. The host dies in any case. Therefore, any means that the infectious agent can commandeer, to get you to make others be more open to it; to value openness in this way, it will tend to use. If we see people doing what is contrary to their interest, specifically regarding behavior which appears to value openness, and such as a damaging infectious agent could exploit for its transmission, the possibility of parasite manipulation ought to come to mind.
What principle could limit the openness-ideal and not simultaneously obliterate it? Could there still exist an openness-value that consisted of saying: ‘be more open, unless it is inconvenient or unless it does damage to any other values which you may have, which will include even exclusiveness?
What principle could limit the openness-ideal and not simultaneously obliterate it? Could there still exist an openness-value that consisted of saying: ‘be more open, unless it is inconvenient or unless it does damage to any other values which you may have, which will include even exclusiveness?
The value of being exclusionary is the contrary of openness-value. Can we be pro-exclusionary and pro-openness and value both of these at the same time, without contradiction? In general, all values other than openness-idealization have some exclusionary-value to them; they must exclude some non-value. Openness-value then must be a contradiction-in-terms, since it would require us also to be open to exclusionism-value, along with the others. Pro-exclusionism has all morality on its side, then, but pro-openness denies and defies all other values (which are worthy of the name).
Morality requires us to exclude some bad things. Therefore, also, moral idealism cannot possibly include openness as an ideal. Moral idealism is a portion of morality in general, which does not allow us to fail to exclude some bad things. If openness as an ideal is nevertheless claimed to be a sort of moral idealism, that is only a contradiction in terms, or directly reduces to one.
Openness to dishonesty and falsehood would not seem likely as values, yet openness (as a value that one can’t have too much of) would value these also. If part of the scientific method is described as idealizing openness, yet would also have us be open to dishonesty and deliberate falsehood, this would show a weakness in being too open. It does not transfer rationality on to an insupportable openness-ideal, just to associate it with scientific method.
Blind (and double-blind) studies are not examples of idealized openness, but of secrecy. Medical studies are part of science, and they proceed as if confidentiality (not openness) were a value. If openness were a proper value, the laboratory that was vandalized because it was open to anti-vivisectionist militants would be better than the one that wasn’t. If scientists were to act as if they believed their own propaganda about openness, there would be no security measures anticipating damage by anti-experimentalists or anti-technology activists. There would be no need for containment procedures either, if openness is a worthy ideal. If there is quarantine and containment value, then openness-value doesn't and can't exist. Also, by the principle of parsimony, if openness-idealization requires all manner of exceptions and qualifications to even come close to being reasonable; it should be dropped (in favor of the alternative).
Science should be about getting to a more rational account of things. Rationality is the real value that explains such instruments as scientific openness and publicity. These are only of value instrumentally, as methods favoring rationality; but only where they do favor it. Technology transfer to dictators does not favor rationality, but openness and publicity (as ideals for science) would have them building up the irrational. This turns the instrumentality against its source value; scientific methods are to serve rationality, not the other way around. Any method, as instrumentality, serves the source value and does not become an end-in-itself. Openness and publicity are methods subservient to the scientific method, which includes more than just these, and which itself is only a way of getting more rationality in our accounts of the world. There is (properly) no ideal of openness; there is only the instrumentality of openness, completely encircled by exceptions and qualifications. Certainly the scientific method does not include openness to repeated deception and fraud.
The scientific method can be said to be primarily about exclusion rather than openness; its aim is to exclude the irrational from our accounts of what exists. Openness is part of this process only so far as it serves the primary exclusionary objective (which is more and more closed to the irrational). To say otherwise is a contradiction-in-terms, or reduces to one; it would mean saying that the scientific equals the unscientific (by being more and more open to the irrational). Likewise, it would mean saying the rational equals the irrational; or that science becomes more rational by being more and more open to the irrational, a contradiction-in-terms. Also, the various parts of the scientific method can’t be mystically ritualized into ends in themselves. Scientific openness is a method that is supposed to lead to greater exclusion of the irrational.
It would be just as illogical to say that the use of blind or double-blind studies elevates closedness into an ideal for science. If one were to then irrationally worship these methods of closedness, as if they were values in themselves, their purpose would be forgotten and contradicted. Likewise, if one were to make an ideal of exclusive authorship, as if the ideal state were closedness to the sharing of credit, the purpose of giving credit to the first to publish would be overturned. The point of giving credit for publicity, and encouraging publicity of results, is not to serve a ritual of openness as a value in itself, but to allow science to become more closed to irrational content which may otherwise lie unexposed. The idea is to expose the irrational inheritances to a greater chance of being excluded or closed-out. To call this process openness-value is not fundamentally true; the final value involved is rational life, enhanced by exclusion of untruth. The goal is to be less open to falsehood, not to become more open.
Science starts by clearing out old superstition in the same way that it finds unsuspected truths which tradition had no position on. The scientific method was developed at a time when its discoveries were very likely to close out an old superstition. There was no sense of an openness-value existing towards the old opinions; these were to be superseded in such a way as to allow no value in being open to them.
If openness-idealization were rational, science would continually revisit the traditional superstitions. Nothing could be disproven, or proven in a final way; but to say that, is a contradiction-in-terms. Or, rather, it implies one; it can be proven that nothing can be proven? If nothing can be disproven, because there always remains an openness-value in calling them unfalsifiable, there will be no final proof of anything either. If the statement of hypotheses in falsifiable terms is (sometimes) like an instrumental value for science, then openness cannot be ideal. Openness to claims which have already been disproven would be a virtue in that case. There is value in disproving a common falsehood, in order to close it out; therefore openness-value in science is a false ideal. Likewise the falsifiability doctrine; if no axioms are permitted, then all knowledge is groundless, including that of those who say they know that falsifiability is of the essence.
There are those who say it is always too early to judge; and indeed that all is prejudice. But that position is a contradiction-in-terms; it is the same as saying that it is not too early to judge all judgements as being made too early. In terms of openness, it is self-contradictory to say that one should be open to the possibility that openness-value is nothing but a prejudice. If openness is opposed to prejudice, why should they not be open to every prejudice, including those which contradict each other? If follows that valuing openness is not really a means of going against prejudice. In any case the government and its schools should not be ‘combatting prejudice’ any more then they should be combatting or suppressing Buddhism, Hinduism, or Judaism (all of which contain prejudices in superabundance).
Is openness a contrary of prejudice as it is sometimes said to be? If openness is a value such that more openness may be called better, then more openness to more prejudices would also have to be better. Therefore openness as an ideal is not against prejudices, and will not even permit us to be closed against any of them .
Openness is also contrary to confidentiality; how can we value openness and confidentiality at the same time? Law, medicine, psychology, journalism, banking (and how many other professions) require confidentiality to be treated as a value. Indeed, what occupations are there which do not depend on confidentiality to some crucial extent? Would we be better if no one worked? If not, then openness is not a proper value. The professional use of confidentiality shows up a lot of extraordinary hypocrisy. Journalists, while insisting on confidentiality of sources, often tell us to value openness, as when they criticize lack of openness to foreigners, to disadvantaged populations or to diversity of a great many kinds. Psychologists try to diagnose nations and races as having phobias against minorities, since there could be more openness than there is, while insisting on confidentiality (not openness) in their own cases. Many businessmen ask us to be more open to foreign products (and sometimes also migrants) while they demand confidentiality (not openness) in their own business dealings. Officials call for openness while insisting on secrecy.
Traitors can betray a country by not observing the necessary degree of secrecy, yet openness is not a value that can stand against the need to avoid treason. Professors speak of openness as something of a special worth, yet they do not want their tenured positions to be opened up to competition. High officials may present openness as a value, but do they wish to allow competition to open up the government's monopoly on the use of coercion? Openness to insurrection is perhaps unlikely to appear on their list of priorities. Writers have extolled openness, but what then was the reason for claiming copyright; wouldn’t more openness be better?
Scholars tell us that there is value created in the spreading of information, as if there were value in not allowing the benefit of information to go to those who pay for its accumulation. But this is clearly false; if the supporters of information development do not get the benefit of their sponsorship of it, they must stop. If we stop supporting the development of knowledge, because the benefits are (by openness-idealization) supposed to be spread out to the world in general at no charge, or below cost, a deep stagnation must follow. This consideration shows the openness-valuation to be falsely-based; we are being made to share for openness' sake, and those who pay for it are the losers. If the supporters of knowledge growth are made to lose consistently, as for openness' sake, what can happen except a stalling of this essential advancer of civilization? If it is not believed that this is happening, one need only look for the breakthrough inventions, which for several decades, have not appeared. Recipient countries, which don't contribute to the progress toward breakthroughs, are taking over the technologies which were developed elsewhere, and leaving the openness-valuing countries with less than they otherwise would have had. Technology transfer at the expense of the net taxpayers is the means by which this is done, for the most part. But if openness were a proper value, the net taxpayers would not lose by having technology transferred at their expense. On the contrary, they could expect to be reimbursed for their costs and then some. There is no evidence that this actually occurs in the sense of openness-as-technology-transfer not being a dead loss overall (to the net taxpayer as transferor).
The sensible conclusion would be that paying for technology transfer is a loss to the net taxpayers. If this were not true, patents and copyrights would not be a sound economic practice (value being assumed to be generated by open competition with no monopolies). Yet it was already observed that the countries with the best records of respecting property rights like patents and trademarks are vastly more productive. Another comparison is that between the period before copyright protection existed and afterwards; publication was all but non existent in the older period compared to the later one. Likewise publication technology could not have developed as it did without the closing-out of openness to ‘pirating’ competition. But if openness were a responsibly-held value one would expect disadvantages to accumulate from loss of openness. There is no loss seen from intellectuals no longer having to win the patronage of a great aristocrat.
If openness were a reasonable ideal, how could there be such a defense of proprietary information as is seen? Corporate espionage and secrecy would have no reason to exist. The fact that they do exist means that secrecy and observance of confidentiality have some function as a value. It is known that commercial secrets have allowed great competitive advantage. If openness is a fit value how may we account for commercial secrecy in general? Indeed, what could explain the existence of locks, a prejudice against openness-value?
