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Rule of the Demos
Lila Rajiva
Lew Rockwell.com
Monday Aug 27, 2007
Most
people today are quite sure of one thing.
A democratic
state is always and everywhere good.
If we didn’t
have the tyranny of the majority, they argue, wouldn’t we end
up with the tyranny of the minority? If we reject democracy, won't
we end up with plutocracy?
Without government
to protect us, we are sure to have corporations to plunder us.
Money and
business, they point out, can be just as coercive as states and
armies. Aren’t armies often for hire by the money men? Didn't
Carnegie send in state troops to break up his unions and fire
on his workers? Doesn't Microsoft bribe governments in Asia, and
didn't United Fruit topple governments in Latin America?
There’s no
doubt that this argument has some merit to it. You can be quite
sure that businessmen, like any other group of people, will get
away with whatever they can get away with.... whenever they can.
But, without being able to jiggle the levers of power on their
behalf, few businesses would ever get to the size needed to do
damage. Few would be able to inflict mayhem on the scale that
even a government of middling incompetence can.
(Article continues below)
And besides,
while many businesses do use fraud – and force – to swallow up
their competition, a commercial transaction, in essence, remains
a voluntary exchange between individuals. If you choose to buy
neither Pepsi nor Coke, it is unlikely that either company will
force you to drink their product. But refraining from pulling
the lever for either Bush or Kerry does not rid you of the guaranteed
presence of one of the two in your life for at least the next
four years. What's more, drinking Coke does not entail any other
obligation on your part. You are not now compelled to eat at Burger
King, wear Reebok shoes, or shop at K-Mart. It is an isolated
act.
But think
of the convoluted and improbable complications that have arisen
just because enough people chose to vote for George W. Bush. It
is no consolation to say that there would be an equal number of
complications – even if different – if other people had had their
way and elected Mr. Kerry to office. Voting for Bush or Kerry
is no longer simply a matter of voting for Bush or Kerry. It is
voting on the nature of Middle East policy, the proportion of
the budget to be spent on arms, health or education, the character
of the Supreme Court, the future of wildlife refuges, the health
of the ozone, the size of the trade deficit, the status of the
dollar – and an almost infinite host of issues, questions, policies
and debates the outcome of which even experts who have spent a
lifetime on them are likely to do not much more than guess at.
Now, it is
true that businesses can be heavy-handed when they sell their
products. A shepherd always tries to persuade his sheep that their
interests and his coincide. Indeed, for some people, the art and
science of sheep-suasion – advertising – constitutes the original
sin of the modern economy.
And not without
reason. Like Satan himself, the modern advertiser is armed with
devilish knowledge of the human psyche far beyond the ken of the
yokels of the Eden whom he is about to swindle.
HIDDEN
PERSUASIONS
Like Satan,
he addresses his blandishments first to the female of the species.
Notice how real estate agents know well to whom they should pitch
their Jacuzzi-armed bathrooms and granite countertop-heavy kitchens?
Just so, the advertiser is certain that the purchase of anything
in the household – even a fig leaf – needs to be approved by the
lady of the house first. He waves the apple – his advertising
copy – under her nose before her husband's.
In other
words, when it comes to the market, even before the umpire allows
it on to the field, sex is up and batting. Had it not been for
his old lady, our thick-headed Adam might still be idling buck-naked,
his feet up, enjoying the peaches and pears of paradise. As it
turns out, however, Mrs. Adam has an eye on the social ladder.
How could she let her spouse hang around neither toiling nor spinning,
content with his rustic life among the apes, when all heaven beckoned?
But, for
an "in" with the "better" crowd she needed something new, suggested
the wily salesman. She needed to take a bite – of the big apple.
We all know how the world’s first ad campaign ended – with the
two consumers locked out of their home, sweating their derrieres
off in the fields to pay for their little binge. Adam got the
workday and his better half got labor pains . . . and their soul
was mortgaged to the devil for eternity
Which might
be better terms than those facing homeowners who’ve hocked their
houses in interest-only or adjustable-rate mortgages – where they
might not have the luxury of eternity before lenders come calling.
So yes, modern
advertising is the spawn of the devil, we haven’t a doubt. Subliminal
sales pitches nestled in TV jingles do their damage regardless
of conscious choice. Yet, the fact still remains that it is the
consumer who buys or does not buy. And should he fail to take
the bait, no goons come knocking at his door or truss him up like
a Thanksgiving bird. Let a soldier fail to show up for duty long
enough, however, he is liable to be chastised, investigated...
and court-martialed.
