Untitled

The past: immutable
The present: ephemeral
The future: inscrutable

Anarchist's Progress

Written by Albert Jay Nock, this classic essay originally appeared in the March 1927 issue of the American Mercury and was reprinted, by Nock, a year later in On Doing the Right Thing

When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day. I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a drove of geese in our neighbourhood. He impressed me as the most entertaining and delightful person that I had seen in a long time, and I spoke of him to my parents with great pride.

At this time I did not know what policemen were. No doubt I had seen them, but not to notice them. Now, naturally, after meeting this highly prepossessing specimen, I wished to find out all I could about them, so I took the matter up with our old colored cook. I learned from her that my fine new friend represented something that was called the law; that the law was very good and great, and that everyone should obey and respect it. This was reasonable; if it were so, then my admirable friend just fitted his place, and was even more highly to be thought of, if possible. I asked where the law came from, and it was explained to me that men all over the country got together on what was called election day, and chose certain persons to make the law and others to see that it was carried out; and that the sum-total of all this mechanism was called our government. This again was as it should be; the men I knew, such as my father, my uncle George, and Messrs. So-and-so among the neighbours (running them over rapidly in my mind), could do this sort of thing handsomely, and there was probably a good deal in the idea. But what was it all for? Why did we have law and government, anyway? Then I learned that there were persons called criminals; some of them stole, some hurt or killed people or set fire to houses; and it was the duty of men like my friend the policeman to protect us from them. If he saw any he would catch them and lock them up, and they would be punished according to the law.

A year or so later we moved to another house in the same neighbourhood, only a short distance away. On the corner of the block -- rather a long block -- behind our house stood a large one-story wooden building, very dirty and shabby, called the Wigwam. While getting the lie of my new surroundings, I considered this structure and remarked with disfavour the kind of people who seemed to be making themselves at home there. Some one told me it was a "political headquarters," but I did not know what that meant, and therefore did not connect it with my recent researches into law and government. I had little curiosity about the Wigwam. My parents never forbade my going there, but my mother once casually told me that it was a pretty good place to keep away from, and I agreed with her.


Two months later I heard someone say that election day was shortly coming on, and I sparked up at once; this, then, was the day when the lawmakers were to be chosen. There had been great doings at the Wigwam lately; in the evenings, too, I had seen noisy processions of drunken loafers passing our house, carrying transparencies and tin torches that sent up clouds of kerosene-smoke. When I had asked what these meant, I was answered in one word, "politics," uttered in a disparaging tone, but this signified nothing to me. The fact is that my attention had been attracted by a steam-calliope that went along with one of the first of these processions, and I took it to mean that there was a circus going on; and when I found that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what else might be taking place.

On hearing of election day, however, the light broke in on me. I was really witnessing the august performances that I had heard of from our cook. All these processions of yelling hoodlums who sweat and stank in the parboiling humidity of the Indian-summer evenings -- all the squalid goings-on in the Wigwam -- all these, it seemed, were part and parcel of an election. I noticed that the men whom I knew in the neighbourhood were not prominent in this election; my uncle George voted, I remember, and when he dropped in at our house that evening, I overheard him say that going to the polls was a filthy business. I could not make it out. Nothing could be clearer than that the leading spirits in the whole affair were most dreadful swine; and I wondered by what kind of magic they could bring forth anything so majestic, good and venerable as the law. But I kept my questionings to myself for some reason, though, as a rule, 1 was quite a hand for pestering older people about matters that seemed anomalous. Finally, I gave it up as hopeless, and thought no more about the subject for three years.

An incident of that election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted brother, very far gone in whisky, fell by the wayside in a vacant lot just back of our house, on his way to the Wigwam to await the returns. He lay there all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of something like half an hour he roused himself up in the darkness, apparently aware that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of "Marching Through Georgia," but he could never get quite through three measures of the first bar before relapsing into somnolence. It was very funny; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always petered out so lamentably. I often think of him. His general sense of political duty, I must say, still seems to me as intelligent and as competent as that of any man I have met in the many, many years that have gone by since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems about as effective as any I could suggest.


When I was just past my tenth birthday we left Brooklyn and went to live in a pleasant town of ten thousand population. An orphaned cousin made her home with us, a pretty girl, who soon began to cut a fair swath among the young men of the town. One of these was an extraordinary person, difficult to describe. My father, a great tease, at once detected his resemblance to a chimpanzee, and bored my cousin abominably by always speaking of him as Chim. The young man was not a popular idol by any means, yet no one thought badly of him. He was accepted everywhere as a source of legitimate diversion, and in the graduated, popular scale of local speech was invariably designated as a fool -- a born fool, for which there was no help. When I heard he was a lawyer, I was so astonished that I actually went into the chicken court one day to hear him plead some trifling case, out of sheer curiosity to see him in action; and I must say I got my money's worth. Presently the word went around that he was going to run for Congress, and stood a good chance of being elected; and what amazed me above all was that no one seemed to see anything out of the way about it.

My tottering faith in law and government got a hard jolt from this. Here was a man, a very good fellow indeed -- he had nothing in common with the crew who herded around the Wigwam -- who was regarded by the unanimous judgment of the community, without doubt, peradventure, or exception, as having barely sense enough to come in when it rained; and this was the man whom his party was sending to Washington as contentedly as if he were some Draco or Solon. At this point my sense of humour forged to the front and took permanent charge of the situation, which was fortunate for me, since otherwise my education would have been aborted, and I would perhaps, like so many who have missed this great blessing, have gone in with the reformers and uplifters; and such a close shave as this, in the words of Rabelais, is a terrible thing to think upon. How many reformers there have been in my day; how nobly and absurdly busy they were, and how dismally unhumorous! I can dimly remember Pingree and Altgeld in the Middle West, and Godkin, Strong, and Seth Low in New York. During the nineties, the goodly fellowship of the prophets buzzed about the whole country like flies around a tar-barrel -- and, Lord! where be they now?


