International Symbol for Political Science
“Yes, you are right — I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.”
- Mark Twain
I majored in Political Science as a youth when I attended college and was completely immune and unaware at the time of just what I was studying and undertaking as a collegial vocation. I had not even the vaguest notion that when all the familiar layers are peeled back and the countless variations of sub-disciplines are explored, it all comes down to one central principle and no other no matter how hard you rationalize it: all political systems rely on violence to work, nothing less and nothing more. Worse yet, they rely on initiated violence and all its subtle and savage applications. Once you discover that police are the center of gravity and schwerpunkt for the lion’s share of political heavy-lifting, you wonder why an academic shotgun wedding between “criminal justice” and political science has not appeared yet.
No other academic discipline as done more to put the gun in the hands of government. And justify it.
What inspired this was a conversation one of my readers had with me about his relative who is a Political Science professor at a university (we know they aren’t heteroversities because only one brand of government supremacism is permitted). His professorial relation was having a tough time getting his mind wrapped around a stateless society and claimed something that stopped me in my tracks. I am paraphrasing but the claim was that he simply was not interested in the moral and ethical implications of his work. These notions are anachronistic, bourgeois or intolerable in polite discussion in the faculty lounge unless…it was used as a lever to increase the power of the state. Then the graybeards in the lounge would nod approvingly as the latest idiotic gibbering from an Occupy Wall Street waif were commented upon or some worthy would talk about the virtue of the people in seeking to have the government step in and regulate the size of fruit or the pressure applied to a man’s groin to search him at an airport.
Let’s face it, all universities are public schools in the sense that they are largely subsidized by the state in funding, research, subsidy of student loans and all the other regulatory baggage that makes these schools into the institutions of advanced shambling and idiocy they are today. Plenty of other observers such as Sowell, O’Rourke and Bovard have penned wonderful bromides about the inadequacy, inefficiency and sheer lunacy of American academia today but few seem to have noticed that for the most part, the political science departments have one charter: to rationalize violence against their fellow planet dwellers whether the domestic machinations of making governments bigger and better or the more exotic foreign policy shenanigans of making excuses for the global war against brown people and folks who don’t share the “democratic ideal” (Gods help us).
So let’s test the thesis. Go to the American Political Science Association website and look for conference papers and I want you to find a paper that does not imply and infer initiated violence in the abstract (I would not wish to ask anyone to read these things) for non-compliance with a government law, initiative or edict. In other words, I am positing that the right to refusal is the ultimate liberty as I have discussed before as long as one is not harming another. What you will find is all kinds of pithy observations, sophisticated hypotheses and prettily worded justifications for non-consensual mechanisms or small groups of folks to command obedience from all they survey or said miscreants and dissenters will be fined, kidnapped, caged, maimed or killed depending on the severity of their refusal or temerity to disobey.
The Juris Doctorate (JD) or law degree is a closely wedded organism to the Political Science discipline in that the legal excesses of America such as the death penalty, unlimited and atomistic surveillance, torture and countless more barbarisms perpetrated by the government everyday find a rich intellectual lodestar to justify the anti-civilizational imperative that is the state. For every Nozick or Block in the academy, there are legions of government supremacist scholars and intellectuals who leave no stone unturned to advocate for violence by the state against the hapless denizens within its borders and without. Sowell is fond of saying the largest population of Marxists on Earth are in American universities and he is right but that is simply one of the collectivist menagerie that inhabits the schools. There are the Lincoln hagiographers and neoconservative Trotskyites and Straussians who make a vocal minority of alleged right wing opinion in the universities but they are actually simply a branch off the giant oak of violence advocacy that is the entire political science discipline. Even the self-named Peace Studies sub-discipline is rather pointed about threats and war as a means to either bring or establish peace. And, in the end, imposing government structures based on initiated violence.
Political Science is no more a science than sociology or psychology and the other “social[ist] science” disciplines mired in hard science envy for certitude and empiricism. Every university should have an altar and evening entrails reading at government erected Trofim Lysenko Memorials to add some magic and mystery to their undertakings. Political science is the military wing of Lysenkoism. It is a vast raft of intellectual rationalization for initiated force and violence against individuals and huge swaths of humans to make them obey the fever-dreams of collectivism that fire the minds of political scientists everywhere. As Professor Rummel, one of the few anti-violence political science practitioners on earth has pointed out, democide or death by government has murdered hundreds of millions of humans outside warfare in the twentieth century alone.
I have often wondered how cops would be incentivized if their everyday job behavior could cost them their jobs and all future livelihood for the rest of their lives if their perennial abuses were not socialized over the taxpayers in their towns and cities for their bad judgment and violence against civilians. By extension, would it not be intriguing if all the collectivist fetishists in the American academy had to actually live in the societies they advocate for and had to live in isolated colonies for a long period of time under the rules they advocate? You want government provisioned health care? Then go to Cuba for a year or live in a hermetically sealed colony with some of your faculty lounge confreres and see how that goes for you. All voluntary, of course, I would never be as presumptuous as a political scientist to impose violence on my neighbor nor consider them my property. The possibilities are endless.
I am standing by for hate mail.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.”
- John Hay
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“Political Science is no more a science than sociology or psychology and the other “social[ist] science” disciplines mired in hard science envy for certitude and empiricism.”
Lol, again with the blatant disregard for evidence, and I assume military intelligence officers are by default the smartest members of the armed services both before and after ending their term of duty?
Come on, you make claims that are embraced by many, Tom Cruise and his sycophantic cultist buddies. And yet you have no real experience in these fields outside of a bit of reading.
Be careful Bill, I have proven to you the efficacy of sociology and psychology- you have yet to prove your claims…;) but, I am boring.
No science could ever be predicated on the use of initiated force. In grade school we call these people bullies, but once they graduate from college, we call them “scientists”.
