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The Downfall Continues
by Butler Shaffer
by Butler Shaffer
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Hardly a day passes without some people-pusher emerging to propose
yet another intrusion upon the liberties of people to control their own lives.
A California legislator has proposed legislation that would make spanking a
child under three years of age a crime, subject to a $1,000 fine or one year in
prison. This measure follows in the trail of such offerings as prohibitions
upon smoking, the criminalization of parents who allow their children to get
sun-burned, the banning of trans fats in food preparation, the regulation of
eating habits to prevent obesity, penalizing motorists who express anger while
driving, and, well, the pattern is doubtless already familiar to you. Not to be
left out of the collective mania, the mayor of a Texas town has now proposed
making it a misdemeanor to utter a racial slur.
Such statist programs have elicited the expected responses from
rational minds: they intrude upon matters which, whether one approves of the
targeted actions or not, are best left to the determination of individuals or
families. That these efforts violate the free speech, liberties, and/or
property rights of people - interests that government officials took an oath to
defend but now scurry to violate in the most detailed manners - is beyond
question. But there is a deeper meaning to these intrusions that is overlooked,
the implications of which portend the continuing collapse of
vertically-structured institutional systems.
It is part of the nature of conscious beings to focus attention on
events that are immediately before us, and to overlook the more distant
consequences of our actions. Frédéric Bastiat addressed such tendencies in his
essay on "what is seen and what is not seen." In a lesson long since lost on
modern minds, Bastiat informed his readers of how the immediate benefits of a
government program masked adverse consequences that get lost in the allure of
the moment. Thus, do we now understand how minimum wage laws increase
unemployment, the prohibition of alcohol and drug usage generate more
consumption of the banned substances, and the coercive nature of American
foreign policies have produced the reactions of "terrorist" groups that the
institutional order tries to explain away as nothing more than hatred of our
virtues and lifestyles.
It is becoming increasingly evident from the study of complexity
that what our dualistic minds have learned to separate into mutually exclusive
categories conceals an "interrelatedness" essential to the well-being of each.
Thus does the police system depend upon criminals, just as lawyers require
disputes, the morally self-righteous need sinners, and orthodontists need
overbites. Such interconnected relationships, I believe, help to explain the
current frenzy to have the state micromanage every conceivable expression of
human behavior.
The institutionally-structured world we have been conditioned to
regard as essential to both our individual and social well-being, has been in a
state of collapse for a number of decades. The unexpected end of the Soviet
Union has been, perhaps, the most dramatic example of this centrifugation of
authority. But the decentralization of social systems has also found expression
in such areas as the education of children, alternative health care practices,
and the development of technologies that place more decision making in the
hands of individuals. The Internet now threatens the influence - if not the
very existence - of the long-established "mainstream media." Broadcast and
print journalism - premised upon the top-down model in which an authoritative
few communicate to the rest of mankind what it is in their interests to have
others believe - now face a horizontal system in which hundreds of millions of
people exchange information over tens of thousands of independent websites,
such as the one you are now reading.
All of this foreshadows what appears to be the breakdown of
traditional social systems that operate on the pyramidal model of the vertical
and bureaucratic direction of mankind. The presumed capacity of those at the
top of the pyramid to gather information imagined to be otherwise unavailable
to ordinary people and to promulgate policies and practices that would lead to
predictable and favorable results, has been the central article of faith in
society. The premise is virtually synonymous with all forms of political
behavior, but also finds itself generally expressed throughout the business
community, organized religions, and school systems. Its underlying assumption
has never been more clearly expressed than it was by former Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara, who employed it to help engineer the slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of human beings during the Vietnam War: "Vital decision-making,
particularly in policy matters, must remain at the top. This is partly, though
not completely, what the top is for."
As institutional authority continues to collapse into decentralized
networks of autonomous individuals, those whose conditioned mindset is unable
to imagine a world functioning without formal direction and control experience
a chilling fear. To such people, social systems that run themselves without
superintendence is not only disturbing to their ambitions for power, but a form
of fanciful thinking. At what is no doubt an unconscious level, such persons
seek to revivify the dying model by its endless reiteration throughout the
realm of human activity. Such people bear a sad but frightening resemblance to
brain-injured people described by Abraham Maslow as wanting "to manage to
maintain their equilibrium by avoiding everything unfamiliar and strange and by
ordering their restricted world in such a neat, disciplined, orderly fashion
that everything in the world can be counted upon."
There is a compulsiveness to such behavior; a faith that the rote
repetition of a familiar pattern will reconfirm its vibrancy. I have often used
the metaphor of a chicken that has just had its head chopped off: it
reflexively flails about in a wild, noisy, and bloody display, but its fate is
sealed. Such, I believe, helps to explain the reactive mindset of modern
people-pushers who see their world of vertical power-structures being enervated
by life forces over which they are losing control.
Those who wish to criminalize the spanking of children, or the
uttering of racial slurs, or eating the wrong foods, are being driven by the
same energy that now leads the United States into an obsession with conducting
wars. It matters not who the momentary enemies happen to be: Afghans, Iraqis,
Somalians, or Iranians. As we have seen, war is a way of revitalizing the
authority of the state. The crumbling foundations of vertical power systems can
be shored up - temporarily - by making people fearful, for fear restores the
herd impulse. I wonder whether previous civilizations whose collapses were
preceded by expansions of the war system, were playing out the same dynamics
one sees in modern America.
But as we have learned so painfully since 9/11, war itself has
become decentralized. American soldiers - whose behaviors and modes of
organization represent the centralized order as much as did the British
"redcoats" during the Revolutionary War - continue to die at increasing rates
at the hands of decentralized Iraqi "insurgency" forces. The interests of the
American political establishment - both Republican and Democrat - are grounded
in the perpetuation of the dying model, which leads its political voices to
continue advocating centrally-directed solutions grounded in the presumptions
of power. The statists need the problems they seek to overcome in order to
rationalize their appetites for authority over others. If such "problems" were
to disappear, new ones - such as fattening foods or parents who spank - will
have to be fabricated. This is why Republicans and Democrats continue to read
from the same script: to propose a fundamental change in direction would be to
abandon the state's vertically-structured model altogether.
President Bush has proposed sending an additional 20,000 troops to
Iraq, a move grounded in the political assumption that resistance to state
violence can be overcome by increasing the level of violence! Such an effort
can only reinforce the destructive consequences - to both Iraqis and Americans
- of a desperate policy driven by a desire to reverse the inevitable
decentralization of human society and the dismantling of power structures. As
with all political action, such thinking suffers from the failure to ask the
right questions and, when the answers continue to be self-defeating, to respond
with the same thinking.
Both President Bush as well as those who want to send parents to
prison for swatting their children's behinds, are each seeking to reconfirm the
validity of an antiquated system that no longer satisfies people's
expectations. Such statists are trying to ride the same dying horse, whose
failure to respond, they believe, can only be overcome by a stronger whip.
January 25, 2007
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern
University School of Law. He is the author of Calculated Chaos: Institutional
Threats to Peace and Human Survival.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
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