It will easily be seen, I think, that the only unusual thing about all this was that my mind was perfectly unprepossessed and blank throughout. My experiences were surely not uncommon, and my reasonings and inferences were no more than any child, who was more than halfwitted, could have made without trouble. But my mind had never been perverted or sophisticated; it was left to itself. I never went to school, so I was never indoctrinated with pseudo-patriotic fustian of any kind, and the plain, natural truth of such matters as I have been describing, therefore, found its way to my mind without encountering any artificial obstacle.

This freedom continued, happily, until my mind had matured and toughened. When I went to college I had the great good luck to hit on probably the only one in the country (there certainly is none now) where all such subjects were so remote and unconsidered that one would not know they existed. I had Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and nothing else, but I had these until the cows came home; then I had them all over again (or so it seemed) to make sure nothing was left out; then I was given a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts, and turned adrift. The idea was that if one wished to go in for some special branch of learning, one should do it afterward, on the foundation laid at college. The college's business was to lay the foundation, and the authorities saw to it that we were kept plentifully busy with the job. Therefore, all such subjects as political history, political science, and political economy were closed to me throughout my youth and early manhood; and when the time came that I wished to look into them, I did it on my own, without the interference of instructors, as any person who has gone through a course of training similar to mine at college is quite competent to do.

That time, however, came much later, and meanwhile I thought little about law and government, as I had other fish to fry; I was living more or less out of the world, occupied with literary studies. Occasionally some incident happened that set my mind perhaps a little farther along in the old sequences, but not often. Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience. Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it -- the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers -- felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect -- nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.

Presently I got acquainted in a casual way with some officeholders, becoming quite friendly with one in particular, who held a high elective office. One day he happened to ask me how I would reply to a letter that bothered him; it was a query about the fitness of a certain man for an appointive job. His recommendation would have weight; he liked the man, and really wanted to recommend him -- moreover, he was under great political pressure to recommend him -- but he did not think the man was qualified. Well, then, I suggested offhand, why not put it just that way? -- it seemed all fair and straightforward. "Ah yes," he said, "but if I wrote such a letter as that, you see, I wouldn't be reelected." This took me aback a bit, and I demurred somewhat. "That's all very well," he kept insisting, "but I wouldn't be reelected." Thinking to give the discussion a semi-humorous turn, I told him that the public, after all, had rights in the matter; he was their hired servant, and if he were not reelected it would mean merely that the public did not want him to work for them any more, which was quite within their competence. Moreover, if they threw him out on any such issue as this, he ought to take it as a compliment; indeed, if he were reelected, would it not tend to show in some measure that he and the people did not fully understand each other? He did not like my tone of levity, and dismissed the subject with the remark that I knew nothing of practical politics, which was no doubt true.


Perhaps a year after this I had my first view of a legislative body in action. I visited the capital of a certain country, and listened attentively to the legislative proceedings. What I wished to observe, first of all, was the kind of business that was mostly under discussion; and next, I wished to get as good a general idea as I could of the kind of men who were entrusted with this business. I had a friend on the spot, formerly a newspaper reporter who had been in the press gallery for years; he guided me over the government buildings, taking me everywhere and showing me everything I asked to see.

As we walked through some corridors in the basement of the Capitol, I remarked the resonance of the stonework. "Yes," he said, thoughtfully, "these walls, in their time, have echoed to the uncertain footsteps of many a drunken statesman." His words were made good in a few moments when we heard a spirited commotion ahead, which we found to proceed from a good-sized room, perhaps a committee room, opening off the corridor. The door being open, we stopped, and looked in on a strange sight.

In the centre of the room, a florid, square-built, portly man was dancing an extraordinary kind of break-down, or kazak dance. He leaped straight up to an incredible height, spun around like a teetotum, stamped his feet, then suddenly squatted and hopped through several measures in a squatting position, his hands on his knees, and then leaped up in the air and spun around again. He blew like a turkeycock, and occasionally uttered hoarse cries; his protruding and fiery eyes were suffused with blood, and the veins stood out on his neck and forehead like the strings of a bass-viol. He was drunk.

About a dozen others, also very drunk, stood around him in crouching postures, some clapping their hands and some slapping their knees, keeping time to the dance. One of them caught sight of us in the doorway, came up, and began to talk to me in a maundering fashion about his constituents. He was a loathsome human being; I have seldom seen one so repulsive. I could make nothing of what he said; he was almost inarticulate; and in pronouncing certain syllables he would slaver and spit, so that I was more occupied with keeping out of his range than with listening to him. He kept trying to buttonhole me, and I kept moving backward; he had backed me thirty feet down the corridor when my friend came along and disengaged me; and as we resumed our way, my friend observed for my consolation that "you pretty well need a mackintosh when X talks to you, even when he is sober."