Alright, Jesse, challenge accepted. I have one root question: is there a consistent pattern of not divining the difference between causative and correlative explanations for phenomena in the soft sciences e.g., mistaking one for the other and does this cause some cynicism among folks when they constantly hear conflicting conclusions from self-same “scientists”? One more question. Does the complexity of human systems and interaction make it almost impossible to assign causative explanations? In other words, take global warming, is it possible for the hard scientists much less the soft scientists to establish the direct (or indirect causation) for anthropogenic linkage to global climate change? Correlation is the poor man’s lame explanation for different phenomenon but causation with certitude is the gold standard.
I have only met one former military intelligence officer (not me) who is smarter than the median of most humans.
Full Disclosure:I have not been nor am I nor will I be a member of Scientology but I would be happy to call Tom Cruise my friend if we hung out together.
First things first, definitions.
Define science – please give me the definition you adhere to.
The definitions (plural) I adhere to are as follows,
Common definition – knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world and its phenomena
Classic definition – knowledge, or pertaining to the making of knowledge (Aristotle)
Now we define Sociology – and again, please let me know if you have a different definition and why
Common definition – The study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society.
Classic Definition (coined 1830 by Comte) – the study of society
Because my education, and pursuits are more in line with sociology I will not define psychology- unless of course you need that as well.
___________________________________________________
Now we can proceed to the common misconceptions of the masses regarding science. Thanks to our modern American society being a sound byte society as a general rule, most of not all of what we know about anything we are not working in or educated in is based on various sound bytes. To clarify, by sound bytes I mean what you know about what you detest (in this case Psychology and Sociology) is based entirely in a small amount of information gathered willy nilly without any due process of your own.
So your request for me to give you varied proofs regarding how others may treat my pursuit in the scientific community is at its base, flawed. First and foremost it is necessary to understand that even in the hard sciences, there is great amounts of division on protocol, approach, what is right and what is wrong. This is the very nature of what I study, humanity and its inability to be other than what it is. A great grouping of individual ideas, ideals and plainly – individuals.
As for Global Warming, please, have you heard the term Red Herring. I do not study nor do I care to study Global Warming, I will leave that to you who study and teach (or taught) Political Science a truly egregious and useless field, almost as useless as Art History or Ministry.
So, lets first clarify definitions and then we can proceed into a discussion on the virtues of my “pursuits” versus yours. As this is what it really will come down to in the end.
Side note, please understand, this is a truly solid article- my only issue is your comparison of political science to psychology/sociology-
So good job!
I should make a note here, I am traveling for the next three days and will likely not respond- but will respond post haste upon return!
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In my earliest days as higher ed student I was drawn to the social sciences. I hungered to know what makes the society tick. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that it was all a massive “publik works”" program.
The good news is I am no wet behind the ears statist teen, in fact I see the negatives in every science subsidized and promoted by the state, the invention of methods of war, new and old philosophies of war, and the mega billion dollar industry supporting the military and or promoting the military.
After all, nuclear science has been perverted and as a result is now commonly seen as evil by many, space related science as well…all thanks to the state and its minions…the best thing to happen in the last decades is the dismanteling of NASA!
Regardless, just because your teacher is a socialist doesnt make the science wrong. After all science is quite simply the pursuit of knowledge.
I understand of course that if I do not pursue knowledge that the author here and those commenting and reading find useful I am obviously not pursuing science. However, doesnt that make you statist by very definition?
Or are definitions also no longer necessary except when they suit us?
I await a response that I know will not come, or at the very least will not answer the proposed approaches.
Thanks for the iconic image. I’ll be posting this symbol (with credit) wherever I can.
Most people who live on taxpayer money are completely oblivious to the coercion that supports their livelihoods. And coercion underwrites virtually all of “Political Science” as it starts with the premise that it’s right and proper to take from people by force in order to achieve some nonspecific and often non-measurable gain elsewhere. Of course, the real test of utility and desirability would be whether people could be persuaded to spend their money on it without coercion. Political scientists never seem to want to be bothered with that detail – they prefer to pick up a gun and proceed from there.
Who doesn’t live or to some extent subsidize their income from “taxpayer money” after all it is a bit disingenuous to use such a broad term. Unless one is dead, or not born they in some form or another use or pay taxes. Making every single person living in the United States a “taxpayer” meaning that one can for all intents and purposes NOT have a business that does not “take” taxpayer money in a very general sense. Isn’t better to separate and or specify those careers that cause the harm in physical ways than by attempting to corral everyone?
For instance, many county sheriffs take “taxpayer” money and yet do not bend to federal will. Are they bad or good?
How many of our “heroes” take taxpayer money directly and turn around and murder or kill whether in “self defense” or simply “following orders” people in foreign nations? Are these men and women bad or good?
How many of those we care about work indirectly or directly for the military industrial complex using our intellects and or labors to further the use of our military as a power of subjugation against innocents around the world. Are they good or bad people?
How many of us seek to use our educations to better the world. Are we bad or good?
According to those responding here I and those like myself who are “social” scientists and practice or use our educations are the problem. Or are we really?
Think about it for a second…EVERY SINGLE person living within these borders UNLESS they have completely removed themselves from society IN SOME WAY contribute to this “epidemic” of state power. Some much more than others, and some far less…who is really the problem.
Chan eil tuil air nach tig traoghadh
Everything ends eventually, unfortunately the common/average human cannot be bothered by their history and refuse to change their actions and as a result our children become us as we become our parents…and the cycle continues.
It is the rare person (like myself) who sees his flaws, admits them and CHANGES his actions to prevent a repeat yet again of what will surely happen…most will not. That is why I study and use sociology, after all, combined with history I have the ability to change my actions…are you?
No response,