Paul
The United States of America belongs to the people of the United
States, and unless you are an anarchist who doesn't recognize the fact
that we have borders, and laws, which separate us from different
<snip>
"Of a piece with this kind of thinking is a companion
phrase, "We are the government." Its use and acceptance
are most illustrative of the hold collectivism has taken
on the American mind in this century, to the exclusion
of the basic American tradition."
The Dogma of Our Times
by Frank Chodorov
[The following essay by Frank Chodorov first appeared
in The Freeman (June 1956) and then in a slightly
different form as the introduction to The Rise and
Fall of Society. This version comes from a 1980
collection of Chodorov's writings, titled, Fugitive
Essays.]
What history will think of our times is something
that only history will reveal. But, it is a good
guess that it will select collectivism as the
identifying characteristic of the twentieth
century. For even a quick survey of the developing
pattern of thought during the past fifty years
shows up the dominance of one central idea: that
society is a transcendent entity, something apart
and greater than the sum of its parts, possessing
a suprahuman character and endowed with like
capacities. It operates in a field of its own,
ethically and philosophically, and is guided by
stars unknown to mortals. Hence, the individual,
the unit of society, cannot judge it by his own
limitations or apply to it standards by which
he measures his own thinking and behavior. He
is necessary to it, of course, but only as a
replaceable part of a machine. It follows,
therefore, that society, which may concern itself
paternalistically with individuals, is in no
way dependent on them.
In one way or another, this idea has insinuated
itself into almost every branch of thought and, as
ideas have a way of doing, has become
institutionalized. Perhaps the most glaring example
is the modern orientation of the philosophy of
education. Many of the professionals in this field
frankly assert that the primary purpose of
education is not to develop the individual's
capacity for learning, as was held in the past,
but to prepare him for a fruitful and "happy" place
in society; his inclinations must be turned away
from himself, so that he can adjust himself to the
mores of his age group and beyond that to the
social milieu in which he will live out is life.
He is not an end in himself.
Jurisprudence has come around to the same
idea, holding more and more that human behavior
is not a matter of personal responsibility as
much as it is a reflection of the social forces
working on the individual; the tendency is to
shift onto society the blame for crimes committed
by its members. This, too, is a tenet of
sociology, the increasing popularity of which,
and its elevation to a science, attest to the
hold collectivism has on our times. The scientist
is no longer honored as a bold adventurer into
the unknown, in search of nature's principles,
but has become a servant of society, to which
he owes his training and his keep. Heroes and
heroic exploits are being demoted to accidental
outcroppings of mass thought and movement. The
superior person, the self-starting "captain of
industry," the inherent geniusthese are
fictions; all are but robots made by society.
Economics is the study of how society makes a
living, under its own techniques and prescriptions,
not how individuals, in pursuit of happiness,
go about the making of a living. And philosophy,
or what goes by that name, has made truth itself
an attribute of society.
Collectivism is more than an idea. In
itself, an idea is nothing but a toy of
speculation, a mental idol. Since, as the myth
holds, the suprapersonal society is replete
with possibilities, the profitable thing to
do is to put the myth to work, to energize
its virtue. The instrument at hand is the
state, throbbing with political energy and
quite willing to expend it on this glorious
adventure.
Statism is not a modern invention. Even
before Plato, political philosophy concerned
itself with the nature, origin, and
justification of the state. But, while the
thinkers speculated on it, the general public
accepted political authority as a fact to be
lived with and let it go at that. It is only
within recent times (except, perhaps, during
periods when church and state were one, thus
endowing political coercion with divine sanction)
that the mass of people has consciously or
implicitly accepted the Hegelian dictum that
"the state is the general substance, whereof
individuals are but the accidents." It is
this acceptance of the state as "substance,"
as a suprapersonal reality, and its investment
with a competence no individual can lay claim
to, that is the special characteristic of
the twentieth century.
In times past, the disposition was to look
upon the state as something one had to reckon
with, but as a complete outsider. One got along
with the state as best one could, feared or
admired it, hoped to be taken in by it and to
enjoy its perquisites, or held it at arm's
length as an untouchable thing; one hardly
thought of the state as the integral of society.
One had to support the state there was no way
of avoiding taxes and one tolerated its
interventions as interventions, not as the
warp and woof of life. And the state itself
was proud of its position apart from, and above,
society.
The present disposition is to liquidate
any distinction between state and society,
conceptually or institutionally. The state is
society; the social order is indeed an appendage
of the political establishment, depending on it
for sustenance, health, education, communications,
and all things coming under the head of "the
pursuit of happiness." In theory, taking college
textbooks on economics and political science for
authority, the integration is about as complete
as words can make it. In the operation of human
affairs, despite the fact that lip service is
rendered to the concept of inherent personal
rights, the tendency to call upon the state for
the solution of all the problems of life shows
how far we have abandoned the doctrine of
rights, with its correlative of self-reliance,
and have accepted the state as the reality of
society. It is this actual integration, rather
than the theory, that marks the twentieth century
off from its predecessors.