This man, I learned, was interested in the looting of certain valuable public lands; nobody had heard of his ever being interested in any other legislative measures. The florid man who was dancing was interested in nothing but a high tariff on certain manufactures; he shortly became a Cabinet officer. Throughout my stay I was struck by seeing how much of the real business of legislation was in this category -- how much, that is, had to do with putting unearned money in the pockets of beneficiaries -- and what fitful and perfunctory attention the legislators gave to any other kind of business. I was even more impressed by the prevalent air of cynicism; by the frankness with which everyone seemed to acquiesce in the view of Voltaire, that government is merely a device for taking money out of one person's pocket and putting it into another's.


These experiences, commonplace as they were, prepared me to pause over and question certain sayings of famous men, when subsequently I ran across them, which otherwise I would perhaps have passed by without thinking about them. When I came upon the saying of Lincoln, that the way of the politician is "a long step removed from common honesty," it set a problem for me. I wondered just why this should be generally true, if it were true. When I read the remark of Mr. Jefferson, that "whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct," I remembered the judge who had sentenced the boy, and my officeholding acquaintance who was so worried about reelection. I tried to reexamine their position, as far as possible putting myself in their place, and made a great effort to understand it favorably. My first view of a parliamentary body came back to me vividly when I read the despondent observation of John Bright, that he had sometimes known the British Parliament to do a good thing, but never just because it was a good thing. In the meantime I had observed many legislatures, and their principal occupations and preoccupations seemed to me precisely like those of the first one I ever saw; and while their personnel was not by any means composed throughout of noisy and disgusting scoundrels (neither, I hasten to say, was the first one), it was so unimaginably inept that it would really have to be seen to be believed. I cannot think of a more powerful stimulus to one's intellectual curiosity, for instance, than to sit in the galleries of the last Congress, contemplate its general run of membership, and then recall these sayings of Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson, and John Bright.[Note 1]

It struck me as strange that these phenomena seemed never to stir any intellectual curiosity in anybody. As far as I know, there is no record of its ever having occurred to Lincoln that the fact he had remarked was striking enough to need accounting for; nor yet to Mr. Jefferson, whose intellectual curiosity was almost boundless; nor yet to John Bright. As for the people around me, their attitudes seemed strangest of all. They all disparaged politics. Their common saying, "Oh, that's politics," always pointed to something that in any other sphere of action they would call shabby and disreputable. But they never asked themselves why it was that in this one sphere of action alone they took shabby and disreputable conduct as a matter of course. It was all the more strange because these same people still somehow assumed that politics existed for the promotion of the highest social purposes. They assumed that the State's primary purpose was to promote through appropriate institutions the general welfare of its members. This assumption, whatever it amounted to, furnished the rationale of their patriotism, and they held to it with a tenacity that on slight provocation became vindictive and fanatical. Yet all of them were aware, and if pressed, could not help acknowledging, that more than 90 per cent of the State's energy was employed directly against the general welfare. Thus one might say that they seemed to have one set of credenda for week-days and another for Sundays, and never to ask themselves what actual reasons they had for holding either.

I did not know how to take this, nor do I now. Let me draw a rough parallel. Suppose vast numbers of people to be contemplating a machine that they had been told was a plough, and very valuable -- indeed, that they could not get on without it -- some even saying that its design came down in some way from on high. They have great feelings of pride and jealousy about this machine, and will give up their lives for it if they are told it is in danger. Yet they all see that it will not plough well, no matter what hands are put to manage it, and in fact does hardly any ploughing at all; sometimes only with enormous difficulty and continual tinkering and adjustment can it be got to scratch a sort of furrow, very poor and short, hardly practicable, and ludicrously disproportionate to the cost and pains of cutting it. On the other hand, the machine harrows perfectly, almost automatically. It looks like a harrow, has the history of a harrow, and even when the most enlightened effort is expended on it to make it act like a plough, it persists, except for an occasional six or eight per cent of efficiency, in acting like a harrow.

Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some enquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine. Was it really a plough? Was it ever meant to plough with? Was it not designed and constructed for harrowing? Yet none of the anomalies that I had been observing ever raised any enquiry about the nature and original intention of the State. They were merely acquiesced in. At most, they were put down feebly to the imperfections of human nature which render mismanagement and perversion of every good institution to some extent inevitable; and this is absurd, for these anomalies do not appear in the conduct of any other human institution. It is no matter of opinion, but of open and notorious fact, that they do not. There are anomalies in the church and in the family that are significantly analogous; they will bear investigation, and are getting it; but the analogies are by no means complete, and are mostly due to the historical connection of these two institutions with the State.

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit -- murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare. Compare the difficulty of securing conviction in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private crime. Compare the smooth and easy going of the Teapot Dome transactions with the obstructionist behaviour of the State toward a national child-labour law. Suppose one should try to get the State to put the same safeguards (no stronger) around service-income that with no pressure at all it puts around capital-income: what chance would one have? It must not be understood that I bring these matters forward to complain of them. I am not concerned with complaints or reforms, but only with the exhibition of anomalies that seem to me to need accounting for.

In the course of some desultory reading I noticed that the historian Parkman, at the outset of his volume on the conspiracy of Pontiac, dwells with some puzzlement, apparently, upon the fact that the Indians had not formed a State. Mr. Jefferson, also, who knew the Indians well, remarked the same fact -- that they lived in a rather highly organized society, but had never formed a State. Bicknell, the historian of Rhode Island, has some interesting passages that bear upon the same point, hinting that the collisions between the Indians and the whites may have been largely due to a misunderstanding about the nature of land-tenure; that the Indians, knowing nothing of the British system of land-tenure, understood their land-sales and land-grants as merely an admission of the whites to the same communal use of land that they themselves enjoyed. I noticed, too, that Marx devotes a good deal of space in Das Kapital to proving that economic exploitation cannot take place in any society until the exploited class has been expropriated from the land. These observations attracted my attention as possibly throwing a strong side light upon the nature of the State and the primary purpose of government, and I made note of them accordingly.

