Classical Sparta had the reputation of being an extremely conservative society, its constitution unaltered through the centuries, and its people cautious and slow-to-bestir themselves. Thucydides draws a contrast between the Spartans and the Athenians in a speech by King Archidamus of Sparta before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 331 B.C.: Archidamus describes the Spartans almost like reclusive shut-ins clinging to their traditions and ascribes to the Athenians an unheard-of daring and lust for new things. In fact, the Spartans were extremely innovative and adaptive, remaining on the cutting-edge of political and military technology throughout the Archaic and Classical periods.

Popular belief attributed the origins of the Spartan constitution to Crete, another region famed for the antiquity of its institutions. Plato, an admirer of Sparta, sets his dialogue on the proper political arrangements for a city, Laws, on Crete and portrays a conversation between a Cretan, a Spartan, and the Athenian Stranger. According to legend, the semi-mythical Lycurgus studied the Cretans’ ways and brought them back to Sparta. This Lycurgus is the one described in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, and historian date his life—if he existed at all—to the 10^th or 9^th century B.C.

The Spartans themselves, however, claimed that Lycurgus’ reforms were much newer, and modern scholarship agrees, placing them in the late 7^th and early 6^th centuries. Before these reforms, the Spartans had “the worst-governed city in Greece” by their own description. Like other major Greek cities in the 7^th century, Sparta emerged out of a process of synoikismos, the merging of multiple small villages into a larger conglomerate. Integrating the governments of these villages proved difficult, however. In particular, two local royal houses, the Agiads and the Eurypontids, refused to yield to each other’s authority and conflict ensued. This was in addition to the conflict between commoners and Eupatridae which every city experienced.

The Lycurgean constitution put an end to the civil strife partly by granting the two houses equal standing but eliminating most of their powers. The kings sat on the Council of Old Men or Gerousia alongside twenty eight others and held absolute command over the army when it marched out to war but otherwise had virtually no power—at first they retained the right to declare war and conclude peace, but this was eventually revoked. Every month the kings had to swear an oath to abide by the constitution alongside the ephors, who swore to not abolish the kingship so long as the kings abided by their oaths. Even so, every eight years the ephors observed the heavens for portents signaling that the kingship should be eliminated.

Contrary to their portrayal in the 300 film, the five ephors were absolutely not monstrous creatures but ordinary men. Originally stargazing priests, the Lycurgean constitution made them annually elected magistrates and transferred to them the bulk of executive responsibilities. The senior ephor gave his name to the year for the sake of record-keeping. The Gerousia functioned as the chief deliberative body, but at the same time, the whole citizenry, some nine or ten thousand men at the city’s height, was given the final say on important issues. Still, the Apella or Assembly could only vote yay or nay on the Gerousia’s proposals and outcomes were determined by the volume of each side’s shouting.

According to legend, the Spartan constitution was never written down but was preserved orally. Archaeology has proven this to be false, uncovering inscriptions detailing the Spartan’s laws dating back to the 7^th century.

The Spartan constitution differed from those of other cities in a few key respects. The first was the relatively prominent role of the kings: despite being largely emasculated, the Spartan kings did hold real power in certain spheres, very much unlike the kings in other cities who were merely magistrates responsible for state sacrifices. The formally limited powers of the kings meant that Sparta could benefit from the brilliance of a king like Cleomenes I, while a less-than-stellar king like Agis II could still be useful.

Also notable was the relatively small number of elected positions. Between the Gerousia and the ephorate, Sparta had thirty three elected officials, only five of whom were annually elected. This kept electoral politics to a minimum. Indeed, most political conflicts described in the ancient sources concern the kings trying to gain additional power or influence. There were plenty of other positions, but they were assigned by merit, positions like officer roles in the army, the kings’ bodyguard, and the Agathoergoi, “Do-gooders,” free-floating troubleshooters.

The final distinctive feature was the relative size of the citizen body in Laconia. As with all Greek cities, not all inhabitants of Sparta were full citizens. The perioikoi, “those who dwell around,” constituted the bulk of the Laconian population and even possessed small villages all their own. How many perioikoi there were is difficult to determine, but estimates for around 500 B.C. suggest there were 50,000, including women and children, while the citizenry, also counting women and children, was roughly 25,000. The Spartan state was thus the most inclusive in all of Greece, aside from the Athenian democracy which it preceded by more than a hundred years. By the end of the 5^th century, Sparta’s status in this regard had declined, but at its inception it was revolutionary.

The combination of a large ruling class but severely limited electoral politics was remarkably stable. On the one hand, with few opportunities for electioneering, the best way for an ambitious man to advance his position was to be a good soldier and earn the respect of his comrades-in-arms. On the other, a broad franchise satisfied the commoners clamoring for reform and provided a large army with which to defend the state and subjugate nearby Messenia.

Control of Messenia was the most important aspect of the Spartan political system, as well as the key to its dominance in Greek affairs generally. The territory of that region was apportioned equally among the Spartan citizens: upon attaining the age of 20, a young Spartan man was assigned a portion of Messenian land along with helot serfs (technically owned by the Spartan state) to work it. Out of the produce of this land, the Spartan was expected to pay dues for his membership to one of the common messes and his children’s education in the agoge, the uniquely Spartan system of public education, as well as to purchase hoplite arms and armor. The apportioning of Messenian lands made the Lycurgian reforms go more smoothly—in other cities, nobles strenuously resisted losing their lands, but in Sparta they were at least partially compensated.

Though a conquered people, the Messenian helots were remarkably well-treated compared to slaves bound to other masters. The helots were enserfed, forbidden to leave their land without permission and turning over half their produce to the Spartans, but otherwise allowed to handle their own affairs themselves. Though the Krypteia, bands of Spartan boys armed with daggers, was a threat, so long as helot paid his taxes and went to bed at a decent hour, he had little to worry about. The Spartans forbad the helots to own weapons and armor, but despite repeated rebellions they still took helots to war with them and rewarded those who performed well. At Thermopylae, the helots died fighting side-by-side with their Spartan masters.

Hierarchy and differentiation defined the Spartan system. The Spartans called themselves homoioi, “peers,” and prided themselves on the large degree of equality in their ranks, but they still had officers, priests, magistrates, elders, and kings. Spartan women had a large degree of autonomy, conducting most business and instilling in their sons the masculine virtue the Spartans were famous for, but they had no role in politics. Men and women had separate, non-overlapping spheres.

Nor was Spartan hierarchy the kind feared by Leftists: one overbearing power crushing all others under its heel. The kings sat at the top but precariously; the ephors held great power but only for a year at a time; elders made most political decisions but needed approval from the citizenry. The Spartans in general stood above the perioikoi and helots, but they treated their inferiors generously. In Sparta, hierarchy was more extensive than in any other Greek city.

Next week, we’ll take a look at Sparta’s military and foreign affairs, where Sparta’s capacity for innovation allowed it to hold supremacy in Greece for almost two centuries.

The post Sparta’s Attempt At Balancing Innovation And Tradition appeared first on Social Matter.