So you don't
want your minds turned into mush by advertising? There is a simple
remedy – turn off the TV. But try turning a blind eye to the law
and you are likely to find yourself in the pokey in short order.
And here
one must confess a bit of bafflement. Day after day, ordinary
folk complain about the stratospheric salaries of film actors,
baseball players and CEOs. You’d think they would worry about
keeping their money from adding to the outsize salaries. But what
do they do? No sooner do they manage to scrape together a hundred
dollars than they blow it on a movie or a baseball game or some
flim-flam stock touted by Alf down at the garage.
What we are
saying is that if Microsoft's business ethics is . . . well .
. . bugging you, you can always shuck Explorer and use
Firefox. You can shelve Hotmail and try Gmail. Spurn Windows and
woo Mozilla.
If Wal-Mart's
labor practices worry you, switch to K-Mart. If you think American
workers are in pain, feel it yourself. Pay extra for their products.
But we notice
that the complainers rarely put their mouths where their money
is. They buy Chinese trinkets, but curse Chinese exporters; they
bewail American consumption, and run up their credit cards.
It can’t
all be blamed on the wicked rich. It must be blamed in some small
part on the wicked poor as well. If there are greedy advertisers
– as there are, alas – there are also senseless consumers. And
if you ban all advertising, you might as well ban politicians
from campaigning and bishops from preaching.
But wait:
You say that pounding the pulpit is a different matter from making
money? Maybe so, but religion has its money-men as well, and if
they can push their wares in the heart of the temple, surely honest
money- changers in the market place should be given their moment.
Besides,
even if all commerce was as rank as Gorgonzola, it is not the
only thing that holds people together. There are a hundred voluntary
associations, none of which have to do with the state – or with
trade. There are churches, charities, reading groups, stamp clubs,
sports leagues, sewing circles, scouts troops, fire-fighting brigades
– none of which use force, fraud.... or even filthy lucre... to
entice their participants.
Here, people
cooperate, exchange, learn, debate, and act; and all without a
gun being fired, a law being passed, or a single cop being hired.
If men are such beasts to each other that they need Big Brother
breathing down their necks in all weather, as statists argue,
how do you account for ordinary civic life?
But the statists
have been hammering out their arguments for a while now and they
aren't going to give in soon. The grip that holds people together,
they answer, has to be something stronger than a handshake or
things fall apart. The cords that bind should be stouter than
heart strings; the glue of human society should be thicker than
blood. Voluntary associations depend too much on good will, on
feelings that can turn on a dime. The heart is too fragile to
bear the weight of responsibility for man's well-being. We had
better turn in our handshakes for handcuffs and our heart strings
for leg irons or the jungle will take over, they claim.
Homo homini
lupus est (man is a wolf to man), as one of the greatest statists
of all, Thomas Hobbes, noted in "De
cive, Epistola dedicatoria."
It’s always
surprising that the very people who claim to love humanity
so much should love human beings so little that they would
lock them up... for their own good.
"This is
one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement," wrote the journalist
Walter Lippman in A
Preface to Politics in 1914, "that it loves a crowd and
fears the individuals who compose it – that the religion of humanity
should have no faith in human beings."
Lippman should
talk. He himself had little faith in human beings. A meddler of
the worst sort, during WWI, he became an advisor to President
Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points,
which are four more than even God needed, as some wit observed.
From having
started out as a newsman, Lippman soon despaired of the brain
power of ordinary citizens. He thought they would never be able
to have an informed opinion on important public issues. Most people,
he argued, were blinded by partial truths or stereo-types – a
word he coined himself. The average man was a spectator who strolled
into a play mid-act and left before the end. He was a member of
a herd. And herds required shepherds. The masses needed heroes
– or villains – on whom they could pin praise or blame for anything
they could not control or understand.
In Public
Opinion, Chapter I, Lippman wrote:
"By the
same mechanism through which heroes are incarnated, devils are
made. If everything good was to come from Joffre, Foch, Wilson,
or Roosevelt, everything evil originated in the Kaiser Wilhelm,
Lenin and Trotsky. They were as omnipotent for evil as the heroes
were omnipotent for good."
Lippman understood
the source of this tendency: The complexity of the real world.