If thieves ask us to leave things open, and tell us that it is our duty to share, there is no doubt as to their moral standing. If a criminal gang gives us the same advice, even though the individual gang member is saying it for the benefit of the others, there is still no doubt that his intentions are immoral. If an official or scholar in the pay of the government asks us to be open to stealing because he says it is our duty to share, he is called morally respectable. Yet he is part of a group that needs people to be open to stealing or forced sharing (at least in the context of current methods of public finance). His moral standing would seem to be the same as the gang member who asks us to value such and such openness. Likewise, if the sympathizer of a criminal gang asks us to value openness to their depredations, on the grounds also of sharing as a duty, his morals are known to be low. The fact that he does not stand to gain from our increased openness does not exonerate him; he still wants immoral acts to be facilitated against the good. Therefore, also, those who ask us to value openness to damaging effects against the good have no excuse. They are still wrong, even if they have no way to gain from it. Malice with no personal interest involved is not better or less dangerous than the other kinds.
Openness-as-a-value requires us to be open to acts of malice, but the virtuous do not need our openness. The more damaging something is, the more openness-value there would be in becoming more open to it. Since all are inclined to be closed to what is damaging, the more damaging something is, the harder it is to be open to it. Therefore, openness-value (if such can exist) must increase right along with the damaging quality of what we’re asked to be open to. The less damage something causes to those who are open to it, the less openness-value there could be (in being open to it). Openness-valuation is not needed at all in the case of what does us no damage. The greater the damage expected from something, the greater also must be the openness-value which could override our preference not to be harmed.
Openness-value, if it were true, would have to become greater as it needed greater power to overcome resistance to openness to the more damaging. The greater the evil, the greater is the openness-value to be assigned to being open to it. If this were not the correct inference, there could be equal openness-value in being open to what we want for other reasons, as with what we can accept only on the basis of valuing openness. But openness-value could have no function if it were as likely to ask us to be open to what we want for some other reason as to what is not wanted because of damaging qualities. It is only in the case of things that we have reason to avoid, that openness-value would not be redundant, unnecessary and uncalled-for. The greater the harm that will come from something, the greater the need for a false value like openness-as-an-ideal to be used against those who don’t want to be open to the harm.
Openness-value asks for an undiscriminating attitude, but one that is specifically lacking in the tendency to discriminate between good and evil; between the very harmful and the harmless. There are two kinds of objects which we are requested to value being open to. One is biological, the other is cultural. These correspond to a genetic openness and to a mental openness. Biological openness is harder to achieve, the greater the damage that it does. Health does not need us to be open to it, but lethal infections do. The harder to achieve a level of openness is, the greater its openness-valuation must be.
If openness were a reasonable value for us, the openness to diversity of medical conditions would be a value also. This means: we are ‘strengthened' by the arrival of leprosy, AIDS, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and other conditions coming in from outside. There is medical immigration. Third-world countries tell their people that, if they can get to certain rich countries, their diseases will be treated for free. Pro-openness says that we are ‘enriched’ by paying for more and more of these, but isn’t that a contradiction-in-terms?
Pro-openness does not allow the furtherance of any dominant culture. If it is yours, then pro-openness would require you to be for some other cultures and turn against the one you know. Thus, pro-openness insists on a kind of traitorous character. Pro-openness would then also destroy any community of values. The more widely shared some values are in a community, the more pro-openness must be against them. But, many hostile camps, with the fewest shared values would be better (according to pro-openness).
Advanced society of any kind requires a degree of monoculture that is really the opposite of what pro-openness would attempt to bring in. Two languages in proximity tend to generate a pidgin which impoverishes both. Several languages in a small area will tend to have one as a bridge, and as a leading monoculture.
Some languages are more like stumbling blocks to thought and communication in more advanced concepts. To call these equal value with the more abstract languages, would be also to say that the population of the world should be chopped down to the level that could be supported by such languages (or such cultures) - if they are as good as any others. If a more civilized culture is not a higher value, then the thousand-times larger population it supports is not a value either, and may be removed as an obstacle to primitive society (and the kind of land-use it requires). These people will not just disappear because room is wanted for an authentic tribal way of life, they would have to be killed to get their land.
Pro-openness should also mean being for openness to diversity of ideas. Though, one might ask: why not be for ideas or concepts that are true only? But this would bring human values back into the picture, while openness-as-a-goal could tolerate no distinction of right or wrong ideas. If it could, how would the openness be served; surely not by homogenizing the openness to diversity down to the very small percentage of true ones? The number of possible ideas must be at least a thousand times greater than the true ones. Therefore to be pro-openness (to diversity of ideas) means wanting falsehoods to drown out the true concepts by overwhelming volume. That policy would require the destruction of civilization also. No organized teaching of true concepts could be tolerated if openness is the goal. But there could be computer-generated originality (of wrong answers) for some years.
Pro-openness is meant to be comprehensive, and quite thoroughly so. So what could limit it to one sphere, when, in the nature of the case, it is all-embracing? If openness can be an ideal of universal character, certainly nothing is to be excluded from the scope of openness-value.
Openness to ideas as an objective sounds tolerant, yet, in principle, a true idea is what the pro-openness cannot tolerate. Where is the room for openness to different ideas, if, on a given point, there is only one truth? But if truth is not to be tolerated, what becomes of the accumulation of truths upon which it is possible to know how to support a large population? Even a small suppression of truths may cause civilization to roll backward disastrously.
Openness to diversity of ideas (as a goal) has to mean the spreading of falsehoods greatly outnumbering the truths that might (incidentally) also be maintained. It is even true by definition, if openness to diversity of ideas also means: different from the true ones. It means openness to ideas that contradict each other, and (especially) the truths that are to be buried under the openness to diversity. There can’t be a diversity of truths that contradict each other; logic doesn’t allow for that.
The bad (or not good enough) is avoided before openness is introduced (as a pseudo-value), but not after. Why not have an openness-value regarding spelling? The more diverse the spelling in use, the greater the ‘openness-value’ has become. The most unintelligibly spelled writing would be in the highest class of openness value of spelling. Note how the introduction of ‘openness-value’ turns the real values upside down.
Would there be value in openness to diversity of maintenance conditions for a motor fleet? If all are in adequate condition at the start, the only possible direction for increasing openness is downward. Whenever a minimum standard is called for, and all meet the standard at the outset, the only greater openness that is even possible is below standard. When a minimum standard is proposed, the diversity (from that) is immediately seen to be a downward move. The more pro-openness one is, the less chance there is to retain some standards.
If the pro-openness is accepted in one area of life, it will tend to spread to other areas even though it is not particularly wanted there. When we try to do away with standards, in order to make room for openness, it turns out that there remain no alternative standards to keep it from going completely radical. The pro-openness has no stable moderate position available to it.
Would a larger openness to chemical poisons in the food chain be good for us? How is it that there will not be any pro-openness agitation on their behalf? Is this because they are not living beings and can’t be in competition with any dominants that the pro-openness would want to overthrow? This is a real contradiction in pro-openness attitudes; why are the new and rare chemical poisons not on the list of diversity items which are to be protected? The pro-openness is really anti-dominant to such a degree that the openness to poisonous chemicals can never be like a value to it, unless there were some way to make them harm the dominants exclusively.
At least you could have ‘openness-value’ of styles, such as clothing fashions, perhaps? Not if they were so diverse as to no longer be fashions. If they were diverse enough to destroy the industrial production of clothing, that would indicate also that there is no value to be gained by openness in that department. Each increment in overall openness to diversity would mean smaller production runs. At the highest level of openness to diversity, each would be made by hand to a different design. No doubt some people can afford to pay ten or a hundred times more. But what about all the others, are they supposed to just die (for openness’ sake)?
Would the openness to ethnic cuisines be an exception to this rule (of never finding openness value)? No, because further openness would require going beyond what the market could support in terms of new cuisines. Their being new would not allow for there to be appreciation of any culinary accomplishment involved. Public subsidy for restaurants does not sound like a worthwhile priority. Tax deductions for rich people to pretend to be gourmets of wide-ranging knowledge (of ethnic cookeries) would be a suitable program for the government?
In any case there would be a flight from value if openness were the objective. The most marginal as businesses would be the most important for openness. Those cuisines which were the least accepted by customers because they were the least sanitary (and the most likely to poison) would be indispensable for openness. Would the government then have to exempt the rarest (because unhealthful) ethnic cookeries from public health regulation? Having done that, would lawsuits for food poisoning have to be thrown out of court for threatening the openness to diversity of cuisines (in such cases)?
For the openness-value, the national cuisines that caused the most sickness proportionally, and were the least popular because of it, are the most important to have represented. Openness to salmonella species infecting the public would be something to work toward, on the pro-openness premise. If health standards were allowed to suppress a cuisine that was rare, what would become of the openness?
Why not be for openness to diversity of behavior? If we are pro-openness, mustn’t we tolerate openness to diversity of behavior, and of misbehavior, and even the openness to actually subhuman misbehavior? The diversity of good behavior doesn’t require tolerance from others. This indicates a bias towards the bad side on the part of the pro-openness.
The dominant may need freedom from aggression, but the pro-openness has to value freedom for aggression. If politics is the ethics of aggression, and the openness-value is established politically, does this mean that the openness value-representation is to be furthered by mere aggression? And, if so, why by aggression, unless there is no rational argument that could persuade anyone to it?
If a school wants openness to diversity of backgrounds, why not recruit a diversity of criminal backgrounds? A murderer would bring in diversity of that kind, and so would rapists, burglars and muggers. The pro-openness would have to call this better than homogeneity. To them, apparently rape is intellectual excitement, thieving is creativity, and murder is a guaranteed cure for ennui. It was that way for the aristocrats of eighteenth-century France, who lost their special boredom, their ennui, when the reign of terror came for them. If openness is ideal, then openness to aggression is better than being closed to it.
Rare qualities that take away from an object’s value obviously do not add to its value. Therefore, openness to ‘diversity-value’ amounts to a contradiction-in-terms. It would mean saying that openness to diversity-enhancing qualities that take away from the value of something can (at the same time and in the same respect) also add to its value.
What passes for ‘rarity-value’ is only a very small supply relative to a very large potential demand. The demand for the full set is the source of the valuation, not the rarity of the last items that would complete it. In the case of genetic openness, there is no demand for most of the rare items in the full set of genetic diversity. The genetic freaks are actually disvalued (in nearly every case) both by the society and by natural selection, which must energetically guard against mutations. Natural selection has to suppress mutations as thoroughly as possible without being closed off completely from the (perhaps) one-in-a-million chance of a good mutation.
Dogs have more diversity of shapes and sizes than any natural species. If there is a diversity-preference operating in nature, the dogs could not be the most diverse in form of all species. Imagine a miniature breed of dog trying to impregnate a very large one then consider if nature can have species with diversity like that (in its breeds). Human diversity preference is not involved either; the dog diversity came from breeding for certain desired qualities in each breed, not for openness as such. If genetic openness could create value itself, there would be untold thousands of species with more diversity of form than the domesticated dog.
