ISSUES IN FOCUS Week of October 12, 1998 |
THE HUBBLE PLOY: WINNING THROUGH FAILURE
Who would have ever thought it? There is a proven way to succeed by carefully planned failure.
A recent news story illustrated this technique, a stratagem that sounds nutty but which has worked—at least so far. This story spoke volumes about American culture. It was a report about the Hubble Space Telescope and new photographs taken by it that purport to show galaxies that are close to the edge of the universe. There is no edge of the universe. Existence simply exists and it is endless.
Those scientists who are searching for the edge of the universe are doomed to failure. It is a senseless exercise driven by a false premise. It is the search for the unreal, for the non-existent, a search for nothing, for something that never has been, is not and never will be. Each new attempt to look farther into the universe results in failure: the edge is never found. This failure fuels the next round of efforts to peer even farther—and it fuels the next round of government funding to pay for the next failure.
The search for the edge of the universe is a rebellion against the primacy of existence, of the fact that existence simply exists, of the fact that there is no way to go beyond existence, get underneath or above or around it: it simply exists. It is an attempt to discover the unreal, to make the unreal real, to make nothing something. The rebellion against existence is a revolt against reality, facts and the truth. It results in the elevation of consciousness, not reality, as the standard of truth. This brings us the celebration and glorification of whims and feelings, rather than objectivity and the truth. And this brings us to the essence of statism. Statism declares you, the individual, are not real, that your life is not your own, that your property is not yours and that your money is not yours. It creates an endless series of programs designed to deny the reality of your right to life and liberty, all designed to fail.
The government-funded Hubble Space Telescope program replicates the pattern of failure seen in other statist programs. Each new failure generates the demand for even more government activity to achieve some allegedly desirable, if not impossible, goal. The programs are designed to fail in order to have that failure provide the excuse and justification for the next round of restrictions.
The Hubble ploy—winning through planned failure—has been a great success for statists. This process has been used by statists on every issue. The quality of state-run education is much worse than it was 50 years ago. Each new decline in public education is cited as the reason for more regulations and for more money to be sucked into this academic black hole. Crime is much worse than it was five decades ago, yet each spurt in crime is used as the justification for increasingly Draconian laws that violate your right to liberty and to the ownership of your property. Drug use is far more widespread than it was a half-century ago, but each new failure by statists to solve the drug problem is used to justify more of the same failed policy. Decades of soaring health-care costs—brought to us by statist regulations and mandates—have stoked the fires for even more regulations.
There is a popular definition of insanity: to repeatedly make the same mistake and then wonder why you continue to fail. For statists, this pattern of behavior becomes a form of sanity for them, since their repeated failures have created the support needed for their next set of regulations. But for honest folks who continue to support statists, it is insanity to continue to underwrite more of the same, more of the same kind of failure we have seen throughout the 20th century.
While there is no end to existence, manmade actions have a definite end, whether that end is recognized or not. Everything is something and every action ends up taking you someplace. What is not recognized by many is that the actions by statists are not really designed to solve any specific problem—whether it is education, crime, drugs or any other problem. Statists create problems in order to gain power. And the ultimate end of their universe is the eventual achievement of total power—otherwise known as totalitarian rule. If America falls into this abyss, the ploy of planned failure will be one of the key reasons for this gruesome end.
Fulton Huxtable
October 12, 1998
© Copyright 1998 Fulton Huxtable