One indication of how far the integration
has gone is the disappearance of any discussion
of the state as state a discussion that engaged
the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. the inadequacies of a particular
regime, or its personnel, are under constant
attack, but there is no faultfinding with the
institution itself. The state is all right, by
common agreement, and it would work perfectly
if the "right" people were at the helm. It does
not occur to most critics of the New Deal that
all its deficiencies are inherent in any state,
under anybody's guidance, or that when the
political establishment garners enough power
a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power
apparatus is indeed the enemy of society, that
the interests of these institutions are in
opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is
brought up, it is dismissed as "old-fashioned,"
which it is; until the modern era, it was an
axiom that the state bears constant watching,
that pernicious proclivities are built into it.
A few illustrations of the temper of our
times come to mind.
The oft-used statement that "we owe it to
ourselves," in relation to the debts incurred
in the name of the state, is indicative of the
tendency to obliterate from our consciousness
the line of demarcation between governed and
governors. It not only is a stock phrase in
economic textbooks, but is tacitly accepted
in many financial circles as sound in principle.
To many modern bankers a government bond is at
least as sound as an obligation of a private
citizen, since the bond is in fact an obligation
of the citizen to pay taxes. Those bankers make
no distinction between a debt backed by
production or productive ability and a debt
secured by political power; in the final
analysis a government bond is a lien on
production, so what's the difference? By such
reasoning, the interests of the public, which
are always centered in the production of goods,
are equated with the predatory interests of the
state.
In many economics textbooks, government
borrowing from citizens, whether done openly
or by pressure brought upon the banks to lend
their depositors' savings, is explained as a
transaction equivalent to the transfer of money
from one pocket to another, of the same pants;
the citizen lends to himself what he lends to the
government. The rationale of this absurdity is
that the effect on the nation's economy is the
same whether the citizen spends his money or
the government does it for him. He has simply
given up his negligible right of choice.
The fact that he has not desire for what the
government spends his money on, that he would
not of his own free will contribute to the
buying of it, is blithely overlooked. The
"same pants" notion rests on the identification
of the amorphous "national economy" with the
well-being of the individual; he is thus merged
into the mass and loses his personality.
Of a piece with this kind of thinking is
a companion phrase, "We are the government."
Its use and acceptance are most illustrative
of the hold collectivism has taken on the
American mind in this century, to the exclusion
of the basic American tradition. When the Union
was founded, the overriding fear of Americans
was that the new government might become a
threat to their freedom, and the framers of
the Constitution were hard put to allay
this fear. Now it is held that freedom is a gift
from government in return for subservience. The
reversal has been accomplished by a neat trick
in semantics. The word "democracy" is the key
to this trick. When one looks for a definition
of this word, one finds that it is not a clearly
defined form of government but rather the rule
by "social attitudes." But, what is a "social
attitude"? Putting aside the wordy explanations
of this slippery concept, it turns out to be
in practice good old majoritarianism; what
fifty-one percent of the people deem right
is right, and the minority is perforce wrong.
It is the general-will fiction under a new
name. There is no place in this concept for
the doctrine of inherent rights; the only
right left to the minority, even the minority
of one, is conformity with the dominant "social
attitude."
If "we are the government," then it follows
that the man who finds himself in jail must
blame himself for his plight, and the man who
takes all the tax deduction the law allows is
really cheating himself. While this may seem
to be a farfetched reductio ad absurdum, the
fact is that many a conscript consoles himself
with that kind of logic. This country was
largely populated by escapees from
conscription called "czarism" a generation
or two ago, and held to be the lowest form
of involuntary servitude. Now it has come to
pass that a conscript army is in fact a
"democratic" army, composed of men who have
made adjustment with the "social attitude"
of the times. So does the run-of-the-mill
draftee console himself when compelled to
interrupt his dream of a career. Acceptance
of compulsory military service has reached the
point of unconscious resignation of personality.
The individual, as individual, simply does not
exist; he is of the mass.
This the fulfillment of statism. It is a
state of mind that does not recognize any ego
but that of the collective. For analogy one must
go to the pagan practice of human sacrifice: when
the gods called for it, when the medicine man so
insisted, as a condition for prospering the clan,
it was incumbent on the individual to throw
himself into the sacrificial fire. In point of
fact, statism is a form of paganism, for it is
worship of an idol, something made of man. Its
base is pure dogma. Like all dogmas this one
is subject to interpretations and
rationales, each with its coterie of devotees.
But, whether one calls himself a communist,
socialist, New Dealer, or just plain "democrat,"
each begins with the premise that the individual
is of consequence only as a servant of the
mass-idol. Its will be done.
There are stalwart souls, even in this
twentieth century. There are some who in the
privacy of their personality hold that collectivism
is a denial of a higher order of things. There are
nonconformists who reject the Hegelian notion that
"the state incarnates the divine idea on earth."
There are some who firmly maintain that only
man is made in the image of God. As this
remnant these individuals gains understanding
and improves its explanations, the myth that
happiness is to be found under collective
authority must fade away in the light of
liberty.
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