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Jeremy Bentham's head (Source) |
Yes, that's Jeremy Bentham's mummified head. In accordance with his will, his corpse was stuffed with hay and "put on public view for all to see" However, in time, his head got knocked off and was replaced with a wax replica. The original head (shown above) was locked in box and remains in the keeping of University College, London.
As you can see, by the end, Bentham's head was not in good shape. Unfortunately, what was inside Jeremy Bentham's head was even uglier than the exterior.
Bentham invented a new moral philosophy called utilitarianism. This is the basis of all liberal thought and can be summed up in the single rule:
It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.The consequences of this idea have been utterly toxic. My purpose here is to consider why. But first, what does it mean?
What is happiness? How do you measure it? Is it to be determined by the number of one's sexual partners, the amount of junk food one consumes, the length of one's life, one's freedom from work or responsibility?
Obviously, the idea is nuts. Happiness is not measurable, and what people think will bring the greatest happiness often brings only misery.
And how do you maximize happiness? Most people would say their happiness would be maximized if they were free to do exactly as they pleased. And allowing and even encouraging people to do exactly as they please is the basic liberal program: no-fault divorce, state-funded abortion, euthanization of tiresome elderly relatives, oral sex as part of the school curriculum, and no, oral sex is not talking a good line, as we of the older generation may have assumed. But as the poet T.S. Eliot remarked,
If you give people what they want, you begin by underestimating them and you end by corrupting them.Exactly, which is what the liberal program has done.
And the project is idiotic because a state of persistent happiness is physiologically unattainable. We possess adaptive mechanisms that make suffering more endurable and pleasure cloy. We are made to strive, drawn by unsatisfied desire and propelled by the experience of discomfort and dissatisfaction.
The wise individual seeks not happiness but fulfillment: moral, physical and intellectual.
But there is another and truly evil implication of the Benthamite doctrine. If the happiness of the greatest number is the object of public policy and the measure of good and evil, then there is no absolute morality and the unhappiness of a few is a morally acceptable price to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Three thousand dead Americans on 9/11 provided the hoped for catalyzing event that kick started the NeoCon Project for the New American Century, aka the long war for American global empire. How easily such mass murder can be justified by the Benthamite calculus. Which means that if 19 incompetent Arabs with paper knives were insufficient to complete the task, why not help them out with a Norad stand-down? The subsequent death of a hundred thousand Iraqis is also easily justified in terms of the greater good.
Single-handedly, with one ridiculous and tawdry idea, Bentham provided the means for the destruction of Christendom, the greatest civilization the World has yet seen.
See Also:
Britain's Peeping State: Bureaucrats At the Washroom Keyhole