The World is Stupid—You Can't Fix It!
But Could Something Be Done?By Claude RoessigeriUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Claude Roessiger
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-7667-2Chapter One
A Tale Told by an Idiot
If we squint our eyes and peer back to an ancient plain beneath an ancient sun, if we imagine our ancestors thereupon, massed and brutish and fearful, if we see these inchoate men through the hot dust lifted by their tramping feet, it is difficult not to also see the one before them, leading them—their leader. And therein is the tale.
Who is this leader we seem so to need and far too often to revere? This hero of epics, this victor in war, this giver of law, this tyrant, this murderer? And what is the stuff of those who follow—the followers, the people, the mass, the dumb herd? Is this ancient story not a curious and painful tale?
If we are saved, if we are to be saved, if man is somehow more than a brutish beast of no account led by a handful of alpha creatures, we can find optimism only in a divine spark. Let us hope for it and pray for it. Without it, the denouement is too awful to contemplate. I speak practically, not religiously.
The inspiration—for such it was, sudden and complete—for this book arose in a single moment when thoughts accumulated over a lifetime coalesced. A window opened upon a broad field whereupon all of the elements stood ordered and interconnected. Do not mistake me: I refer not to a vision, or anything like it. No! Rather, a puzzle whose disjointed pieces have long been left on the table unassembled, and to which the solution is of a sudden seen. Call it a moment of insight, the eureka moment that is now increasingly understood as a very real phenomenon.
What were the pieces of this puzzle? Many. But at the core was always the existence of a masterpiece, a keystone, and that broadly speaking the essence of it was liberty and man, perhaps—not necessarily religiously—the soul of man. The question was and is "Can man be man without liberty?" We tilt toward philosophy with such a query, but we will not enter upon philosophy's province even if our pursuit leads to philosophical considerations. The questions we shall pose do not have easy, ready answers. We must think deeply. Do other pieces to the puzzle exist? Oh, sure. Can man be free? Does man want to be free? Does it matter?
We have learned that somehow the progression of Western thought led man from the dark cavern of the ancient world, where a man was no more than a beast of modest value, undifferentiated from the mass of men, to the modern world, where enlightenment made each man precious in his own right ... and a beast of modest value, undifferentiated from the mass of men. What changed? What did not?
We will leave the epistemological questions to the great thinkers; it was probably in the nature of things that their questions would lead to answers that are in fact only further queries, the unknown leading to the unknowable. Instead we will consider how the world may be stupid, and why we cannot fix it. This would seem a pessimistic thesis. In a way, it is. But it is more than that. To have any hope of curing a disease, one must first understand its nature. No matter how awful the ill, it must be examined, palpated, smelled, and—yes—sometimes contracted before we can hope to conquer it. It's a journey we shall take together.
We will begin with the nature of society's organization, which is after all in the nature of man. We have all learned at some time one of those platitudes that glide by us as we gaze numbly out of a classroom window, that man is a social animal. Well, he is, isn't he? With the exception of a few hermits—inevitably the butt of jokes that betray our suspicion of solitude—we gather in societies. It may be that we have some need for each other's company, to view the social animal through one lens, or it may be that we gather for protection, as a school of fish, to view it through another lens. Which is true? It matters, even if our common-sense experience suggests to us that it's some of both.
Various theories explain the origin of government. The political theorist Mancur Olson elaborated the theory of the "stationary bandit." It runs this way: Man as a solitary creature found himself vulnerable. He banded into groups. One among the group was brighter, swifter, stronger, better looking, or what have you, and became the group leader. Capable leaders were more successful than less capable ones, and groups led by capable leaders became tribes. At the time man was a hunter- gatherer, so the tribe that hunted and gathered more successfully became larger. Those who did a bad job were sent to extinction without passing Go. Those who managed to survive joined a more successful tribe. Success, then as now, was defined by the accretion of goods: food, shelter, utilitarian things, pretty things, women. This led to plunder. In fact, in Mancur Olson's words, the successful hunting group became "roving bandits." And they were ordinarily led by a stronger leader, a roving bandit himself. As the basic necessities became reasonably assured for the group, and as some sort of division of labor and good organization liberated some time for mischievous pursuits, the roving bandit's eye fell increasingly upon trinkets and nubile creatures, suggesting the need for a place to keep the newfound booty. Ah! A tent, a hut, a house, a manor, a castle, a walled town, and—presto—the roving bandit parked the horse and became a stationary bandit.