At this time I was a good deal in Europe. I was in England and Germany during the Tangier incident, studying the circumstances and conditions that led up to the late war. My facilities for this were exceptional, and I used them diligently. Here I saw the State behaving just as I had seen it behave at home. Moreover, remembering the political theories of the eighteenth century, and the expectations put upon them, I was struck with the fact that the republican, constitutional-monarchical and autocratic States behaved exactly alike. This has never been sufficiently remarked. There was no practical distinction to be drawn among England, France, Germany, and Russia; in all these countries the State acted with unvarying consistency and unfailing regularity against the interests of the immense, the overwhelming majority of its people. So flagrant and flagitious, indeed, was the action of the State in all these countries, that its administrative officials, especially its diplomats, would immediately, in any other sphere of action, be put down as a professional-criminal class; just as would the corresponding officials in my own country, as I had already remarked. It is a noteworthy fact, indeed, concerning all that has happened since then, that if in any given circumstances one went on the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost nothing. The accuracy of my own predictions during the war and throughout the Peace Conference was due to nothing but their being based on this assumption.

The Liberal party was in power in England in 1911, and my attention became attracted to its tenets. I had already seen something of Liberalism in America as a kind of glorified mugwumpery. The Cleveland Administration had long before proved what everybody already knew, that there was no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; an election meant merely that one was in office and wished to stay in, and the other was out and wished to get in. I saw precisely the same relation prevailing between the two major parties in England, and I was to see later the same relation sustained by the Labour Administration of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. All these political permutations resulted only in what John Adams admirably called "a change of impostors." But I was chiefly interested in the basic theory of Liberalism. This seemed to be that the State is no worse than a degenerate or perverted institution, beneficent in its original intention, and susceptible of restoration by the simple expedient of "putting good men in office."

I had already seen this experiment tried on several scales of magnitude, and observed that it came to nothing commensurate with the expectations put upon it or the enormous difficulty of arranging it. Later I was to see it tried on an unprecedented scale, for almost all the Governments engaged in the war were Liberal, notably the English and our own. Its disastrous results in the case of the Wilson Administration are too well known to need comment; though I do not wish to escape the responsibility of saying that of all forms of political impostorship, Liberalism always seemed to me the most vicious, because the most pretentious and specious. The general upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy, the mechanism of the State would work freely and naturally in but one direction, namely, against the general welfare of the people.


So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in any other direction; and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon sheer guesswork; none of them upon actual investigation. The treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based, finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was originally formed by this-or-that mode of social agreement; others, by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that enough information must be available; the formation of the State in America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.

I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes -- an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.[Note 2]

This at once cleared up all the anomalies which I had found so troublesome. One could see immediately, for instance, why the hunting tribes and primitive peasants never formed a State. Primitive peasants never made enough of an economic accumulation to be worth stealing; they lived from hand to mouth. The hunting tribes of North America never formed a State, because the hunter was not exploitable. There was no way to make another man hunt for you; he would go off in the woods and forget to come back; and if he were expropriated from certain hunting-grounds, he would merely move on beyond them, the territory being so large and the population so sparse. Similarly, since the State's own primary intention was essentially criminal, one could see why it cares only to monopolize crime, and not to suppress it; this explained the anomalous behaviour of officials, and showed why it is that in their public capacity, whatever their private character, they appear necessarily as a professional-criminal class; and it further accounted for the fact that the State never moves disinterestedly for the general welfare, except grudgingly and under great pressure.

Again, one could perceive at once the basic misapprehension which forever nullifies the labors of Liberalism and Reform. It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbours that I should go to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having some one of a somewhat different type "amongst those damned rascals down there." "Yes, but," I said, "don't you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so -- a very short time, anyway -- before I should be a damned rascal, too?" No, they did not see this; they were rather taken aback; would I explain? "Suppose," I said, "that you put in a Sunday-school superintendent or a Y.M.C.A. secretary to run an assignation-house on Broadway. He might trim off some of the coarser fringes of the job, such as the badger game and the panel game, and put things in what Mayor Gaynor used to call a state of 'outward order and decency,' but he must run an assignation-house, or he would promptly hear from the owners." This was a new view to them, and they went away thoughtful.

Finally, one could perceive the reason for the matter that most puzzled me when I first observed a legislature in action, namely, the almost exclusive concern of legislative bodies with such measures as tend to take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another -- the preoccupation with converting labour-made property into law-made property, and redistributing its ownership. The moment one becomes aware that just this, over and above a purely legal distribution of the ownership of natural resources, is what the State came into being for, and what it yet exists for, one immediately sees that the legislative bodies are acting altogether in character, and otherwise one cannot possibly give oneself an intelligent account of their behaviour.[Note 3]

Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work -- i.e., by applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labour-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery -- i.e., the appropriation of the labour-products of others without compensation. This is called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private land-ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.

It is a primary instinct of human nature to satisfy one's needs and desires with the least possible exertion; everyone tends by instinctive preference to use the political means rather than the economic means, if he can do so. The great desideratum in a tariff, for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means (exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political means.