The major problem with the empirical case against democracy is the lack of data. The first democracies arose in Greece, but we have good historical records for Athens alone, with partial information about Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and a few other city-states. After the Classical period, states calling themselves democracies have been few and far between. The first such state was Republican France, but the rise of democracy worldwide has taken place primarily in the 20^th century and gone hand-in-hand with the rise to world supremacy of the United States of America.

Another issue is definitions: even the most radical democrat in antiquity would never have dreamed of putting the political franchise on a territorial basis, of handing out citizenship to anyone simply born within his city. Athens didn’t even have universal manhood suffrage, let alone extend voting rights to women. If we want to condemn democracy as it is understood today, then we have virtually no data whatsoever. Pretty much all we have are governments which we claim are in the process of destroying themselves and their societies, but which, for better or for worse, haven’t gotten around to it yet.

We do have one good example of the dysfunction of democracy in France. The horrors of the French Revolution are well known, and in the end, the First Republic couldn’t even preserve itself for fifteen years before it fell. Still, a single datum does not a convincing argument make.

At the same time, the Athenians back in the days of yore did call their government a democracy, and many advocates of democracy today hark back to the Athenian example, so it does seem reasonable to count Athens as a democracy. Indeed, it was the example of Athens, and especially the opinions of historical commentators, which gave to democracy the unpleasant reputation which it held until very recently.

Thucydides and Xenophon chronicle Athens’ fall in the late 5^th century and paint a grim picture. Thucydides’ account of the civil wars throughout Greece which resulted from the titanic clash between Athens and Sparta makes for gripping reading, and it is hard to come away from these sections without being deeply moved. Other stories, such as Cleon’s high-handedness with his political enemies and the judicial murder of Socrates, also darken democracy’s image.

But there are problems.

For one, the civil wars throughout Greece were in no way the fault of democracy or even democratic ideology. Oligarchic parties were just as complicit in the wars as democratic ones, and they could be just as ruthless in victory, as the behavior of the Thirty Tyrants shows. Also, Athens was not subject to such civil discord, at least not until the oligarchs gained Spartan support. Indeed, Athens, Sparta, Argos, Corinth, and Thebes, all the top-tier Greek cities appear to have been domestically quite placid since no outside force was in a position to change their government. Whether a city was governed by an oligarchy or by a democracy made little difference as long as it stuck to its choice of regime.

Additionally, the constitutional distance between an oligarchy and a democracy was quite small in the ancient world. Every Greek city had magistrates, an aristocratic Council, and a popular Assembly. A democracy had a proportionally larger citizen body and vested more power in the Assembly, while an oligarchy placed the balance of power with the Council. Both democratic and oligarchic parties justified their power through appeal to the general populace: democrats offered the common man participation in government, while the oligarchs claimed to be better at governing. If these two constitutional arrangements produced radically different domestic policies, the surviving historical record does not show it.

Foreign affairs appears to be the realm where democracy performed badly. The Athenian democracy was very aggressive, provoking Persia, subjugating its Delian allies, antagonizing Sparta and other cities, and striving to regain its empire even after its crushing defeat in 404 B.C. Thebes also adopted a democratic constitution in 378 B.C., and this moment signaled Thebes’ aggressive rise to supremacy in the Greek world. In the 3^rd century, the Achaean League emerged as a power in the Peloponnesus as a democratic confederation.

One should not be surprised at this point to learn that there are problems with this assessment.

The first is that democracy is far from unique in presiding over foreign aggression. All societies go through periods of waxing and waning, and when waxing, tend to be aggressive toward their neighbors. Argos subjugated the Peloponnesus under a tyranny; Sparta did so under an oligarchy; the Achaeans repeated the feat under democracy. Countless non-democracies have been just as aggressive: Persia, Macedon, Babylon, Assyria, Carthage, and Rome.

The second is that a society, even a democratic one, tends to expand when under the leadership of a small number of extraordinary men. Athens had Themistocles, Aristides, and Cimon; Thebes had Pelopidas, Epaminondas, and their companions; the Achaean League had Aratus and his fellow tyrants. Once again, this feature is not unique to democracies, but it even more strongly suggests that democratic government is not what causes foreign aggression.

When the men who have led a society to greatness perish, there arises the challenge of maintaining their gains, and it is here that democracy fares poorly. New territories and new peoples have to be incorporated into the political order and governed effectively, and the new geopolitical reality has to be comprehended as well.

A monarchy or aristocracy moves smoothly into an imperial position because it is already accustomed to ruling over one society. Forging personal connections with conquered peoples and finding experienced administrators is relatively easy for people accustomed to doing so just to govern their own society. Additionally, elites tend to have a better idea of what their society is actually capable of, since they administer, if not constitute, much of its wealth and institutions. Cimon knows that trying to conquer Boeotia is a bad idea; a random Athenian on the street probably does not.

Though Athens is considered the archetypal democracy—which makes sense, considering it was the first one—the Achaean League deserves some special attention. The Achaean League began as a coalition of democratically governed cities in Achaea, naturally, but expanded by admitting new cities on equal terms to the founding cities. They also did not oppose tyrants who ruled cities they wanted to conquer, but instead offered them jobs in the League government. This gave the Achaeans a pool of talented administrators and generals and helped maintain a balance of power among the League cities. The scheme was remarkably successful—the Achaean League only fell because it ran afoul of Rome.

The best historical argument against democracy is simply that democracies have not emerged organically very often. Some kind of popular government seems well-suited to cities and very small societies, but for large, spread-out societies it just hasn’t worked out until the modern day. And these historical, small-scale, and limited democracies have not been noticeably worse at governing than monarchies or aristocracies. The main failing of democracy comes in imperial government, something that a lot of societies don’t have to worry about.

Modern democracy, however, is a very different animal. Ancient democracies belonged to ethnically homogenous societies rather than geographical areas, women did not participate in politics, and the corrosive ideology of Leftism did not hold sway. It is these features that have transformed a perfectly good form of government into something hostile to civilization itself.

The post Ancient Democracies Weren’t As Terrible As Modern Democracies appeared first on Social Matter.

To one skeptical of religion, this looks suspiciously like either superstition or propaganda. The hand of God did not actually give victory to the Israelites, but saying that it did certainly bolsters the case for believing in Him. Indeed, a god who does not promise victory (provided he has anything to do with war at all) is rather hard to find.

This is not by accident. Whether the gods exist or not, increased religious devotion could actually help in battle, making the difference between victory and defeat.

Picture an standard ancient battlefield: two armies facing each other on an open plain. At the sound of trumpets the troops advance, first at a brisk walk, then at a jog. When the two sides get close enough, they stop and form battle lines. The rank and file exchange poorly-aimed blows or missiles, while well-armed officers duel. Very few people die, and when a man does fall, the troops standing behind him step forward to fill the space he left. On the flanks, squadrons of mounted nobles throw javelins or shoot arrows or perhaps charge at each other and fight with swords and spears—at least until they get tired of it and take a break. The battle isn’t exactly a picnic, but for the most part the only people seriously risking their lives are the highly-trained and well-equipped aristocrats who declared the war in the first place.