It doesn't take a bridge of much account to understand that the stationary band it is what we call government. The instincts of government are those of a thief and a tyrant, and a man who wants to be free is left to defend himself against—let's be clear, historically this means to kill—the stationary bandit. Not so easy. The stationary bandit has an elaborate security apparatus designed to protect him against exactly this eventuality, but another fact remains: his slaves prefer to be slaves. Shocking? Let us continue, for herein is the essence of our inquiry: if the world is stupid and it cannot be fixed, it's because the component parts somehow aren't right. The component parts are human beings. An even cursory study of history supports this view, however antithetical it seems to us: man has spent most of his existence on this planet as a slave, a subject, a serf, a brutish beast led by a small number of strong leaders, sometimes led unwillingly but far more tragically and frequently led willingly. The times—indeed they are hardly even moments but only instants—of enlightenment and grace are few, so few that one can count them upon a single hand, whereas those of oppression and darkness require the gathered hands of us all to fairly count them ... and even then one will want for fingers. Oppression and darkness are the natural state of man.
In the Western world, we are or think of ourselves as, terrible evidence to the contrary aside, children of the Enlightenment. Well, not so fast. In what someone called the terrible twentieth century, more men killed other men than in any other century in history. Enlightenment? There was a distinction between us and previous incarnations of humanity, it's true: some of us were horrified. In classical times no one gave mass slaughter any particular thought; our ancient brethren were more realistic than we and considered it the way of the world, the spoil of the victor, the right of the stronger, or somehow, intuitively, the survival of the fittest. Maybe it was. Some historians have advanced the argument that more advanced societies annihilate less advanced ones, barely leaving unspoken the implication that it's not a bad thing. Be the implication as it may, the axiom stands: more advanced societies triumph over less advanced ones, whether it be suddenly with flashing swords and lopped-off heads, or over the longer course, by their comfort and ease unconsciously killing off the hungry and the poor, as in Africa today. It is not just by the sword of the strong that men die, but also by the hand of disdainful good intentions. The comfort and ease of the wealthy suggests in the current time—with self-satisfaction put first, as always—that it would be a good thing if the poor were not so poor ... so just mandate it.
This in one guise is called "fair trade," whereby we ensure the increased prosperity of the already not-so-poor and guarantee the death—literally, not figuratively—of the world's poorest. Under the Fair Trade Doctrine, we will only buy goods produced by those who receive some guaranteed "fair price" for their labor. Unfortunately—a small failing of economic understanding—one cannot mandate a fair price in the place of a market price, and when one does one always either creates a black market or some kind of monopoly. And, damn the downtrodden! We shall revert to this topic. It is only one among many examples.
We fast forward now, from ancient man through classical man to modern man and the revolutionary movement that hit its stride with the French Revolution. What a marvel that was: the template for the horrors of communism a century in advance! It is true that the French Revolution had some threads similar to those of the American Revolution—which was far more a social revolution than a war of secession, in spite of what England thought—but it's also true that in spite of both having had a common ground in the Enlightenment, they took divergent paths. Whether their ultimate destinations will be very different remains to be seen; they are surely less different than once thought. France today has an oppressive government. So has the United States. The glory of the stationary bandit! From the smoke and the blood of the French Revolution came a Marxist revolutionary fervor that is with us yet, the slain Soviet and Maoist hosts having expired without taking with them the disease that killed them. We shall inquire into the nature of this disease, for it is one that greatly afflicts us. Stupidity? Yes, in fact. How can one try an experiment in every conceivable way for over a century, without ever finding the least suggestion of success, killing hundreds of millions of men and women in the process, and continue to try? It's as silly as the old alchemist's dream of turning lead into gold. It's very wrong! In fact, it's much more than that: it's savagely and criminally stupid. But this is the nature of man, and it makes our world.
As we do not seem able to free ourselves from the virus of socialism in all its Hydra-like guises, we will do well to understand its nature. In the modern language of technology, this virus enters the body as a Trojan horse, masquerading as good. Upon having successfully invaded the body, it turns upon its host and shows itself for what it is and ever has been: a stationary bandit, a tyrant, and a murderer, one more sad chapter in man's inhumanity to man.
The lyrics to its siren song are sweet: "a human face," "life in harmony with nature," "equality"— the égalité that continues to plague the French—"human rights," "peace," and all the nostrums of youthful idealism. Its reality is much harsher: the dictatorship of the proletariat that turns out to be just another dictatorship; violence and repression; equality divided—equality of privilege for the masters and equality of misery for the serfs; the wholesale destruction of nature in the construction of the New World Order—that self-serving bromide about not making an omelet without breaking a few eggs; and the grinding into ashes of the human spirit.
