#17: Government and its Agencies: Audrey III (“Feed Me!”)

Government begins as servant and ends as parasite.

I feel fairly safe in believing that there never was a moment in time when the social contract was actually negotiated and signed; when our pre-Neandarthal ancestors gathered, perhaps on a plain, and all made their mark, yielding their pointed sticks and clubs to a government. At the same time, the conceit of a social contract has its use in drawing our attention to the responsibilities a democratic government has to its citizenry. And while our primitive ancestors may not in general have actually negotiated a written social contract, the Founding Fathers of the United States did do so; the contract is known as the American Constitution.

The Constitution is a remarkable document and lays out in astonishing subtlety and detail what the relationships of the various constituents of the nation are to be. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the wisdom and sophistication of the document once we become familiar with the backgrounds and gifts of the Founders. These were not the murderously deranged, psychotic rabble of the later French copycat revolution, these were sober, well educated, sane, courageous, and talented men who reflected deeply on the questions of governance.

They were even aware, although perhaps not clearly, of the most universal threat posed by even democratic government, and that is simply that no institution is driven only by the purposes for which it was created. Or, in the equivalent formulation: All institutions are driven by motivations beyond those intended by their creators.

Institutions are not like corporations, they are not abstract bloodless “virtual” entities whose only existence lies in some purely legal fictition; institutions are rather aggregations of living individuals gathered for a special purpose. But, for good or for ill, individuals all have needs, wants, and ambitions of their own that they hope to fulfill through the institution in which they work. As a result, we can take it as an axiom that every institution seeks always to increase its size and power quite independently of the purpose for which it was designed. Like Audrey II of the Little Shop of Horrors, an institution is always craving more food and always growing; always, that is, any unless constrained by the population that created it.

Thus, citizenries and their institutions will never share all of their objectives in common and there will always be a tension between the needs and wants of the population at large and the institutions supposed to be their servants.

But in this conflict of interests, the institutions have an inherent strategic advantage, namely that their leaders recognize the adversarial relation between themselves and the citizenry, while the citizens do not. The leaderships of governmental institutions are not only constantly scheming at ways of hoodwinking the citizenry and bleeding it of its wealth, they are constantly working on increasing the size of their constituencies. And by “constituencies” I do not mean the people who ignorantly keep returning them to office, but rather the armies of people whom they have encouraged to become completely dependent on their largesse. It must be seen that poverty is not perceived as an evil by governmental institutions, but rather as an instrument in the maintenance of power; that larger and more governmental agencies are not seen as an unfortunate necessity, but as a part of the extension of the institutional power base.

According to Hobbes, the social contract was initially forged because our ancestors were wandering about in the forests in vulnerable and impoverished isolation. They were, he famously said, living lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Obviously, no one wants a life like that, so they came to the decision that things would only improve when they could stop worrying about the aggression of others. Thus, we are told, our ancestors all agreed to give up their their pointed sticks and clubs, and to cede the responsibility of their individual protections to a ruler.

Of course, this never happened. For one thing, the giving up of arms surely came much later, sometime in the middle ages when the right to bear arms was restricted to a King and derivately to his nobles. Since bandits also continued to bear arms, the only unarmed populations were, first, the peasantry, and, second, the slowly evolving merchant class. Both of these classes were regularly pillaged, looted, and raped by both the armed forces and the banditry.

Oh my, that’s shockingly like what happens in the urban centers of Western countries to the middle class! The tax-paying citizens still living in those centers have the choice of being harrassed, squeezed, and pillaged by either the armed gangs or the armed police, neither of whom want an armed citizenry. What they want, as does government, whether benevolent or not, is unarmed passive prey.

But, you may ask, where does all this lead?

It leads, sadly, to the total domination of the productive ones by the same government to which they innocently ceded in time immemorial the responsibilities of their protection. The servant inexorably becomes the master, and the citizens are reduced to lives of impoverished confusion and depression. They are reduced to the condition of the peasant girls kidnapped by the 16th century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who kept them alive in her dungeon for the sole purpose of bleeding them, so that she could bathe in their blood and remain young forever (it didn't work). Or, to change the metaphor, they are reduced to the state of Masai cattle, bred and managed only for their meat and blood.

Government accomplishes all this not only by the threat of force and bribery, it simultaneously creates an entirely new conceptual framework in which the concrete individual (who was trying to improve his lot with the social contract) becomes nothing and the state, in the form of an abstract individual, becomes everything. The state ceases to exist for the people, the people now exist for the state.

