It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.” But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. . - Murray Rothbard . Imagine that your Uncle Willie has, for the past twenty years, indulged in the habit of drinking a quart of Scotch each day. He now suffers from what any competent doctor, after numerous tests, recognizes as cirrhosis of the liver. His doctor informs him that a liver transplant is his only hope for recovery; that such an operation would be both very risky and expensive; and would require Willie to give up his profligate habit. What would you expect Willie to do? If he was like most people, he would take his symptoms to another physician, until he found one who would offer him a remedy that didn’t require changing his lifestyle! Perhaps switching to a different brand of Scotch will be enough to save him.
Such is the mindset now driving so much of politics in our world. We are suffering the consequences of living by the illusion that reality can be rejected, truth made into falsehood, and contradictions reconciled if only the political will can be mobilized on behalf of programs and policies whose costs will be borne by others. With schools and the media serving as principal catalysts, otherwise intelligent persons are conditioned into identifying themselves through mutually-exclusive – and, therefore, conflict laden – categories. By attaching themselves to organizations and institutions that represent such identities, people divide themselves into racial, religious, gender, nationality, age, cultural, economic, and other groupings and then compete for the powers of the state to obtain special privileges not available to others. In such ways are laws promulgated making it illegal for some private parties to discriminate against selected classes of persons. Criminal acts can be elevated to “hate crimes” – with enhanced penalties – when committed against members of specially protected groups. That “black lives matter” more than “all” lives is a proposition that can send members of various divisions into the streets for angry confrontations. There are no principles involved in any of this, save for the pragmatic one of amassing as much power as possible to persuade the state to get you whatever it is you want.
Such is the way of all politics – regardless of the words used – bearing in mind that words, being abstractions, are always subject to interpretation. Without the social conflicts that such processes generate, and which the state promises to manage, political systems would quickly be out of business. Like the childhood game of “musical chairs,” the contest is rigged to assure that some will be denied the benefits that come from having access to the state’s machinery of force. Such lack can be overcome, they discover, only by mobilizing “their” group around a powerbroker adept at playing the hostility game.
The conflicts and discord essential to the well-being of the state must be seen, by most people, as the inevitable unfolding of an allegedly malevolent human nature. Wars, social unrest, economic dislocations, assassinations, imprisonment without trials, the militarization and brutalities of the police, the transfer – via taxation and an ever-expanding national debt – of private wealth to the politically-favored few, are among the major costs swept under the rug of human consciousness.
But such destructive consequences are not part of the political litany the schools taught us, and of which the media continue to remind us. According to them, the state is to engage in establishing “justice,” “domestic tranquility,” the “common defense,” promoting the “general welfare,” securing “the blessings of liberty,” and protecting such “unalienable rights” as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” concepts that apply universally to human beings because “all men are created equal.” If such benefits are applicable to us all by virtue of our shared humanity, how can they be reconciled with the state’s needs for division and conflict among those to be ruled?
If the manufacturers of refrigerators, alarm clocks, or toasters employed the kinds of advertising used by political systems to peddle their products, the Federal Trade Commission would see to their criminal prosecution. The state is sold to a gullible public – and at monopolistic prices – not as “a” means of securing the harmonies and virtues promised in preambles, but as “the” only means of doing so. Who can object to policies that foster the “general welfare,” or that defend individual “rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?
The reality, however, is that the state is good at only one thing: destroying what people value, be it life, the human spirit, economies, and the peaceful regularities that arise from voluntary cooperation. Because of their monopoly on the use of violence, political systems are unsurpassed in the skills of devastation and liquidation. The photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obliterated by nuclear bombs, serve as posters for what the state does best.
How can such diametrically opposing qualities appear to be harmonized so as to disguise the contradictions? The simplest and crudest means is to lie (e.g., “we are threatened by terrorists” and they have “weapons of mass destruction;” “illegal immigration brings murderers and rapists into America”). And why not? As every experienced politician knows, a lie is as good as the truth if you can get people to believe it. But other strategies are equally useful: deceit, fraud, distortions, exaggerations, forged documents, miscalculations, counterfeiting, omissions, and other forms of fakery – each of which is but a variation on lying – can also be employed, particularly when repeated by institutionally-respected others who thus lend credibility to the lie.