Pro-openness is also pro-deviant, and the rarer the deviance is, the greater the ‘openness-value’. Serial killers, mass-murderers, suicide bombers, gang-rapists, all of these (and more) are highly deviant and rare. Pro-openness must be for all these, if the diversity consists also of them, and if they only harm a dominant. Pro-openness is not on the list of classical values and there is good reason for this. The caprice of officials is not an adequate basis for the establishment of legitimate value for man.
If the pro-openness were strongly-based someone by now would have taken up its cause, as the general thesis of a comprehensive work. Do all the writers who could attempt it consider such a project so foolhardy? This also indicates that there may be no intellectual underpinnings to the pro-openness idea.
In mathematics, there are not less than billions of diverse (or rare) incorrect answers to equations. No ‘openness-value’ is to be allowed for an incorrect solution there. Likewise, there are thousands of diverse (and rare) ways of building a house that will collapse, none of which can actually create ‘openness value’. In politics there are thousands of ways of adding power to a government that result in a collapse into dictatorship, yet their diversity gives no value to them.
Standards and pro-openness are in conflict because openness is immoral to advocate; it is anti-value. To be for openness is to be against standards (which must then be diversified away from). Moral standards are also diversified away from, if openness is what one is for. Being for openness is also irrational because it calls for diversifying away from standards of logic and rationality. Evil is also a way of diversifying away from the moral standard that is compatible with human life. Selecting for openness is evil; it diversifies away from whatever standard is necessary for any good to come from anything (that is, selecting openness for its own sake, as if it could be a value).
The opening-up of successful species like humans to outside genes is a requirement of pro-openness if this is at least technically possible. Therefore, pro-openness would demand that the genes of sub-human primates (and others) be introduced into the human species. There is openness to diversity to be gained, and no endangered species to be lost, this way.
. In terms of gaining openness, such hybrids would not need to be viable. They could be maintained artificially just to serve as an openness conduit, or as carriers of experimental diversity. Since they are interspecific hybrids, they are significant carriers of diversity in themselves. There have been intermediate species between chimpanzees and humans in the past. Diversity has been lost by their extinction. Now pro-openness requires that intermediate forms of this kind be created and maintained artificially. It would be a most significant increase in genetic openness, that could be won that way.
It would be significant openness, because the human species is a dominant one.
If openness can be a proper value to man, then human genetic openness, and its potential for increase from the outside, is not to be disregarded. But the hybrids between human and ape are the way to get the most significant increase in genetic openness for man, by crossing the species boundary.
How can pro-openness ask for less, unless it is not a value at all? Can we be too ‘rich’ with openness to diversity? Can we develop too much ‘strength’ of genetic openness? If pro-openness is subordinate to some superior representation of values, why must it be? Can one believe that openness is a value for man, but only when it is not inconvenient? If openness is part of a value system (which subordinates it), how can it ever be a standard of value? A standard of value would have to be an end-in-itself, not an instrumentality subordinated to the real value. As an instrumental value, pro-openness is, in any case, not compatible with real values. It can’t be paired with any value (for man) because as soon as you have something good, pro-openness says: change it, we need openness instead.
Pro-openness does apply to the human genetic inheritance also, if it applies to anything. Pro-openness, then, would give us ape-men (if it can be done at all).
Disease-resistance alleles may often require both parents to have had them in order to have any noticeable effect. In this case, admixture would frequently be causing the loss of these attributes before their protective effect could be identified. If it only shows up when both parents have the protective genetic attribute, only relatively isolated groups will likely maintain it in identifiable form. These factors may be needed in the future, either directly, or indirectly, as models for drugs. Therefore, public intervention for greater admixture can jeopardize the health or even survival of the human species.
If epidemics were to arise that require the the disease resistance of populations that also expanded for that reason in the past, these same groups could expand again and reduce the total diversity. Advocates of openness to diversity have a special regard for aboriginal groups of precisely the sort that declined in numbers (often by more than ninety percent), after contact with Europeans. These extraordinary declines were caused by infectious disease, against which these aboriginals were genetically very weak. Pro-openness favors these populations, not in spite of, but because of, their weakness versus infectious disease (in the past).
Does it follow that the pro-openness must hate the Europeans, who imposed (and expanded into) the downfall of diversity in these aboriginal populations’ territories? Would it also follow that pro-openness in power would try to impose handicaps on Europeans, in order to prevent a potential dominant group from sweeping the field? Even though the circumstances with infectious disease are much different today, must pro-openness want to kill the Europeans just because the aboriginal diversity could be again cut down in much the same way as before? If so, is this not a violation of their rights, to establish it as state religion that one race might well be pre-emptively killed off, because they might win a competition of disease resistance? If government schools are, by their very nature, unable to rid themselves of such a doctrine (advocating mass-murder), then they deserve very much less support.
Is it necessary for those who doubt, or deny, the value of openness to prefer cloning? Do they want the human race to be replaced by a race of clones? Of course they can’t want a cloning program that is, in any case, absolutely impractical.
The pro-openness would have to prove that it is more than a false dilemma: ‘cloning-value’ (by similarity) as against ‘openness value’. Our unwillingness to value clones to the exclusion of openness is not proven to be in contradiction to our unwillingness to value openness as such. Rejecting the pro-openness idea does not lead to clone idealization or even to inbreeding advocacy. Life as a value for each organism, whether it reproduces by cloning or sexually, or uses inbreeding, never ordains cloning, inbreeding, or openness as a standard of value.
This false dilemma proposed by pro-openness does set up the alternatives which are relevant. Cloning plus inbreeding, on the one hand, versus mutations, is the relevant comparison. Mutations are poison if mutagens are correctly regarded as poisons. Some vanishingly small percentage of mutations, like one in a hundred-thousand mutations (to functioning genes) might be considered good. ‘Clonigens’ or ‘inbreedogens’ might be considered poisonous also, but not in the same degree.
‘Clonigens’ and ‘inbreedogens’ do not sound like very menacing items. Research now indicates that, in people, there are factors that pro-openness might call ‘inbreedogens’. These would cause people to prefer to mate with the genetically similar (but not too similar). This may explain the high correlation for a number of physical traits between parents. Now, compare the fearsomeness of 'inbreedogens' with that of mutagens, carcinogens, and teratogens.
Regarding human cloning, suppose that there is discovered a drug which often causes identical twins to be conceived, and call it a ‘clonigen'. Would we call this a poison, or fear it to any great extent? Valuing openness to carcinogens would result in favoring mutations which allow cancers to develop. Pro-openness is pro-carcinogen, therefore it is not a proper value for man.
The deformities and other birth defects caused by teratogens are examples of human diversity. How can pro-openness be against the divergent forms caused by teratogens? Is it possible to be too ‘rich’ with openness? If not, then pro-openness is also pro-teratogen.
Again, the rejections of clone-idealization plus the rejection of pro-openness are not mutually exhaustive of our alternatives. It is certainly not proven that we can’t reject both at the same time without contradiction. Further, we can reject pro-openness, clone-idealization, and inbreeding as standards of value (or as high value), all at the same time without contradiction. It has not been proven that we can’t reject pro-openness, pro-clonism, and pro-inbreeding, all at the same time without any inconsistency or contradiction.
It is true that the pro- and anti-openness can be represented as very far apart. But how can they be proven to be in such relation as to allow only pro-openness on one end, and pro-clonism (plus pro-inbreeding) on the other, with no other alternatives possible? The spectrum with pro-openness on one extreme, and over towards its opposite position (not pro-openness), is broader than we’ve been led to believe.
The pro-openness were saying that their doubters must be for human inbreeding. At the same time, the pro-openness is also for openness to divergent cultures and customs. These include the practice of inbreeding, as with first cousins, even by arranged marriages of minors. The pro-openness asks us to tolerate, or even value, customs of inbreeding. This is a very serious contradiction for the pro-openness; how can they then also say that inbreeding depression is support for their case?
The pro-openness may refer to the marriage of people of the same race as 'inbreeding', in the case of a race that they consider to be dominant. At the same time, groups that they call the diversity, can breed half-siblings even, while the pro-openness response is to speak of tolerance, not inbreeding depression. The fear of the pro-openness is that dominant populations will use something close to literal inbreeding to create a super-dominant group. Yet this is the pattern that nature uses with people; the tendency is to breed close to the threshold of literal inbreeding. Pro-openness, as anti-dominant, wants those groups who have the most to lose, and the least to gain genetically, to go for ‘new blood’. In Donald A. Levin’s “Hybridization and Extinction” (American Scientist, 5-02) it is mentioned that, as “Darwin had observed, most hybrids are inferior to their parents” (p.254). And that “they are usually weak and sterile is a reflection of the differences of the parents”. If we are pro-openness, we should want a dominant to breed with as different a type as possible, the better to cancel out any superior genetic adaptations. This is their preference, because the pro-openness has to be anti-dominant.
To be against ‘openness-as-a-value’ does not set us against life, but rather keeps one well in line with its requirements. No runaway cloning-worship would follow, not by the logic of opposing ‘openness-value’. But pro-openness consistently goes against life of every kind, and can’t be moderated by real values, not without renouncing the pro-openness. If openness-as-a-value is renounced temporarily, in order to make room for life as a value, why should the ‘openness-value’ come back in? Because “variety is the spice of life”? But openness to diversity is also the poisoner of life, the mutation that destroys, the weakness that corrupts, indeed it is an anti-value. Pro-openness harbors backwardness, requires special favor at the expense of success, and tries to make an object of value out of mistakes. If there were a rule of the mutagen, a mutagenocracy, wouldn’t this be pro-openness more than any alternative?
The growth of openness is like the growth of mutant cancer, or can be. Genetic mistakes cause damage because a given life operates with a very specific identity. Life processes can’t be run just any new way, as though openness to all manner of genetic diversity could be of value to life. There would also not be so much energy expended on the prevention and repair of mutation-damage, if openness to such diversity were a proper value for life.
Sexual reproduction can also be seen as a means of eliminating the results of mutation-openness, which would be irremovable in a clonal lineage. These mutations can exterminate the clonal lineage, both being sealed off together. If mutations are genetic damage caused by radiation, biological copying errors and the like, then always the mutation is damage (to functioning genes). It is only in the very rare instance that this damage can still be advantageous to the one in which it arises, even though it must be damage at the outset. The difference is between damage, and net damage, in the long run (to a lineage).