There is no grand, Hollywood-style mêlée for fairly straightforward reasons. For one, in a mêlée you can’t tell friend from foe, whom you’re supposed to defend and whom you’re supposed to kill. It’s also much easier to defend yourself and your friends if you’re all in a close formation. People don’t want to die, and they don’t generally want to kill either, so they leave the deadly fighting to the professionals. Fatigue is also a major factor: even the officers and nobles can’t fight hand-to-hand in heavy armor for more than a few minutes at a time.

This happy equilibrium usually collapses quite suddenly. If one side’s cavalry drives their counterparts from the field and turns on the enemy infantry, the foot soldiers, threatened from the front and the rear, will run away. Alternatively, if an officer falls in a particularly spectacular fashion, the troops around him may give up hope and flee. Or the soldiers in the rear could simply decide to turn tail and run; lacking support, the men in the front ranks follow. At this point, the victorious army commences pursuit and kills a great many of the enemy soldiers, who are now more interested in getting away than in actively defending themselves.

Morale was the primary deciding factor in an ancient battle. Superior equipment or fighting skills certainly helped, as did effective use of terrain and combined arms, surprise and stratagem, and just pure dumb luck (the favor of the gods, indeed), but all of these were in practice simply more effective means of driving the enemy off the field, of convincing him that to continue resisting was pointless. As long as an army retained its formation, the casualties it suffered were dramatically lower than if it broke and ran. Bloody battles of attrition like Cannae were the rare exception, not the general rule.

Ancient armies had a variety of techniques for bolstering morale. One was to place older, more experienced troops in the rear, where they could keep the greener fighters from slinking off. Having aristocrats or even well-trained commoners serving as officers was another method: with their distinctive equipment they could serve as rallying points and would inspire confidence by their mere presence. On the flip side, an officer’s death could cause morale to plummet. With aristocratic officers, bonds of patronage also held soldiers in place: the noblemen supported them in peacetime, so they returned the favor in war.

Beloved generals could use their troops regard for them to great effect as well. At the battle of Orchomenos in 85 B.C., Sulla ran to where his soldiers were fleeing, climbed upon a rock, and shouted, “When they ask you where it was that you left you commander in the lurch, you may tell them it was at Orchomenos.” Sulla’s soldiers were ashamed to disappoint their general, so they resumed fighting and won the battle. Some commanders, such as Alexander the Great, actually did engage in combat, but the general’s presence was far more important than his prowess.

The core of morale, however, was assabiyah. A soldier fought for the men standing beside him, men who come from the same country, who speak the same language, who pray to the same gods. These were the same ties that bound a community together; indeed, an ancient army was a microcosm of the soldiers’ society.

So when a people met defeat in battle, a likely explanation was that their group feeling was weak; if assabiyah had been strong, they wouldn’t have run away and been beaten. At the very least, strengthening assabiyah couldn’t hurt anything. Thus, charges of impiety and renewal of religious devotion.

There were dangers, however. Specifically ginning up fervor could easily go too far: the Romans, for instance, loathed the Carthaginians for engaging in the barbarity of human sacrifices (gladiatorial shows didn’t count), but after repeated defeats by Hannibal, the Romans revived that ancient practice for that one special occasion.

Modern weaponry has substantially diminished the importance of morale in war. In times gone by, valor could at least be said to carry the day; now, fighting spirit is one of numerous factors a commander must consider. This does not mean that morale is unimportant, but merely that it does not even come close to deciding battles all by itself.

The old ways don’t die easily, however.

Democratic politics provides a venue for recurring conflict and runs a very grave risk for it. Though a democracy exists to ensure the supremacy of one faction over its rivals, those rivals are still allowed to participate in politics, in effect tricking them into accepting a subordinate role by holding out the vain hope that they might one day win power for themselves. This means that the submissive faction is supposed to keep losing over and over while still believing in the system that disempowers them. Eventually they’ll wise up.

Repeatedly trying to win elections and influence policy and failing results in the same response as marching out to battle and losing: mutual recriminations and holiness spirals. Newer, more ideologically extreme candidates emerge and win prominence. However, because winning elections often requires broad appeal, these extreme candidates aren’t much more successful at the ballot box, and when they do attain office, since governing effectively requires compromise, they don’t accomplish very much. And so the cycle continues.

Ideally, when a people or political faction keeps losing, it changes its approach to the conflict, as well, since mere team spirit is often insufficient. The Romans’ adoption of the Fabian strategy was probably more effective at defeating Hannibal than burying a poor, innocent Gaul alive. In a democracy, this means that the repeated losers will decide to stage a coup, a move which can win short-term success but doesn’t work as well in the long run.

The case of the oligarchs of Athens is instructive. The Alcmaeonidae established the democracy to assure their own supremacy in Athenian politics, and their rivals kept trying to seize power. Building alternative institutions failed when the democrats struck back and defanged them, and playing politics according to the democrats’ rules went nowhere. In 411 B.C., extreme oligarchs attempted to stage a coup but were quashed by the democrats and moderate oligarchs; the regime of the Thirty Tyrants was predicated on Spartan support which failed to materialize. After the civil war, the democrats had had enough of the oligarchic party and drove its up-and-coming leaders out of politics. These young ideologues were forced to express their views through only literature and philosophy.

Today, we have conservatives as the perpetual losers. Name a major conservative victory from the past fifty years, if you can, outside the venue of gun rights. The Republican Party establishment shrewdly encouraged and rode the wave of opposition to Obama but would much prefer that right-wing extremists just vote Republican and nothing else. Donald Trump is a threat to them simply because he rallies the crazies. When the Republicans lose their bid for the presidency again next year, there will be even more disenchantment with political affairs among those of us over on the Right. Anger and resentment won’t be the only emotion results; zeal will be another.

The trick will be in channeling this righteous fury in constructive directions and not into electoral politics.

The post Losing Battles And Losing Elections appeared first on Social Matter.

First, let me address the misunderstanding. In my piece, I presented three potential Ancapistans: the United States of Ancapistan, the Free Town of Ancapistan, and a world containing the Free Towns of Ancapistan, Nozickville, and Rothbardia. Alrenous erroneously assumes that these are supposed to be realistic depictions of what would happen were the state abolished, and the bulk of his criticism concerns the implausibility of these scenarios. We cannot assume, he claims, that Ancapistan would look anything like what I have imagined. Indeed, the very reason for establishing Ancapistan is that neither we nor those who presently hold power are as wise as the market process, which will ultimately decide the form Ancapistan takes.

This is all well and good but also beside the point. My purpose in imagining these three Ancapistans was not to consider them as remotely likely outcomes; rather, it was to employ the method of imaginary constructions. The archetypal use of this method is Mises’s Evenly Rotating Economy in which everyone has perfect knowledge of the future but still goes through the motions of economic activity. The ERE is utterly fantastic, but it is still useful for elucidating the difference between profit and interest.

The three Ancapistans serve the same function: to help tease out details and nuances of anarcho-capitalism that aren’t immediately obvious. They are carefully constructed artifacts manufactured for the sole purpose of occasioning specific questions. The only requirement for these scenarios is that they arise through processes sanctioned by anarcho-capitalist norms.