This instinct -- and this alone -- is what gives the State its almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify the State, and to insist upon the pretence that it is something which it is not -- something, in fact, the direct opposite of what it is. One understands the complacent acceptance of one set of standards for the State's conduct, and another for private organizations; of one set for officials, and another for private persons. One understands at once the attitude of the press, the Church and educational institutions, their careful inculcations of a specious patriotism, their nervous and vindictive proscriptions of opinion, doubt or even of question. One sees why purely fictitious theories of the State and its activities are strongly, often fiercely and violently, insisted on; why the simple fundamentals of the very simply [sic] science of economics are shirked or veiled; and why, finally, those who really know what kind of thing they are promulgating, are loth to say so.

The outbreak of the war in 1914 found me entertaining the convictions that I have here outlined. In the succeeding decade nothing has taken place to attenuate them, but quite the contrary. Having set out only to tell the story of how I came by them, and not to expound them or indulge in any polemic for them, I may now bring this narrative to an end, with a word about their practical outcome.

It has sometimes been remarked as strange that I never joined in any agitation, or took the part of a propagandist for any movement against the State, especially at a time when I had an unexampled opportunity to do so. To do anything of the sort successfully, one must have more faith in such processes than I have, and one must also have a certain dogmatic turn of temperament, which I do not possess. To be quite candid, I was never much for evangelization; I am not sure enough that my opinions are right, and even if they were, a second-hand opinion is a poor possession. Reason and experience, I repeat, are all that determine our true beliefs. So I never greatly cared that people should think my way, or tried much to get them to do so. I should be glad if they thought -- if their general turn, that is, were a little more for disinterested thinking, and a little less for impetuous action motivated by mere unconsidered prepossession; and what little I could ever do to promote disinterested thinking has, I believe, been done.

According to my observations (for which I claim nothing but that they are all I have to go by) inaction is better than wrong action or premature right action, and effective right action can only follow right thinking. "If a great change is to take place," said Edmund Burke, in his last words on the French Revolution, "the minds of men will be fitted to it." Otherwise the thing does not turn out well; and the processes by which men's minds are fitted seem to me untraceable and imponderable, the only certainty about them being that the share of any one person, or any one movement, in determining them is extremely small. Various social superstitions, such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology, and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack, and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had stopped. So I think it very possible that while we are saying, "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" with our eye on this or that revolution, usurpation, seizure of power, or what not, the superstitions that surround the State are quietly disappearing in the same way.[Note 4]

My opinion of my own government and those who administer it can probably be inferred from what I have written. Mr. Jefferson said that if a centralization of power were ever effected at Washington, the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth. Comparisons are difficult, but I believe it has one that is thoroughly corrupt, flagitious, tyrannical, oppressive. Yet if it were in my power to pull down its whole structure overnight and set up another of my own devising -- to abolish the State out of hand, and replace it by an organization of the economic means -- I would not do it, for the minds of Americans are far from fitted to any such great change as this, and the effect would be only to lay open the way for the worse enormities of usurpation -- possibly, who knows? with myself as the usurper! After the French Revolution, Napoleon!

Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached, they have many followers. Perhaps among those who will see what I have here written, there are two or three who will agree with me that the believers in action do not need us -- indeed, that if we joined them, we should be rather a dead weight for them to carry. We need not deny that their work is educative, or pinch pennies when we count up its cost in the inevitable reactions against it. We need only remark that our place and function in it are not apparent, and then proceed on our own way, first with the more obscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action.

Footnotes
1. As indicating the impression made on a more sophisticated mind, I may mention an amusing incident that happened to me in London two years ago. Having an engagement with a member of the House of Commons, I filled out a card and gave it to an attendant. By mistake I had written my name where the member's should be, and his where mine should be. The attendant handed the card back, saying, "l'm afraid this will 'ardly do, sir. I see you've been making yourself a member. It doesn't go quite as easy as that, sir -- though from some of what you see around 'ere, I wouldn't say as 'ow you mightn't think so." (Back)

2. There is a considerable literature on this subject, largely untranslated. As a beginning, the reader may be conveniently referred to Mr. Charles A. Beard's Rise of American Civilization and his work on the Constitution of the United States. After these he should study closely -- for it is hard reading -- a small volume called The State by Professor Franz Oppenheimer, of the University of Frankfort. It has been well translated and is easily available. (Back)

3. When the Republican convention which nominated Mr. Harding was almost over, one of the party leaders met a man who was managing a kind of dark-horse, or one-horse, candidate, and said to him, "You can pack up that candidate of yours, and take him home now. I can't tell you who the next President will be; it will be one of three men, and I don't just yet know which. But I can tell you who the next Secretary of the Interior will be, and that is the important question, because there are still a few little things lying around loose that the boys want." I had this from a United States Senator, a Republican, who told it to me merely as a good story. (Back)

4. The most valuable result of the Russian Revolution is in its liberation of the idea of the State as an engine of economic exploitation. In Denmark, according to a recent article in The English Review, there is a considerable movement for a complete separation of politics from economics, which, if effected, would of course mean the disappearance of the State. (Back)

Love and Marriage Redux

I have decided to readdress the marriage issue a second time, partially because I failed to mention the Alternatives to Marriage Project in the prior post, but also because, to my dismay, no one aside from Jim even attempted to answer directly any of the many questions I asked (and Jim's answer was a weak one, in my opinion). I can only guess that my questions were all misconstrued as rhetorical. So, this time I think I'll use more direct language, which will hopefully encourage a more fruitful discussion.

