The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  Weathermen

  welfare

  West Germany

  “What Is the People” (Hazlitt)

  What Went Wrong (Lewis)

  White Guilt (Steele)

  Whitman, Meg

  “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” (Mamet)

  Wikileaks

  Wisconsin

  Women-in-Jeopardy films

  work

  World Turned Upside Down, The (Phillips)

  World War

  Wright, Frank Lloyd

  Wright brothers

  xenophobia

  Y2K scare

  Yellowstone Park

  Yiddish

  youth

  Zionist Conference

  1 I do not think I am naïve. I have been supporting myself for quite a while, and, as a young man, took every job I could get. I was very glad to have them, but my happiness was neither gratitude toward my employers, nor insensitivity to the various slights, uncertainties, and thefts to which the unskilled, myself among them, were all subject. I was glad to have the money, and looked (and look) for any opportunity to earn more with less expenditure of effort and in more congenial circumstances. This attitude, I believe, is fairly widely shared, cutting across even the most deeply riven political lines.

  2 See the educative outpouring of admiration, after September 11, for the police and firefighters, and the military—for those of our fellow Americans actually involved in the legitmate operation of Government. See also, per contra, Government’s affection for privatization—of the Chicago parking system, of various national prisons, of toll roads, of the care and feeding of troops. These among the few, legitimate enterprises of Government have in common a benefit to the citizenry greater through government oversight than would be delivered by the Free Market competition. Privatization is called “outsourcing,” but it is merely sale by incumbents of the property which is the people’s. Can anyone believe that any franchise has ever been sold by any government anywhere other than with the accrual of some personal benefit to the executives and legislators involved in the sale?

  3 President Obama said, “The individual at some point, must be able to say, ‘I have enough money.’ ” But will Mr. Obama, out of office, say this of himself, and of the vast riches he will enjoy? One must doubt it.

  4 The Right and the Left, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals—the goal of the Left is a Government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought either to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

  5 Compare Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, 1914: “For the basis of settled habit goes to sustain the institutional fabric of received sophistications, and these sophistications are bound in such a network of give-and-take that a disturbance of the fabric at any point will involve more or less of a derangement throughout. This body of habitual principle and preconceptions is at the same time the medium through which experience receives those elements of information and insight on which workmanship is able to draw in contriving ways and means and turning them to account for the uses of life.”

  6 See also the grand visions of Urban Planning, which destroyed the Black Neighborhood, Welfare, which destroyed the Black Family, and Affirmative Action, which is destroying the Black Youth.

  7 Consider the congruent phenomenon of the response to the inevitable failure of Government Programs. These Good Ideas—the Great Society, the War on Poverty, etc.—as above, upon inevitable failure, spawn increased governmental programs to “complete” their “work”—their failure being, inevitable again, ascribed to underfunding.

  8 The mastery of skills is, more basically, essential, as inculcating the practical approach to problems: that is, “What am I trying to accomplish, is it worthwhile, what are its probable costs, where might I go for guidance, what tools do I require, how may I judge my progress?” These tools are the necessary precondition of any success in the world, whether in changing a tire or in supporting a family. As obvious as it is to state, the test, “How will I know when I am done?” seems to have escaped the voters on the Left. “When,” they might be asked, “will there be enough ‘Social Justice’? When will there be enough redistributing of wealth? When will there be enough ‘equality’?” This inability, in the electorate, to frame actual, practicable goals is exploited, first by the demagogue, and then by the dictator he may become or who replaces him; for, in the totalitarian state, nothing is enough, and, so the “Programs” must always continue.

  9 Liberal Arts colleges have also traditionally sold their wares on the claim that such will allow the students to “discover themselves.” It is no accident that decades of such advertising have attracted and produced graduates who are unfitted for society, who can survive only through parental or institutional subvention, as intellectuals, as soi-disant “artists” or as “drifters.” Who does not know the thirty-year-old described by his parents as “still searching for himself?” By forty this person is, by his parents, generally not described at all, for to do so would be either to skirt or to employ the term “bum+.” It is not the purpose of the university to allow or to help students “find themselves,” but to fit them to take a place in and contribute to their society. How may endorsing and prolonging the impenetrable solipsism of adolescence do so? It cannot and it has not.

  10 The intellectual may dismiss their importance (confirmation, baptism, Bar Mitzvah, marriage) but, in so doing, he does not obviate, but merely postpones and camouflages their appearance.

  The contemporary youth, pampered in perpetual adolescence through college and graduate school, is spared, or, it may be said, is unaware of the necessity that self-sufficiency is a prerequisite for marriage.

  He lives in a serial nonpledged monogamy, in ad-lib cohabitation. This is preceded by no awe-provoking exchange of oaths, or reminder of his (now legal) duties.