The three Ancapistans do meet this requirement for Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism. Rothbardianism starts with a basically Lockean property system but updated to fix various problems in Locke’s scheme. The Lockean proviso is gone, and original appropriation consists of altering un-owned resources in an objective and intersubjectively ascertainable fashion, whatever that means for the resource in question. Contracts regarding the exchange and use of property allow for a wide variety of relationships: buying and selling of goods, loans of funds, rents for land, insurance policies, and even corporations and community covenants allowing for collective decision-making. There are also a variety of rules governing what sorts of contracts can be made and enforced, requiring many volumes to fully enumerate and describe, but which roughly correspond to those points of agreement between the common and civil laws.

Rothbardianism has three great advantages. The first is that it is extremely flexible: pretty much whatever way a group of people want to peacefully live together can be arranged according, though some clever lawyering may be required. The second advantage is that it is realistic: it actually matches how people have settled and continue to settle disputes in the real world, not perfectly of course, but still quite closely.

The third advantage is an intellectual one: Rothbardianism makes a clear distinction between what is lawful (its concern) and what is prudent, equitable, aesthetically pleasing, or what-have-you. This makes it possible to compare reality with an ideal, and allows people to act contrary to other norms. It may be a good idea to lock your door when you go out, but if you don’t, Rothbardianism will not excuse the man who stole your television set.

Alrenous’s anarcho-capitalism is a rather different animal. He does not follow the Lockean theory of property. Instead, he identifies a person’s property with those resources the person is capable of defending. If you can defend something from someone trying to take it, then it’s yours; if you can’t defend it, then it wasn’t yours to begin with.

This may sound like a bad caricature of anarchism or a rephrasing of “Might is Right,” but there is more to it than that. Where Rothbardianism looks first to establish property rights and leaves for another time the question of how to defend them, Alrenous makes defense primary and looks for legitimacy later. There is good reason for this inversion: you can claim as yours all the resources you like, but if you cannot defend your claim against rivals, well, then your claim doesn’t amount to very much.

Alrenous’s approach has the advantage of giving people with poor impulse control and high time preference a very good reason to respect private property: if they do not, they suffer immediate and severe retribution. Defense also doesn’t have to be individual; you and your friends can band together or you can hire someone else (probably multiple someones) to do the job for you. These organizations of people also enforce contracts, demand arbitration, and maintain the anarcho-capitalist order by punishing those who seek to disturb it.

Sounds good so far, but let’s look a bit deeper. How do you make sure that your defense organization doesn’t loot your property? After all, you’re expecting them to defend you from enemies that you couldn’t handle yourself—they’d better be dramatically more powerful than you are alone. There are three ways.

One, you can defend yourself really well and specifically develop defenses against your defense organization. For instance, though your town might build high walls to protect against invaders, you can still fortify your own house. Alternatively, there is the possibility of switching defense providers. If your current provider menaces you, you simply hire someone new who will be eager to prove his worth.

The danger with both of these options is that they can be turned against you. Suppose you contract to do some work for your neighbor Jim but he stiffs you on the bill. You appeal to your shared defense organization to enforce the contract. If Jim can defend himself or can switch providers, you might well find yourself in a pickle. This isn’t likely to happen often, but more than one city has devolved into feuding factions because one man injured another and comparable forces supported the cause of each.

The third way to defend yourself is to only hire people whom you trust. These may be co-religionists, relatives and co-ethnics, long-term trading partners, or just good friends of yours, ideally some combination of all four. These factors help you together form a high-trust society in which the likelihood of your defense provider trying to loot your or your neighbors trying to cheat you is dramatically smaller.

Now what about arbitration? If the criterion for ownership of a resource is the ability to defend it, why would anyone submit to arbitration? If you can take and hold a resource, you do that; if you can’t, then you don’t get it. Everything seems fairly straightforward.

Arbitration comes about because war is expensive even when you’re sure to win. Jim can hole up in his house, but what if he wants to go to the market? Trade is very hard to engage in when you’re constantly trying to cheat everyone or resorting to violence all the time. It’s much simpler and cheaper to submit your disputes to third parties and abide by their decisions.

All in all, it looks like Alrenous’s approach is actually superior to the Rothbardian one. By making defense the basis of private property, we have ensured at the outset that property rights will be protected. The Rothbardian legal system comes into effect out of this milieu not because everyone is ideologically committed to anarcho-capitalism but because it’s a good idea. And material interest is a much more secure foundation than ideology.

I know, dear reader, that you’ve been awaiting this for a long time now, and I shall not disappoint: there are problems. The main problem is that I don’t have to formulate some far-fetched fantasy in order to find a world in which Alrenous’s rule that it’s yours if and only if you can defend it holds sway; we’ve already got one: the real world. The one with states all over it.

So what went wrong? How did we get states where we should have gotten anarchy?

To see this, let’s first consider the following question: how would Ancapistan prevent a state from emerging? Statists raise this question quite frequently, and anarcho-capitalists have a number of responses. The long and the short of these responses is that Ancapistan is a stable equilibrium: any perturbation, any attempt to establish a state, will be met with force adequate to eliminate it. Today we live under states which defend their power vigorously; in the same way Ancapistan will organically defend itself.

Alright, but what guarantees that Ancapistan can sustain its equilibrium indefinitely? This equilibrium depends on a kind of balance of power between all the defense providers; why should we assume this balance of power will be perpetual?

In fact, nothing assures that Ancapistan will last forever. Nor should we expect it to; it is unreasonable for the statists to make such a demand. Societies wax and wane and so do their institutions. The Ancapistanis of today are fierce defenders of their liberties; their grandchildren may be different creatures.

Now let’s consider another imaginary construct. You live on an island and in a town established and protected along anarcho-capitalist lines. One day, however, a large group of strangely dressed people calling themselves Athenians appears and makes various demands of you and your people. They call upon you to maintain an Athenian garrison, accept rule by what they call a “democracy,” and join the Delian League, a group of cities who pay tribute to Athens. If you refuse, they threaten to level your town, kill all your men, and enslave your women and children.

Now, you’re none too keen on accepting these terms, but you don’t have very good options. Your own town’s defenses could hold out for a while, but these Athenians have a reputation for persistence and the wealth to support their troops through a long siege. Perhaps a network of defense providers could defeat the Athenians? Indeed, there is one called the Peloponnesian League, led by your friends the Lacedaemonians, that has fought mightily against Athens, but that conflict has proven extremely expensive and the Lacedaemonians have agreed to peace with the Athenians.  Justice argues against acquiescing to the Athenians’ threats, but material interest suggests capitulation.

Indeed, the Melians found to their sorrow that in the real world “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

At various points in time people have discovered ways of defending claims to resources that are dramatically more effective than those used by their neighbors, and instead of sharing this knowledge for the benefit of all mankind, they used it to subjugate their neighbors. That is why states emerged out of the supposedly stable equilibrium of Ancapistan, and states remain in existence because drastic disparities of power also remain.

So does this mean that anarcho-capitalism is bunk? Should we cast aside this lovely dream, Ancapistan, and all become statists “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” style?