Our understanding of the world is comprised of a mixture of our prior experiences, biases, fears, myths, lessons drawn from motion pictures and television entertainment, parental and school teachings, among other sources. Included in this mix are the lies, deceptions, and other misstatements created by those who find such methods useful in their efforts to control others. Our thinking and understanding must have a sufficient consistency with reality to allow us to engage in effective action. Mankind has been discovering that the real world is made up not so much of discrete, isolated parts, but of complex, interconnected networks of matter and energy that are subject to change, and hence remain in fluctuations that produce unpredictable behavior. Whether the tangle of relationships we think we see are connected causally, or only coincidentally, brings confusion into our efforts to understand our world. If we are seeking causal explanations of events, misrepresentations of reality and the twisting of truth can disrupt or obscure the connections that hold our world together. Like a rock thrown through the middle of a spider’s web, shattering networks, the perversion of truth and other misrepresentations produces ambiguities that sever the linkage that holds the universe – as well as society – together.
In recent decades, we have witnessed the proliferation of both the systems of decentralized exchange of information, and the content engendered thereby. As a consequence, increasing numbers of men and women are seeing through the structured patterns of lies that hold the institutional order together. When lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking get mixed together with demonstrable and analytically-sound truths; when falsehood and truth, speculation and factual analysis compete for our understanding in a jumbled world of contradiction and confusion, such that it is difficult to distinguish the real from the fanciful; then both the state and its followers become desperate.
Who are the most popular presidential candidates now trumpeting their solutions to our collective plight? The thinking of the sometimes “independent” Bernie Sanders, and that of Donald Trump, seem to intrigue those who have no time to waste on ideas, philosophic principles, and analytic inquiries. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential races, Ron Paul was very successful in energizing the minds of the ten percent – Albert Jay Nock’s “Remnant” – but was a nuisance to those who resented having their attention deflected from institutional-serving diversions. There being no Ron Paul in the current campaign, the politically submissive can find comfort in letting their minds drift back to the more exciting politics of the 1920s and 1930s, when socialists and “strong men” competed to allay the state-generated fears that had devastated so much of human society.
By now, one might have thought that the twentieth-century failures of socialistic systems to plan for, direct, and distribute material benefits through centralized government planning, would have informed the judgments of even the least curious among us. Mussolini’s “guild socialism;” Hitler’s “National Socialism” (Nazism); and – unless you missed the news – the Soviet Union; have, along with less ambitious efforts to centrally plan economies, demonstrated their inferior mechanisms – when compared with market economies – to benefit mankind. Such historic failures have not discouraged the shallow-minded from joining the torchlight parades for Bernie Sanders – and, in Great Britain, the recently elected head of the Labour Party, and equally ambitious socialist, Jeremy Corbyn. “This time for sure,” the intellectually benighted assure themselves.
No longer able to bamboozle intelligent minds that insist upon factually-based, and analytically sound reasoning, the state turns to its default position: the use of whatever amount of violence is required to secure obedience to its will. Desperate men and women are immune to calm, reasoned discourse; preferring the reactive impulses of their reptilian brains. Those disinclined to burden their minds, or to interrupt the sense of haste with which they believe problems need to be confronted, may find the twentieth-century’s “strong man” approach more satisfying. Herein is to be found the attraction many have to Donald Trump, not simply as a comic figure to annoy supporters of the political process, but as the man who can do whatever needs doin’ to “get things done!” In a recent public opinion poll, 30% of those responding said they would accept a military takeover as a solution to current problems, the kind of thinking that is also reflected in a widespread indifference to militarized police forces in American towns and cities.
It being the nature of political systems to employ violence as its most reliable tool, the state has had to elevate this practice from being a last resort to its first response. The demonstrated failure of socialist and other central planning regimes to swindle men and women out of the control of their lives and other property interests, has combined with a growing popular skepticism over such surrogate “threats” as terrorism, climate change, immigration, Islamic religion, and whatever other “peril du jour” the statist chefs might cook up, to discredit efforts to foster peace, liberty, and social order. Whatever menace the statists hold up for the gullible to ingest, always has as its only means of defense an enlarged and more powerful central state. But fortunately increasing numbers of people are beginning to see through this racket.
Rothbard’s warning extends far beyond the realm of economics to include all of our thinking – and the social systems our thinking produces – about how men and women are to live decently in society. The study of chaos informs us that the more complex a society becomes, the more that institutions – particularly the state – try to control and manage the complexity, increasing the likelihood that the institutional order will end up destroying not only the informal networks that hold society together, but the institutional order itself. It is such dynamics that are also bringing about the end of Western Civilization.