By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite Politics]

It is worth noting that politics is interesting only in as much as it pertains to philosophy, for it poses an important question: In what way should people be governed? Note the should. That word automatically supposes a value judgement about the topic.   

It seems that in our time, philosophy is too hard a subject matter for people to be much enthused about.  Politics is often the only branch of philosophy where regular folks feel comfortable vociferating about the ‘rights and wrongs’ of ideas or issues as they come up in the world of public opinion. But, human beings are philosophical by nature at a much more fundamental level than just political opinion, only many of them don’t realise it. Identity politics takes up way too much attention considering how shallow and worthless its causes actually are in the greater scheme of things. It is a first-world hormonal headache in a stupefyingly vacuous culture.   

I spoke the other day, in the course of my job, with a husband and wife in their early seventies whom I had only just met. They were looking at rather a large financial decision and the topic of a rapidly changing world came up. The husband mentioned that he and his wife occupied opposite political camps. I had no idea which of them was on the left or which was on the right until Wifey blurted out, “Yes, I’m the one who raised our children right.” In that funny moment I immediately knew that she was the lefty… who else in today’s climate would make that highly ethical claim in such a self-assured fashion of expectant solidarity with a female stranger? Ahh, the high-handedness of the left – if only they were as high-minded by dint of habit.

It has been observed many times that politics is downstream from culture.  Politicians are the resulting consequence of popular philosophical ideas which come to dominate a culture; they are not the cause of those ideas, but they can obviously magnify them.

I’m thinking right now of Winston Churchill. Consider what it took, philosophically, for him to lead Great Britain through the period of World War II. There was no prescription for him to repair to. All he had was his judgement. 

First of all, he tenaciously held the idea of Britain’s sovereignty, not to mention its self-determination and valuable way of life, to be wholly sacred and so did the average Brit. 
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Second, he judged the rise of aggressive Nazism to be in and of itself utterly evil and so did the average Brit (that was before anyone knew what would become known as the horrible fate of European Jewry). The British Empire may have been many things but it was not governed by tyranny where people had to sacrifice themselves for the nefarious ends of a totalitarian state. Nazism was just that. 

Third, as the recent film about Churchill, Darkest Hour, shows so sharply, Churchill did not suffer from the philosophical belief of peace at any price, hence his refusal to let Benito Mussolini, himself an evil tyrant, try to broker a deal regarding the terms of Britain’s peaceful surrender to Germany. There were ideas worth the horrible cost of war such as freedom and the Anglo-Saxon way of life, and so thought the average Brit. 

Fourth, Churchill knew that one of the costs of fighting that war would spell the end of the British Empire as he had known it, since it meant passing the brilliant torch of Western culture officially to America – as ancient Greece had once done to ancient Rome (but not so consciously). Churchill did this with full knowledge of what was actually transpiring. Christopher Hitchens’ book Blood, Class and Empire shows this almost heartbreakingly, as he commentates on Churchill’s letters to President Roosevelt during the course of the war.

Churchill tapped into the prevailing ideas that British people cherished in their hearts and minds. He personified the matchless value of a strong leader fighting for the ideas of the common man. That philosophical attitude very often is felt as nothing more than a gut instinct by many, but Churchill’s strength lay in the fact that he could put it powerfully into lucid language that could strike a personal chord in all men because those philosophical pathways in his erudite mind were already so well traveled. 

A nation’s sovereignty, a regime which may be evil, the question of peace at what price, a state of affairs that is worth the terrible sacrifice of bloodshed – these are weighty philosophical ideas that suddenly emerged in an urgent political context only 79 years ago. 
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Privately, as free citizens of citizen governments in countries that won that brutal war against terrifying odds, we should all have strong and well-reasoned views on such matters, after all, these are the issues that our grandparents faced and history teaches us that our children and grandchildren may have to face them once again in the near future. They need moral guidance from us – philosophical guidance that speaks to what is right and what is wrong; what is worth fighting for and what is not.
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Do not let the hollow distractions of identity politics divert us away from the deeper philosophical questions of our existence as political animals, for the subject of politics encompasses nothing less than the profound questions of what man’s nature is in this reality that we call existence, and what in our existence is worth dignifying or demolishing.