I say, “No.” Show me a flawless philosophy and I will see it picked apart; show me ideal institutions and I will watch them become corrupt. As Herodotus put it, “Many once great cities are now small, and the small towns of old have grown great in my own day.” Show me a perfect society and I will prophesy its doom.

Rothbardianism reminds us of the value of private property in constituting civilization; Alrenous corrects Rothbardianism’s overemphasis on abstract justice, reminding us that the enjoyment of rights requires the power to defend them. Neither system is perfect, and they both share certain flaws, but they still point in the right direction: civilization as opposed to chaos.

The post Reply To Alrenous On Anarcho-Capitalism appeared first on Social Matter.

One advantage state-society has over Ancapistan is that it is much easier for us living today to conceptualize. State apparatus’ are so broad, so firmly entrenched, and have existed for so long that imagining in concrete terms how society would look without the state is much harder than imagining how society would look with a much smaller state. Indeed, the way anarcho-capitalists sometimes talk about Ancapistan makes it sound like some kind of Underpants Gnome scheme:

Step 1: Abolish the state.

Step 2: ??????

Step 3: Profit!

To ameliorate this difficulty, let’s start with something simple. Suppose everyone in the U.S. woke up tomorrow morning a committed anarcho-capitalist and with whatever knowledge is necessary to coordinate the dismantling of the state. Everyone then participates in dismantling the state and at all levels, so there is no more federal government, no more states, no more counties, no more cities, what-have-you.

But then people start rebuilding the old state institutions: the people living in Auburn form a corporation called “the City of Auburn,” and it is located within territory controlled by another corporation—“the state of Alabama”—which in turn is part of “the United States of America.” These institutions are built up in libertarian fashion, with voluntary contracts and property transfers, and there is no conscious scheme or active coordination toward this end; it simply emerges out of the spontaneous order of the market process. Eventually, exactly the same system that presently exists, with all the same agencies, bureaus, powers, and prerogatives, comes into being.

So why did we bother abolishing the state? Everything we didn’t like about the present day has been restored and with the imprimatur of anarcho-capitalism. What good has it done us to tear down the United States of American only to see it replaced with the United States of Ancapistan?

The anarcho-capitalist may respond with a variety of changes I have not noticed. For instance, fractional-reserve banking may not exist in the U.S.A. anymore, police brutality may have been reduced, along with corruption in general, or the U.S.A. is less imperialistic in its foreign policy. But all this is small potatoes next to abolishing the state: if these were the things we wanted, establishing Ancapistan seems like an extremely inefficient way to accomplishing them.

The United States of Ancapistan does offer one feature that the United States of America did not: the possibility of legal exit. If you don’t agree with the process leading to the restoration of the U.S.A. (or if you want out later), you don’t have to participate. At least, no official appears at your door telling you that you are participating whether you like it or not. You may be subject to boycotts or other forms of shunning; there may be some vandalism or other attacks against you that just can’t be solved; or if you can receive justice through the U.S.A. system, the wheels may turn very slowly. If there are a lot of you, y’all could band together and support each other, but even so, there might well be very strong incentives to either acquiesce or leave.

Theoretically, you can exit quite easily; practically, that proposition becomes rather trickier.

It seems that if you expect people to reestablish existing institutions—in other words, if people are basically satisfied with the state structure today—then there is little reason to support anarcho-capitalism. All the fruits of abolishing the state can be reaped more easily by simply reforming the state.

Now let’s shift gears and consider a different scenario, one radically different from the U.S.A. Imagine that some catastrophe strikes the world and utterly destroys society as we know it. However, there is a small group of anarcho-capitalist preppers who survive and form a community somewhere in the wilderness. These preppers band together for mutual support and collective protection from outsiders, and they establish protocols for dispute resolution. To top it all off, each adult swears an oath to abide by the laws of the community.

Years pass and children grow to be adults. When a child reaches the age of majority, he or she is given the choice of swearing the same oath as the founders or being exiled from the community. As the population grows, people begin to appropriate unused land, and the territorial extent of the community begins to grow. Disputes may become more frequent, considering that there are more people to have them, but they are still resolved according to established law, and the Free Town of Ancapistan flourishes.

Now let’s throw some wrenches into this system.

Let’s suppose that the preppers didn’t swear an oath, or at least didn’t make their kids do it when they grew up. Everyone still knows the rights and responsibilities of town citizenship, and people who openly refuse to accept these terms are still exiled, but there is no ritual whereby a person indicates that they consent to the community contract. As long as they don’t leave, they are assumed to give tacit consent.

Tacit consent is a notion frequently invoked to counter anarcho-capitalist claims about the legitimacy of present-day states: the statists claim that everyone knows the terms of living in a country, and if they don’t like those terms, they are free to emigrate. “America: love it or leave it,” they say.

Does reliance on tacit consent transform the Free Town of Ancapistan into the People’s Republic of Prepperville? Is the divide between state and non-state merely that in one you raise your right hand and say some words when you turn 18? Presumably not, but if not, then contemporary states have legitimacy: their subjects do consent to being ruled by them. The problem with states, then, is what they do and how they rule, not that they lack the consent of the governed.

Returning to Ancapistan, let’s not worry about the oath and go in a different direction. Imagine that the Free Town of Ancapistan has a neighbor, the Free Town of Nozickville. Ancapistan and Nozickville each control a certain territory by dint of original appropriation, but this isn’t all the land they use. There is a forest where both Ancapistanis and Nozickvillers hunt deer, which could lead to conflict between the two towns. Fortunately, the Ancapistanis and Nozickvillers reach an agreement on hunting rights, stipulating that the forest will be reserved for hunting, that hunters from both towns will be permitted to hunt there, and that the number of deer each town may hunt will be limited in order to maintain the deer population. They furthermore agree to defend the forest from any outsider who tries to hunt there.

This sounds like a fine exemplum of anarcho-capitalistic legal practice: two parties settling their differences through negotiation and respect for property rights. The problem is that neither town has the right to enforce their claim on the forest against anyone else because they didn’t originally appropriate it. Sure, a hunter owns the deer he kills, but that doesn’t mean he owns the grass the deer eats or the forest where it lives. Even if the towns build a fence around the forest, you don’t automatically own land you enclose with a fence.

So when hunters from the Free Town of Rothbardia come to the forest and kill some deer, Ancapistan and Nozickville naturally protest, but according to anarcho-capitalist theory, they have no grounds to do so, and the Rothbardians would be completely within their rights to ignore their agreement and hunt in the forest anyway. If both sides prove obdurate, what results is war.

Well, crud. Anarcho-capitalism was supposed to prevent war, but here it is causing it. On the one hand, the Ancapistanis and Nozickvillers claim that they had an agreement establishing their exclusive right to use the forest; on the other, the Rothbardians claim that they cannot be bound by an agreement to which they were not party. The root of the dispute is whether property rights have to be established by original appropriation or whether they can be established by convention instead.

