“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.” – John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged
After tackling the virtues of selfishness and the concepts of value and reason, I stumbled upon an article in USA Today. Eric Trump, son of Donald, “made sure there was no ambiguity regarding his opinion” of David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, agreeing with a Denver radio host that “[t]he guy does deserve a bullet”. Putting aside the innate issues of racism for now, one must unpack the threat of physical force on the metaphysical level.
I do not believe in a pacifist society, as it will crumble under the first threat of force, but I also do not believe threats are moral. Irrational people exist, as is the nature of humanity. However, the solution is not in a polar opposite society. If our society, which is merely a collection of individuals, formed a gang of thugs that were only organized on the principle of protection against outside force, it would be chaos. We must find a solution at a halfway point. As I say in The Virtue of Selfishness, “the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another”(103).
To evaluate the questionable rationality of threats, one must take the objective standpoint of punishment and established reasons for justice to be served against the irrational. Threats are not actual physical force, but they allude to it, and must be taken seriously. The objective standpoint of justice holds reason at its core. Threats are irrational because they stem from an emotion, feeling, urge, wish, or whim that is “an attack on man’s self esteem” (8). Ethicality stems from reason, not whims. A threat fits well in my definition of a whim: a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
Eric Trump was heedlessly acting upon his whims when he said that David Duke should be rightfully assassinated. This is clearly an attack on a man’s self esteem, even if Duke is a man with substantial ties to one of America’s most bigoted hate groups. Duke has been evidentially proved a racist, which is “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism” (120). Trump “said the Clinton campaign intended to discredit his father by labeling him a ‘bigot, a racist, xenophobic, this and that.’” (Cummings, USA Today), yet he throws threats of physical force around without intent of consequences. Threats are irrational whims, and goes against the basic metaphysical principles of consciousness as reason. As John Galt in Atlas Shrugged implied, these threats of force do not incentivize us to become “better” people, and therefore are irrational.