Yes, I said that institutions are made up of people, and so the state also is made up of people. But in the new narrative of the state, the individual supposedly served by government becomes an abstract individual, which is strictly speaking ‘no individual in particular’. And when "the state" acts, it acts not in the name of a concrete individual, as it might in a dictatorship, it acts in the name of all the concrete individuals, which means that it acts in the name of ‘no individual in particular’.

Think of the horror of our distant ancestor Uggg, who gave up his pointed stick and his club for his safety and for a longer better life, when he discovers now that what he actually got instead was slavery to a system that not only doesn’t serve his interests at all, it serves the interests, the theorists of the state tell him, of no individual in particular! Poor Uggg, he is so confused.

And he isn’t cheered at all when he discovers that in point of fact, real live individuals do benefit mightily under the new system, but none of them are his people; they are instead the individuals to whom he entrusted his safety and the improvement of his life. They are the individuals of the politburo living and relaxing in their government-bought dachas, they are the apparatchiks of the Democrat Party, they are the members of the Canadian Senate, whose only function is to fatten and batten on the citizen dime.

And Uggg didn’t just lose his pointed stick and club. As the millennia passed by, the Big Religions developed working alliances with the Big Monarchies and he also lost his control over his eating habits (when they left him any food at all), whom he screwed (when his bosses didn’t get to screw them first), for what reason, and when, the circumstances of his children’s births and growth, and the circumstances surrounding his death.

What Big Religion realized was that when one controls the most fundamental of human passions, eating, screwing, reproducing, and dying, one controls the entire man. The Big Monarchies were eventually felled by utterly disgusted and starving mobs who in their ignorance replaced them with even more greedy and efficient parasites, the joyfully inaugurated Democratic Governments. Ah, yes, the workers of the Russian soviets were really happy with the October Revolution in 1917 when Lenin's Change They Could Believe In came upon them, those at least who didn't wind up in the cellars of Lubyanka prison, hanging on meat hooks while Felix Dzerzhinsky looked on smoking a cigarette.

But possibly the most interesting stripping of his humanity that fell upon poor Uggg was when Jehovah took away his revenge.

Justice is MINE, sayeth the Lord!

MINE, he said sternly, not yours. YOU got nuthin. You shut up! I don’t care what the other guy did to you – I, I, me, I get to give him what-for, NOT you.

The secular democratic governments saw this, and saw that it was Good. Thus they went one step further, they actually banned the actual passion itself! Not only was revenge no longer going to belong to Uggg, being administered by Jehovah, revenge was going to be extinguished and replaced with "Justice," which would be administered by (you guessed it, not Uggg) the State; and it would be utterly devoid of emotion. Justice would have nothing to do with Uggg and his sense of grievance at all, it would merely serve the pragmatic needs of "the State," which is, of course, nobody in particular. Justice would now serve "rehabilitation."

In the end, whatever it was that made poor Uggg want to live at all is either completely controlled by one institution or another, or it is simply taken from him entirely.

In the end, Ugg is told that his “passions” make him disgusting, make him primitive, make him un-civilized. He is told that whatever makes him a concrete, individual person makes him morally defective.

In the end, the person they will tell poor Uggg to emulate will be the “abstract citizen,” Hegel’s perfect citizen, Musil’s Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, The Man Without Qualities.

Poor Uggg.

#16: Seven Principles for a Reflective Citizenry

Every citizen of every state ought to be guided by some basic principles in evaluating his government's growth initiatives. Here are seven such principles, all, however, derived from the fundamental principle first expressed as the motto of an American literary magazine, the Democratic Review (1837-1859), that "The best government is that which governs least." I prefer the logical equivalent that perhaps stresses the point better: "That government is worst that governs most."

I. The first is that the probability of any governmental initiative to succeed varies inversely with the square of its complexity. What this means is that the more complex a plan is, the less likely exponentially it is to succeed. Example: the current U.S. Democrat Health Care proposal(s).

II. The second is that the probability that a prediction will come true varies inversely with the square of the length of time involved. This means that later predictions are exponentially more likely to be false than earlier ones. Example: Al Gore’s doomsday predictions.

III. The third is that the benefit of any government plan varies directly with the square of its cost. This means that the cost of the plans increases exponentially for every additional unit of benefit. Example: every western entitlement program in existence.

IV. The fourth is that the benefits of any initiative intended to help the poor accrue exponentially more to its initiators and administrators than to its proclaimed beneficiaries. Examples: Illegal immigrant amnesty proposals.

