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Saturday, April 26, 2008
The Threat And The State
Fran here. I've been rather sternly pressed lately, as the Curmudgeon mentioned in Thursday's pitiful substitute for a proper screed. (Why do I keep the old bastard around?) However, that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking. Front and center among the things on my mind is this: the paradoxical yet natural alliance between governments, nominally constituted to protect their subjects' rights to life, liberty, and property, and the very forces that threaten those rights.
There are many facets to this alliance. I can only hope to cover a few of the most immediate and compelling ones today. Read on.
"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence." -- Mohandas K. Gandhi
In their Illuminatus! trilogy, fantasists Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson made the pithy statement that "The State is based on threat." If this is not self-evident, it should be. The defining characteristic of a State -- a government, for those not attuned to the lexicon of political sociology -- is its monopoly privilege on the use of violence to get its way. Thus, the State is a violent and parasitical institution, a vampiric entity; it survives by coercively sucking sustenance out of productive persons and their voluntary organizations. In a nominally free country, the victims of State parasitism submit, with varying degrees of grumbling, on the grounds that the alternatives are all worse.
Alternatives? What alternatives? Other States? Some change in the fundamental relations between a State and its subjects? No State whatsoever? The first choice is seldom objectively preferable. The second is easily revealed to be unattainable. The third frightens most people too greatly for them to give it sober consideration.
Let's pause on that third dismissal and ask a penetrating question: Why? Why is the idea of no State whatsoever too scary to think about? Let's leave to one side the question of whether a Stateless society would be stable, or just, or could defend itself adequately against State-ridden ones. Assume that there are satisfactory answers to those objections, if only for the purposes of this discussion, and ponder the balance sheet the State has accrued this century past.
Historian R. J. Rummel estimates that governments have killed about 170 million people since 1914. Governments seize about half the income of the world population each year, to spend on their own ends. They maintain corpora of "laws" so ambiguous and luxuriant that no individual can ever be certain he's in full compliance with them. They fasten restrictions on movement, production, and trade that artificially limit human progress. Government agents routinely brutalize and intimidate persons not charged with any crime, sometimes in pursuit of a "real" criminal, sometimes under the pretext of an investigation, sometimes just for the Hell of it.
Governments also routinely corrupt money, pervert education, and pollute communications of all sorts. They systematically invade the privacy of families and restrict freedom of speech and worship. They're utterly hostile to the right to defend oneself, especially with weaponry of any sort. Finally, no government can be trusted to respect property rights; their rationales for abridging or abolishing them increase monotonically over time.
But government is a necessity, T. C. Mits (The Celebrated Man In The Street) will tell you, because someone has to protect us against "them."
"Them." The enemy. The implacable ones who slaver at our gates, awaiting our slightest moment of inattention. Who, if not opposed with all the power at our command, would swarm over our walls, kill the men, rape the women, sell the children into slavery, and leave not one stone atop another. Who would doubt that there are such persons and forces, bent on evil of that magnitude?
I certainly don't doubt it. I've exchanged fire with "them" on several occasions. But I've come to wonder whether the State has had a hand in evoking and strengthening our enemies, nurturing them to buttress the rationale for its existence.
I conceive of Western civilization thus: That collection of societies:
- Each of which nominally adheres to the rule of law: that is, each one enforces a set of civil norms that apply to all individuals, expressed in its legal system and (nominally) enforced by its government;
- Each of which upholds a set of cultural constraints derived from the Christian Enlightenment, expressed by social discrimination and enforced by ostracism or boycott;
- All of which claim they will defend those norms and constraints when attacked;
- Which promulgates a set of broadly Christian-Enlightenment standards for individuals' conduct toward one another in private, though these are enforced only by social exclusion;
- Which divides members from non-members according to their fidelity toward those norms, cultural constraints, and standards.
I've argued in the past that this civilization has been greatly eroded. I continue to think so. But until recently, I hadn't entertained the notion that its national governments, the supposedly protective agencies to which its residents have submitted, would make alliance, more or less cheerfully, with the most virulent threats to us.
Yet that does indeed appear to be the case.