An advocate of openness would have to tell a couple, about to conceive a child, to spend time in a radioactive mine (or cellar). That would increase the chances of mutation, of genetic damage and the chance for openness. If this were not enough, then they would need more radioactivity to cause more damage more consistently. If openness could be a proper value, then more genetic damage, especially that of a lasting kind, is more value.
But perhaps no one is supposed to take openness seriously as a value. Mightn’t one just toy with it and not see where it leads? That might be a popular attitude, don’t take it seriously, it is only for entertainment, for cookery ideas and new slang-words, styles, and taking care of minorities in trouble. But, if so, how could it be a serious offense (or problem of any kind) to be against the openness?
Pro-openness as a universal is also in self-contradiction for that reason. If it operates as a universal across the entire terrain of values and truths, it is imposing a uniformity of approach that pro-openness must also damn. It can’t be less than universal without adopting some standards that would limit it, and that would be against the openness, and necessarily so. Therefore, pro-openness always contradicts itself. It needs to be universal, and at the same time must oppose all universals. What is universal is surely against the openness, if anything is.
Any concept (universal) of pro-openness also denies all concepts (universals) including its own. What pattern could be more dominant with the pro-openness agitation than a hostility against universal standards? These are the special objects of hatred to such an extent that one may conclude that the pro-openness advocates must fear that they can’t measure up to any universal standards. And, as pro-openness advocates, they are in fact unable to maintain any universal standards.
Consider that there is a recent development in science called ‘lethal mutagenesis’. It uses mutagens to push, for example, a colony of viruses over the threshold where they can no longer reproduce, because there are so many mutations. But mutations are new diversity and would be a value (if openness can be such). Therefore, pro-openness cannot be opposed to the use of lethal mutagenesis against any species or breeding group that is not rare or endangered. .
The pro-openness is also for socioeconomic class openness. If a locale has a uniformly prosperous population now, accommodation of openness to diversity from that will necessarily bring the average standard down. But if an area has an unusually low average class level, who will ask them to change their policies to accommodate the dominant, the pro-openness?
The term ‘diversification of investments’ does not refer to diversifying downwards. It means balancing one risk with a similar risk in a different direction. It doesn’t mean diversifying by going below investment grade, or imagining that risk is reduced by buying a large number of different bankrupt companies’ paper. The more open the portfolio, in the literal and unlimited sense, the larger the proportion of defaulted bonds and defunct companies stock it must contain.
So the analogy with ‘diversification of investments’, as supposedly supporting the openness-value representation, does not follow at all.
In the nature of the case, openness ‘value’ has to mean diversifying towards lower value. If this were not so, it would not need to be ‘valued’ for openness’ sake, it would not need to be supported, protected, nor especially tolerated. Yet openness is offered as an object of special consideration, one with needs and claims even beyond all others. It is offered in this way precisely because such openness requires support and, indeed, the special tolerance. Openness is presented as if it could be an end-in-itself precisely because it then means weakness, it means anti-merit. If the public does not become much less supportive of this, they will grow ‘rich’ with very destructive parasites.
Openness to diversity of customs includes all sorts of evil customs such as: slavery, cannibalism, suttee (wife-burning), human sacrifice, torture, foot-binding, mutilations (like clitorectomy), despotism, pogroms, forced conversions, religious wars, terrorism, bribe taking, lynching and omerta. If, the greater the rarity of such customs, the greater their ‘diversity-value’, they can’t be dismissed as irrelevant, marginal elements of openness.
This contradiction-in-terms blazes out from the pro-openness: race is unimportant (and so is ethnicity), so let’s have less prejudice. At the same time, the pro-openness insists on the importance of race (and ethnicity), since racial and ethnic ‘diversity-value’ are asserted. Race can’t be irrelevant if’diversity-value’ of race can arise at all. Further, this implies the inheritance of racial mentalities, since the pro-openness can see no need for a test of the presence of these racial (and ethnic) mentalities, they are automatically assumed to be present.
The professorate, in the pay of government officials, has not seen any need to offer evidence or argument for this position (that ideas are inherited genetically and racially). They find it convenient to play along with such an establishment of state religion and just make ad hominem accusations against any dissenters.
This can be seen in practice through the government policies that reject any standard by which certain racial and ethnic groups might differ. According to the government, any standard that generates what they call ‘disparate impact’ must be rejected in favor of racial preference. If literacy beyond the fifth-grade level is absent in half of one racial group, but in only fifteen percent of a ‘dominant’ group, then that literacy standard is illegal, and must be replaced by racial preference (for the diversity).
If this is the attitude of those who are pro-openness doesn’t it follow that the openness value-representation is subversive of all standards, even the lowest? Without universal standards, what do we have but double-standards and, in effect, no standards at all?.
From Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve: “At ten highly selective law schools... the average black was in the bottom 1% of the white distribution”. In medical schools they find “the average entering black medical student at the 8th to 10th percentile of the white distribution” of scores. For graduate school applicants taking the Graduate Record Examination, they found “blacks at the 10th to 12th percentile of the white distribution”. For twenty-six top colleges, they record the “average black at about the 10th percentile of white students”. Also “universities today cannot publish the data on their admitted students and hope to persuade the public (or specialists in education) that their policies are reasonable”.
If these are not the marks of an anti-merit society, what would be? Still, one could say that test scores might not be so meaningful. If they were not, though, then IQ scores should also go sharply up after severe brain damage, not just decline. Large groups of young children would sometimes get higher average raw scores than adults, when both groups were representative of their age groups, but that never happens. IQ tests would have no use in medicine for determining the extent of dementia.
Children with physical indications of Down’s Syndrome (mongolism) would as often be above average on IQ tests, as below, but that doesn’t happen. Also the age gradations would not smoothly rise for each year on the tests given to children. People who are drugged in a mentally incapacitating way would not get consistently lower scores.
Children with physical indications of Down’s Syndrome (mongolism) would as often be above average on IQ tests, as below, but that doesn’t happen. Also the age gradations would not smoothly rise for each year on the tests given to children. People who are drugged in a mentally incapacitating way would not get consistently lower scores.
Likewise, the measured conceptual ability is not social rank resurfacing in a different form. If it could be, brain injury as from a permanently damaging blow, or a life-threatening infection, or a temporarily drug-induced state would not bring it down. The newly-brain-damaged do not acquire new parents or backgrounds by that means.
Lead poisoning would not cause IQ’s to decline more than it would cause them to rise, if no significant biological attribute were referred to by IQ. Low-IQ mothers would not be five times more likely to give birth to low-birth-weight babies than high-IQ mothers, regardless of the background socio-economic status of either. Also, low-IQ mothers would not be ten times more likely to have a child in the lowest ten percent of IQ’s than high-IQ mothers (almost) regardless of the background socio-economic status of either. Young men who have been in prison would not be a dozen times more likely to be of low IQ (than high) regardless of the background (parental) socio-economic status of either. IQ’s would not accurately predict college class ranks or job success, if it were not a meaningful measure. Parents with money would be able to buy education sufficient to put their low-IQ children through college, at a similar rate as the high-IQ students, but they aren’t really able to, to any great degree. Twins would not turn out duller or brighter according to which was lighter or heavier at birth. Also, fetal alcohol and drug syndromes would not be found together with low conceptual abilities (more than the opposite case). Deafness in infants would not be associated with low-IQ more than high, in later years. The low scorers would not be much more likely to be left back in school than others, but they are.
If openness were a reasonable value-possibility, then a company could recruit a diversity of intelligence levels, including the lowest, in large numbers, and not suffer for it. Yet as David Hu, in Asian Week, asks: “would you fly in an airplane from a company whose motto is, ‘we put diversity first?’ If pro-openness were valid, the less community of language in a place of business, the better off that business would be. A school would still have applicants willing to pay, even though no two students spoke the same language, if pro-openness were valid. They could also have all levels of IQ that are found in the general population represented, even the rare ones on the low end, and be better at developing the intellects of their students for it. Or, at least they could have the openness toward the low end, but the high end might become very quickly unavailable to such a school.
If openness is a legitimate value, more openness is better, is it not? Less openness would be worse, and least openness, such as everyone speaking the same language at a school would be worst of all. If something like racial quotas is necessary in a multiracial society, as the pro-openness is inclined to say, then openness is bad for that society (which can’t get by without such aggression by the government). This involves a contradiction for the pro-openness, how can openness be both good and bad in that sense.
Pro-openness does insist that government must intervene to keep employers and schools from rejecting diversity. This could be taken as an admission that genetic diversity is not good for those places, but must be forced on them (likewise in the case of cultural diversity). Isn’t this an establishment of religion, for the government to impose genetic openness as a (false) value on employers? If there is no rational basis for it, and it is implicitly admitted that genetic openness is not good for those who have it forced on them, what else could it be? .
If the parasitization on employers is heavy in the high-openness area, and much lower in the low-openness area, and the employees’ pay is a sizable percentage of the total costs, mustn’t this drive the expansion towards the low-openness region? Won’t this cause an increased reliance on public subsidy in the high-openness district? Can’t such a process even snowball and lay waste to one jurisdiction after another?
If openness could be a value to employers, why the desperate measures by government to bring diversity-carriers and employers into a relationship? If the employers have no reason to run away from the diversity, why would government officials want to run after them with guns?
How could the market conditions ‘conspire’ to reward the firms that flee fastest from the openness and punish those who are stuck with it? Isn’t it an establishment of religion to try to enforce the premise that such market conditions do involve a racial conspiracy? If an idea has nothing but government money behind it, yet has courts and legislatures intervening to impose it, is that establishment of religion or not?
Pro-openness’s claim of equality of all cultures is implicitly a contradiction in terms. It is not an example of superior culture to say that there are no superior cultures. Whatever suppresses the performance of the undeveloped cultures, it cannot be proven to be the existence of the dominant cultures magically suppressing the undeveloped. Conspiracy theories of underdevelopment do not prove that the dominants cause the underdeveloped state of the diversity.
.For the pro-openness, there can be ‘too many’ of one race at a school, and it doesn’t even matter much to them how that happened. What matters for the pro-openness is to get quotas for that school. Such racial preference policies, imposed by official aggression merely, are certain to cause intensifying racial conflict the longer they are held onto. The fact that young children are involved intensifies the provocation; with no outlet or catharsis available, the pressure just quietly builds to the point where it explodes. Those who set up these racial policies (through the courts) are perfectly aware of the explosive charge that they are causing to accumulate. They know it, and they want it, because it allows for the establishment of dictatorship (that supposedly would be needed to control a national emergency). Officials have chosen race, rather than some other point of division, not in spite of, but because of its high potential to set off internal war. The groups are thus already organized for war; they have on the uniforms that they can’t take off.