Marriage is, at best, meaningless. At worst, marriage is a superstition on a par with a belief in wood sprites. Marriage and commitment (...and love ...and cuddling ...and financial support ...and sex, etc.) are not identical, and I believe that people who conflate these things are making a category mistake. Contrary to Jim's assertion, people's primary motivations for marriage don't include avoiding getting hassled by hospital staffs (or I should say this is true at least for the vast majority of people who aren't robots).

On Valentine's Day, Howard Stern announced his engagement to Beth Ostrowsky, his sweetheart of more than 6 years. He received dozens of congratulatory phone calls about the engagement. I truly do not understand why (and, by the way, none of the people congratulating him brought up tax savings or avoiding hassles in hospitals). How will marriage improve their relationship? (By the way, that is not a rhetorical question). Is Howard, perhaps, afraid that without the marriage contract, BethO might leave him? Is perhaps fear the primary reason for marriage, then?

At one point Howard made the odd statement that by getting married he was "giving up other pussy." How is that? Hadn't he already done that six years earlier? I honestly do not understand this--unless, in truth, marriage consists primarily in making the statement, "I promise to give you half of my assets, plus additional future income, if I ever have sex with someone other than you, or even if I decide at some later date that I no longer want to be with you."

Do people really find that to be a romantic sentiment?

(Non-religious) people who want to defend marriage need to explain:

1) Why forcing someone to stay with you past the point they would in the absence of a marriage contract should ever be considered a good thing. Why would that situation ever be preferable to one where it's clear that the couple is together out of love and shared values?
2) Exactly what it is that marriage gives you that you absolutely cannot get outside of marriage.
3) Why those few legal rights marriage conveys to a couple are so damned important - and yet no one ever mentions them, really, when they talk about marriage.

Love and Marriage

Why do we have marriage contracts, but not friendship contracts?

Why is asking someone to marry you any different than what Calvin is asking Hobbes in the above cartoon?

I confess to not understanding marriage’s allure. Some might conclude from this that I must not be much of a romantic. However, I would counter that perhaps my misunderstanding is due to a genuine romanticism on my part. After all, what is the defining characteristic of “marriage”? It’s not love. It’s not commitment. Love and commitment are beautiful, romantic things to be cherished and encouraged—and even celebrated and announced publicly to friends and family—but these things are not the same as marriage.

Marriage—stripped of its religious aspects, which, as an atheist, I of course find utterly meaningless—is simply a contract, isn’t it? And not just any contract. It’s a contract designed to make it difficult and expensive for one party to leave the other. Why would anyone do that—especially to someone they love? How is binding someone to you, even if only figuratively, in any way romantic? Why create a situation in which there is any doubt about the motivations behind your spouse’s (for lack of a better word) sticking by you?

Thoughts on this issue are encouraged and appreciated. You can find more food for thought in this essay written by the egoist John Beverley Robinson in 1889.

What does God explain?

When guys like Will Wilkinson are writing brilliant stuff like this it really kills my desire to blog much at all, at least when it comes to the heavy philosophical topics. Given the law of comparative advantage, I should leave the philosophizing to Will (and others) and I'll stick to, uh..., something else I haven't quite figured out, yet.

Anyway, I particularly like Will's approach to the definition of an atheist, here:

...[I]f something plays a role in our best explanation of some phenomenon, you should believe it exists. Otherwise, not. God, for instance, is the best explanation for nothing. That’s why you shouldn’t believe in God, or the posits of string theory. (People...who hesitate to call themselves atheists because they cannot “prove” nonexistence are simply confused about ontological commitment. If [one's estimate of the probability] p for “God exists” is so low (”vanishingly unlikely”), then God must play no role in [one's] economy of explanation, which is all there is to being an atheist. You don’t just get to decide whether or not you are one.)

I see little to disagree with in any of the rest of the post, either (or the whole blog, for that matter).

I rarely find myself feeling envious of another man's genius, but Will Wilkinson is definitely one of the few exceptions. Perhaps in part it's because he's got a really hot girlfriend who seemed (at last check, anyway) to be totally nuts about him. Some guys have all the luck!

The Unquotable Max Stirner

The title and masthead for this blog comes from an idea of the 18th century German philosopher, Max Stirner. Die Eigenheit, translated as "ownness" by Steven Byington, is of central importance to Stirner's conception of what it means to be an egoist. Perhaps the most concise way to describe it is as the diametric opposite of slavery. Ownness means submission to no higher will - obedience to none but the self, and even this is seen as ultimately incompatible with ownness, since Stirner says it can be achieved "only by recognizing no duty, not binding myself or letting myself be bound" - meaning that unless you can change your mind, you can become a slave even to yourself.

In spite of what I see as serious flaws in Stirner's thought, I can't help but be inspired by his underlying message, which is a celebration of the individual as the source of all things good, as against the "higher" concepts (such as "God" and "The State" - things that even today retain an "exalted" status), which end up being the source of all things bad. An oversimplification, certainly, but you get the idea.

Stirner's message, unlike Nietzsche's, for example, is uncompromising and unwaveringly consistent. Unfortunately, though, Stirner's prose is rarely passionate and colorful, and never given to aphorism (as you can probably surmise from the clunkiness of the blog's masthead quote, something I spent an appreciable amount of time searching for, and am still not totally satisfied with). In fact, Stirner's most famous 'quote', "The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime," while being certainly a very Stirnerian concept, doesn't appear to be something he actually said - at least not in so many words. I keep looking for it, but I have yet to find it.

