Why the 4th of July Still Matters

Intellectuals, Cambodia, Plastic, and Mithril

Washington Crossing the Delaware. Emanuel Leutze. 1851

“A savior who wants to turn men into angels will be as much a hater of human nature as a monster who wants to turn them into slaves and animals.” — Eric Hoffer

---

Complaints about the 4^th of July are on the rise: “The fireworks are too loud. They are too dangerous.” Some now question the day itself. To some, it is simply puzzling. To others, it is an insult, and their complaints go far beyond the 4^th, ranging from American’s past imperfections, questions of the Constitutions relevancy, the failures of the Founding Fathers, and even the foundations of modern civilization as a whole.

And so we are left with a question: why does the 4^th of July, Independence Day, still matter?

It matters because we live in a novel era. We do not submit to tyranny, and yet are forever at risk of it. There are some who flourish in this freedom, many who self-destruct, and a select minority who want to destroy it. I want to focus on the latter category this 4^th of July.

I came across a striking quote and it got me thinking.

Czeslaw Milosz was an intellectual — a poet — who witnessed the Soviet Union drain Poland of life. He wanted to understand the mindset of a specific genus of intellectual, and tried to put words to what they must have thought as they walked down the road: “What is the significance of the lives of the people he passes, of the senseless bustle, the laughter, the pursuit of money, the stupid animal diversions?” The intellectual believes we are “victims of the delusions that each individual exists as a self,” and that the intellectual himself “… is warm-hearted and good; he is a friend of mankind. Not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”¹

The intellectual: love of humanity, hatred for humans.

From this pedestal the descent begins.

Let us treat the following as a historical cautionary tale.

Intellectuals like Milosz are those whose professions deal primarily with ideas, not reality.² Writers, poets, politicians, academics, and the like. But the particular subset of intellectuals Milosz wrote about were those who viewed themselves as akin to God, and all those walking down the road — firefighters, businessmen, those with callouses on their hands, single mothers working two jobs — as plastic.

This plasticity is of interest. With the right amount of heat, plastic can be molded into any form we want. It is a mockery of our ancient awe for quality — stone, ivory, bronze, iron, gold, mithril. Plastic is cheap. Infinitely malleable. It is also poisonous and leaches chemicals. It seems, then, this subset of intellectuals honed in on the plastic aspects of mankind like vultures to a caribou corpse.

The obvious question is why they viewed others as plastic. On the surface, it appears as though their goal was to socially engineer humans to create an updated Stone Age, an idealized, extra-egalitarian version of what they thought we had in the hunter-gatherer days but with all the trappings of the modern world. A utopia. No selfish rich people. No preyed upon poor people. No racism. No sexism. No fools with their freedom to laugh as if they owned the place. No freedom to fail and own your fate. And maybe — who knows? — carve out something a little special for themselves since they were the ones who dreamed up this return to nature and freed others from the burden of running their own lives.

So to figure out why the 4^th still matters, we must ask dig even deeper: what did this utopia look like?

It looked like what Milosz saw in the Soviet Union. It looked like East Germany and Mao’s China. It also looked like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge with its Stone Age communism that, as Peter Maguire writes, would “prove to be one of the most radically destructive social experiments of the twentieth century.”³

Plastic looks like the Khmer Rouge using the pronoun it to refer to human beings. An it does not need to be taught reason. An it does not deserve respect. An it does not deserve life. Pin Yathy describes his experience: “…there were no prisons, no courts, no universities, no schools, no money, no jobs, no books, no sports, and no pastimes… There was no spare moment in the twenty-four-hour day. We all lived in an enormous concentration camp… The Khmer Rouge often used parables to justify their contradictory actions. They would compare people to cattle: “Watch this ox as it pulls the plow. It eats when it is ordered to eat. If you let it graze in the field it will eat anything. If you put it into another field where there isn’t enough grass, it will still graze uncomplainingly. It is not free, and it is constantly being watched. And when you tell it to pull the plow, it pulls. It never thinks about its wife or children…”⁴

The Khmer Rouge murdered nearly two-million people. Twenty-five percent of Cambodia’s population. Their own population.

At last, intellectuals no longer had to endure the terror of witnessing humans free to laugh and bustle and pursue money and celebrate a sense of pride.

What then?

The irony deepens, for our intellectuals version of the Stone Age was to the real Stone Age what plastic is to mithril.

True, dehumanization existed in the real Stone Age. Pre-state bands across the globe referred to themselves as “we”, or “people”, or “human beings.” The Pygmies called anyone who was not a Pygmy an “animal.” The Yanomamo thought the white ethnographer living among them was a “subhuman”.⁵ Everyone else fell into some lower form of Homo; something other, something inferior, something they could kill. We are we, they are its.

This is significant for two reasons. Our ancestors answered to nature, not to men. And they dehumanized other people, not their own. They were not noble savages, but visceral savages: united and proud, anti-plastic and pro-freedom.

Well, then, what do we learn from this perplexing subset of intellectuals? Those intellectuals who claimed to love humanity and yet despised lesser mortals and their “stupid animal diversions” like family and pride? Those intellectuals who were terrified of having to make something of themselves in freedom, of their inner meaninglessness, of their envy and jealousy and rage? Those who were upset they were not Philosopher Kings, since they were the makers-of-ideas and not the draggers-of-knuckles? And those who were simply doe-eyed idealists?

Their fourfold follies are laid bare. One, they wanted to go back to nature but were doomed from the start since they hated their own people and worshipped other people. Two, they did not lead their people to ancestral harmony with nature. Instead, they led their people into concentration camps and crowbar executions, the inevitable conclusion of any social-engineering experiment in plasticity. Three, they did not care about building their utopia so much as they cared about destroying everyone else’s freedom. And last, intellectuals are those who give rise to these Stone Age revolutions, but it is these same revolutions that cannot allow the existence of intellectuals. In an epic irony, they are liquidated along with the lesser humans they sought to crush.

Now let us return to the present.

Throughout America and the West as a whole, this hatred of one’s own people, heritage, and country has spread its roots.

Why, then, does the 4^th of July matter?

It matters because our experiment of freedom-within-a-state is held in contempt precisely because it holds freedom as a value; because those who admit only the sins of America and will not admit even an ounce of the unprecedented decency she has granted us share a common heritage with the utopianists of old; because this hatred of America might bring on something far worse than America itself; because our delicate and radical right to rebel against the tyranny of men is the gift to us from the Founding Fathers; because it is a No to masters and a Yes to self-command.

It matters because the animal diversions of fireworks and their red, white, and blue spider-webs spanning the blackened sky above are not only a reminder of winning a war for freedom in the past, but of our right to fight — and win — every war for freedom in the future.

It matters, ultimately, because the 4^th of July is not an American Revolution, but a Human Revolution.

---

To help What then? reach more readers, please consider adding a like, restacking, and sharing this essay to help spread the good word.

1. Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko, Vintage International ed., Vintage International, 1990.

2. Sowell, Thomas. Intellectuals and Society. Basic Books, 2010.

3. Maguire, Peter H. Facing Death in Cambodia. Columbia University Press, 2005.

4. Yathay, Pin, in collaboration with John Man. Stay Alive, My Son. Cornell University Press, 2014. I found this through the Black Book of Communism.

5. Chagnon, Napoleon A., 1938-2019. Ya̦nomamö, The Fierce People. New York :Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.