V. The fifth is what is often called “the Law of Unintended Consequences,” and it holds that policy and legislation intended to have one set of consequences often have utterly unanticipated and undesirable ones. Hence, the adage, “be careful what you wish for.” Example: Johnson’s Welfare Policy – intended to improve the living conditions of the poor – actual consequence: an explosion of the birth rate among the poor.

VI. The sixth is that institutions meant to serve develop appetites and objectives of their own, completely distinct from those of the people they were intended to serve. This means that one should be very wary of increasing the number or the size of such institutions, since their objectives may very well not be compatible with one’s own. Examples: Dr. Frankenstein's Monster and every current government initiative in place.

VII. The seventh is that every large governmental initiative involves an enormous redistribution of income from the many to the few. This principle holds generally, regardless of whether the system of government is Socialist or Capitalist or Mixed. Example: Eisenhower's "military/industrial complex," Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and every Soviet 5 year plan.

#15: Reinventing the Self

'Can the Republican Party reinvent itself?', the spin doctors ask. They also ask this of Governor Sanford; of John Edwards; of Michael Vick. In the old days, we only thought of "inventing" things, not people, and we used it transitively, not reflexively. Is it true that just about anything can be invented, even reinvented, and that some things can actually reinvent themselves? Judging from media talk, it seems a given that people at least really can 'reinvent' themselves, and even often should.

At first glance, this seems to be a new use of the word at odds with the way we used to use it, where it applied to things, not people, and described time wasted in doing what had already been done. 'Reinventing the wheel' was synonymous with useless duplication of work. The reinvented 'reinventing', on the other hand, does apply to human beings and it implies useful change. Such 'reinventing' is meant to be more than superficial and always carries with it a complete change of basic beliefs and attitudes. The new 'reinventing' is the seamless transformation of an unappetizing person into a marketable one, the beauty salon's 'make-over' at the level of personality. 'Reinventings' try to evade hypocrisy in two ways, by making the changes so seamless that they escape notice and by claiming true conversion if caught. Both of these strategies capitalize on the slipperiness of self and ride on the elusiveness of personality. After all is said and done, personal change is hard to document. But is personal change a 'reinventing'?

The apparent shift in the meaning of 'reinventing' reflects a gradual change in our view of the world from one in which people were selves that were reliably constant into one in which people owned designer selves that could be altered or discarded; from one in which selves were organic to one in which they were artificial. We moved from viewing our selves as our inner guides to viewing them as stories for influencing others. We moved, in effect, to a world in which the self became a kind of clothing accessory. This shift was no accident. As we became more dependent on the state, the need for inner guidance diminished, while our needs for excuse and popularity increased. But history was on the side of “reinvention” on a much larger scale than even this. In philosophy, the non-existence of the self was explicitly argued by Sartre, not surprisingly, since enduring character is not an easy find among the French. And even in technology, the power of computers introduced a new concept into films, that of “morphing.” Microchip technology enabled animators to seamlessly transform a person’s features into one completely different.

With all of those factors at play, it is easy to forget that the real shift was not in the use of 'reinvent', but in the culture’s movement from a living self that we are to a manufactured self that we own. The reason we can now 'reinvent' our selves is because our 'selves' have become inanimate things. But the shift was still an easy sell.

First, the reinventable self automated absolution. As an acquired artifact, a thing made by others, the defects of the reinventable self always accrued to its makers, whether they were parents, corporations, governments, religions, other races or other genders; and a self made by others could always be disavowed and its makers always litigated. The reinventable self denied not only original sin, but any sin at all. It was a mechanical excuse equal to any offense. It improved on confession by dispensing with contriteness, penance, or a forgiving priest. Perhaps it was this fact that led to 'being born again', a trope of the reinventable self, religion's effort to catch the wave. And second, the sell was supported by a cynical misreading of America's most cherished credo, that of the equality of men. Originally intended to imply equality before the law, it was first extended to equality of opportunity and most recently, though only tacitly, extended to equality of native ability. The original stated an axiom of civil law, the last was a futile attempt to legislate fact. But while nature ignored our legislative efforts and people remained stubbornly unequal, it was still clear to the supporters of native equality that the reinventable self was friendly to their cause, since it held that the only differences between people lay in the selves they possessed and those were always replaceable.

