A Boy Genius Who Killed 14M Poor People(thebulwark.com) |
A Boy Genius Who Killed 14M Poor People(thebulwark.com) |
The moral calculus is very simple: taxation is theft, the ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how many people would die. The theft must stop.
Cf. with abortion: Abortion is murder, so it must stop. The ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how much suffering the banning of abortion would cause, abortion must stop.
What these have in common is a phenomenon which Orwell talked about in his "Principles of Newspeak" essay. If you make words like "theft" and "taxation" to be synonymous, or "abortion and murder" to be synonymous, you blur over the endless richness of meaning that English has. You destroy meaning which are useful in tracking features of reality--and you destroy meanings which could refute your position.
At the age of 23, I had completely bought into it. I would have cheerfully consigned those 14 million people to die. At 23, I knew exactly which lever to pull in trolley scenarios.
What is even more scary is this: would I ever even have been able to let myself realize I was wrong? Or would I have spent the rest of my life rationalizing? How, exactly, do you admit to yourself that you consigned more people to death than Goebbels? Would it even be possible to express any kind of empathy without feeling the weight of so much guilt that it would cause you to be so traumatized that you would never recover?
The hazards of improper binding of meaning in language and experience are well known.
It so happens there was a Polish philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century who wrote an enormous tome on the subject of society and science, and the general hazards inherent to the structure of language and meaning:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
His work has an extensive legacy, yet is not well known.
The subject of semantic hazards needs to be taught. Children can pick up on the hazards very readily with instruction, but are not likely to comprehend the matter on their own. Moreover they will tend to prefer to wield their personal discoveries like magic which is another hazard.
Electronic mass media have greatly amplified semantic hazards and has greatly disturbed us. We are engulfed by media that leverage semantic hazards for ill gains, and many of our leaders are blend of ignorance of the hazards or maliciously exploiting them.
As anyone who is paying attention to the AI can see, the social media industry is greedily at work on systems intending to further disturb and exploit the public mind for fun and profit, no matter the cost.
Many of these people that claim to have been affected by the cuts live in war-torn countries. Shouldn't this fall on the shoulders of their government? Why are they poor and destitute with no medical care to begin with?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
As for other governments, yes, the failed ones deserve criticism but the Trump administration broke legal commitments in their rush to prevent aid from reaching people. If your neighbor leaves their home due to an abusive spouse, you don’t get to shift blame to the original abuser when you kick them out in the middle of the night – it just means the victims have been failed again.
It’s also a mistake to think of this as a cost. The United States quite willing spent money to influence other countries because anyone who thinks further ahead than the next quarterly report recognizes that even from a strictly utilitarian perspective it’s better to have international negotiating power instead of wars. Cutting USAID saved far less money than DOGE has already cost taxpayers, and cutting it mostly means that China is picking up the global power status we’re shedding.
It is unfortunate, because sure, we sent a lot of money to Africa without much to show other than influence. Tomorrow, we would industrialize Africa to bolster our economy. Win-Win for all involved.
ETA: pretty good read with an outside perspective:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/8/3/the-real-reason-...