Now an anarcho-capitalist would here claim that the two parties would not go to war but instead seek arbitration by a third party. Perhaps, but why should they? If the disputants’ power is lopsided—that is, if Rothbardia could easily capture the forest, or if Ancapistan and Nozickville could easily hold the forest—then the stronger party has little reason to risk their claim by submitting to arbitration. Arbitration might be cheaper, but war is more certain. Only if their powers were comparable would arbitration be expedient, and even then they might well war until they realized its futility.

The only other defense by the anarcho-capitalist would be to say that Rothbardia is in the right—property rights cannot be established merely by convention but only by original appropriation. This has the advantage of preventing war, but it also causes a tragedy of the commons: because no one has property rights over the forest, there is overhunting and the deer die out.

Convention-based property rights are extremely useful for managing resources that are consumed when they are appropriated. You own the deer that you kill through original appropriation, but you only own the wild herd through convention. They’re also useful for settling disputes before they have a chance to fully develop. For instance, Ancapistan and Nozickville could negotiate borders well beyond the territory they have originally appropriated in order to prevent conflicts over land in the future. The only problem with convention-based property rights is that even a committed anarcho-capitalist is not required to respect them if he is not party to the convention that established and sanctioned them. This leads to conflicts which anarcho-capitalism cannot resolve peacefully.

Let’s now try to summarize what we’ve learned by examining these hypothetical Ancapistans.

From the United States of Ancapistan, we learned that abolishing the state is only worthwhile if we think people really want something radically different; otherwise they will just rebuild exactly what we tore down. We also determined that the goal of “exit,” which both anarcho-capitalists and neoreactionaries seek, requires more than the abolition of the state. Eliminating the state, at least as it is currently constituted, may be a necessary condition for “exit,” but it is not sufficient.

From the Free Town of Ancapistan, we learned that whether or not people expressly consent to their government should not be a major concern. If the governing institution is constructive, then tacit consent should be sufficient for us to accept it; if the governing institution is destructive, then we should oppose it because it is destructive, regardless of whether or not people consent to it.

Fetishizing consent is a distraction.

We also discovered that anarcho-capitalism has a serious dilemma: either it must accept that its own system can produce conflicts in which both parties have justification or it must deny the validity of convention-based property rights. Such rights may be extremely useful, but they also open the door to irreconcilable conflict.

Neoreaction and anarcho-capitalism share a deep disquiet about contemporary affairs, a feeling that there is something very wrong with the Western world as it is presently constituted. The main difference is that anarcho-capitalism claims to have found a solution to our problem: abolishing the state and establishing respect for private property. Once this is accomplished, those of us who seek “exit” will be free to leave and build our own institutions, and the destructive elements of our current society will stand revealed and be dismantled.

Neoreaction does not have a solution because we think the situation is much more complex. The state is not the only social evil, nor is it always and invariably the worst social evil. Indeed, the fact that people have created states so frequently indicates that the state arises from some inherent feature of human nature, the irrational desire to enforce one’s will on the world and to dominate others. If the state can put limits on this lust for domination, allowing a basically peaceful society to exist and flourish, we shouldn’t worry too much about whether people actually consent to it or whether every single property right accords with anarcho-capitalist norms. We won’t make the perfect the enemy of the good when it comes to the state.

Anarcho-capitalism, on the other hand, is obsessed with the state and with property rights. An anarcho-capitalist believes that if the proper forms are filled out and filed correctly, all solvable social problems will solve themselves. Sure, not everything wrong with society will be fixed in Ancapistan, but that’s just because we can’t eliminate scarcity. Ancapistan isn’t supposed to be a utopia, just the next best thing.

The road from anarcho-capitalism to neoreaction is paved with the realization that the Cathedral and Leftist entryism are even graver threats than the state. It is easy enough to see that Leftism, with its hostility toward private property, is a natural enemy to anarcho-capitalism, but its institutions and tactics make it an especially dangerous foe.

Anarcho-capitalism accepts that the state requires ideological support in order to survive, but its understanding of the relationship between the state and the organs of propaganda is primitive. It takes as its model the bandit lord who settles down and hires a press agent, assuming the state always holds the upper hand. This is not the case in democracies, where Cathedral-type networks are the actual decision-making bodies. Just on a pragmatic basis the Cathedral is a greater threat than any state: even if you could somehow abolish a Cathedral-controlled state, the Cathedral would simply rebuild it.

Leftist entryism is another phenomenon that is simply too complex for anarcho-capitalism to handle. Physically removing Leftists from Ancapistan is one thing, but given Leftists’ propensity to lie about their motivations and intentions until they acquire the power to enact their agenda, ferreting out hidden Leftists and keeping them out of positions of influence have to be significant concerns for Ancapistan. It does us no good to build a functioning society only for Leftists to swoop in and destroy it.

Neoreaction marks an improvement upon anarcho-capitalism with its flexibility. Anarcho-capitalism is an important set of ideas, emphasizing the importance of private property and the effectiveness of non-state institutions at solving problems today considered solvable only by the state. Combining anarcho-capitalism’s political and legal insights with empirical knowledge of which other practices and institutions contribute to human flourishing will not help us create a perfect society, but it will make our best practicable approximation more resilient.

The post Analyzing Ancapistan appeared first on Social Matter.

There is, in fact, no hypocrisy involved. The Cathedral is democracy, and populism really is anti-democratic. Democracy has always been a tool for elites to rule over non-elites; popular rule is a chimera.

To see how this is so, let’s look back at the first democracy: Athens. As I discussed before, Greek city-states were initially ruled by aristocratic republics. These republics were controlled by a few noble families collectively known as the Eupatridae, “those born of good fathers.” The commoners were kept under the thumb of the Eupatridae through a system of debts and the laws protecting private property, as well as aristocratic control of the magistracies. However, many of the commoners were armed and so could demand reforms from the aristocrats. The Eupatridae preferred to reform slowly or not at all, but if a cunning and charismatic noble broke ranks, he could rally the populace and install himself as a tyrant.

The Athenians managed to avoid tyranny for a long time through a combination of aristocratic unity and partial reform. In 632 B.C., a man named Cylon tried to seize the tyranny but was defeated by aristocrats and the general populace. Ten years later, Dracon was elected archon and allowed to create a written constitution. Dracon granted formal citizenship to all landowners capable of furnishing arms and established an elected council officially open to commoners as well as nobles. Dracon also established a written law code, though its penalties were considered harsh. Much of what Dracon did was simply writing down and formalizing the practices of the earlier republic, and he effectively laid down an oligarchical constitution.

Dracon’s laws satisfied the commoners for a generation, but in 594 B.C. they elected Solon, a celebrated poet and successful general, as archon and charged him with further reforms. Solon granted most of the commoners’ demands: the main one he held back was redistribution of land. Solon’s principal innovation was to establish citizen classes based on wealth, abolishing the legal distinction between the Eupatridae and the commoners. He also expanded the franchise to include landless laborers, a class which included agricultural workers and town craftsmen. Solon’s constitution was later called democratic because of its similarity to the constitution of Cleisthenes, but no one called it that at the time.