People can change their religion, or their class or their political ideas, but not their race. When race is chosen by officials as the line upon which antagonism and war is to be developed, this maximizes the possibility for a lengthy and escalating conflict. The groups stay polarized because they can’t change their race. On this observation, it would seem that officials have chosen the approach that will give them the most war for their money, or for their tyranny.
There are reputed ideals like peace, love, brotherhood, equality, altruism, diversity, tolerance, openness, candor, charity and compassion which one could say are never really valued in their literal or exaggerated meanings. Who could want peace, or pacifism, such that any aggressor would meet with no resistance? How many could desire absolute ‘love’, as in a radical condition of free love, and all the lethal diseases that would take over along with it? Who could wish for a ‘brotherhood’ that included even perfect solidarity with the most evil?
Equality is also not likely to be wanted, if it would mean a situation like the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, shooting everyone with eyeglasses, just because they might be unequal. And worse: there are further egalitarian policies to be pursued beyond that. Altruism would be mass suicide if taken in an extreme direction. Tolerance, taken to the limit, would have us tolerating anything, no matter how bad. Openness would cause us to be open to any and every evil, if it were practiced as value without limitation. Likewise, candor, charity and compassion can be radicalized into absurd excess. Yet untold millions believe in all (or some) of these doubtful values. They do not believe in them in a radical way, and must often resent any attempts to push them into absolute openness, equality or all of the above. Many are willing to say that they value openness, yet are highly resistant to anyone’s trying to push them much further into it.
It follows that pro-openness does exist, in the same way that pacifism and egalitarianism are said to exist. It is not necessary for there to be any significant number of people actually practicing, or pining for, an absolute pro-openness. If there can be an egalitarian movement, or a pacifist one, then pro-openness is not impossible (as a movement in which hypocrisy is permitted). Are there not a great many wealthy and prominent altruists, in spite of the ease with which they can be identified as hypocrites? Don’t we have egalitarians of wealth and influence, and who also hold conspicuous titles of distinction?
If there are pacifists who incite riots, then the pro-openness can also exist. It can still be present, even though, no one can really want it in the literal and unlimited sense.
Given that the pro-openness can exist at all, the tendencies towards a more radical pro-openness should be understood. The relevant question is, how do we know that a moderate pro-openness regime can’t snowball into a more radical one? When they have it set up like a value, the necessary result is to say that more of this is better. More altruism would be called better, more equality, more pacifism, more diversity, more tolerance, more compassion and more openness would all be called better.
One group in power can force further moves towards these propaganda-ideals while remaining more secure than the others within a shelter of hypocrisy. Since they don’t have to pay the price themselves, but just force it on others politically, they don’t need to care what happens to those who are sacrificed. This is how pro-openness also can move towards a more radical program; the people who force others towards the pro-openness goals are not necessarily the same as those who are made to pay the most for it. This possibility introduces a serious instability, one group (the pro-openness in power), can afford to be as irresponsible as their caprices would ever lead them to be. So long as the false value is not rejected, the tendency is all towards further excesses in the name of the misvalued item. When political power is used, the false value can be refuted ever so thoroughly, yet the political establishment can hold on to it regardless. Government schools are in a position to ignore any refutations of their false values. They can proceed as if not a word had been said against them with nothing to fear except that their funding might be taken away.
One group in power can force further moves towards these propaganda-ideals while remaining more secure than the others within a shelter of hypocrisy. Since they don’t have to pay the price themselves, but just force it on others politically, they don’t need to care what happens to those who are sacrificed. This is how pro-openness also can move towards a more radical program; the people who force others towards the pro-openness goals are not necessarily the same as those who are made to pay the most for it. This possibility introduces a serious instability, one group (the pro-openness in power), can afford to be as irresponsible as their caprices would ever lead them to be. So long as the false value is not rejected, the tendency is all towards further excesses in the name of the misvalued item. When political power is used, the false value can be refuted ever so thoroughly, yet the political establishment can hold on to it regardless. Government schools are in a position to ignore any refutations of their false values. They can proceed as if not a word had been said against them with nothing to fear except that their funding might be taken away.
If the majority should find such false values are set up over against them, their recourse is only to cut down the political funding of these. There is no need to fear the loss of education, if it is not being given because research and the diversity come first. The less is given to the majority, the greater they should feel the incentive to withdraw support from that which misvalues the openness. It should not be expected that such cultures will spontaneously change. No refutation is likely to be sufficient to induce a change in a cultural regime that feeds on government. No absurdity is too great for the misvaluers of openness, so long as they can put the costs onto others. No degree of damage is too devastating, so long as they have it borne mainly by others. Irresponsibility is the privilege of the pro-openness in power, or in a position of influence. They answer to no one, and especially not to the majority; not when the majority is the dominant that is supposed to be overthrown (in the name of openness to diversity).
If openness to diversity is said to be good for students, then how is it possible for Nobel prizewinners in science to come from schools with no diversity to speak of? If less than half of these prizewinners went to school with students of a different race, how can openness to diversity be considered a value for schools to pursue? The top performers should be most affected by the absence of a necessary ingredient for high achievement. Likewise a desirable or advantageous component should most affect those in the top-performing levels, if it is missing. But if higher education is mostly self-education, as is often the case, then diversity among the students is of no assistance. This is most of all true of those on the highest levels, since those who are behind them can’t be their teachers (on this level). Many of these may cultivate a humble and egalitarian style, and will say on questionnaires that they learned as much from the dullest and most drunken of their classmates as from their professors. Such statements are not an appropriate basis for public policy. They are especially not to be relied on when the facts support the opposite conclusion.
What portion of the great works of literature, art or architecture was created by someone who had ever met an Asian or a black, or an aboriginal of America or Australia? May this proportion be assumed to be more than a tenth? If the great works of genius were almost all created without any encountering of diversity, such as that of the races, how can this diversity be called cultural value? Because you can’t live with what you don’t know? But we can live with the exotic; otherwise openness would be an evil to us. Those who made the greatest works of human achievement did not know or attend school with people of other races, or very few of them did. If this was no hindrance to them, how could it be one today? Because the facts of history have no bearing on what is willed with all the heart - of government officials?
There are countries in Asia, such as Japan, which have had Nobel prizewinners in science. But there is no diversity(that would be counted as such in the United States today) in their schools. No one would suggest that universities in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan or China should recruit African or Latino-Indian students on a racial basis and reasonably expect this to cause their institutions’ performance to rise. The pro-openness would have to ask for precisely this sort of policy. Therefore, they cannot do so reasonably. Yet the pro-openness in the United States has got such policies enacted; as when students are recruited on a racial-diversity basis. The same is true with companies.
Many large corporations in Japan, Taiwan and other countries do business with hundreds of foreign countries, yet have no diversity on their staff. The pro-openness is bound to say that these corporations can’t function without the diversity, but they can and do prosper. If zero openness to diversity can surpass high (or higher) diversity, then there is no reasonable argument for the pro-openness.
If the highest levels of achievement have been found in the context of zero diversity; as in the case of zero racial openness in cultural and business settings, then it must be even less likely to be important for the middle ranges. The moderate levels of achievement must have lower requirements for value-enhancing circumstances than the highest.
How could the racial diversity cause achievement? If it can, this must mean that the races are fundamentally unequal. If race itself can contribute to achievement, then the races must be unequal in this way.
Consider that almost all the post-WWII independent countries in the world today are the result of partitions that occurred in the context of racial policies. British India had anti-merit policies with a racial coloration to bring in untouchables and ‘scheduled tribes’ to government employments and so on. But a few years later the imperialist divide-and-conquer policies came to spectacular fruition. A partition of the country, with nearly a million deaths, and ten million or more violently pushed over the new borders, attended the independence festivities (in 1947).
In (British) Malaya authorities had set quota-type policies to prevent Chinese from getting ‘too many’ places in colleges and government jobs. Then a Chinese insurgency developed, which was violently suppressed, but within five years the country was partitioned into (Chinese) Singapore and Malaysia. The Malaysian government intensified the quota policies against the remaining Chinese and other minorities. In recent years it has been a federal crime to publicly protest the racial policies of Malaysia.
In (British) Nigeria authorities started to use quotas to keep Ibos from getting ‘too many’ government jobs. Independence occurred a few years later, and native leaders intensified the quota policies. Six years later the Ibos made a coup, but were deposed, except in their area, called Biafra. Over a million people died as a result of the civil war, before Biafra was deliberately starved and put down.
Another symbol of mass death, Bangladesh, came into existence very similarly. In East Pakistan, as it was called then, there were said to be too many West Pakistanis in positions of importance. Quota policies were set up, but this only inflamed the conflicts, which culminated in 1971 with secession. A typhoon hit about the same time, giving the new country, Bangladesh, a name like that of Biafra.
In Sri Lanka representatives of the majority decided that the Tamil minority had too many places in certain occupations, especially those requiring considerable education. Quotas were established, and tightened in 1973 and 1974, in such a way as to virtually exclude the Tamils. Tamil secessionist warfare started, with effective partition of the country accomplished about a decade later.
The government is not likely to say that it is fomenting race war in order to aggrandize its power, but officials can say that their racial policies are pro-openness. Their moral image would be crippled if they said racial conflict as a means to power is their objective. Their moral reputation should be just as handicapped if they say they are guided by openness-as-a-value, if people would take care to see what this would mean.
The government is not likely to say that it is fomenting race war in order to aggrandize its power, but officials can say that their racial policies are pro-openness. Their moral image would be crippled if they said racial conflict as a means to power is their objective. Their moral reputation should be just as handicapped if they say they are guided by openness-as-a-value, if people would take care to see what this would mean.
When it is announced that there is to be celebration of openness to diversity in a city, does anyone expect that they are about to give us a long list of the Protestant denominations in that place? Would anyone not be thoroughly surprised if they were given that list, rather than one of races and ethnic groups? That being the case, it is known to essentially everyone that the pro-diversity is about race and ethnicity, (when it is about people). It is about irreconcilable differences and specifically those differences which can be exploited to foment civil war on a racial-ethnic basis.
