L. Neil Smith and Insane Troll Logic

Having thoroughly established the paranoid nature of L. Neil Smith’s view of the modern world, the question still remains: how can he or anyone else develop a worldview that is so vastly at odds with the way the rest of humanity sees it?

There is always the possibility that his writings, even his fictional works, are some form of stealth parody. After all, Poe’s Law tells us that any parody of something extreme is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing (but beware: if a real thing sounds extreme enough it can be mistaken for parody). Smith may right now be enjoying a hearty laugh at how easily he can fool all us suckers. [I should point out that he believes that “[a]ny publicity is still publicity -- and there are those for whom your disapproval constitutes a recommendation” ("Some New Tactical Reflections"), implying that even something that castes him in a bad light will nonetheless help him sell books.]

However, assuming he really believes that what he says is true, then the obvious answer is that it stems from his anarchist ideology, but that still doesn’t explain how he comes up with his bizarre and surreal arguments. It’s obvious that they are based on flawed, irrational reasoning, but I couldn’t pinpoint the kind of reasoning he used until just recently, as I continued my study of tropes. There is one that has emerged from Internet culture called “Insane Troll Logic”. This is when someone says something so totally off the wall that, if he isn’t kidding, he must really believe it. Insane Troll Logic cannot be argued with. It is so demented that any attempt to make it more rational would just render it more incomprehensible. It is, of course, the favored logic of Internet trolls, but it crops up elsewhere as well, and it didn’t originate with the Internet; you can find examples in comics, pre-digital TV shows, and even classic literature.

The thing is, what makes Insane Troll Logic truly insane is not that it comes to conclusions we disagree with, but because it uses methods that make no sense to anyone not already indoctrinated in the ideology. In other words, the only way you can follow Insane Troll Logic is if you know what its arguments are based on, otherwise it’s just gobbledygook. Some Trolls will even admit this, though they usually try to make it sound like all you need to do is educate yourself in the True Knowledge. This is the exact opposite of classical logic, which uses formulas and rules of procedure to arrive at conclusions and is ideologically neutral. The point is, anyone who understands the rules and formulas can follow any classical logical argument, even if he doesn’t know the basis for the argument.

Another way in which Insane Troll Logic differs from classical logic is that everything in classical logic must be supportable, either by other arguments or documented evidence, and responses to counter-arguments must themselves be based on logic. Insane Troll Logic, on the other hand, never supports itself with anything except the Troll’s assertion that it’s true, and when challenged he usually responds with some form of “Because I said so!” Also, he tends to respond to counter-arguments with accusations that his opponent is lying. To my knowledge, Smith has never actually asserted that he’s right and we must believe him, but he never documents his arguments with hard facts and his entire attitude is that we must take his word for everything he says, otherwise we’re evil collectivists or their dupes.

I struggled for some time trying to find what I thought would be a good example of Smith’s Insane Troll Logic, because much of what he says can sound reasonable, at least until he waxes apocalyptic. But damn if he didn’t go and provide a near-perfect example! In an article published on The Libertarian Enterprise entitled “Economic Genocide”, he makes the following claim:

Over a fairly long lifetime, so far, I have come to the sobering realization that all that leftists, communists, socialists, Democrats can do--aside from stealing everything they can from everybody who works for a living, and stamping out every simple pleasure that makes the travails of life worth enduring--all they ever think about is killing.

As usual, he provides no evidence to back up his claim -- probably because there is none! -- but he can’t leave such a provocative statement unsupported, so he presents the following argument:

1. The average individual is forced by the government to surrender one-third of his or her earned income to the government; ergo

2. for every three such individuals so taxed, one whole human being has been economically obliterated. He calls this “economic genocide”.

Out of curiosity, he asked a colleague to calculate just how many people the government has obliterated in this fashion. Here is what Smith reports:

It turns out to be a very difficult question to answer. Tax rates have varied over the years, and so has the number of Americans subject to taxation. In the end, my colleage [sic] estimated that it [the government] had consumed the productive capacity of some fifty million (50,000,000) innocent human lives. That's roughly four times the number of victims claimed by Adolf Hitler. It almost equals the number of individuals killed in all of the Second World War. It fits in somewhere between the number of Russians slaughtered by Josef Stalin and Chinese killed by Mao Zedong.

For Smith, the consequences of this are significant, even major: “So now you finally know where your flying car went, and why there's no cure yet for cancer. You know why there's no luxury hotel aboard a Big Wheel space station, no vacation resort on the Moon, and no scientific base on Mars or Titan. All of those things, and many more that we expected to have ... by now, were devoured, sometimes quite literally, by grants to investigate the territoriality of tree frogs, programs to feed individuals who can't--or won't--work ..., programs to keep people from smoking the wrong vegetable or ... shooting, snorting, or rubbing it into their bellies, not to mention enforcing laws against licking the wrong toad.”

Some people might argue that Smith is being metaphorical; that he does not mean the government literally snuffed out 50,000,000 people. Perhaps; he is careful to refer to “productive capacity” and the like. But my impression is that Smith is seldom metaphorical in his rants, and he did connect “economic genocide” back to actual genocide:

By carrying out economic genocide, as I've discussed above, through relentless cultural genocide against gun owners in particular, but against the inhabitants of "flyover country" in general, plain old-fashioned genocide against the American Indian as well as Russian refugees in France following World War II (look up "Operation Keelhaul"), and now, in an act of world democide that would stagger Hitler, Stalin, or Mao: in collaboration with eco-fascists and eugenicists in the United Nations, the systematic extermination of nine-tenths of the human race for the sake of saving "Lovely Mother Gaia"--the mindless, insensate ball of rock and dirt that we call Earth. ... 6,300,000,000 innocent, productive human lives.

Note his terminology: “productive human lives”. The same kind of terminology he uses to describe economic genocide, and all this is used to support his claim that leftists, Democrats, etc., only think about killing people. Still need convincing?

Barack Obama wants you dead. Eric Holder wants you dead. Nancy Pelosi wants you dead. Harry Reid wants you dead. Diane Feinstein wants you dead. Charles Schumer wants you dead. Henry Waxman wants you dead. Carolyn McCarthy wants you dead. John Boehner wants you dead. Diana DeGuette wants you dead. The entire Udall family wants you dead. And Sheila Jackson Lee wants you dead. Some of them get wet imagining it.

So it seems clear that Smith equates the economic genocide of productive human lives with the physical genocide of actual human lives. And he uses that to justify calling liberals and Democrats killers.

If this makes absolutely no sense to you, if you find it impossible to wrap your brain around this argument, if you’re tempted to dismiss it as a joke or believe I have misrepresented it, don’t worry about it. That’s the point of Insane Troll Logic. Unless you’re an anarchist who hates leftists and believes they are out to enslave or even kill you, you will never comprehend this kind of thinking.

Next week I will start examining specific claim that Smith has made, but if you find his arguments hard to believe, just keep in mind you probably weren’t meant to, or even that Smith may just be pulling all our legs after all.