"We are not
equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many
permutations and combinations," he wrote. So we make a map of
it. The problem however was "to secure maps on which their own
need, or someone else's need, has not sketched in the coast of
Bohemia."
That’s to
say, our pictures of the world are more or less fictions. From
the madman's hallucinations to the scientist's models, we are
all – to some degree or other – creating stories and images that
correspond only partially to the changing flux of reality.
But then
of course, when we act, we step out of this pseudo-environment
into the real environment. In wartime, he observed, there existed
"the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe,
and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which
there was a violent instinctive response."
From that,
Lippman noted, arose Herbert Spencer's tragedy of the murder
of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts.
Lippman was
also ahead of his time in understanding the nature of the press.
Unlike the liberals, who thought it would remedy the defects of
public opinion, he knew that it actually intensified them.
So far you
can have no quarrel with the man. He could have stopped and decided
then and there to become a haberdasher or grocer and one’s respect
for him would have remained intact; indeed risen. But instead,
the virus of power bites into his innards. He looks at the herd
and instead of simply avoiding it, he wants to chivvy it along.
He wants to mold it, and turn it into putty in the hands of "a
specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality."
These experts and bureaucrats, whom Lippman called "elites," one
might as well call hacks.
If Lippman
wanted a technique of government employed by a cadre of experts,
he got what he wanted. Ever since his time, busybodies have been
in charge of the American government. Political scientists and
PR men have been massaging and managing it. We can see how that's
turned out.
Lippman was
finally no better than the Marxists and materialists he criticized,
and he fell a victim to the same errors they committed. Just as
they condemned religious ideologues for molding the consciousness
of the bourgeoisie with vain hopes of a Christian paradise, and
then turned around and tried to mold the consciousness of the
proletariat with even more preposterous hopes of a communist
paradise, he too thought he could control the masses with propaganda.
At the heart
of all these attempts is nothing more than monumental hubris.
What made Lippman take upon himself a role God was by most accounts
unwilling to assume? Even Christianity leaves our free will alone.
Christ is content to stand at the door of our hearts and knock.
But Lippman would like to pick the lock and make himself at home.
In fact, he has made off with the TV and the computer while we’re
kept in deep slumber by his posse of propagandists and professional
liars.
What Lippman
discovered was that men can’t possibly know all they need to know
to think and act coherently within a large state. They become
the target of demagogues and desperadoes. They are manipulated
by editorialists and experts, politicians, and pundits, until
at the end they can hardly recognize where their own ideas end
and other people's opinions take over. In short, Lippman has looked
at modern man and found that a large-scale democracy is a contradiction
that does not suit him. But then, rather than drawing the conclusion
that such a state is inherently unworkable and should be thrown
out, he does the very opposite. He decides to keep his imperial
democracy.... and throw out man.
THE UNIMPORTANCE
OF BEING EARNEST (IN INDIA OR SOMALIA)
So we need
to ask: Is man really such a hopeless creature?
Admittedly,
the evidence is all stacked against him. From Jacob onward, a
human being is a liar and a con man. From Cain down, he is a murderer.
But here let’s make an observation. Goodness is very rarely newsworthy.
Had President Clinton been spotlessly faithful to his wife, he
would not have graced the front pages so often and entertained
us all so endlessly. We would have yawned and turned off our TV
sets instead of smirking. Goodness is boring, dull, uneventful.
And for that
reason, we have a very biased view of human nature. Accustomed
to reading gripping stories of treachery and mayhem, we usually
fail to notice fidelity and kindness. Our eyes are always scouring
the distant horizons for colorful scoundrels. The farther off
they are, the less we can know of them and the more our imagination
can fill in the gaps. The people we do know, on the other hand,
are so close we can hardly see them. We know them so well we cannot
reduce them to caricatures that entertain us. And so, entranced
by reckless outlaws, we ignore thoughtful in-laws.
The truth
is, ordinary people are neither good nor bad. They are, as we
like to say, subject to influence. That influence tends to the
good in the small circle of what a man knows first-hand, where
he is among friends, family and a small community. It tends to
the bad everywhere else, in the infinite circle of opinions and
ideas at large in the big world with its pomposity and punditry
He is ill-equipped to deal with them and they swirl around him
in a miasma through which he can stumble only dimly. To tell the
truth, even in his home, the best laid plans of men are surprisingly
apt to go a-gley. How much more in the world!
