Happy Monday FRians! Hope y’all had a great weekend and hope all you dads had a wonderful Father’s Day!
As always, Monday’s post was written by Stephen Hall. Thank you, as always!!!!
Earlier last week, I had occasion to mention a rather minor observation concerning an intrinsic part of the concept of property ownership which I thought not only obvious and trite, but rather innocuous. I had several responses which were simplistic renditions of “you are stupid” in one form or another, but a couple people wanted to engage at length, one a rather insulting troll, but the other asked interesting questions and appeared sincere in wanting answers.
Such is Twitter.
The particular assertion that I made was that “ownership” of property could only exist if there were a government recognition of “ownership” of property. By definition the idea that you “own” something is a social construct of the recognition and collective defense of that ownership, without which there is no such concept as “crime” in this specific case, “larceny”, or “theft”.
From this the troll deduced that I was advocating for a dictatorian, totalitarian state which with unlimited powers of taxation, akin to a socialist Bernie supporter. The reasonable fellow discussed the concepts of ownership, crime, and the state.
However, both of them combined to enlighten me as to a rather odd observation regarding a modern philosophical movement within a certain segment of society, not merely in America but lurking in the shadows of virtually all western societies.
It was the realization than many, but I don’t believe most, of the people who call themselves anarchists, libertarians, or anarcho-(fill-in-the-blank)-ists actually derive much of their philosophy from the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.
In Leviathan, Hobbes analogized the totality of each society as a living animal with the different functions of the professions and occupations of the citizens as akin to the organs and systems of the animal, that every person was a small part of this greater whole.
The health of society depended on people and institutions filling their assigned roles and duties efficiently and competently, while that society by functioning well and healthily protected the citizen by the communal effort providing him security, place, and purpose.
While few have actually read Hobbes, many are passingly familiar with his works as academia became enamored with that analogy and have discussed it in many textbooks and in many college classes.
Actually reading the book, there is a philosophy underlying that analogy of a more profound, though less unique and startling, nature as to the relationship between man and the powers of the state, the citizen and the foreigner.
He describes at some length what he sees as that natural state of man without the state wherein every man is out for himself without restraint, without law, and without God’s morality. He viewed the nation, or the state, as a creation of God to impose upon man the moral law, thus the biblical reference to the Leviathan.
He saw man, left to his own devices as a beastly creature who would murder his neighbor, steal, rape, pillage, assault, batter, lie, cheat, and any other sin one might imagine to the extent that he was physically able to do so and logistically capable of achieving.
He call this condition of unrestrained anarchy the natural state of warre to which man was inclined.
(Yes, that is spelled correctly in his early 17th Century middle-English, and I think it quite appropriate in this discourse to employ his original spelling because is signifies something different that what we think of as “war” having also the characteristics of an every man for himself anarchy in all aspects of life, not an organized contest between nations.
Further, if you don’t like his antiquated dialect, you ought to vacate the confines of mine curtilage, forthwith!)
It was in this context of the choice between the natural state of warre of man without the state or the presence of a state with all of the divine authority appurtenant thereto. In essence, he argued that the authority of the state, of government, was naturally unlimited because to place an individual above the state was to invite dissension and division which undermining the authority of the state would leave man unprotected to that natural state.
In the rather simplistic rationalizations of Mr. Hobbes, there were only two possible outcomes, either a state with absolute authority or the chaos of that natural state of warre which would be anarchy. Anything in between was just a passing stage to one or the other extreme, and he would have argued that any limited government was doomed to eventually fail or rightfully assert its full authority.
Fearing that warre wherein every man is prey to the vices and indulgences of his neighbor, those who adhered to Hobbes’s views held that there was no natural limit to the power and authority of the state, thus advocated authoritarianism, or dictatorship if you will.
Those anarcho-libertarians mentioned earlier are surprisingly Hobbesean in their outlook and philosophy in that they also view every society as having to eventually end up as either completely free and devoid of government or completely authoritarian, unlimited in the power of the government.
However, in their perspective that natural state of warre becomes seen as a natural state of peace where people do not prey upon one another but will naturally cooperate and work things out amongst themselves without any interference from the state.
The apparatus of the state, the government, is viewed by them as not the preserver of the peace but the instigator of all of the ills and misfortunes of society. They hold that without the nation states there would be no war between people and nations, and that people would naturally come together to defend their society and to stop criminals.
“All taxation is theft by some to live off of the labor of others, and the government serves no purpose other than to take from people and enslave them.” This is their view of the state, not that in a certain respect it is entirely wrong, any government does tax the labor of the productive to pay for the operations of government, but like the Hobbeseans the elite of the state either control everything or nothing at all.
(Oddly enough, the anarcho-(fill-in-the-blank)-ists, seem to imagine that there is no relationship between the type of government a society adopts and the economic system under which they chose to operate, thus you have anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists even though neither communism nor capitalism could conceivably function in an anarchy.)
It is only natural when you have some people within a society advocating for a completely authoritarian government that you would have an unthinking reactionary movement directly opposite them. Such anarchists become useful idiots in creating the instability necessary to usher in the totalitarian government they think they are fighting against.
Such simplistic philosophies are dangerous, not because they have influence but because they are mindless political weapons to be aimed at the sane forces within a society. It is our decaying educational system with empowers such foolishness by elevating emotion over thought, demands over reason.
It is certainly an interesting time to be alive, though not necessarily in a good way. Let us ward against that natural state of Warre, of which Mr. Hobbes so poignantly warned us.
