#59: Damn, This Dog Just Won't Stop Eating!

Let’s talk about “Populism.”

Populism must be distinguished from Socialism, though the two are closely related. Socialism is nothing other than populism with a pseudo-scientific mask. Both are efforts to harness the power of simple greed and envy. But people, particularly people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are uncomfortable with their own greed and envy, and so the clever politicians invented a narrative in which their greed and envy resurfaced in the guise of fairness and justice. This narrative capitalized (no irony intended) on the powerful Enlightenment trend of science and pseudo-science from the 18^th c on, this narrative was the Socialism of Marx and Engels. What Marx decided was “let’s give Populism a popular 18^th c Materialist cloak and a trendy scientific ‘look’. Yeah! That’s the ticket, we’ll turn Populism into a ‘science’ which ‘proves’ that greed and envy are really fairness and justice!”

“I love it!” he said to Engels, “Ain’t bullshit great when you serve it on a plate?” (loosely translated from the German)

That was the brilliant first step. The brilliant next step came from Lenin, who said to himself, “the pseudo science thing is good, but it can’t hurt to make it a secular religion, too! Yeah! That’s the ticket, we don’ need no God to make a good religion!” Stalin, of course, took that thought and ran with it.

The point is that if we focus on Socialism, we are not looking at the root phenomenon. Socialism is not the name of a societal impulse, it is the name of a marketing strategy, a sales story or narrative.

Populism has been around for quite a long time, it’s an answer to the question that has vexed rulers for as far back as rulers have existed. I suppose the question came into existence just around the time that people left behind that mythical condition that Hobbes called “the state of nature” that preceded any society at all. The question is: How do you control all those people?

Most of the time the answer was simply threat and killing. Those who respond to threat, you keep and enslave, those who don’t, you kill. But, eventually it dawned on rulers that there was another consideration, namely that of national productivity. The problem with the primitive repression method was twofold, 1) it was always risky for the rulers, and 2) that the wealth required to maintain a state did not seem to be generated under primitive repression. There’s always an overhead to running a state, even a slave state. You have to pay your army, and pay it well, and you have to feed the slaves, so as to produce the wealth with which you pay your army. The rulers in such a state are only safe as long as they can keep their army satisfied. This problem is exemplified in the state of North Korea today, and it is trying to solve it by blackmailing the outside world with nuclear weaponry. Primitive repression, as it turned out, was not a very good system, not even for the rulers.

The Romans had a better idea: Populism at home, primitive repression in the empire. The rulers of Rome were safer than their primitive repression antecedents. Of course, there were ongoing assassinations, but these were often prompted more by the insanity of the rulers than by the nature of the system. The empire could be sucked dry of its wealth for the maintenance of the army, but, more important, that wealth made it possible for the rulers to buy the passivity of their citizens. The Romans, bless them, invented (drum roll!) … ENTITLEMENTS!

The Romans gave their citizens “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses). Of course, that was still a far cry from free health care, free education, welfare, working for the government, etc. etc. etc., but it was one of Rome’s most lasting inventions (right up there with roads and aqueducts!).

But people are naturally greedy and ungrateful. What have you done for me lately? they ask. And they’re fickle. Once the Pandora’s Box of entitlements was opened, the only way of acquiring power was by trumping an opponent’s offers. That’s how we went from panem et circenses to free enrolment at the Sorbonne and welfare in the Bronx.

Once we left primitive repression behind and the people’s voice (the vox populi) got a say in who got to milk the national cow, the mechanism for acquiring power automatically became Populism or the distribution of new entitlements.

Now, one could argue, as many have done, that this is a great system because the power acquisition mechanism for the greedy would-be rulers mechanically assures the distribution of national wealth to the citizenry. And there is truth to this, since the unwashed masses (I’m not speaking specifically of the French here), the hoi polloi, have done much better under this system than any preceding one. However, the system suffers from an intrinsic and fatal flaw. The system forces the rulers to offer benefits that the national wealth cannot pay for. To put the system’s internal problem as succinctly as possible: the modern democratic system lacks a natural internal governor on entitlement spending.

What I mean is this: the impulse to acquire political power is psychologically natural; the greed and envy of the electorate is psychologically natural; but there exists no psychologically natural impulse to curtail the desire for power or greed and envy.

I’ve been told, don’t know if it’s true, that dogs have no internal monitor on their eating, that, unless stopped by their owner, they will eat until they die. The problem of the democratic state is that it is like a dog in this respect.

Thus, the financial problem for the rulers is always the same: how do we pay for the panem et circenses? There have always been only two possible sources of money: outside the nation and inside the nation. These days, nations are finding that their options have dramatically shrunk.

Originally, they took the path of least resistance, they solved the problem by looting enslaved colonies. But the cost-benefit equation increasingly turned against this strategy until the imperialist nations found that their colonies were actually costing more to control than they were yielding in wealth. The imperialists left their colonies, most often in expensive, protracted, stupid, and bloody conflicts. They still had to pay the costs of ever increasing panem et circenses. So, they turned to the inside, to taxation.

But while the unwashed masses, a.k.a. the electorate, quite naturally psychologically loves having its greed and envy satisfied, it equally naturally psychologically hates the opposite of that, namely being taxed. And so the government, the rulers, did the clever and inevitable thing, they taxed the few in order to provide the panem et circenses of the many.

And here we arrive at the inevitable, the inexorable consequence of democracy: Populism, the attempt to control a large mass of people by harnessing the greed and envy of the majority against a productive minority.

But even the most extreme taxation on the productive minority has failed to yield the requisite amount of money, so they now they turn once again to the outside, only this time in the form of borrowing.

This dog just won’t stop eating! It’s gonna die.

Marx thought there was a “logic” to history, a natural, inevitable progression in which capitalism was just a stage on the way to the ultimate classless society. It may be that he was half-right, that there is natural mechanical progression in the affairs of men, but that he was wrong where it would end and how. History has seemed to take us from primitive repression states to increasingly democratic ones. But the democratic ones seem to suffer from an internal defect that will not lead them to the so-called workers’ paradise, the “classless society,” but rather to an inevitable collapse, from which will arise, most likely, societies once more of primitive repression.