Once again the reforms were satisfactory for roughly a generation. During this time, Athenian politics split not along class lines but geographic ones: the townsfolk led by Megacles vying with the farmers led by Lycurgus on the Attic plain. Peisistratus, a relative of Solon and noted general, assembled his own party of hillmen and seized power. He was quickly expelled but later agreed to marry Megacles’ daughter in exchange for his support and returned to Athens. However, Peisistratus and Megacles had a falling out, forcing Peisistratus to flee yet again. Peisistratus bided his time, marshaled his forces, and returned to power a third and final time after defeating the Athenian army at Marathon in 546 B.C.

Behind this straightforward political history hid families and networks of patronage. Cylon was the son-in-law of Theagnes, tyrant of Megara; part of the reason for his defeat was that the Athenians fiercely hated the Megarans and were not interested in effectively being ruled from Megara. Peisistratus rallied the hillmen to his cause through his own family connections, and the Peisistratids had friends in Athens until 490 B.C. when the Athenians defeated the Persians attempting to effect their return.

After the Peisistratids, the two most powerful families were the Alcmaeonidae and the Philaidae. The Megacles with whom Peisistratus dealt was of the Alcmaeonidae, and he was named for the archon who put down Cylon’s revolt. The Alcmaeonidae were extremely wealthy and well-regarded, but they suffered from a debilitating weakness when competing with their fellow aristocrats. When Megacles was fighting Cylon’s forces, he promised that men who had taken refuge in the temple of Athena would be allowed to leave unharmed; as soon as they were within his power, he had them put to death. This act of sacrilege polluted Megacles and his family, who were immediately exiled.

Though the Alcmaeonidae were allowed to return, the threat of repeated exile remained. This was the source of the falling out between Megacles and Peisistratus: aware of the Alcmaeonidae’s ancestral curse, Peisistratus decided to not have any children by Megacles’ daughter and so “he slept with her in a way not according to custom,” as Herodotus delicately puts it. This was a good move for Peisistratus considering that he was having enough trouble holding on to power and didn’t need his offspring to be polluted.

Despite Megacles’ conflict with Peisistratus, the Alcmaeonidae largely accommodated themselves to the Peisistratid tyranny. However, they were implicated in the murder of Hipparchus in 514 and exiled by Hippias. In order to bring about their return to Athens, the Alcmaeonidae bribed the priests at Delphi into inducing Sparta to overthrow the Peisistratids.

Under the leadership of Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonidae vied with the other noble families led by Isagoras for power. Isagoras wanted to establish an oligarchy with Spartan backing; Cleisthenes realized that he could seize supreme power by appealing to the people. With tyranny out of fashion, he invented democracy. Isagoras invoked the Alcmaeonidae’s ancestral curse to thwart this move, and the Spartans also moved to oppose Cleisthenes, but the Athenian people were taken with the idea and resisted. The Spartans were defeated, Isagoras banished, and the Alcmaeonidae’s enemies massacred.

Cleisthenes’ main reforms to the Athenian constitution involved reconstituting the ten Athenian tribes to eliminate regional rivalries. He also instituted ostracism, a process that placed all prominent men under the same threat of exile as the Alcmaeonidae. Having a large franchise and many offices selected by lot also made it harder for rival families to accumulate power: the Alcmaeonidae could rely on their patronage network, while the other nobles had to compete with ambitious commoners. These same commoners would be allies of the Alcmaeonidae, who portrayed themselves as friends of the people. Democracy was thus the tyranny of a whole family rather than a single man.

The Alcmeaonidae ruled Athens unchallenged for about fifteen years, when Miltiades, leader of the Philaidae, came to Athens. Miltiades’ uncle (also named Miltiades) had been sponsored as tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese by Peisistratus, and this later Miltiades had taken over after his uncle and his brother had died. He had continued to rule as tyrant under the Persians and even participated in Darius’ campaign against the Scythians. However, in 499 B.C. he joined the Ionian Revolt and was forced to flee when Darius reestablished control. He came to Athens with poor prospects: a relative outsider and a former tyrant with ties to the Peisistratids.

What Miltiades brought to recommend him was money, extensive military experience, and a fervent opposition to Persia. The Alcmeaonidae had overestimated Athenian power and backed the Ionian revolt, angering the Persians. In 490 B.C., the Persians launched a punitive expedition against Athens with the secondary goal of restoring Hippias, who accompanied and advised the Persians. Miltiades’ qualities earned him a generalship and his familiarity with the Persians helped win the day in the second battle of Marathon. He later led an expedition against the Aegean islands captured by the Persians but died of an infected wound.

Miltiades’ brief time in Athens completely upset the balance of power in the city. For the first time since the democracy was founded there was serious opposition to the Alcmeaonidae. Cleisthenes was dead, and their new leader, Megacles (yes, another one), was accused of conspiring with the Persians and lost a great deal of influence. This meant that during the 480s B.C. no one held supreme power, giving outsiders the opportunity to seize it. Cleisthenes’ protégé Aristides formed an oligarchic party while the common-born genius Themistocles put together a democratic one. These parties constituted the two poles of Athenian politics for the rest of the century. The democrats generally held the upper hand—Themistocles had Aristides ostracized shortly before the Second Persian War—but the oligarchs had their moments of strength as well.

These two parties did not differ on ideology, at least not at first. They represented different economic and, despite Cleisthenes’ efforts, regional interests. The oligarchs were primarily aristocratic farmers, while the democrats drew their strength from the city. Further differences crystalized over time, but only well after the Persian Wars.

The two parties put their differences aside to fight the Persians, Themistocles winning the naval battle at Salamis, Aristides commanding the Athenian hoplites at Plataea. After the Persian retreat, both supported the creation of the Delian League. Indeed, it was Aristides who suggested allowing member cities to contribute money instead of ships, allowing Athens to build an enormous navy and convincing the allies to give up their defenses. When the League members objected to Athens’ domination of the League, the Athenians enforced their rule on their erstwhile allies. Both the oligarchs and the democrats were complicit in Athenian imperialism.

The democrats suffered a serious setback, however, in the aftermath of the sack of Athens. During this time the formal government effectively ceased to operate. This allowed the oligarchs to start building networks of patronage: with their wealth and personal relationships, they could help people seeking justice or otherwise in distress while the Athenian government was totally helpless. The court of the Areopagus, an ancient institution made up of former archons and which tried homicide cases, was the center of this oligarchic movement.

The oligarchic party also benefited greatly from the coming of age of Cimon, son of Miltiades. Cimon served as commander of the Delian League forces through most of the 470s and 460s. He brought to the table many of the same qualities that his father had possessed, especially wealth and military competence. His greatest victory was at the Eurymedon River in 466 B.C. There he led the Delian fleet to victory over the Persian armada and then staged and amphibious landing and routed the Persian land army as well. A peace treaty between the Delian League and the Persians soon followed. Cimon also had personal and family connections throughout the Aegean: his father had contacts in Ionia and his grandfather had been king of Thrace. These allowed him to manage the Delian League without being too overbearing—he could have his friends work through the established governments rather than creating a new imperial administration.