None of this is meant to imply that Stirner is turgid or unreadable. On the contrary, as I said, he can be very inspiring (though, undoubtedly, parts of his works are difficult without some understanding of his context). It's just that Stirner seems content to let his points unfold gradually. Too bad he never heard of the MTV generation and the concept of the evening news soundbite.

War: What is it good for?

War…proves some to be gods and others to be mere men, by turning the latter into slaves and the former into masters… War is just. –Heraclitus

During the years of the so-called peace, politics…have only a meaning inasmuch as they prepare for total war. –General Ludendorff

War means the State in its most actual growth and rise: it means politics. –Max Scheler

War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an exigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is Power. –Treitschke

[I]t is in war that the State displays its true nature. –E. Kaufmann

The State, from the first moment of its existence, takes its stand in the sphere of war… War is not only the most perfect form of State activity, it is the very element in which the state is embedded; war delayed, prevented, disguised, avoided, must of course be included in the term. –H. Freyer

Quotes taken from Hegel and the New Tribalism, chapter 12 of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies.

They struck me as appropriate for Memorial Day.

What is this blog about?

Recently, it seems this blog has had a rather narrow focus. I'll admit that I have been slathering quite a bit of attention on John Burley (and though he certainly doesn't deserve it, I do still have 2 or 3 more Burley posts planned). Honestly, though, I have no intention of adding Die Eigenheit to the cacophony of personal finance and real estate investment blogs out there. I mean, what the hell do I know?

So, you see, I have always felt that if this blog's theme is anything at all (aside from its autobiographical nature), then it would have to be epistemology.

As a die-hard skeptic, I take belief very seriously. I often find myself consumed by doubts - sometimes to the point of experiencing a profound (and very disturbing) solipsism. Of late - as you've seen if you're one of the 4 people who reads this blog regularly - this tendency to question obsessively has manifested in my exploration of the the wacky belief that there are actually "secrets" that "the rich" keep hidden from the hoi polloi. This has meant a focus on John Burley, since, of the countless people spouting such nonsense, he's the one I am most familiar with. I will, soon, run out of things to say about that, though, at which point I'll have to move on to other things.

Al Swearengen once said, "If you want to see God laugh, tell him your plans," so I won't bore you with the specifics of mine. But if you were beginning to worry that I might never shut up about Burley this and Burley that, you can rest assured that even I will have had my fill of him before long.

Hayek Would Approve

And all the anarchists say, "What took you so long?!"

hat tip, Catallarchy.

Nihilist Assault Group

Last night I went with my friend Steve and his friend Chris to the 9:30 Club to see Stereolab. It was an enjoyable show.

I've been a big fan of theirs for years, in spite of their overt Marxism. Lately, though, their leftism hasn't bothered me as much. George Bush has done a lot to enable me to embrace my own inner leftist.

There's another aspect to this, too. Take a look at these lyrics:

What's morals after all?
Set of rules from above

Moral panic calls for more censorship
While annihilating le perdure sens critique
Critique, Moral panic calls for more censorship

Morals are for the blind, not the critical mind

Morals which don't even tackle the real issues
Morals which seek intervention and control
Morals which don't even address the real problems
Morals that just seek control over our lives

If you're familiar with the words of Max Stirner then I think you'll have to agree that this seems to be more than just a distant echo. On the other hand, I doubt seriously if Stereolab are even aware of Stirner. So what are we to make of this?

In my own humble opinion it's a small confirmation of the controversial thesis that, as David Leopold says in his introduction to the Cambridge edition of The Ego and Its Own, Stirner was "central to the formation of Marxism," because he "[forced] Karl Marx to break with left Hegelian modes of thought" - in other words, to abandon his Feuerbachian humanism and develop his own "historical materialism."

Of Stirner's book, Engels himself said, in a letter to Marx, "...this work is important...the first point we find true is that, before doing whatever we will on behalf of some idea, we have first to make our cause personal, egoistic..." Marx, on some level, must have agreed with him, because the two of them wrote a refutation of Der Einzige that was longer than Stirner's own book!

There's no way we'll ever know for sure, but for my part, I like to think that Laetitia is channeling Stirner, even if Marx is playing a bit of an intermediary.

Confirmation Bias

Is it just the skeptics and the scientists who take epistemology seriously?

This question springs from my continued study of The Bible and its prima facie absurdity. Confronted with the Bible's inherent lunacy, Christians metaphorically wave their hands and avert their eyes, and take comfort in those biblical passages that glorify faith. It seems very few of them are truly concerned with the fundamentals of how we know what isn't so. I find it fascinating that religious folk can be so blind when it comes to their own crazy beliefs and yet so rational when it comes to the crazy beliefs of others. Jews laugh at Catholics. Catholics laugh at Mormons. Mormons laugh at Scientologists... ad nauseum. Of course, this tendency isn't restricted to the religious sphere alone. It seems par for the course in any sales pitch for snake oil.

While I was an admissions counselor at the University of Phoenix (really nothing more than a glorified telemarketing position) I had the pleasure of having two "network marketers" on my admissions team. One was affiliated with Quixtar (an Amway offshoot - though they don't like to point that out) and the other was affiliated with some long-distance service reseller called ACN. I was only able to have a couple brief (though animated) conversations with the Amway/Quixtar zombie before he was completely alienated, but they were enough for me to surmise that the guy was completely closed off to rational discourse. For example, he felt it was a huge selling point that Quixtar "pays you back" for the things that you purchase from them. Inexplicably, he thought that this was materially different from if Quixtar simply lowered the prices of the items in question, and he further felt - again, inexplicably - that this was an important demonstration of the truth that he would soon be able to retire and live off the massive residual income - he would soon be living the dream.

