"Lessons from the Ancients - a reply from FreeHal"

Whilst I think you are one of the best thinkers on the web, and certainly miles ahead of anyone else on the democratic roots of current problems, I wanted to take issue with you on your proposal here.

It is characteristic of your clarity of thought to have the confidence to propose solutions. The overwhelming majority of commentators would not dare to, even if they could. So I hope you won’t mind my debating you!

It is not just that I disagree with you, but that the things I disagree with most are fatal flaws in almost all political thought about the future. Specifically, the assumption that the state power is a natural necessity, a fact of life. And that state power tends to a stable equilibrium.

These assumptions, so unconsciously made on this side of the Atlantic, underpin the catastrophic complacency of political leaders here, and the suicidal destructiveness of left-wing activists.

“Catastrophic complacency”, because European elites appear to believe that the state will always be in place and, thanks to the inoculating effects of democracy, always protective. I cannot think of leaders with less historical right to think like this.

“Suicidal destructiveness”, because activists such as the black hoods tend to be inordinately welfare dependent. It makes no sense to hack away at the tree whilst perching on its driest twig. Worse than that, the routine use of violence against the state is dangerous on a continent where civil breakdown has so often led to carnage.

So I would like to challenge your proposal on the following bases: first, its own merits; second, its impracticability from our current position; third, it’s limiting assumptions (see above).

And, finally, to propose a more realistic and preferable alternative.

Before that, I should reiterate your view that democracy leads to the welfare state. Also, what I take to be your view that, as with the Ancien Regime, any class or group will use state power to exploit others.

I don’t know if you would agree with me that the commonest use of the state – it’s common denominator – is to enrich those controlling it. Usually by coercive methods such as simple taxation, or the sale of monopolies. But also by reducing the relative wealth of other groups, e.g. by preventing business people from prospering by banning usury.

If so, then I think it is difficult to see how the state can be rendered beneficial, as you seem to me to be saying it can.

Your proposal’s own merits

Your proposal appears to me to be an attempt to reduce, rather than cure, democracy’s self-destructiveness. In the same way that the American constitution sought, in part, to prevent abuse by checking state powers against each other, your proposal seems to countering electoral incentives against each other.

I don’t think this will work.

First, your proposal seeks to prevent abuse by inhibiting action, and governments need to take action. This was precisely the problem when the British constitution was more “balanced”, i.e. when the House of Lords had more power, and led to the Parliament Acts reducing that power in order to get its legislation enacted.

This was one of the problems with 18th-century Venice. It’s oligarchical republic looks corrupt to modern eyes. It had served Renaissance traders well, but was ill suited to the needs of Industrial Revolution and emerging stockmarkets for transparency and moralism. As a result, Venice lagged, and was easy prey for Napoleon.

Second, there is no stable equilibrium between the three classes (monarchy, aristocracy, and general population) whom you empower. One of them will always be stronger, or weaker, than the others. If the optimum balance is reached, it will be momentary.

You mention the British setup as a potential ideal. In which case, why didn’t it work? Britain ought to be in much better shape than its European deadbeats, but it isn’t, at least not by much.

That lesson from Britain is instructive: there was no logical stopping point at which the balance of power was just right. When the power of the monarchy was too restrictive for some, it was taken away by revolution. When people felt the aristocracy had too much power, the constitution evolved to reduce it. This was done by the power of the state, served by elaborate constitutional theory. The powerful use the state to their own ends. The state invites this.

Third, class is not the only, or even the primary, group-interest. Tribal divisions can be felt just as strongly. See, for example, Saddam and the Tikriti clan. See the Islamic enclaves in Europe, a continent which prided itself on having grown out of such divisions. Or the scourge of anti-semitism, whose blight has been promoted by monarchies, aristocracies, and populations alike.

Or anticapitalism – hostility to those who make money. A lot of people have something to gain from that if only via taxation. This is the current situation in Europe, and quite compatible with your proposal. Just look at the current situation in Britain from the point of view of your threefold system.

The monarchy is unaffected by the prejudice against commerce and trade. The monarchy does not live by trade, but by inherited wealth, chiefly landholdings which are largely unaffected by anticapitalism. If there is a reduction of wealth in society generally, the monarchy becomes relatively wealthier. It has little to lose, and something to gain, from prejudice against moneylending, share-dealing, and widget-making.