The popular wisdom of an earlier age understood that 'selves' were not always easy to discern. "She's trying to find herself," we used to say, as if selves could be concealed or mislaid. But even this earlier view clearly presupposed that everyone did in fact have a self even though they might not always see clearly what it is. A person's moral worth was thought to depend on the quality of this self and we called it 'character'. It was a kind of reliable permanent personal substrate that an acidic brew of commerce, technology and politics has managed to dissolve. 'Character' was the self that Socrates urged us to try to know and to which Polonius exhorted us to remain true, but 'character' is largely gone. 'Character' has been replaced by lexic parvenu 'persona'. This word implies less than 'character" but more than the old word 'role', which carried with it the smell of insincerity. 'Playing a role' suggested an intentionally camouflaged inner reality. When we take on a new 'persona', on the other hand, we are hiding nothing, we are actually transformed. This 'persona' is taken to run deep the way we used to think that character did, but it is new and improved, along with diapers and sanitary napkins, because it is disposable.

A world with fluid, shifting selves is an easy sell, especially since it's usually sold on the pay-later plan, but there is still a significant price, even if delayed. The moral, legal, economic, religious and political issues attached to this view are considerable and we are already struggling with them. Without a permanent self, who is responsible for debt or crime or child or country? And how do we determine which self was at home when the debt was incurred or the crime committed? If selves are dropped upon us by others, when, if ever, is it time for the family or the state to expect people to take ownership for the selves they have? A world inhabited by reinventable selves is a world in which everyone can blame, but no one is responsible, a world in which everyone can promise, but in which the promisers can disappear at will. If Nancy Pelosi could really reinvent herself (would that she would!), she might well be a better woman, but would she still be the woman the good people of San Francisco elected? How many reinventions will we allow our elected officials? Our spouses? Our friends? I don't know what the truth about selves may be, or even how we would recognize such a truth in the end, but we can and ought to ask ourselves in the meantime how well we like this world in which selves that have outlived their usefulness may be casually and painlessly replaced. Would it not be nice to live in a world in which people stuck to their principles, their spouses, their children and their countries even when things got tough?

#14: The "What if Everyone Did That" Argument

Often, when a child does something the adults think bad, they ask the child, "What if everyone did that?", thinking that there is some salutary lesson in this counter-factual question. Actually, there is not. The argument is either inapplicable to the case or an enthymeme, an argument depending upon a suppressed or tacit premise which is quite evidently false. To begin, the argument is ambiguous between a "moral" one and a prudential one.

The moral one relies on our intuition that there are acts we consider inherently objectionable. If it is the act itself that constitutes the problem, then it does not matter who performs it -- it is objectionable whether others perform it or whether we perform it ourselves. But if the act in question is indeed inherently objectionable, then there is no need for the counter-factual thought experiment since it will be evident to the child from a consideration of the act itself that it is objectionable. Indeed, we sometimes chide a child who appeals to the "fact" that "everyone else is doing it," by asking another counter-factual question: "If everyone else jumped off a roof, would you do that too?" thus making the point that he should be making a judgement independent of what others do or do not do. The case will either be one in which an independent judgment is made possible by the very nature of the act or it will not. If it is the first case, then it would seem that the counter-factual question argument should not be applied, since the child will see that the act should not be done regardless of what other people do. But what if the act is not evident in this way?

A valid argument on non-moral purely prudential grounds could be constructed if a certain suppressed premise is made explicit (or added), but that argument would not be sound, since the premise is baldly false.

The suppressed premise is that there exists a causal relationship between what the child does and what the rest of the world does. No such causal relation exists. If the child were logical, he would respond that he would certainly not like it if everyone did as he did (since this would be bad for himself). Fortunately, he would continue, my doing this will never bring it about that everyone else does so, and so I will continue doing as I have done. I certainly prefer that others not do as I do, but also am quite content to do as I do. If it is claimed that I hold "inconsistent" preferences, that does not bother me in the slightest; I have no obligation to be "consistent" (whatever that might mean here) in my preferences.

We can see that the premise is needed simply by noting that the denial of a universal affirmative claim does not yield its contrary (which is what the argument wants). The universal affirmative would be "all men do x." The child is asked to agree that he would not want this, therefore wanting the denial of the universal affirmative. But this denial only yields the proposition's contradictory, namely "It is not the case that all men do x" or "Some men do not do x." But this will not do the job for the argument, since it still leaves the child the option of continuing to do x, while all the others do not.

What the argument really wants is a conclusion to the effect "No men do x," which excludes the child's doing x. The only way that the argument can achieve this is by making it the case that if anyone at all does x, then all do x. In effect, by making it impossible that some do x and some do not. This can be done only by the assumption of a causal relationship between anyone doing x and everyone doing x. Therefore, unless the child abstains from doing x, everyone will do x. But this causal assumption is transparently false.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you see it, the vast majority of children are not that logical and continue to be influenced by this argument all the way into university political indoctrination classes.