In fact, however it's cooked or tossed, socialism ends up being about power, the strong over the weak, wreaking upon the world the terrible dreams of their own fevers. Socialism sweetens its bitter medicine with the sugar of newspeak, wherein words are given meanings exactly opposite to their plainly understood ones. It was not a trivial notion when the prophet Isaiah enjoined "not to take bitter for sweet, dark for light, or evil for good." The misuse of language, a reflection of the decline of critical thought, assured by the relativism and dumbing-down of education, is a root cause and component of oppression. Penny-ante tyrants fashion themselves kings. The people gawp and take the bait. Without a rigorous education, liberty fails.
But we have digressed from our thesis while explaining it: at the heart of our misery is ... ourselves. We cannot posit a stupid world without coming to understand that it is man who makes it so—primitive, atavistic, tribal, fearful, superstitious man. We see in the mirror all the brush strokes of modernity, but we don't see that the paint never dried, and that it takes only a few scrapes of the knife to reveal the primitive being, dull-browed and unenlightened, cowering before thunder, scurrying in the night lest magical forces ensnare him, whispering the most fantastic tales to his credulous and fey fellows.
There is security in the tribe: anything is better than standing alone. Liberty means standing alone, with the free man rendered sufficient unto himself by his enlightenment. Better to compromise liberty for security. If the price to pay for security is serfdom, so be it. The night is too frightful. And thus does man choose slavery. We saw recently how easily Americans, shocked and frightened beyond reason by the events of 9/11, gave up their fundamental liberties to gain what they thought might be some increase of security. Alas it wasn't to be, and never was. As Franklin observed, those who think to give up liberty for security lose both. Americans of the revolutionary generation, or even of the nineteenth century, themselves within some sort of living memory of the Revolution, would never have reacted thus to 9/11; they would have understood that safety lies in courage.
The question is—now, later, in the futures of our children's children—whether there is any hope. The answer is "Maybe, some." It is not a sure thing. History can only make us doubt. The glory of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 restores our faith. So we continue.
The slave of ancient Egypt, the serf of the medieval manor, and the citizen of our modern social democracies have this much in common: some kind of security in the place of liberty. All are bound by force. You think not? Try not to pay your taxes in one of our modern social democracies. Then, return to this paragraph, chastened. What is a tax but a seizing of man's labor, a medium of exchange by which the labor is given to the prince in fungible rather than literal form? Oh sure, there is a difference. I'm being deliberately provocative. The hypothesis in our modern states is that "we tax ourselves." That is since long years a canard. We only imagine to do so. In fact what happens is that the stationary bandit buys the votes by which to do what he wants, so there is an appearance of common cause with the people, but this is a chimera: a bought vote is a corrupt vote, and it means nothing. It is in its own way a coerced vote, as empty as the votes used to elect the Politburo in the Soviet State.
Indeed, in the second chapter, we shall explore the essential corruption of modern social democracy. The economic rule is rather simple: when taxes begin to pay for wants rather than needs, the fabric of corruption is woven as factions vie for influence and money. In our social democracies, the wants today are preponderant, the needs often neglected. The wants are no more than latter-day Roman circuses. This is why we have billions for the teachers union's pet projects—of no value to education but assuring their votes—and kids who can't read, while our roads fall apart.
One thing however is historically clear: socialism doesn't work, collectivism is a dud, and authoritarian states inevitably fall to freer states, until they themselves become authoritarian—the sad and apparently unavoidable fruit of success. This thesis was the subject of a recent inquiry whereby a historian examined key battles, the turning points in the course of Western civilization: Alexander's annihilation of a Persian army five times greater than his own, for example, and Lepanto another. The conclusion was that collectivist armies and societies, rigid by their natures, fall to freer and more flexible ones. Thus, the great advances occur remarkably swiftly—instants in time—when flexible, freer societies have their moment in the sun, as during the first three centuries of the Ottoman Empire, at the time the most liberal and arguably benign society on the planet. China may be living such a moment in the sun right now, with the rapid dismantling of the collectivist hell under which it suffered and starved—Mao's socialist paradise—and the manumission of the clever and creative Chinese to do their own thing. The result is indisputable: three decades of the most remarkable growth in prosperity ever seen in the history of man ... and no one starving anymore. This will no more be forever than it ever was for any people, but it may give the Chinese a good twenty-first century. They are in that sweet spot where the revenues of the state are not yet punitive upon the people, and thus they are able to be sufficient unto themselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The World is Stupid—You Can't Fix It!by Claude Roessiger Copyright © 2010 by Claude Roessiger. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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