Fear's Intellectual Fruit
When people are afraid, they tend to subordinate themselves. Then, Illiberal concepts help to justify our slide into self-subordination. Courage starts with naming these concepts and calling them out.
The breakdown of a free civilization starts in the shadow.
An urge to control originates in our unconscious minds, which comes from fear. Some project that urge, rationalize it, and then try to impose it on the world as a political ideology. Such projections can act as a veil of illusion between ourselves and the world, causing us to fail to see reality, and tempting us to embrace the mechanisms of compulsion. From these shadow impulses, three powerful concepts have emerged to threaten what remains of the liberal order.
The first comes from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
The Leviathan Formulation
Hobbes’s most famous work is Leviathan (1651), in which he laid out his views on the social contract and the necessity of a strong central authority to maintain civil society. Hobbes wrote during great political turmoil — the English Civil War — and his work reflects that era’s chaos and insecurity.
According to Hobbes, individuals come together to form a social contract, agreeing to give up certain freedoms and submit to authority in exchange for protection and order. The sovereign—be it a monarch, assembly, or other form of governance—must then provide that security. Failure to do so breaks the “social contract,” absolving citizens of their obligations to obey.
Though Hobbes is considered a proto-liberal when his work is taken as a whole, his Leviathan Formulation threatens liberalism itself. That formulation goes:
Rule. Assume that sovereignty—that is, powerful rule—functions as a kind of monopoly over some territory;
Rules. People living together can only be a nation if they have a common system of rules;
Ruler. A common system of rules can only exist if those rules come from the same source, a ruler—an authority of such power that only it has the final say.
Rule. Rules. Ruler.
Political theorist Vincent Ostrom insists this sort of relationship,
must involve fundamental inequalities in society. Those who enforce rules must necessarily exercise an authority that is equal in relation to the objects of that enforcement effort. (Emphasis mine.)
Those objects are, well, the rest of us.
One day, as if by divine will, a man named Desh Subba wrote to me from Nepal. I had just written the preceding paragraph under the heading "The Leviathan Formulation." I had never met Subba, but he wanted to share his philosophical perspectives. I almost didn't pay any attention at all because it's easy to ignore unsolicited contacts in broken English. Still, Subba had at that moment sent me an article he'd written on Thomas Hobbes, which piqued my curiosity.
Synchronicity and all that. In the article, Subba concludes:
To avoid the fear of the state of nature; [Hobbes] created artificial social contract and handed over to absolutely power (monarchy, government and commonwealth). Entire political philosophy of Hobbes wandered around the hide and seek of fear.
Broken English notwithstanding, Desh Subba had just put fear right at the center of the Leviathan Formulation.
And he is right.
Hobbes himself wrote the rudiments while fearful in France, having fled the English Civil War. Our formulations and philosophies are just architectures we construct around raw emotional centers we evolved more than 200,000 years ago. Since then, humanity has built Leviathan out of fear to varying degrees. In this way, one can say the state is an externalization of our fear. It offers the false idea that the more power we give it, the less fearful we will need to be.
Despite my liberalism, I have never so enthusiastically embraced the overwhelming power of Leviathan as I did in the days after September 11, 2001. In time, I came to regret that embrace. I was under the spell of Thanatos Masculine.
But I digress.
Hobbes's rule-rules-ruler formulation has so thoroughly infected our minds that most of us have trouble interrogating it. It not only has a persuasive internal logic, but it has been our reality for so long it's hard to imagine things being any other way.
But maybe all those punks and hippies riding around with "Question Authority" stickers were on to something. Maybe those who wrote the Declaration of Independence were onto something, too. And maybe we should have paid more attention to those hippies, punks, and patriots.
Instead, we listened to our fear and our urge to control.
Yet it's curious that so much of liberalism, at least the American founding's legal doctrine, has accepted the Leviathan Formulation from the start. The founders wanted to figure out how to check power while preserving it, despite the protestations of Jefferson and Yates.
And since 1789, the central authority Hamilton wanted has grown both parasitic and predatory on the backs of the people.
The Great Temptation
The second concept, though distinct, is related to the first. We can think of The Great Temptation as a psychological outgrowth of the Leviathan Formulation. Once we accept the logic of rule-rules-ruler, we are in a certain kind of intellectual box, one that imprisons our imaginations and mutes our creativity. And in that box, we tell ourselves all manner of stories about the necessity of political subordination. Enter the pundits. The policy wonks. The activists.
Now that we have power, how can we use it?
The assumed necessity of this necessary evil ends up masking its evil. The Great Temptation forces us into crude binary thinking: Either authority acts or the worst follows. And those stories we tell ourselves take us down any number of roads, depending on what social problem we hold up as the mother of all problems. Fear's voice whispers in the background.
But the Great Temptation always comes with risks.