The strategy of’divide-and-conquer’, and of virulent anti-merit activism is especially prominent in immigration issues. It can be observed that immigration policy is a large part of what pro-openness is concerned with. Immigration can be peculiarly efficient in dividing a country into irreconcilable groups, when it is recruited on an anti-merit basis, or mainly on the basis of nothing but blood.
Massive recruitment into a country on the basis of blood, is able to lead to great bloodshed, thus, this could be the objective of the supporters of such policies who have some idea of what they are doing.
There is an extent to which the progress of civilization can depend on some countries having merit policies on immigration, but pro-openness is adamantly against this.
What would one think if the government hired people almost exclusively on the basis of their having relatives who worked there? What if all our best colleges recruited mainly on the basis of blood connections? What if sports teams switched to using only relatives of team members, or mainly them? However unthinkable those possibilities may be, it can be noted that this is the American immigration policy; blood and almost nothing but blood. As if human merit did not exist, and never could have existed.
For pro-openness to be true in immigration Americans would have to be the lowest-performing people in the world. After all, each step towards openness is a step up, according to the pro-openness. But if Americans were not any better, who would apply for a visa to such a place? What’s more, this would apply to every other country, which would also have to have the worst people in the world, but that is a contradiction-in-terms. They can’t be all the worst at the same time (and in the same respect), yet they would literally have to be the worst, if any and all such openness would improve them.
It is also a serious provocation by the government (and its schools) to say that our people are poor and weak to the extent that any openness to the outside would ‘enrich’ and ‘strengthen’ the population. It is intended, perhaps, also as a racial provocation, to bring closer the race war that officials may be counting on to allow for the establishment of dictatorship.
Sometimes it is said, in support of anti-merit immigration policies, that immigrants are willing to work. But those who say this, also know better than to say to the people of a poor country that “foreigners are willing to develop their minds”. If they did, it would (correctly) be taken as meaning that the natives are not willing to develop their minds, and would be resented. There is no way of getting around the question of merit by saying one group is to be arbitrarily defined as being more willing to work. A group is called hardworking when they can’t be described as productive, yet productiveness is the real value in this regard.
A society that rejects the contributions of those who have the most to offer, in order to force acceptance of the destructiveness of those who have the least to offer is also an anti-merit society for that reason. Today, English is the international language in the same way that (international) mathematics is of the quantitative realm. Someone who does not know English is lacking in international merit in the same way as someone who does not know the symbolization of mathematics is (in a quantitative field). Merit in English language abilities is not merit for a particular country with a particular national language; it is international merit. in spite of this, pro-openness claims that we can improve our society by bringing in millions who are illiterate, or far below standard, in international language. This also proves that pro-openness is anti-merit.
Pro-openness often claims that merit features in immigration policy would be anti-family. It is the immigration policy that divides those families; therefore immigration is anti-family. The more immigrants admitted who would need ‘family reunification’, the more anti-family such a policy must be.
The pro-openness also bids us have compassion for and solidarity with the (political) refugee. It cannot be shown that we need to do that here. In fact, it is wrong to offer that refuge in the rich countries, where public subsidies, often a hundred times greater than what is required in a poor country, are resorted to. There are a great many poor countries who depend on the rich ones, and can thus be made to accept refugees on any scale that was actually needed. That is, needed by true refugees, not by those who are only trying to improve their economic circumstances, yet who pretend to be special objects of persecution.
A real political refugee, who invades our borders, is implicitly attempting to get us to declare war on his country. He turns himself in to the authorities without delay. Yet it may not be feasible for us to accept his war, or to let him declare it for us. In any case, there will never be large numbers in this genuine refugee category. Pro-openness, by emphasizing the refugee, as if there would be a great many honest ones, avoids thè’ issue of human merit, that might otherwise be applied. The pro-openness, by going to such lengths to avoid the application of the merit principle, also indicates how weak it is on that standard. ‘Refugees’ moving toward the rich countries with the most liberal aid programs are a very obvious exploitation. If they were for real, it would be ‘any port in a storm’ for them.
Why would the pro-openness emphasize the category of refugees, when the genuine cases may be no more than one in a thousand of the total immigration, unless it were to find a way to evade the question of merit? We don’t stop imprisoning people for violent crime, just because some few may be falsely convicted. In any case, all the real political refugees can be taken care of outside the rich countries, and there would, in that circumstance, be very few false claimants. Life in a poor country, for someone who is accustomed to it, is not a prison sentence, or a punishing decline in the broad-category status of his living standards. Even if it were, the false claimant of refugee status, who invades a country, does deserve to be punished. Refugee zones can have a high degree of freedom, even in quite poor countries. They can have freedom of publication, with a share of internet connections. They can have economic freedom, to do business among themselves, with the capital that is available to them there. Likewise, other freedoms can be assured to them in such zones, or don't send them there.
What they mustn't be given is an inheritance of the results of past freedom and virtues, which give them every incentive to lie about what drives them out. It is too easy to lie, when all that is required is to suffer. Rewards should be for virtues and achievement, not suffering and attunement to what story needs to be told to get a share of the rich man's legacy.
What they mustn't be given is an inheritance of the results of past freedom and virtues, which give them every incentive to lie about what drives them out. It is too easy to lie, when all that is required is to suffer. Rewards should be for virtues and achievement, not suffering and attunement to what story needs to be told to get a share of the rich man's legacy.
The pro-openness is also quite active in trying to get privileges for foreign criminals, who are illegally residing in a country, which they have invaded. These include a large proportion who cross the border in groups, carrying weapons, and with obvious hostile intentions against the laws and standards of the invaded country.
It is clear that merit principles would never favor the illegal alien, but pro-openness does. Pro-openness tries to get amnesties and public subsidies for the illegal alien, and says that those who oppose them in these efforts, are ‘against the diversity’. They try to make it sound as if only racism would be against this swarming-in of foreign criminals.
The illegal alien is in a status relation, rather than a free-contracting relation, to the citizens he deals with. He is not in a position to report crimes that he witnesses, and that places him outside any rational community of values. As an illegal alien, his is not a rational life. He is a party to aggression when he does not cooperate with law enforcement to the necessary extent. To allow robbery and other such crimes to go unreported is to be in complicity with aggression. This pattern favors the more violent, thievery rules the places that they live in, such that pro-openness is here asking for diversity from law, from peace, from reason and decency. This openness is a very clear conflict with the rational life-interests of the citizenry.
Does not tolerance of illegal immigration select for those with the greatest hostility towards the laws and standards of the country that harbors them? What would happen to a society that continually selects for those most willing to bring its standards down? Would such a country even revive the slave trade, since there are no standards we shouldn’t sacrifice, according to the pro-openness, so long as there is some additional openness to be gained? Going further down in terms of exploitation may be pro-openness, but who else could value such a state of affairs? The use of illegal aliens represents an extreme case of exploitativeness because of the status difference as against the citizen.
The pro-openness asks also whether we are for competition, when it works for us, but against it when it is inconvenient. No one believes in competition as an unlimited value. Hitler and Stalin were in a competition to kill the most people, but no one would call that good competition. Competition for sovereignty is war, or civil war. It is not right to idealize competiton, as to the point where warlike competition, involving actual aggression, is cheered on. Valuing openness to competition for sovereignty is to value war itself. Even the strictly economic competition doesn’t and shouldn’t try to cheapen every element of production. It would miss the chances to increase wealth, if it did blindly attempt to cheapen every aspect of production. An increase in competition on the low end of the economy is bad if it prevents the raising of economic standards.
Some kinds of competition result in displacement without making the general population any better off. If the government promotes this, isn’t it immoral, for officials to dislodge people unnecessarily? In the case of immigration, what are they in the way of, a treacherous policy of aiding the foreigner, while leaving the citizenry undefended, who are made to move out in order to aid and accommodate the foreign diversity? Are they guilty of wanting to live free of (frequently subsidized) lowlife competition sliding in (often illegally) from abroad? Do they have an irrational fear of the foreign criminals who exploit the undefended borders to move into a life of crime?
Perhaps it will also be said that the existence of armies is ‘xenophobic’, or that the existence of sovereign countries is ‘xenophobic’. If borders, armies, and sovereign lands represent ‘neuroses’, we need more of them, though. The psychologizing of politics is a kind of ad hominem response that evades (and fears) the political points that were to be answered. It shows a very weak argument, to be only willing to criticize your opponents possible psychology (rather than his argument).
Instead of attempting to diagnose races, nations, classes and so on, the pro-openness partisans should say what they need anti-merit immigrants for. Would they dare say that it is in order to bring standards down, out of gratuitous malice against those who have some standards (that they would like to maintain or improve)?
This sets them against all human merit; to say not 'let the best man win' but 'let in my relatives regardless', is to be anti-merit. The presence of the anti-merit immigrants is a constant affront to justice. Justice would not have chosen these people (above others). That they they might have been admitted on a free immigration policy is no objection; such a policy is impossible in a welfare society.
This sets them against all human merit; to say not 'let the best man win' but 'let in my relatives regardless', is to be anti-merit. The presence of the anti-merit immigrants is a constant affront to justice. Justice would not have chosen these people (above others). That they they might have been admitted on a free immigration policy is no objection; such a policy is impossible in a welfare society.
According to Representative W.N. Vaile of Colorado, speaking to the congress in 1924, "If there is a charge of 'discrimination', the charge necessarily involves the idea that the proposed quota varies from some standard which is supposed to be not 'discriminatory'. What is that standard"? The pro-openness wouldn't even ask that question, or at least not in such a way as to suggest that it could possibly be answered. Perhaps what Vaile meant was that we are entitled to discriminate and can't be reasonably criticized for it, because there is no compelling standard of human merit, or at least not that many people care to recognize. Yet if there are no general standards of human merit, then we are perfectly entitled to discriminate on any arbitrary grounds and no one can reasonably appeal to higher justice. If we are to have some standards, then these apply also to all kinds of recruitment, including immigration. The pro-openness calls all merit standards 'discriminatory', and insists that any and all of them be dropped.
They are to be dropped in favor of openness to diversity. A diversity of bodies, of physical types, imported on a government policy, and on a public subsidy (to maintain them), is also what we are to damage our standards for. Even though all standards are discriminatory and harmful, we can at least be sure that the dominant is somehow evil, according to the pro-openness. By what standards can anyone claim to know this? If they say they can know it by some standard, there is an obvious contradiction-in-terms, showing up there and then.There is nothing evil about the dominant as such. Pro-openness does not attempt to show how the dominant is evil, and cannot do so, if all standards are discriminatory (as they say). In many cases, one can know perfectly well that the dominant has value or virtues that are superior, because it is by those qualities alone that it can become or remain the dominant.