  When he tires, and eventually marries, the ceremony will be understood as supererogatory—has he not engaged in cohabitation several times before? He knows how to live with a woman, he has done it many times.

  The awesomeness of an oath, and the meaning of his signature on a legal document

  committing him to various responsibilities, will occur to him—though only at the end of his marriage. They, in their totality are known as “divorce,” which has, in our day, replaced marriage as the culturally determined ritual signifying “leaving home.”

  The ceremony of beginning one’s new home, of separating from one’s parents, originally ending in marriage, with desire and joy, has been replaced and is now attended by rancor and shock: the community has finally insisted upon its rights.

  11 In 1998 Daimler-Benz, and the Chrysler Corporation, of the U.S. were engaged in prolonged negotiations regarding their proposed merger. A sign appeared on the shop floor at Chrysler: “Culture will beat organization every time.” (Paul Ingrassia, Crash Course)

  A guest comes to your house. He mentions that he collects and enjoys rare scotch.

  It happens that you have just received a bottle of rare scotch, and it sits, unopened, on your sideboard. “I’m not a big scotch drinker,” you say. “I wouldn’t know one from another, but I just received this as a gift. It’s just going to sit there; please, why don’t you take it?”

  The guest may accept or decline the gift. Should he accept he is likely to say: “Thank you, but only on the condition that you share it with me.” You open the bottle and the guest pours you both a shot, which you both enjoy with the appropriate comments. When the evening is over, it is not unlikely that the guest will leave without reference to the now-opened bottle. At this point you, the host, are likely to suggest that he take “his” bottle with him. He, again, may accept with thanks, or refuse gracefully. No social norms have been violated.

  But consider a similar situation.

  The guest arrives, a
nd notes the rare bottle of scotch. You open it, and pour two drinks, and you both remark on its excellence. At the close of dinner you suggest that, as you are not a big scotch drinker, the guest should take the bottle home with him. This is now a gross breach of manners; the guest cannot accept without the taint of greed, he cannot decline without the risk of offense, and, indeed, he has been offended, for he has, now, not been offered a gift, but scraps from your table.

  12 See the presumption of courts to award custody of small children to mothers; and California’s community property law, which, however much it presents itself as gender neutral, is, effectively, an acknowledgment that a woman’s period of nubility is limited and irreplaceable. In the above cases the cultural understanding that women and infants must be protected is so deep and ineradicable that even in a climate of supposed “gender neutrality” (see the absurdity of women paying alimony to men), the law assumes the coloration of gender-blindness in order to serve the underlying goal, which is the viability of the culture irrespective of those laws enacted for its supposed betterment.

  13 Why is the MA in English literature, film, gender studies, and so on, bagging groceries? Because he is just too old to begin an apprenticeship. That door has closed, and his college career has ensured his fittedness only for the position it was advertised as obviating: a menial job.

  14 Those on the Left, generally, do not understand that they are endorsing a position. They understand what, to the Right, would be arguable assumptions, as “beyond question,” or, to use a blunter but more accurate term, “taboo.”

  15 Is it “a racist country,” because some television show was hawking as news a group of deranged skinheads posturing? Let’s note the fact that the broadcasters considered it a sufficient novelty to display it as newsworthy. And let us note further that there is no position closed to any African American because of his race. Our laws and our culture as a whole have conclusively rejected racism. Why does it delight the Left to claim the contrary?

  16 The Liberal child, unexposed to the concept of self-support, is discouraged from, and indeed will not anticipate, the day of its necessity. And see the assumption underlying the Liberal’s consignment of his child to a wash in the gentle pool of doctrine: What is it? That “something will turn up”—he, as an adult participant in a sick economy, knows it will not—or that Society will take care of his child. Putting aside the question of “Why should it?” or “Who will pay?” let us ask “With what monies?” The third, unexamined, and, I fear, more prevalent method of dealing with the child’s economic future is not to. “Rabbi Judah said, ‘He who does not teach his son a craft teaches him brigandage.’ ” (Gemara Kiddushin 29A, with thanks to Rabbi Mordecai Finley.)

  17 Note that these endeavors are easily mastered, in a short intensive course of study or of laying-on-of-hands. They are, in this, much like, and indeed are the progeny of, those leisure activities once known as Adult Education, and tagged generically, by wits at the time of its emergence just post-war, as “underwater basket weaving.” They are not learned but imbibed, either through the short-course indoctrination or through the individual’s magical discovery of his “gift.”

  18 So much for the family.

  19 “The wealthy and the powerful no longer have the monopoly of violence they had in the past, and it’s driving them up the wall.” (Noam Chomsky, A Hated Political Enemy.)