Fighting the war on drugs risks treating half the population as criminals.
Fighting 'inequality' risks cutting the most productive down to size.
Fighting a recession risks creating a depression.
Fighting racism risks racializing everything.
Fighting climate change threatens society's living systems.
Fighting terrorism risks creating an imperial surveillance state.
The most insidious part of the Great Temptation is that it's a low-cost proposition in the near term. Once you're tempted, you don't have to do anything except let it happen. You just have to do your duty, which is to put your faith in a supreme authority and forget that behind that authority is a vast apparatus of compulsion with its own agendas. Such a proposition, relative to say working with our neighbors, appeals to our inner teenager, who is both indignant and lazy.
I can hear my interlocutors now:
Some problems can only be solved when we all act together, they'll say. It would be nice if we could all agree to act together for the good of all, but this rarely happens. There is always a group that is feckless, ignorant, or selfish. When confronted with problems requiring collective action, those problems’ very existence justifies concentrated authority.
Collective Action
It would seem collective action problems are everywhere. These are situations in which all individuals would be better off cooperating somehow but fail to do so because of conflicting interests. They are discouraged from acting as one.
One classic example might be a street light from which multiple parties would derive benefit. My benefiting from a street light that I pay for doesn't prevent you from benefitting from the same light even if you don't pay. Because our access to light, respectively, can't easily be controlled, it can't easily be sold to either of us as it would be in some ordinary market transaction. Unlike transactions for other types of goods, such as a subscription to this publication, public goods can be more complicated. Goods such as street lights can be underproduced. That's why many see defaulting to authorities to provide such goods as unavoidable.
Concerns about collective action loom large in our explorations. We want to see the mutual benefit that occurs in narrow market transactions extend further out to more people, creating omni-win dynamics. We hope these omni-win dynamics extend to as much of humanity as possible and the natural environment.
But can we avoid lapsing into the Leviathan Formulation?
Most people think government authority is justified primarily to solve collective action problems. Pseudonymous blogger Scott Alexander in his viral sensation "Meditations on Moloch" asks us to consider the story of a group of fish farmers on a lake. If they sign a compact and no one defects, waste from the fish farms will be controlled, the lake will stay clean, and the fish farms will be sustainable. But if anyone figures out they can profit by defecting from a costly filtration system, they'll all end up defecting, and the lake will be ruined. Therefore, Alexander suggests, bring on Leviathan to control Moloch. In other words, to keep the lake clean, we have to trust a group of people with all the guns and jails and pray they're not monsters.
Of course, Moloch dines on K Street, too, but I digress.
What if we could find examples of people escaping these multi-polar traps on their own? Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for doing just that. She explains how people, for centuries, have evolved local institutions that help them avoid collective action problems. It turns out it happens all the time. People figure out that they don't have to pray for good rulers.
They just have to devise good rules.
Another classic example of collective action includes levying taxes to provide for national defense. People protected by Leviathan shouldn't be able to free-ride on Leviathan; the rationale goes, especially if the point of Leviathan is to protect us from Behemoth or Ziz. Conveniently, Leviathan is powerful enough to tax. And this fact has a deep history, so much so that most of us follow old liberals like Benjamin Franklin as thinking of taxes as inevitable, like death.
The trouble is, as with many things with which authority is entrusted, there is a point beyond which national defense becomes excessive, wasteful, and offensive (instead of defensive). Today, the United States manages what appears to be a global empire, with some estimates indicating more than 650 non-domestic military bases worldwide. Some see that role as a good thing: the world benefits from a force that has been a de facto global constable, which has protected international trade and kept rogue states in line. To others, America's role is a bad thing, as military adventures carried out in the name of pre-emption have turned into costly quagmires and destabilizing occupations.
But being the bully of bullies is a costly proposition. Almost everyone agrees you need national defense. Virtually no one agrees about how much. And without market prices, we have fewer ways of determining anything like national defense's true value, much less its true costs. Whatever your position, the very idea that voters have control regarding the size and scope of the military-industrial complex is, well, naive. The U.S. defense budget is gargantuan and growing.
If ever there were a way to feed Moloch, it would be through the military-industrial complex. If ever there were a way to feed Moloch, it would be through justification by way of collective action.
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Every society must have a final arbiter of disputes. Because the final arbiter must stand above the disputes he arbitrates, he is perforce anarchic. Thus, as Alfred G. Cuzán* showed, there is no escape from anarchy.
Here is the heart of all political science: Either there is a single anarchic arbiter claiming sole insight into universal moral laws, with monopoly on a police power from which there is no escape; or there are multiple anarchic arbiters modestly asserting insight into communal morals of long acceptance, whose power is constrained by the threat of abandonment.
*https://mises.org/library/revisiting-do-we-ever-really-get-out-anarchy