In reality it is important to have standards, not so much the racial categories. But for the pro-openness, merit standards are perfectly disposable, while racial classifications are the necessities of life and of functioning society. On this observation, one would have to conclude that racial conflict is a partly hidden, yet important objective for the pro-openness.
The pro-openness is enthusiastic in its racialization of any discussion of immigration. They would like us to believe it’s all about race. If the pro-openness insists that only racism could be against anti-merit immigration, why not inquire if this has any chance of being true? It is known that the incomes of recent immigrants are far below those of the citizenry. The difference is on the order of thirty percent lower for post-1980 immigrants. Median personal incomes for these immigrants show that sort of disparity. This has serious implications for net public subsidy of those cohorts (post-1980). In a welfare society, low-income populations are parasitical on the above-average groups.
If every other immigrant in the post-1980 group has one child in public school, that would be over $4,000 per adult immigrant. It is actually somewhat less than this, so let the estimate be $3,000 per adult (post-1980) immigrant. America spends over $6,000 per person on medical expenses. Older people get around half of this, so allow $3,000 per adult (post -1980) immigrant plus $1,500 for the one child for (approximately) every two of them. Asthma, diabetes, and other medical conditions are distributed broadly across the age groups, as is the free (or heavily subsidized) dental care.
The police, courts, and prison systems cost over $150 billion a year. Each additional resident requires their share of this total to be added on; in round numbers: $500 a year. Public transit is heavily subsidized, and is heavily used by immigrants. To this can be added a share of the cost of the military, subsidized municipal water delivery, subsidized utility services that lose money on low-income customers (as required by the government), translation and foreign language subsidies, government immigration services given below cost, and whatever public subsides that may add up to $1,000 a year.
This brings our total to over $9,000 a year per person. From this must be subtracted the taxes that are paid. If the median personal income of this group is estimated at $16,000 and taxes at $3,000 we have a net public subsidy of $6,000 per person before the interest on the national debt is added. Since the immigrant is borrowing the money for his public subsidy (through the government), the interest rate on the national debt must be applied to what he has drawn down. This will double the net public subsidy to the typical (post -1980) immigrant. The government has run large deficits during all this period, often at high interest rates. The immigrant must be charged the interest that is actually attributable to him for this estimate. The total net public subsidy to the typical post-1980 immigrant adult is estimated here at more than $10,000 a year, with essentially no hope of repayment. Their incomes are still in the net public subsidy range twenty years on, with retirement only ten or twenty years beyond that.
Since more immigrants come in each year, the public subsidy mounts up to hundreds of billions a year. The citizenry now pays hundreds of billions a year just to import this diversity of anti-merit immigrants. It is not supported out of current income, but by borrowing in competition with capital investment. The money is borrowed from rich foreigners who may realize before long that our ‘investment’ in public subsidy of the openness to diversity only gives rise to a demand for further subsidies, but never to repayment.
The pro-openness like to say that we are ‘investing in people’. Other countries invest in production, but America ‘invests in people’, that is, in consumption. ‘Investing in people’ is another hideous political slogan. Yet if it is taken as a metaphor, unseemly as it is, it would be education and training that it might refer to. But is education given more to the retarded, or should it be more for the brighter and less for the less-qualified? Likewise with immigration policy; do we ‘invest’ more in those who receive public subsidy because they are non-English speaking, uneducated, illiterate or criminal, or does morality require that we give first place to those who are most above standard, and reject those who are below it?
In any case the term ‘investing in people’ is really too insulting to the objects of the ‘investments'; they are not our slaves. Governments with any pretense of respecting individual rights should be too embarrassed to use such a phrase as ‘investing in people’. It is a cover-name for public subsidy, for current consumption. In the case of anti-merit immigrants from the post-1980 cohorts this ‘investment’ is an obvious case of huge sums thrown down the public subsidy rat-hole. Nothing is left to show for it, but the openness and the national debt, trillions upon trillions, ‘invested in people’, in openness, in consumption, - just to do damage. The Orwellian big-lie technique, a contradiction-in-terms such as referring to current consumption as ‘investment’ (in people) is an indication of how strong the arguments for developing openness might be. One could note that no recipients of this ‘investing in people’ are actually required to pay it back. If some of them actually do repay, that is thoroughly unexpected. Yes, they call it an ‘investment’ where there is no expectation, or requirement of repayment.
The reason that so many immigrants parasitize the citizenry is because they have children in public school at a higher rate than the citizens and because they don’t have older relatives who have long paid taxes in this country. Since such a large percentage are in the twenty-five to fifty age group, their fertility rates don’t need to be very high in order to eat up public subsides at a rate that is ruinous to the citizenry.
A willingness to consume net public subsidy from the citizenry established the foreigner of that type as an aggressor, definitely lacking in rights. Such a foreigner has only privileges which may be cancelled anytime. The other big reason for net public subsidy consumption by anti-merit immigrants is their low incomes. In their first ten years, they are typically one-third below the median. Even after twenty years they are most commonly well below the median income, and this means massive public subsidy. Yet the pro-openness finds it convenient to pretend that recent immigrants are net taxpayers. Actually the anti-merit (pro-openness) immigration is like adding another Puerto Rico every few years. If the last twenty million immigrants cost the citizenry upwards of $200 billion a year, how much will we be weakened and impoverished by the next twenty years’ quotas of anti-merit immigrants? Yet the pro-openness insists that we are ‘enriched’ and ‘strengthened’ by the new openness to diversity from abroad. Adding trillions onto the national debt just to accommodate the immigrant, is ‘riches’ and ‘strength’?
In Europe, the diversity is brought in by refugees, who receive outright welfare far beyond what happens in America. Again, the governments borrow money to import diversity at enormous expense. If openness were a safe value for man, the countries that import such diversity at public expense would not be worse off financially, but they are.
In Kuwait, the refugees who were living there at the time of the Iraqi invasion often joined the invaders, and aided in the pillaging of the country. In the Congo, refugees have started, and kept going, numerous civil wars, resulting in the death of millions. If one population is called the victims, this doesn’t mean that they can’t (or don’t) victimize others. The most brutalized are not the least, but the most, likely to victimize.
In America, the metropolitan areas with the highest percentage of anti-merit immigrants are most often among the poorest in the country. The lower Rio Grande Valley (Brownsville), El Paso, San Antonio, Yuma, Miami, and the Imperial Valley of California are in the lowest income category of populous districts. When a city starts out way above the average, anti-merit immigration pushes it back down towards the national median personal income and even below. If pro-openness could establish a legitimate value , these negative events would not occur.
In California, the public schools’ performance was in the top ten percent of the states, before the mass anti-merit immigration policy was set up in the 1960’s. By the year 2000, their public schools performance had fallen to the bottom ten percent, alongside Mississippi and Louisiana. A vast increase in openness had occurred as a result of agitation by anti-merit activists. Yet if openness were a safe value for people to try to hold, this astonishing downfall of school performance would not have happened. Now, why should California be much more a center for high technology in the future than Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana or Alabama? Will they be able to make up the difference by importing foreign talent, in the context of anti-merit immigration policies, and yet also proportionally more than, say, Louisiana?
Boostering stories about the value of openness may fool some people, but they can’t prevent intellectual disabilities in the population from having their effects. The pro-openness can say that only racists would be so impolitic as to mention such results, but the placement of speech taboos doesn’t allow for the amelioration of any such problems. It actually tends to retard progress on such difficulties (as become off-limits to rational discussion).
New York City is another big example of a place that received a massive increase in openness at the same time that its schools went from above average to the level of the lowest performing school aggregates (i.e., where the comparison is of this city to state averages). Even one such example contradicts the prediction of pro-openness; that an increase in openness would bring standards up, not down. This means also that the standing of the increasingly diverse should not decline relative to the less diverse. Pro-openness predicts that the relative standings should favor the more diverse, but the facts indicate that the opposite is true, although perhaps not in every last case.
Pro-openness also predicts that diversity brought in by immigration policies should not bring economic standards down from what they would have been without the new openness. The theory of supply-and-demand indicates that more labor supply will bring the wage-levels down from what they would have otherwise been. If two countries start at the same level, but one of them brings in diversity through immigration while the other doesn’t, the more diverse country will fall behind. That is, the more ‘diversifying’ country will have lower economic standards than the other, provided that it ‘diversifies’ on a large scale.
The supply and demand for labor causes this to happen, because labor also competes with capital (such as labor-saving machinery). When, for the sake of openness, much labor is brought in from abroad, there will be substitution of labor for capital investment (which is of a labor-saving type). That is, new capital investments in labor-saving categories will be displaced by abundant labor. This will happen to some extent with any labor force increase, but it can become extreme in its effects in the case of anti-merit immigration that involves large numbers. With mass immigration of an anti-merit type, there are levels where existing capital investments of a labor-saving kind will be displaced. All this follows necessarily from the principle of supply-and-demand relations, and from the fact that there is some considerable substitutability of labor and capital. From this, one should expect that a pro-openness immigration, recruited in large numbers on an anti-merit basis will bring economic standards down from what they would otherwise have been. Yet pro-openness predicts the opposite.
The facts are not compatible with the pro-openness prediction. During the period of mass anti-merit immigration into the United States, since 1973, median personal incomes have stagnated or even declined, for around three decades running. Unemployment has increased several times over since the 1960’s. Productivity growth has fallen from around three percent a year (in the sixties) to about one percent a year (since 1973). Other countries, such as Canada and Australia, with similar circumstances of mass immigration, had similar declines. But, countries with no pro-openness immigration policies, such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, had no slowdown in productivity growth comparable to that of America.
Countries with the fastest labor force growth are also (with few exceptions) the poorest in the world. Nigeria, Mali, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia, and Somalia are examples of this effect. Almost any government, no matter how bad, can usually manage one or two percent growth. But very few can do better than that per capita. If all you know about a country is its labor force (or population) growth rate, you can guess its per capita income and its rank order position in the total list of countries to an amazingly accurate degree. This high correlation cannot be a coincidence. The exceptions have obvious explanations such as a recent oil discovery or a once-in-a-century political collapse. This most improbable correlation to the rank order of per capita incomes (if it were coincidence) indicates a likely causal relation. The suggested mechanism is the pre-empting of the opportunity for labor-saving capital investment by labor force growth.