Government after government has "cozied up" to forces that, given a chance, would work the destruction of the whole Western world. It's not confined to Jimmy Carter or the State Department. Western governments have poured tens of billions of dollars into the pockets of nations and organizations that hate freedom with a red passion, while simultaneously making it ever more difficult for private parties to act in defense of their own interests. Western governments have invited immigration from lands where babies imbibe the hatred of freedom with their mothers' milk. Western governments have neutered themselves in the face of even the most overt threats to peace and freedom: the Islamic invasion of Europe, Britain, Australia, and Canada; the emergence of a new proto-Communist axis in South America; and the North Korean, Iranian, and Syrian efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. If our States had wanted to amplify the threats to our freedom and well-being, they could not have done a more thorough job.
Perhaps they did want to amplify those threats.
It might not be an organized, conspiratorial movement. It might be the result of the operation of governmental and bureaucratic incentives. I've written about such things before. But the consequences are what concern me. They aren't made more palatable by the absence of conscious villainy.
In this year of Our Lord 2008, Western Civilization confronts a greater, and more fearsome, array of threats than any it has ever faced.
Don't believe the BS about World War II being the real test of our mettle. Hitler's and Tojo's regimes were doomed from the moment we entered the fray. Those were pathological societies dominated by Master Race notions that doomed them from the start. We weren't unduly strained by the effort required to defeat them; in fact, we did so in the middle of the most severe economic contraction America had ever experienced. That should give some perspective to the true magnitude of the threats the Axis powers posed.
But in that war, our governments had to pretend, convincingly, that they were on our side.
It was easier with Japan, an alien, highly xenophobic culture with an undisguised mythos of racial superiority and inevitable world conquest. More, they struck us first, despite the warnings of their wiser military minds that the United States was an enemy the Empire of Japan could not afford to make. With Nazi Germany it required some fan dancing, for apart from the racial purity laws and the Endlosung, the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" were too similar to those of the Third Reich to be subjected to searching examination.
Note that immediately upon the conclusion of World War II, a war won by American manpower and American productivity, we had a new enemy of even more frightening aspect: world Communism, embodied first in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and later in the People's Republic of China. Yet both these threats had grown fat on American aid. Stalin's regime would not have survived the war had it not been for massive American infusions of capital and war materiel. Mao Tse-tung's regime was almost entirely a creation of the Department of State, which was heavily infiltrated by Communists and sympathizers who labored ceaselessly to create enmity between Washington and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. To claim that no one could possibly have foreseen the threat these totalitarian powers would pose to freedom and peace is to dabble in lunacy.
Washington created the Communist adversary. Washington nurtured both these powers into credible threats to American security and the peace of the world. Conspiratorialism aside, it's easy to conclude that Washington needed an antipodes with which to cow its subjects into continuing submission, so that the triumphalism that followed World War II wouldn't lead us to question Washington's assertion of sweeping, dictatorial authority over every smallest aspect of our enterprise, our localism, and our lives.
But Communism was "defeated" in the early Nineties, wasn't it? The Communist states in South America aren't real threats to us here in the North, are they? Perhaps; perhaps not. But in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the gradual "capitalization" of Red China, Washington and the national governments of Europe haven't exactly sat still. Covetous eyes had already shifted to the Middle East; both for its oil resources, and for the threats it could provide.
In his award-winning novel JEM, Frederik Pohl postulated the geopolitical reorganization of the world into three blocs:
- The "Food Bloc," whose expertise is agriculture and which served as the breadbasket of the world;
- The "Oil Bloc," whose principal asset is energy resources and the means to reach them;
- The "People Bloc," which exports workers to countries that cannot or will not produce enough of their own to maintain their labor forces.
This vision has come almost completely true. Unfortunately, the Food Bloc, of which the United States is the most important and visible member, is currently in thrall to the Oil and People Blocs. The West imports the export commodities of the Oil and People Blocs to so great a degree that our bloc's security has been seriously undermined.
The Oil Bloc nations have employed the oceans of dollars we spend on their oil to weaken our resistance to their geostrategic initiatives and demands. In the attempt to loosen their chokehold, the West has even begun to convert food to fuel, in blatant defiance of the laws of nature. In consequence, the world is suffering a global food shortage, and Americans are facing the specter of food rationing for the first time in the nation's history. The People Bloc nations have sent hither swarms of immigrants that are gradually creating a fifth column that could bring down our nation by violence and subterfuge. They've almost succeeded in doing exactly that to the nations of Europe. In both the Old World and the New, our enemies' thrusts have progressed with the tacit assistance of our national governments.
