#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.