The Aristocracy is in a similar position (in fact, I wonder why you separate the monarchy and the aristocracy? The monarch has historically been first among aristocratic equals). Aristocratic wealth has traditionally derived from land. Their landholdings insulate them from the effects of inflation. Suppose, for example, the current mania for government bailouts leads to high inflation, the price of land will probably keep pace with inflation, or outpace it, because land, like gold, is limited.

Democracy, or “the people”, probably benefit the most from anticapitalism which vilifies money-makers, in order to justify confiscating money from them. I don’t need to repeat the argument which you make so clearly about the majority voting for welfare programmes to be paid for by the minority. This is happening right across Europe, and most other western democracies, and is the motor and linchpin of their problems.

In summary, I don’t see how, if your solution was put in place tomorrow, it would significantly affect the European democratic demise.

Impracticability

I note your honesty and realism on this point:

“What can be done? Probably nothing. The game must be played out. But what should be done if we could?”

I cannot resist asking what is the point of hypothetical solutions? Please forgive me if I sound sarcastic. It is simply that I think it is important to consider practicable solutions, in response to the terrible violence ahead. The more so because so few others are doing so.

As one of the comments to your essay says, your solution would require substantial reworking of the American Constitution. I think this would require a breakdown so severe as to create the tabula rasa situation which prevailed in the decades after the American Revolution. I wonder if a solution which requires so severe a breakdown is worth having? In those circumstances I doubt that heads will be clear enough rationally to think through proposals such as yours.

Civil breakdown gives rise to more Benito Mussolinis than Thomas Jeffersons. Which is why systems such as your proposal are generally the result of continuity rather than break down – ancient Greece, the Venetian Republic, Great Britain.

I have described elsewhere terrible violence which is going to accompany the breakdown of democracy in Europe. The important thing is to provide a solution which people can take up as democracy starts to fail. And that is simple if we can shed the blinkers of our times.

Limiting assumptions

“Freedom for the Wolves means death of a sheep” – Isaiah Berlin.

People need rules in order to live safely and to enter into bargains.

You don’t need me to tell you the unpleasant facts of human nature, that there are people who will harm you, or break their contracts with you, if they are forced to do otherwise.

And the demand for civil order is evidenced by the lengths people will go to, and the brutes they will tolerate, in order to get it.

After a decade of civil war, the Afghan population tolerated the Taliban. Many Iraqis were compliant under the order, of sorts, that Saddam provided. Even today, European business people tolerate unsustainable tax and spend on the basis that it provides a system of contract law they can use.

In a third world hellhole prison the sensible thing is to give yourself to the biggest brute in the place, because he will protect you from the others. Society can descend to those levels.

People need rules.

The false assumption is that only the state can provide and enforce those rules.

I can’t fault you for this assumption, but ask you to reconsider it. In Europe it is the state’s power – the power to ratchet up government spending – which threatens to destroy the state itself. And to elevate brute force and to let ethnic hatred off the leash.

But there is hope: the fact that people want enforceable rules means that they can find ways to provide them, independent of the state.

This is the stupidity of the statist, that the more pressing the need for order is, the less able people must be to find it outside of the state.

A more realistic solution

The state provides enforces its rules, whether you agree with them or not.

Most people assume that, in a democracy, everyone consents to be ruled in this way, but that is not the case. E.g. taxation: if it were voluntary, it would not be necessary – and it wouldn’t be taxation.

I would prefer to pay for my own health care and education, rather than receive it via the inefficient and prescriptive state, but I have no choice whichever way I vote.

I propose a system of law which people can sign up to voluntarily. Like you might to do with a condominium, health care plan. Think of a state which you can opt in or out of. With enforcement mechanisms, forcing you to comply with the rules you opted into.

I refer to this as ‘private law’.

The immediate question is, “Why would anyone voluntarily restrict themselves like this?”.

The reason is because of their need for safety, and for the regulation of contracts. By signing up to a set of rules like this, you are likely to put yourself amongst other people who have chosen to submit to similar rules of behaviour, at least as regards other signatories. You agree to standards of behaviour towards other people who agree to the same, and vice versa. The bulk of thieves and thugs immediately excluded from your immediate environment.

Even if no-one else signs up to such a set of rules, you still benefit because other people can trust you enough to enter into contracts with you. People can do business with you – you can prosper.

“But what about the powerful man – he doesn’t fear crime, and doesn’t need to submit to a system of law to protect himself. Others will treat him decently out of fear. Why would he submit to such rules?”