Americans, at least, are not insensitive to this. The fear of colonization and economic subjugation grows daily among us. Yet we can't quite work out what ought to be done about it...or who ought to do it.
"Of course the tiger will love you, Tavy. No love is more sincere than the love of food." -- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
The State, as I've described it above, is a vampiric institution. Its food is its subjects. The fantasies of excessively imaginative Web writers notwithstanding, no predator can survive the cultivation of sincere affection for its prey; the idea is self-contradicting. That's written in the laws of this universe.
Yet every government, no matter how constituted, maintains the pretense that it exists to serve its subjects. How often, after all, do we hear politicians, and the special interests who own their souls, speak volubly of the "essential services" government provides to "the people" -- usually in the context of a "necessary" tax increase? How often are we treated to dire predictions of what will happen if the State should cease to do this or that "for" us?
Quite a lot of persons with no particular axe to grind buy into such notions. Yet the State has no superhuman powers. It only has what it takes from private persons and institutions. It can only do what it can hire private persons and institutions to do for it. Nor is it motivated by a sincere interest in our well-being. Indeed, it's a serious error to speak of the State possessing motives of any sort. Being a collective entity, all the motives within it are those of individuals -- and it is well established that individuals are moved solely by their own desires, fears, and beliefs.
The desires of individuals in the employ of the State will always be a sample of those in the general population. As a species, humans are not notably altruistic. Indeed, we're inclined to ask, when approached by an arbitrary supplicant for whatever reason, "What's in it for me?"
Worse, the incentives that attract persons into State employ, or that lead them to contend for high office, filter the population in a particularly negative way. In comparison to the general population, those who desire high office or a place in the bureaucracy are:
- More enamored by power over others,
- More obsessed with their personal security,
- More driven by the acquisition of status and prestige,
- Less willing to admit to their mistakes,
- And less concerned with questions of right and wrong.
I say this with complete assurance. What are the attractions of a place within the State, after all? Power over others; security against unemployment; a position "above" ordinary citizens; and insulation from the consequences of their decisions and actions. It would be contrary to everything we know about Mankind to discover that the complementary drives listed above are not overrepresented among politicians and State hirelings.
To such a statistical aggregate, "public service" is of interest only to the extent that it can further the "public servant's" desires for power, security, prestige, and personal immunity. This dynamic operates continuously on any enduring governmental institution, repelling those applicants and ejecting those entrants who don't subscribe to its norms, refining its salient characteristics ever closer to immiscible purity.
"You who are born of Hope do not know of the State. It is an institution of old Earth, which we have left behind forever. Its form and its genesis varied. Its methods of operation did not. The State existed to legitimize those acts which no individual would be permitted by his neighbors to commit. Its minions killed, raped, and stole what they would. The masters of the State presumed to dictate what they, in their arrogance, called laws. They compelled and forbade all other men, with superior force as their only justification."There was no refuge from the depredations, for all that unhappy world was gripped by States. Over every square inch of ground, some State claimed the power of life and death. Everywhere one might turn, some State stood draining the people of their substance, forbidding them to come together except under its auspices, squeezing their blood from them. Even to ask 'why?' was to dare the State's wrath. To offer defiance was called treason, and was punished by unthinkable cruelties. For six thousand years, the States of Earth rampaged unchecked over suffering humanity." [From an unpublished novel]
"Institutions have their own dynamics, and the dynamic of governments is to grow." -- David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
"Government Systems, acting in accordance with the laws of growth, Tend to Expand and Encroach. In encroaching upon their own citizens, they produce Tyranny, and encroaching upon other Government Systems, they engage in Warfare." -- John Gall, Systemantics
Antarctica excepted, the land surface of the world is now completely partitioned into States. That is, there is no smallest piece of enduringly dry real estate over which some State does not claim "jurisdiction." Yes, those are "sneer quotes." "Jurisdiction" means the sovereign privilege of discriminating right from wrong and dispensing justice on the basis of those discriminations. Yet as we can see from ordinary observation, the deeds and pronouncements of a State seldom have much relation to right, wrong, or justice as ordinary persons understand them.
Unless the other bodies of our Solar System should come within our reach, it would seem that there's no further room for governments to expand geographically. All governments expand their authority and their exactions from their subjects to the limit of their subjects' endurance. Indeed, in some cases, such as Zimbabwe, the rulers treat the survival of society as unimportant.