  20 In the opinion of Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor.

  21 The problem, at the end, is that there must be governments, as Moyo says, to pay for things everyone uses but no one wants to fund, like her lamppost. But governments, as they grow, grow corrupt, and aid, as it has corrupted Africa, has corrupted America. We call it taxes.

  To make government responsible to the citizens it was originally designed to serve, its size must be reduced, for the invitation to corruption and waste, for personal gain, or from “good intentions” is so great as to be evidently insurmountable. Government must be reduced, not abolished, which is the all-purpose canard of the Left. “Do you then vote for anarchy or laissez faire?” But reduced to the point at which the harm it inevitably does can be controlled or reversed. This potentiality is the true worth of the system of free enterprise—the alternative being periodic revolution, where governments are overthrown; which is, as Moyo says, the problem with Africa. We elect the worst, on both sides, and then marvel that they steal, subvert, waffle, and do every last thing but obey their oath to defend the Constitution. They are not elected to “do well, “ or to “transform” but to serve, protect, and defend the Constitution. And we will only stand a chance of finding those actually dedicated to doing so when we take the money out of it—both theirs to spend and squander, and that accruing to them, on their golden retirement, for all the favors they have done.

  22 “Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It [sic] is therefore fear-based.” (Deepak Chopra) Is it too much to suggest that this quote contains the most basic prescription of Liberalism, “Stop thinking”?

  23 In a conversation with a Liberal Friend, The International Committee on Climate Control had been found to be cooking the books on Global Warming, and its much vaunted “hockey stick” graph showing a marked abrupt increase in the world’s temperature incident with the consumption of fossil fuels was revealed as a sham. The Liberal said, yes, perhaps this was true, but would we want to scrap our efforts to control a situation as Serious as Global Warming simply because the phenomenon was proved to be an invention? His argument recalled to me Al Sharpton’s championship of Tawana Brawley, whose false accusations and perjury led to the persecution of innocent police officers and the disruption of their lives. When she recanted, and admitted perjury, Reverend Sharpton suggested that though perhaps the testimony was not all it could be in this case, nevertheless, he still supported her because of the systematic history, in similar cases, of supportable claims of abuse. He was, that is, not interested in the Truth.

  24 “Of the thirteen populations of polar bears in Canada, eleven are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present. It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant.” (Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Polar Bear Biologist, Dept. of the Environment, Government of Nanavut, Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada.)

  25 It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman’s right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.

  26 “Aristotle established a general principle of scientific enquiry: ‘First we must seek the fact, then seek to explain.’ The scientific method is now popularly conceptualised that the science on global warming is settled as a process where authorities balance volumes of opinions. That’s it. A phenomenon is now scientifically proven because various authorities and some scientists say so. Evidence now no longer matters.” (Ian Plimer, Heaven and Earth)

  27 And funded by the Marshall Plan, which is to say, by a surplus of American industrial wealth.

  28 “The causes are the increased polarization of the society that’s been going on for the past twenty-five years . . . larger and larger segments of the population have no form of organization, and no constructive way of reacting, so they pursue the available options, which are often violent.” (Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies, and Democracy, 1994)

  29 The poor man is poor because of “structural oppression”; the rich man rich because of “greed.”

  30 “But there must be Laws,” the Liberal says. Who would deny it? But the alternative to Statism is not the Left’s scareword of anarchy but Democracy.
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  31 As per Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

  32 Most Victorian novels featured the stock character of the profligate son. He was a gambler, and, having run through his inheritance, was constantly appealing to his father to pay his ever renewed gambling debts.

  The father inevitably paid, “for the honor of the family.” And he paid wringing his hands and cursing his fate. And the son thanked the father, wept, swore to reform, and continued gambling.

  Why not, as there was, to him, no cost?

  He had been taught, by his father, that there was no penalty for losing.

  What worse lesson for a gambler?

  For, if losing is cost free, why bother either to (a) learn to gamble or (b) quit?

  The serious gambler learns young, and painfully, that he must control his impulses, that he must not pursue fantasy, neither wish for the cards to turn, but learn the odds and husband his resources for those times when the cards or dice do favor him.

  There is a technical term for the gambler who can neither learn nor quit: he is called a sucker.

  Our politicians, left and right, are, to belabor the metaphor, the wastrel son: they are free to spend, to chase fantasies, and to squander resources, for the resources are not theirs, and there is no penalty for their misuse or loss.

  The wastrel son gambles, at no cost, for the thrill it provides; the wastrel politician does so in pursuit of fantasy (good works), or money. The money may be in direct support for his campaigns, or in free redecorating of his summer home; or it may be issued in the form of plaques recognizing his good works, which plaques, on his retirement from office, may be traded in for money.