How much
less likely are we to figure out the road map for billions of
people, when we can’t figure it out for ourselves?
If there
is a design in our lives, it is hardly one we spot ahead of us.
It is more likely to sneak up on us from behind after we have
lived through it. We look back and then notice a pattern in what
we took to be meaningless chance. Our intellects, perfectly suited
to master the physical world around us, are dangerously bad at
understanding ourselves or others in the same way. In fact, when
we try to, we are always rebuffed. Life seems to be impervious
to logic and our lives turn out to be more the product of contiguous
actions piled one on top of another like bricks in a wall, than
the execution of any preconceived design.
The Scottish
Enlightenment was quick to grasp this:
"Every step
and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened
ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations
stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human
action, but not the execution of any human design," wrote Adam
Ferguson. (An
Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson,
1767: Part Third. Section II, p. 122 of the Duncan Forbes edition,
Edinburgh University Press, 1966).
The patterns
that arise naturally from our actions rather than from our conscious
design create an order far more complex and sensitive than any
artificial structure designed by a planning committee. "This type
of spontaneous order – unlike the Zug-zwang of central
planning – is the result of "natural processes," as I write in
a new book with Bill Bonner, Mobs,
Messiahs, and Markets.
In the free
market, for example, theoretically at least, each actor knows
what he wants and he senses what others want. Not through second
guessing ...or second sight. Instead, he does it through the mundane
everyday business of watching prices. The price quickly tells
him all he needs to know at that moment to best negotiate his
needs. Free markets make for the type of complex order that isn’t
ever predictable. Central planning makes for the type of simple-minded
mess that always is.
Take a recent
case in India.
"They landed
up at my house and made me take this cow," wailed Kamlabai Gudhe
in Lonsawala, Wardha in the north Indian state of Maharashtra.
("Till
the cows come home," P. Sainath, Hindu Opinion, November
23, 2006).
Ms. Gudhe,
a Dalit (lower caste) farmer, lost a husband to suicide in the
summer of 2006. If that wasn't bad enough, she was then the
target of an act of governmental mercy. She got a cow.
"I said
we don't want this," she remembered, when asked.
Other villagers
had similar complaints:
"The buffalo
I got through the government cost me Rs.120–Rs.150 a day,"
said one.
"I feed
it the wheat meant for my son – who was the 'beneficiary,'"
added another.
That hasn't
stopped the bureaucratic Mother Theresas who thought up the aid
program for poor farmers in which quality cow relief was the lynch-pin.
The Maharashtra Chief Minister planned to bring in 40,000 new
cows to the area in three years while the Indian Prime Minister
guaranteed 18,000. Apparently, everyone had a say in the business,
except the cows.
Or the villagers.
And now,
the scheme turns out to be full of . . . well, bull. The
villagers know nothing about rearing the beasts. And since there
had to be someone to look after them, there was one less person
earning a living in each household. Inflow and outgo became as
mismatched as the US current account.
Or as Mother
Gudhe put it succinctly: "This brute eats more than all us in
this house put together. And we don't get more than four liters
of milk in a day from it."
None of this
was unforeseen, mind you. With admirable precision, if not tact,
even the Planning Commission called it "insane." They would know.
"It was not
clever to give poor farmers costly cows in places where there
is no water or fodder," say the agricultural experts.
No kidding.
And the state
supply of chow is so bad that even starved cows turn up their
noses at it.
That might
be because they weren't from anywhere around the place. They were
phoren – to use the Indianism for it. The Animal Husbandry
Department, which started out looking for cheaper breeds, ended
up with Jerseys – and half-breed Jerseys at that – each costing
Rupees. 17,500. That's a fortune for poor Indian farmers. Especially
in a state where wheat production is in decline from lack of water.
What does a starving farmer do with a ravenous cow?
The Jerseys
might not be full-blood, but they have all of their appetite.
They each need Rs. 50 of oil cake a day, green fodder, and someone
to look after them. Then there's the Rs. 30 for the bus ride to
sell the milk. That adds up to almost Rs. 150 for maintenance,
against earnings of less than Rs. 70 a day during the milking
season. And nothing at all the rest of the year. Why, it's almost
as bad as a Neg Am mortgage.....
Nature can
only take away your harvest or starve you.
It takes
a bevy of hacks to make you have a cow over it as well.
To gain more
support for that thesis we turn from the animal husbandry of central
government hacks to the Infotech policy of warlords.
