BURNHAM, JAMES, Suicide of the West

It is C, the Forgotten Man, who is always called upon to stanch the politician’s bleeding heart by paying for his vicarious generosity.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty towards others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like a giving hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

If we are made in some degree for others, yet, in a greater, are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling, and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable.

It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose a man had less right in himself than one of this neighbors or all of them put together...Nothing could so completely divest us of that liberty as the establishment of the opinion, that the State has a perpetual right to the services of all of its members.

Unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous.

The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remaining explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty...The signs of the conflict and of the toll it was to exact...were evident in Jefferson’s proposal for free public education; in Paine’s advocacy of a number of governmental welfare functions; in Franklin’s view that an individual has no right to his "superfluous" property.

Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor’s pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man’s duty is to serve - according to a purely quantitative standard of value. He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic class, but the greatest happiness of the greatest number, regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one’s own happiness, says [John Stuart] Mill, the individual must be "disinterested" and "strictly impartial"; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions....[T]he capitalist system ensures that, most of the time, the actual result of individual profit-seeking is the happiness of society as a whole. Hence the individual should be left free of government regulation...not as an absolute...not on the ground of inalienable rights...but [on the ground of] social utility. Mill (along with Smith, Say, and the rest of the classical economists) was trying to defend an individualist system by accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents.

[T]he justification of individual freedom in terms of its contribution to the welfare of society means collectivism.

Since there is no rational justification for the sacrifice of some men to others, there is no objective criterion by which such a sacrifice can be guided in practice.

[Under the politics of altruism] the sole recourse of the citizens is to gang up on one another and maneuver for who’ll get sacrificed to whom.

Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only moral justification for his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state - to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation - and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

Man - every man - is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others.

Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution- or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others - misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement - failure is not a mortgage on success - suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence - man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone's altar nor for anyone's cause - life is not one huge hospital.

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.

The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.

Do-gooders fail to realize that most good done in the world is not done in the name of good. Most good things get done because of self-interest.