He will need to submit to a set of rules in order to be able to trade with people. He might have enough power to intimidate people out of committing crimes against him or his family. But he will still need to observe civil law in order to get other people to enter into contracts with him. This will be more important for such a person, because his power is likely to come from his wealth.

In a commercially active society, wealth and power can only be preserved by participating in commerce. If he refuses to submit himself to law, and retreats inside his castle walls, he will find that others, more enterprising and modest than he is, will overtake him. Other rich people, who do want to trade, will force him to heel because violence creates instability.

The key here is the need to engage in commerce, to enter into contracts which, because of their intricacy, require social stability.

This is how stock markets, those barometers of stability, keep the peace. The myth is that democracy keeps the peace, but this is not so, as any history of 1930s Europe will reveal. Democracy can break down into violence, or usher it in. However, it is rare for societies with healthy stock markets to do so, and if they do the stock markets do not survive.

“But what if you like one system, and I prefer another? Won’t this mean that we can’t trade with each other? Won’t this mean that we go to war? ”

Absolutely not.

My system may be different from yours, but provided the intentions are similar they can be compatible. The people who run my system, and the people who run your system, can agree that signatories observe their rules in respect of members of the other system. The people who run each system benefit most by getting more members, and the way to get more members is to get your system recognized by more people, even members of other systems.

It is likely that these systems will adopt levels of recognition: if your system is very similar to mine, I will observe all my rules in any dealings I have with you; if our systems are very different, there may be only a bare core of rules that we have to observe towards each other.

But the basic incentive is to maximise compatibility, so as to maximise the numbers of people that members can deal with.

“But won’t the tendency be for one system to become all-powerful, and to wipe out other systems by force? That way your system leads to monopoly rule, or dictatorship!”

This is the age-old objection to the free market, predicted by Marx and others. It has yet to materialise.

The evidence, from the American railroads, to IBM, to Microsoft, to today’s newspaper industry, is that corporations become too big at their own peril. Inefficiency and arrogance blind them to new competition and newer markets.

If a private system of law starts to treat its customers and subjects, it will find them leaving in droves. If it prefers to take its members into conflict with people they would prefer to trade with, then its members will become poorer.

In any event, it is unlikely to reach that stage, because even the threat of conflict has a serious effect on share values, and members of aggressive systems will find themselves in a permanent bear market, unable to attract investment.

At its most simple, people don’t want this. They don’t want to be part of something big and oppressive. It makes them uneasy. They will search for the competitor for this reason alone.

“Won’t such a voluntary system be vulnerable to the aggression of more dictatorial, warlike, systems?”

This has been the mistake of most enemies of freedom – from Hitler, to Kruschev, to Gorbachev, to Saddam – to presume that people who live in freedom are weak. Dictators are too stupid to learn the lesson, so they will always be a threat.

But the basic fact is that free people are stronger than the un-free.

First, free people are materially stronger. Free societies are richer because they allow people to do more or less what they want to do, and people will inevitably do what they want to do better than people doing what they don’t want to do.

And they will create more value with their efforts, because they create what people want, not what dictators tell them to. And value is a result of what people want, not what they are told to want. This is important, because material wealth translates into weapons, troops, intel, and alliances.

Second, people who fight for freedom fight harder, from the Greeks at Thermopylae to the RAF fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain. They fight because they want to, as well as because they are told to, and that matters on the battlefield. It also matters off the battlefield, when the various administrative and logistical decisions are made.

It is rare for a free people to lose a war against a subjugated people of a similar size.

This is only an outline of the system of private law which people can take up when democracy collapses. It repays further thinking.

Conclusion

The assumption that only the state can provide order is very widespread, almost universal. I think it stems from the Greeks, whom you have cited, and whom we disregard at our peril. However, their political debates took the existence of the state as a given.

In that respect, the time has come to surpass the Greeks. For this reason I think it is appropriate to talk in terms of a new phase of civilisation.

And this is where intellectuals such as you and Fjordman, who are still able to think, find themselves in a crucial role. We have no such intellectuals class in Europe any more. And this at a time when it is no longer a question of intellectual diversion, but are finding a way to avoid the war zone.

We have no option but to try, unless we are content to live under the rising brute. But saving civilisation is simple provided we can shed the limiting assumptions of our age.

And on this plea I ask you to think again!