There is
proof, after all, that Hayek’s spontaneous order exists. Apparently,
you can see it at work – in Africa.
Somalia is
the only country in the world, they say, where there is almost
no government. It is a pure free market, say some observers.
According
to some others, it is also a Hobbesian jungle where "life is solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short."
You don’t
have to make up your mind about it. But is it?
Its true
that since President Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, the country
has been without much in the way of a central government.
Rival warlords
roam unchecked, pillaging and extorting. Famine has killed more
than a million and sent even greater numbers fleeing abroad. Public
education and literacy are low compared even to other African
countries; there are few roads, and the country is forced to rely
on foreign financial institutions for a number of things. Health
care is out of the reach of most people.
A failed
state, a third world hell-hole, a basket case, some would say.
Look what
happens when you don't have government, statists cluck. With dismay.
But if Somalia
is a failed state, it’s an odd sort of failed state; with Internet
cafes all over the place, the cheapest web surfing in the continent,
and cheap local and international phone calls. ("Telecoms
thriving in lawless Somalia," Joseph Winter, BBC, November
19, 2004.)
There is
no formal banking system, but the money exchange services handle
up to a billion dollars worth of remittances in a year. The main
market in Mogadishu has everything you could want from food to
electronics. The private sector offers other services efficiently
too – such as, hospitality and security. Since the demise of the
central government, the Somali shilling has become far more stable
in world currency markets, while exports have quintupled. ("Stateless
in Somalia and loving it," Yumi Kim, February 21, 2006, Von
Mises.org).
Look what
happens when you don't have government, crow anarchists. With
glee.
But here,
an about-face is in order. It’s true that the government and the
governing classes are a circus fit to have scorn and ridicule
heaped on them. But that’s because government as it is today in
most countries is unwieldy, parasitic, inefficient, and murderous.
There is,
however, another idea of government, with which no one can have
a quarrel. It is the one you find in the Federalist papers and
in the writings of the American Revolution.
"That government
is best which governs least," wrote Tom Paine.
For the Founding
Fathers of America, government was an evil, but a necessary one.
It worked best when it was limited to protecting life, property,
and the rule of law – the minimum conditions needed for a society
to flourish.
Anarchists
will argue, of course, that you don't need a government to do
that. Private groups are perfectly able to provide security, defense
and infrastructure. I am not ready to argue with them. I don't
believe I know enough of the matter one way or other. But one
thing I do know is that both anarchists and statists are confused
in their talk. They say state when they mean government, and they
say government when they mean the rule of law. They confuse anarchy
with chaos, and the absence of the state with the absence of law.
Somalia is
stateless, but it is not entirely without laws; there is anarchy,
but there is not yet complete chaos. Somalia may well be an example
of how spontaneous order can take root even when the state collapses.
The
Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development
in the Horn of Africa (2005) written
by Michael van Notten, goes to the heart of the matter. Van Notten
is a Dutch lawyer who married into a Somali clan and lived in
the country for the last decade or so of his life.
Van Notten
points out what western observers do not want to notice. Somalia
might lack a government, but it's not completely without governance.
The country still relies on traditional Somali customary law,
which, he points out, would not be able to work if a strong central
government and Western-style democracy were imposed on top of
it. In other words, Somalia's free market doesn’t operate in suspended
animation, or in a vacuum. It rests – in a precarious, wobbly
way, it’s true – on the traditional law of the Somalis. And it
does have a government – even if it’s only the government of the
Somali clans.
Somali customary
law and clan government follow natural law closely. And whatever
fragments of a genuine free market operate there do so only because
of the norms of behavior springing from this indigenous system.
Van Notten
makes another interesting point. He suggests that the terrible
problems plaguing Somalia don't arise from the free market or
the lack of central government at all. Instead they are the result
of the constant attempts to impose government, albeit unsuccessfully.
"A democratic
government has every power to exert dominion over people. To fend
off the possibility of being dominated, each clan tries to capture
the power of that government before it can become a threat." (Van
Notten, 136, 2005, cited by Yumi Kim).
And the fear
of domination is only kept alive by incessant U.N. efforts to
intervene and impose a Western-style government in the country.
Leave the clans alone, he says. Let foreign governments just deal
with them.
The irony
is that a real free market is not free at all. It is, and always
has been, restricted – by laws, customs, traditions, morals, expectations.
