It’s not often that we encounter other voices on social media whose perspectives so closely mirror our own. So you can imagine our surprise when, during his conversation Alex Jones on a recent podcast, G. Edward Griffen expressed such a perspective, and along with it, told his unique story about how that perspective emerged.
For example, for years he had been convinced that communism and fascism represented the ‘extreme Left’ and the ‘extreme Right’ respectively. But after comparing their ideologies to each other, to his utter shock he discovered that they were “exactly the same.”
“If I could be fooled on that – that communism and fascism were opposites – if I could fall for that, I could fall for anything,” he lamented.
And while that experience appears to have kept him uncomfortable with using the labels of Left and Right, Griffen undertook a journey of discovering the true political polarity that drives all of politics and essentially arrived at the same perspective that we ourselves have been advancing each week on this show.
“There is a battle between collectivism and its opposite, which is called individualism. I found out that those are the only two ideologies in the world,” he concludes. And, in refuting collectivism’s sacrifice of the individual to the group, Griffen demonstrates that ‘the group’ is a non-existent abstraction.
Explaining why society continues to drift Leftward, Griffen has faulted individualists with failing to define and explain the philosophy of freedom in the same way that collectivists have done with the likes of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In response, he plans to publish his own list of principles associated with individualism, tentatively titled ‘The Human Manifesto.’
“It’s not a political ideology, it’s a human ideology… and that is what freedom is based on,” he explains.
While his objective is laudable, isolating and associating the word ‘human’ exclusively with individualism comes with risk. Collectivists have exercised a near monopoly on their various ‘human-isms,’ and to them ‘human rights’ refer exclusively to some given collective. In contrast, the only possible kind of right that actually exists is called an ‘individual’ (not ‘human’) right, and only individuals are capable of exercising such rights.
Indeed, Griffen himself has already acknowledged this reality through his understanding that any given ‘group’ is just an abstraction that does not actually exist in the physical world. While it is tempting to encourage him to consider ‘The Freedom Manifesto’ for his book title, this too comes with risks, given both the over-use and misuse of the word ‘freedom’ itself.
Hopefully, given his lesson learned the hard way with respect to discovering the fake Left-Right polarity (identified as communism versus fascism), he might become more comfortable with considering a title that cannot be usurped by collectivists, something like ‘The Right Manifesto.’ In this context the word ‘Right’ can both be interpreted in its generic meaning (correct, proper, etc.) and in terms of being the correct political polarity associated with individualism.
Whatever title he ultimately chooses, at 94 years of age with decades of objective research and experience behind him, we should not be surprised that G Edward Griffen should have arrived at a philosophical perspective that certainly looks Just Right to us.
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