Meanwhile, my ACN friend was often privy to these conversations, and he would happily join in the derision. Unlike the Amway zombie, my ACN friend, Mike, was someone I had known for a while. Based on overheard conversations I had always kinda guessed he was in on some sort of get-rich-quick scheme, but I always felt it was none of my business. Subsequent to the Quixtar conversations, I broached the topic with him.

The first thing I asked him was why he was so down on Quixtar. He said it was because that was clearly an unworkable pyramid scheme, whereas ACN was the real deal. This is, of course, the standard sales pitch of every pyramid scheme out there. They all claim that their compensation plan avoids the pitfalls of the "real" pyramids and assures success to those "business owners" who "only have what it takes." Nevermind the mathematical impossibility of this claim. The mental gymnastics that Mike performed, when confronted with these inherent obstacles to easy money, were a sight to behold:

Well, obviously we both look at network-marketing differently. I look at as something you can do part-time, which is fun, where you have no boss, where it is all up to you. If you produce, you get paid if you do not you don't, there is no grey matter. I look at is as sorting through people, looking for superstars and believing in someone who may not ever think they can do something great. I have gone in knowing most who take this ride will fail because of either lack of belief, work ethic, or fear. I know I have to pay very close attention to those who are successful and duplicate what they have done . For what they have and the experiences they have are what I want for myself and my girlfriend.

I'll take the easy pot-shot first and say that I agree with him when he says "there is no grey matter." Of course I'm sure he meant to say "area," but in this instance I choose to have faith that Freud was on to something. The rest of the 'graph reads like Kiyosaki on a three-day speed binge, but when he makes the claim that what he is doing is "fun" I have to call foul. Having been a Realtor for two years, I know how uncomfortable it is soliciting your friends and family for business.

Now, I don't mean to pick on my unfortunate friend (who has, since writing the above, not-so-much come to his senses about ACN as ground to a halt - the way he put it: "I have transferred my time and energy into other areas"). He simply serves, I think, as a reminder that the religious impulse lurks in unexpected places. We have an insidious--though perhaps understandable--tendency to see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe--what the philosophers, skeptics, and scientists call confirmation bias.

Oh, and by the way, check out the real "Secrets of the Rich" here.

StirnerMax

Suddenly I'm sad I can't read Italian.

Why Drugs are Good

I miss my uncle. There was a wonderful man... Always had a funny story. Small town doctor. Entreprenuer. A bit of a show-off. Respected in his community. Loved by all. He was also addicted to pain killers.

I guess you'd call him a "functional addict" or something. He hid his addiction quite well from his family and friends, patients and co-workers, but there was a loneliness about him, which I always figured was the loneliness of a towering genius forced to put up with dolts. A divorcée with grown kids, he lived alone. That, along with a recent break-up of a multi-year romance, a crushing debt, and the responsibilities that go along with a start-up business venture, must have weighed heavily on him. This was certainly the lens through which we in his family interpreted his weariness.

To feed his addiction he was forced to forge prescriptions for fake patients. Obviously this leaves a paper trail. To cover his tracks, he would fill the prescriptions in different towns throughout the state. Unfortunately he wasn't careful enough, and ultimately a nosy, self-righteous pharmacist figured it out, called him up on a Friday afternoon, and informed him that the authorities would be notified on Monday.

It isn't hard to imagine the calculus that my uncle must have gone through that weekend. Doctoring was all he knew - was almost certainly how he defined himself. So, losing that would be tantamount to losing himself. "How is a 50-year-old man going to start over?" he must have thought. What's the answer? How would he pay back all the money he owed for starting a business - a business that he would now probably have to give up? Not to mention, how was he going to get his next fix? These problems, difficult as they are on their own, must have seemed completely insurmountable to a man also suffering from a broken heart. His solution was to kill himself on Sunday.

Now, the question you're probably asking is, "How can this have anything to do with drugs being good?" The answer is that it wasn't the pills that killed my uncle. What killed him was a system that encouraged his death. Why call it a "war" if there aren't supposed to be casualties? And innocents die in war all the time, right? That's just how it goes...

The war on drugs is a sick, sick thing. People die. Others rot for years in jail cells. Police are diverted from actual policing and are alienated from the communities they serve. And for what? What do we have to show for it? A bust every now and again pulls a few kilos off the street, so junkies have to shoot up baking soda until the re-supply? Where is the evidence that the war on drugs has done anything other than destroy lives?

But I digress... Drugs. Good. If I could choose between a dead uncle and a live uncle who's addicted to pills, guess which I'd choose. A non-addicted uncle would be great, but he is not among the choices. Prior to the pain killers, my uncle was an alcoholic for years, so some part of him needed those drugs to deal with life. What of it? They didn't turn him into a pedophilic serial-killer. Why should you or a pharmacist or a cop or a politician have any say over what is or is not "good" for my uncle or the street junkie or anyone else who makes the choice that, today, they're going to take drugs? How is that not an example of profound arrogance - particularly when you offer no alternative, except to destroy their lives if they continue making the "bad" choice?

So this is why drugs are good: because good people take drugs. Sometimes it's just for a fun time and why not? Sometimes, as in the case of my uncle, it's just a fucked up way to deal with the bad things in life, to get through the god-forsaken day any way you can, and if the alternative is death, then, believe me, the cost is too great. Choose drugs. Drugs are good.