In Somalia or the West, you have to choose. It is either natural
law or the law of the jungle.
THE GOLDEN
RULES
We note in
this regard the arguments of Peruvian free market economist Hernando
Soto. De Soto thinks he knows why the ground rules in the West
allow the market to work:
Every increment
in production, every new building, product, or commercially
valuable thing is someone's formal property. Even if assets
belong to a corporation, real people still own them indirectly,
through titles certifying that they own the corporation as "shareholders."
(The
Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and
Fails Everywhere Else, Hernando De Soto, New York: Basic
Books, 2000, p. 48).
Without these,
says De Soto, you don't have a free market, no matter how big
a government you have. Otherwise, why is it that entrepreneurship,
natural resources, and abundant labor have not saved developing
countries like Egypt and Peru, or Kosovo and Colombia?
Without adequately
documenting property rights, they cannot "readily be turned into
capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where
people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral
for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment."
De
Soto, p. 6, cited by H. Perritt
While Western
nations have sophisticated legal infrastructures that permit capital
to be created, property laws in developing countries are so unwieldy
that they actually pose a barrier to economic activity. Some of
the statistics De Soto lists would be comical if they were not
appalling (De
Soto, pp. 18–27).
In Peru,
opening a small shop with one worker takes 289 days. Registering
it costs 31 times the minimum monthly wage. Getting a permit to
build a house on state land takes 6 years and 11 months, and 207
procedures in 52 governmental offices. Obtaining legal title to
the land takes 728 steps.
In the Philippines,
formalizing informal urban property takes 168 steps and 13–25
years.
In Egypt,
building on desert land, needs 77 steps, 31 different governmental
offices and 6 to 14 years.
In Haiti,
obtaining a 5-year lease takes 111 steps and 4,112 days.
The result
of this bureaucratic obstacle course is that people live and work
outside the law. And they pay the price. No one will lend them
money except family members. So they end up specializing and producing
for smaller circles. The result? Lower productivity. Capitalism,
he argues, needs legal protections to work. It needs rules.
But here,
I have a bone to pick with Mr. De Soto. He thinks the only rules
that work for capitalism are western rules. In fact, the title
of his book makes no sense at all in some ways. Capitalism Fails
Everywhere Else? If so, why is Western investment capital flooding
China? Not to finance socialism, we can be sure. No, the
Communist Chinese have proved to be the biggest capitalists of
all.
What that
means is that no particular set of laws and institutions – as
long as they protect the ground rules of exchange – can claim
to be uniquely fitted to the growth of the free market. Instead,
the laws that enable spontaneous order must arise – spontaneously
– from each society in which it operates. They have to be the
result of the unique history and customs of the people of that
society. "Western" laws are not necessary to Chinese or Malaysian
capitalism. Chinese and Malaysian laws are enough.
The reason
is that the laws that get passed with pomp and circumstance in
legislatures are not the laws that really govern society. They
only look like they do. But ask yourself this. If they really
did, why is it that the crimes committed by commissars in the
Soviet Union, by the Gestapo in Nazi Germany . . . and by the
American CIA . . . were all committed with the law books bulging
at the seams?
It is not
how many laws you have that matters, but how well those laws are
obeyed – which is a matter of culture and history, of what people
expect.... and what they are prepared to accept. And to know that
takes the study of history and manners; it needs a knowledge of
morals and religion. The usual smoke and mirrors sideshow supplied
by the political class won't do. You need to turn to the accumulated
wisdom of case law and precedent, of customary law and conventions.
The free
market arises wherever there have been such laws and systems –
whether in Europe or Africa or Asia.
The spice
trade of the Indies, for instance, operated for 500 years without
Western laws, yet it corresponded roughly to free market capitalism.
In Africa, buyers and sellers met under a tree, not a mall, but
what they had was still a market where prices were arrived at
by bargaining between buyers and sellers. Not set arbitrarily
by the chiefs.
Africans
might have used gold-dust salt before the Europeans brought in
paper currencies, but they were still using money.
Today, in
fact, some of us might think that gold dust look like the stronger
currency.
How else
can we explain the difference between statutory laws and customary
laws like the Somali clan laws? One way to think about it is to
see it as the difference between fiat money, like paper currencies,
and a real store of value, like gold. You see, if there is nothing
to back up the paper currency churned out by a central bank, then
the country is in a bit of trouble. Pretty soon, people come calling
for their loans with cudgels and pitchforks. It’s happening right
now in America.