Then we have writers like Julian Simon who, in the Ultimate Resource, says "“.. . it is better to have more people and a lower per capita income...”. Per capita income is not a valid criterion, according to Simon, because “...it would mean doing away with all lower-income people.” This assumes that absolute dictatorship, bent on mass murder or expulsions, is compatible with maximization of per-capita output, even in the richest countries possible with today’s technology. Also, that individuals' rights can be disposed of without causing economic failure. Further, that unlimited violent aggression can be committed in a country and somehow, also, not do violence to economic values. The pro-openness, also, denies the validity of per capita output as a criterion. Note that those who are enthusiastic for anti-merit immigration (such as Julian Simon) find it necessary to eliminate per capita production as a criterion of success. When the people realize that they have been fooled on the question of whether openness can improve their living standards, the pro-openness can just fall back on their denial of per capita production as a criterion of progress.
In this, the pro-openness would have the precedent of the religious who say: cast your bread upon the waters and it will return to you tenfold. But when it does not return at all, they respond that wealth, production, and such values are worldly and unworthy of a noble spirit. Likewise with the pro-openness; if you complain that no ‘riches’ or ‘strength’ appear, even though we have multiplied the openness, because none could ever spring from openness as such, it is said that you are racist, you are intolerant, ungenerous and lacking in the sensibility that could appreciate openness for its own sake. But weren’t the donors supposed to gain by ‘investing’ in openness? Why is the pro-openness entitled to a contradiction as serious as this? Why must they make ad hominem accusations against those who bring to light these contradictions? Openness is good for you, unless you realize that it very likely won’t be, in which case, you are just bad, and the bad cannot speak the truth on the subject of openness-as-a-value?
Is it like the Emperor’s New Clothes, this openness value-representation, which only the evil cannot see the splendors of? This emperor, pro-openness, is wearing no clothes at all, and not everyone is afraid to say so, just because same charlatans have declared that only the immoral cannot see them.
The people would prefer to have high and rising standards, and not just be made to share with the foreigner for no reason other than that he is diverse from them. Perhaps a professor in the pay of the government could talk himself into believing that any other person, no matter how bad, is his moral superior. This is what openness-as-a-value would mean, if anyone believed it literally. Yet public policy is to be based on what no one can literally believe; that any other person, including the worst, has ‘diversity-value’ over him?
The diversity is most commonly below the average. With major support from the pro-openness, immigration policy has been so anti-merit for so long that scarcely one percent of the total immigration would have been able to be admitted on an all-merit basis. This is a group of perhaps two-hundred thousand, and one from which breakthrough developments might reasonably be expected to come. That is, not frequently, but almost to the exclusion of other echelons which are also theoretically capable of contributing an important new development, as in science or technology.
This consideration gives the lie to the claim of the pro-openness that anti-merit immigration policies are to be credited with such breakthroughs as do happen with foreigners or immigrants in the country. Likewise openness-as-a-value can be given no credit, an all-merit immigration policy could give us fifty times as much, and it would all be because of high standards, not from openness as such. Pro-openness militates against any such standards, then points to an inventor of foreign birth, or an immigrant Nobel prizewinner, as though an all-merit policy could so easily have rejected these. Perhaps in some cases it would reject a few of them, but that doesn’t compare to the dozens of times as many which an all-merit policy would likely yield us. As to the abstract possibility of free immigration into a wealthy alternative-welfare society, would any brilliant people be willing to just plunge into such a chaos of plundering, if it is even briefly possible?
Similarly, what becomes of those of great and rare merit, who are rejected by the anti-merit policies? What if many of them would actually need to match up with a large and rich society or institution, in order to develop to the point of making a great contribution? How much, then, are we missing out on, by indulging an unclean taste for anti-merit policies? If it were many hundreds of billions a year, would this not be a monstrously large tribute to the pro-openness in power?
Pro-openness causes us to lose now, not just in the hypothetical future of a more extreme case of the pro-openness, anti-merit society. Worse, it has been doing so long enough to accumulate an overhang of past losses, a lot like the national debt. It can bleed us slowly, or quickly, or very rapidly, as in the extreme case of racial-ethnic war. In any case, the openness has been proven not to be a safe value for man.
Pro-openness cannot tolerate there being one truth on a given point, because that would suppress the openness to diversity of untruths.
The pro-openness once claimed that its doubters and critics must be advocates of inbreeding. Yet, with a dominant species, namely human beings, the pro-openness would call for interbreeding chimps and humans just to get genetic diversity into a dominant.
Pro-openness, which at one time claimed to be an opponent of racism, now has universities preaching racial hatred against Caucasians. This is not incidental to it, pro-openness does blame the white race for the downfall of diversity in the world. Pro-openness has often claimed that its only alternative is the idolatry of the clone, yet identical twins are clones and it can never be proven that there is anything evil about them (as human clones).
Mutations are the new genetic diversity. The pro-openness, which pretended to be concerned with human health and disease-resistance, is now shown to be pro-mutagen, pro-carcinogen and pro-teratogen. But we can never be too ‘rich’ with openness, it is said. Pro-openness is in self-contradiction for being against any universal, which is a dominant (if anything is), while also insisting on a universal; namely, the pro-openness ‘principle’. The pro-openness is especially opposed to universal standards, therefore it is destructive of any community of values. Without these, only civil war is possible.
The pro-openness of today regards the huge downfall of diversity of rare species (and of rare languages) that is underway as disaster and as multi-genocide. If this is true, what degree of violation of rights could the pro-openness not accept to slow down the extinctions and ‘genocides’?
If genetic openness could be a safe value for man, then ‘lethal mutagenesis’ could be used in all sorts of populations, including human beings, with beneficial, rather than lethal results. Diversification of investments is not a case of any actual ‘openness-value’. If it could be, then one could increase the quality of a portfolio by diversifying well below investment-grade. The higher the proportion of bankrupt companies’ paper in the portfolio, the greater the ‘openness-value, if such could exist. ‘Openness-value’ has to mean diversifying towards lower value, if it is to be used as a standard (more than just sporadically).
The coercive pro-openness in recruitment, with its racial emphasis, involves believing that ideas are transmitted genetically and in a racial pattern. But that is the literal meaning of racism, which pro-openness claims is the belief of those who deny the ‘openness-value’. Yet the pro-openness defines racism as applying a standard that results in a disadvantaged race getting less.
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Pro-openness has schools accepting people who are in the bottom ten percent of the standard scale that applies to the majority, to the ‘non-diverse’. Then they graduate such people, and even send them out to practice surgery on those who don’t realize that they are living in an anti-merit society, ruled by anti-merit activists. Pro-openness sets up diversity of disabilities as an ersatz value.
Pro-openness also involves establishing racial conspiracy theory as an official doctrine to explain, why the 'diversity-value’ of minorities does not express itself economically or culturally. The diversity supposedly would be on the same level as the dominants, if it were not for the exclusionary activities of the dominants. According to this official doctrine, such exclusionary activity is never necessary to prove.
The assumption of equality in this sense, as in multiculturalism, is contradictory. It is not an example of superior culture, to say that there are no superior cultures. The coercive pro-openness in recruitment excludes people because of their race; ‘too few’ of one kind has to mean ‘too many’ of another classification. Officials have chosen race, rather than some other point of division, not in spite of, but because of, its high potential to set off internal warfare. Consider that most of the independent states that exist today arose by partitions that were made in the context of ongoing racial policies.
It is only the least reconcilable differences that could interest the pro-openness. The policy of ‘divide-and-conquer’ is the historical precedent for this central feature of the pro-openness establishment.
Immigration policy is a large component of the pro-openness regime. Immigration can be effective in dividing a country into irreconcilable groups, when brought in on an anti-merit policy. What if the government recruited employees almost entirely on the basis of blood connections? Yet this is accepted in immigration policy. It is provocation for the government to say that our people are poor and weak to the extent that any openness to diversity from abroad would ‘strengthen’ and ‘enrich’ us.
The furtherance of civilization may require that some important countries have merit policies on immigration, yet the pro-openness is intensely opposed to such a development. All genuine refugees can be accommodated in lower-income countries; since, as repressive regimes are established or overthrown, there will always be much poorer countries, which recently have acquired about as much freedom as the richest several dozen countries, or can provide it in a refugee area. The wealthiest countries need only use their power to get the (genuine) refugees accommodated in those lower-income countries.
The maintenance of armies and the borders of sovereign states is not known to be xenophobia. If the pro-openness have an argument to support their position, why would they try to diagnose nationalities as having a neurosis? In any case, the pro-openness is not in a position to diagnose classes, nations, and other such large groups and never will be (because no one ever is).
In America, the typical immigrant is on net public subsidy for decades, and often permanently. The expenses are not negligible, but add up to considerable sums per immigrant. Overseas, the situation often is much worse. This sort of ‘investing in people’ is causing massive losses; it is current consumption of a damaging kind. Yet to the pro-openness it doesn’t matter if nothing is left to show for these ‘investments’ but the openness. Large-scale anti-merit immigration gives large increases in the supply of labor, especially on the low end of the pay-scale. But capital and labor are substitutable for each other to such an extent that this immigration must bring wages, labor standards and productivity down from where they would otherwise have been. This theory (supply-and-demand) predicts the stagnation of median personal income, the decreased rate of productivity gains, and rising unemployment of the most recent decades of mass anti-merit immigration, but a pro-openness theory must predict the opposite. When pro-openness results in declining, or long-stagnating per capita outcomes, it turns out that pro-openness denies the validity of per capita improvements as a criterion of success.
In conclusion, openness is not a safe or acceptable value for man. For those who say they believe in it the most, pro-openness is more likely a cover for a passion to establish dictatorship and do great damage to the good. It is, by now, clear that pro-openness, if honestly believed in, would have people doing what no one ever actually does. It would have them believing what no one ever really believes, such as that any destitute foreigner is better than them, just by being different, or diverse as they say. Since the pro-openness is not honestly and radically believed in at all, it must also function as a cover for the real value or sentiment behind it. Pro-openness is a passion for the outlawry of human merit, for anti-merit society and the dictatorship that could radically impose it, for the racial and ethnic wars that allow for this, and for mass death. Pro-openness is not a proper human value, but an intensified (and slightly concealed) hatred against any proper human values.
The pro-openness, if they had rational arguments available to them, would not be so bereft that they would need to say that only the fascist, only the racist, only the xenophobic, only the human-cloning enthusiast, only the human inbreeding devotee, or only the endangered species destroyer, could fail to see the value of openness. The reliance on this ad hominem technique indicates a most serious failure to develop convincing arguments in favor of openness-value.
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