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​

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By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite Politics]

“It’s a man’s world and it always will be,” wrote Camille Paglia for ‘Time’ magazine back in 2013. She ends her article with these words:

   The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

To hear a female academic elevate the virtues of men and capitalism is as rare as finding a unicorn, yet Paglia consistently and correctly acknowledges that the vast, life-enhancing infrastructure of the modern world is indeed a ‘male epic’. Only a seasoned battle-axe worth her salt would make such an acknowledgement in today’s rabidly anti-male culture. Paglia clearly points out that the countless roles women now have in the workforce have only been made possible by men. Men have fought and died for our civilisation, men do the hair-raising tasks of building skyscrapers out of steel and glass, and it is men who risk their lives laying the gas pipes and sewer pipes, and hanging the electrical wires that power our days and nights.  










One of the outstanding qualities I’ve notice about brilliant battle-axes is that they have an outstanding grasp on human history. Paglia is well educated in the humanities and the classics. It is always history that she draws on to enlighten the modern mind, since how well can we really understand human nature in today’s context without knowing how it created the days of yore?

Being a staunch cultural critic and author with a strong philosophical bent, Paglia has often been compared with that other formidable battle-axe Ayn Rand, or at least told she sounds a lot like the late Russian–American philosopher. It is a comparison Paglia obviously quite likes:

  “Ayn Rand was the kind of bold female thinker who should immediately have been a centrepiece of women’s studies programs, if the latter were genuinely about women rather than about a clichéd, bleeding-heart, victim-obsessed, liberal ideology that dislikes all concrete female achievement. Like me, Rand believed in personal responsibility and self-transformation as the keys to modern woman’s advance.”

It was Rand, who, more than any other American thinker, lay out the moral basis for capitalism; pretty ironic when one considers that she defected from Bolshevik Russia, but then perhaps that is how she could see the stark difference between a system that supports the individual or a system that annihilates it.

It goes without saying that the system of capitalism existed in America before Rand was even born, but it was she who gifted it with a fierce moral defence, which she thought had never been done properly and was too important to be left undone. 

In one of her seminal works (she had so many), Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, a book which Rand said was a non-fictional footnote to her colossal novel Atlas Shrugged, she wrote:

    The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

According to Rand, no country has ever practised laissez-faire capitalism, i.e. capitalism without regulations, but the closest any nation did get to it was America in the latter half of the 19th century (after slavery was abolished).

   “Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.”  [Ayn Rand – Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal]

For Rand, a free market was the product of a free mind. One of the few legitimate roles of government in her philosophy was to objectively enforce contractual agreements in civil law courts, since in order to avert personal financial injury, a free market depends upon the integrity of voluntary agreements being upheld. In her book on ethics, The Virtue of Selfishness, she wrote:

   The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.

Justice is so central to the system of capitalism that there now exists in Western countries a whole slew of people who proudly self-style themselves as Social Justice Warriors, as if they are on the side of human virtue by claiming the ground of the “common good”. A hundred years ago I wager that, had they been alive, they would’ve been warriors for the Temperance Movement. Those wrong-headed old battle-axes took aim at social justice causes and were so successful that the Volstead Act was made law in every American state. The result was total prohibition of the production, sale and consumption of alcohol, which brought forth a destructive mafia underworld and black market – the very opposite of capitalism.

Battle-axes like Rand and Paglia are of a different type altogether. Human reason is what they dedicated themselves to in the name of personal responsibility and the power of the individual mind. That kind of woman not only knows how to live well in freedom by the standards of her own personal rigour, she also knows how to extend that courtesy to others and give credit where credit is due. Paglia does this beautifully by acknowledging that it is men who have built a wonderfully complex civilisation in which the normal standard of operation at play is that women themselves prosper – even without them.
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If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​