The problem
arises because statutory laws can be passed endlessly, even if
they have little relation to how the masses of ordinary people
actually think and act. That means you can have a country where
theft and looting are the norm, that might still have very intricate
laws on their books against theft and looting. The statutes won’t
do a thing to help.
Customary
law, on the other hand, can't be plucked like a rabbit out of
a top-hat. It has to live...and breed... in the cozy warrens and
nooks of particular, real communities with particular real values.
And because
it does, people tend to accept it more often. It works more often.
It is a more
sensitive and complex measure of a society that tells the stories,
not of just those who happen to breathe now, but of the unborn...and
the long dead. It reflects the fractal fellowship of generations
and time. Not the unwieldy geometry of states and boundaries.
It’s the contrast between a dynamic and a static page on the web.
So, while
the cogito ergo sum might look like a rock from where to
tackle technical and physical problems, it is shifting sand when
it comes to human ones. History and experience are outside the
beat of unalloyed reason.
Which is
why, when it comes to understanding how masses of men think, we
are better off without naked logic. We are better off with the
warm, colorful outfits in which practical wisdom and rhetoric
trick themselves out.
MINDING
THE CROWD
That, ultimately,
is what the hidden persuaders in our democracies have figured
out. They know that the masses of men – and that could mean rich
hedge-fund managers just as often as poor villagers – don’t really
want to think for themselves. And, for the most part, can’t.
What they
want, as Lippman noted, is to simplify things.
Joseph Goebbels,
the Nazi minister of propaganda knew that... and knew how to use
it.
A lie, simple
enough, big enough, and repeated often enough, without explanation
or reasoning, is all it takes to drive a crowd mad.
And so we
get the pundits and the propagandists of the state. We get the
real rulers of our democracies.
How it happens
is easy enough to understand.
Take a fellow
going about his own business. Ordinarily, he is unlikely to settle
for less than a solid explanation for things that go wrong. If
his car starts skidding, he takes it apart at the mechanic shop
to find out why and he doesn't get back in until it works. The
penalty for careless thinking on the subject might be his life.
Of course,
on many bigger issues, his life might also be at stake. If he
lived in New York, for instance, any explanation for New York's
crime rate becomes rather personal. But while his car only affects
him, New York's crime rate affects millions of others. On the
subject of his car, he confidently relies on his own hunches.
On the subject of New York crime, however, he becomes diffident.
It is not his problem alone. Some one else should think of it,
he decides. Best leave it to the people who know. Experts. Pundits.
He opens
the paper and reads the opinion column of Professor Tedious Pontificator
at Princeton University. He has never been to Princeton University.
But he has heard it's very good. At any rate, it is very expensive,
which is the same thing, in his mind. It is a reliable brand.
He has also never heard of Professor Ponti. But professors, he
has been told, are egg-heads. They know. So if Professor Ponti
says that New York crime rates have gone down because of gun control,
he figures, it must be true. Besides, the fellow has said so in
the papers. It must be St. John's Gospel. At any rate, he now
has an opinion on hand rather like a concealed weapon that he
can fire off at the nearest bystander.
"Dear," he
begins, putting down his paper and glancing across at his better
half. "Did you know that New York's crime rate has gone down because
of gun control?" Here, he gets the first pay-off for his secondhand
wisdom. With a single bleat, the poor sod has established himself
in his wife's eye as a man of the world, conversant with public
issues. For a fleeting moment – since, in marital life, such moments
are always fleeting – he glitters before her, even if it is only
in Professor Ponti's borrowed feathers. He too has become an expert.
But there
is another payoff. By thinking like everyone else, the poor man
trades in the uncertainty and loneliness of being an individual
for the certainty and camaraderie of belonging to a group. What
use would it be for him to be right if he was right all on his
own? What would it profit him to gain his soul but lose the world?
He decides he would rather have the world. Or rather, an instinct
lodged in his brain drives him to it. Solidarity with his unthinking
fellows is wired deeper in his skull than the fleeting pleasures
of reasoning on his own.
In his heart
and soul, man is a social animal and solidarity with his group
– however wrong – is more important to him than being right alone.
In that moment,
he catches the contagion of the crowd.
In that moment,
democracy becomes demagoguery.
This article
is an adaptation of an article published
in Dissident
Voice
in December, 2006.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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