The central question of State expansion is what will facilitate it. That is: What conditions external to the State will predispose private persons to accept its further expansion at the expense of their liberty and property? A historical review indicates that private persons imbued with the mores and traditions of Western civilization will cede these things:
- When they are made conscious of a new or elevated threat;
- When the threat originates, or seems to originate, from "outside;"
- When the nature of the threat suggests that the State is the "right" entity to combat the threat.
The more recent threats we've faced have presented a blended character. In part, they appear to issue from outside; certainly, nuclear proliferation, South American Communism, and Islamic terrorism are not prima facie homegrown products. But in equal part, these most recent threats share a domestic quality: the covert exportation of nuclear materials, technology, and knowledge; domestic support and encouragement for Latin American "liberation" movements ideologically hostile to freedom and capitalism; the immigration of large numbers of Muslims to Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States. In fact, all of them have benefited from support, whether active or passive, by the governments of Western nations.
This is not the result of a conspiracy to make us more afraid. At least, it need not be a conscious conspiracy. But the dynamics of State power and growth are buttressed by the popular perception of threats. That suggests rather strongly that State officials and functionaries would be less disposed to view threats, whether of the wholly external or partly internal sort, as matters requiring correction than as opportunities for growth.
No organization labors to put itself out of business; witness the March of Dimes's swift conversion from fundraising for polio, now a mere memory, to fundraising for birth defects. State organs and bureaucracies are supremely unwilling to surrender power or pelf. One of the best examples available is the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which ought to have coincided with the abolition of the bureaucracy charged with enforcing Prohibition. It did not; that organ survives today as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, one of the most powerful, least accountable, and most roundly hated of all government offices.
It is madness to expect a State institution whose sustenance depends upon the perception of threat to act in such a manner as to nullify that threat. Rather, we may reasonably expect such an institution to act to conserve the threat, or at least the perception thereof...and perhaps even to enlarge upon it.
If it were otherwise, nuclear proliferation, particularly of the Islamic sort, would be countered by decisive military action. If it were otherwise, the oil collar about our necks would be countered by intensified domestic oil exploration and exploitation, by more extensive and more sophisticated use of our coal resources, and by the rebirth of nuclear electrical generation. If it were otherwise, the waves of immigrants hostile to freedom and Western culture would be impeded by firm physical barriers, manned by cadres of armed men permanently authorized to shoot to kill.
Yet it's not a conspiracy. At least, not a conscious one. At least, I hope not.
More anon.
Comments
May God grant your muse make “anon” soon. This theme has been exposed before but, sadly, it has not been pounded into a screaming front-page issue.
It first came to my attention in the mid nineties when Dr. Walter Williams expanded in his column upon another column by economist and historian Professor Robert Higgs The Myth of “Failed” Policies that had been published by the Von Mises Institute. Your column today surely echoes the synopsis offered by Dr. Higgs [emphasis added by me]:
Many other sacred cows graze in the pasture of failed policies, and a similar story may be told about each of them. All cases contain two common elements.
One, obviously, is that the so-called failed policies are government policies. Government being, in Ludwig von Mises’s apt expression, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, it can force the citizenry to endure policies even if they are failures from the perspective of the general public. But Mises also taught that ultimately no system of government can last unless it receives support from public opinion.
Hence the second common element of all so-called failed policies: humbuggery. As Mises’s great disciple, Murray N. Rothbard, pointed out on many occasions, government is not just force, it is also fraud.
Dr Williams provided several good short examples in his 1995 column that today haven’t gotten any better. As these are examples in areas other than defense posture, they add fodder to your argument by demonstrating the problem is endemic to all government programs.
He ended his review with a line that concisely anticipated your reflections today:
Professor Higgs’ bottom-line lesson is this: When the political process is taken into account, government policies that any reasonable person would call a failure are nearly always a spectacular success.
I hope that it is in fact more than sad that these cogent earlier thoughts have been permitted to languish, long dormant, will help propel your follow-up.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 04/26/2008 at 05:29 PMPersonally, I’m more of a fan of Wilson’s Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/04/re-threat-and-state.html
Posted by Consul-At-Arms on 04/28/2008 at 01:45 AM
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