Cimon’s prestige was enormous on account of his victories, which, combined with the Areopagus’ patronage network, meant that Athens was an oligarchy in all but name. This was not how it was supposed to go. The Alcmeaonidae had to take a back seat while the Philaidae ruled their city. Though the Alcmeaonid leadership was in disarray, they could still work through the democratic party, and when Cimon showed weakness, they struck.

In 464 B.C., Laconia suffered a great earthquake which damaged much of Sparta and inspired many Messenian helots to revolt. Sparta called on its allies to help suppress the revolt, and at Cimon’s suggestion Athens sent a contingent. However, the Spartans were concerned that the Athenians would incite further rebellion and so sent Cimon home.

Ephialtes was the leader of the democrats at this time and he seized the opportunity created by Cimon’s loss of face. The Areopagus was his first target: Ephialtes indicted its members and stripped it of most of its powers. He then moved to ostracize Cimon, an effort which also succeeded. Ephialtes had more reforms in mind, but he was assassinated not long thereafter.

Pericles took control of the democratic party and finished Ephialtes’ work. Pericles lowered property requirements for office and instituted pay for public officials. He also restricted citizenship to men with two Athenian parents, cutting out the children of oligarchs with wives from among the allies. These measures undercut the oligarchs’ patronage network and assured the ascendancy of the democrats until 411 B.C.

In terms of foreign policy, the democrats’ ascension was a disaster. Where Cimon had supported friendly relations with Sparta, Ephialtes had claimed that the two states were natural enemies. Pericles and the democrats followed Ephialtes’ ideas and made several moves to antagonize the Spartans. Athens allied with Megara against Corinth, supported the revolting helots, and even threw in its lot with Argos, Sparta’s ancient enemy. The first Peloponnesian war followed promptly.

The democrats believed that Athens had the power to rule over much more of Greece; the oligarchs held that, while there was still room for small-scale gains, the Delian League represented Athens’ natural limits. This first, seesawing conflict with Sparta proved that the oligarchs were correct, and Athenian policy moderated from then on; only with the rise of Alcibiades in the 410s did the Athenians become as aggressive as they had been in the 450s and 440s.

Although vindicated in this one sphere, the oligarchs found themselves completely subordinated to the democratic party. Cimon returned from exile to negotiate a truce with Sparta but died leading an expedition against Cyprus. In 442, Cimon’s successor Thucydides (relation to the historian unknown) was also ostracized, marking the effective end of the oligarchs’ political power. They did not go away—Nicias formed a coalition with the oligarchs during the second Peloponnesian war, there was a short-lived oligarchic coup in 411, and the Thirty Tyrants were oligarchs—but the democrats held the upper hand. The final blow came in 399 B.C. with the execution of Socrates. Thereafter, there effectively was no oligarchic party.

We can draw a number of lessons about democracy from the politics of Athens. The first is a definition of democracy based on actual practice rather than theory: a state is a democracy if it has a strong electoral principle and a relatively large ruling class. When Cleisthenes founded the democracy, citizens constituted roughly fifty percent of the population of Athens. During the Classical period, this percentage declined to roughly one third as a result of both citizens dying in war and foreigners and slaves coming to Athens. This contrasted with oligarchic cities where the citizen population was closer to ten percent. “Rule by the people” didn’t actually mean rule by all of the people in a given territory, just by the ones included in the political system.

Another thing to note is that democracy involves patronage that goes outside of the formal structures of the state. When the Alcmaeonidae put the democracy in place, it was simply a tool for empowering their patronage network and weakening those of other noble families. Though the Philaidae struck back and the Alcmaeonidae were weakened by the Persian Wars, this network did not go away by any means. Indeed, both Pericles and Alcibiades belonged to the Alcmaeonidae through their mothers.

Thirdly, even in a firmly established democracy there will exist a loyal opposition that can occasionally seize power. The oligarchs of Athens were relatively efficient when it came to solving problems and this served them well in the 470s and 460s. However, the oligarchs did not change the constitution; the democrats had to do that in order to take back power. Only during and after the second Peloponnesian war did the oligarchs became militant, giving their opponents an excuse to crush them.

Populism is the appeal to the common people for political purposes; a populist argues that the existing political system does not adequately serve the needs and desires of non-elites and needs to be changed on that account. Peisistratus was a populist, rallying the hillmen to his banner. Cleisthenes was not:  with Hippias expelled, he supported the retention and strengthening of the underlying democratic system laid down by Solon against Isagoras’ proposed reform.

Within an established democracy, democratic politicians do not pander to the people. There already exist channels for addressing problems and concerns. In the early democracy at Athens, those channels were the Alcmaeonidae’s patronage system and the state apparatus that system allowed them to control. Individual proposals might have to be argued for, and individual politicians still had to compete with each other, but all of this was done within a kind of proto-Cathedral.

When Miltiades and Cimon challenged the Alcmeaonidae, they did so through populism, offering skills and connections that local Athenian politicians lacked. They and the Areopagus also built up their own alternative to the democratic cathedral by going outside the formal structures of Athenian government. Cimon was especially notable for allowing poor Athenians to take fruit from his orchards. The oligarchs brought efficiency and expertise and so managed to create a place for themselves where the original intention of the constitution was to disempower them. In the end, however, the democrats strengthened the state and destroyed or absorbed the oligarchs’ patronage systems, incorporating them into a new and stronger cathedral.

Turn now to the present-day Western world ruled over by the Cathedral. The relationship between the Cathedral and the Athenian democracy is not isomorphic, but there are striking similarities. Today, we have priests in the Academy, wealthy donors and foundations doling out patronage, the political machines of the major parties, demagogic orators posing as journalists, and the coercive apparatus of the state all conspiring to maintain their collective supremacy. Today, we also have the pervasive and destructive ideology of leftism.

Our first observation about democratic Athens—that there was a strong elective principle and a large ruling class—also applies to the Cathedral. The elective element is fairly obvious, and trumpeted at every opportunity. We in the West get to elect our leaders (many of them, at least), and this makes them accountable to the People, and so on and so forth. Democratic governments hold sway in all Cathedral-dominated states.

The Cathedral is also quite large. Taking the university system as the primary training ground for Cathedral members, forty-percent of the U.S. population is college educated; the rate is lower in most other Cathedral-controlled countries, but still above thirty-percent. Granting that not all college graduates are active participants in the Cathedral, this still makes the Cathedral roughly comparable in size the citizen population in fifth century Athens.

The patronage network outside the formal structures of the state is also present today—indeed, that is what makes the Cathedral the Cathedral instead of just the Government. There are countless think tanks, foundations, advocacy groups, news organization, and academic institutions who all support each other ideological and materially. The Cathedral operates in exactly the same fashion as the Alcmaeonidae and their competitors.

Finally, there are many people with interests opposed to the Cathedral who nonetheless participate in it. In the United States groups such as the Religious Right and talk radio listeners fall into this category. The Cathedral would love little more than to wipe these people from the face of existence, but they don’t seem to realize the Cathedral’s hostility and so don’t actively rebel against it. So long as they work within the system managed by the Cathedral, the Cathedral doesn’t devote too much energy to figuring out how to eliminate them.

We can thus see how the Cathedral, far from being a mere vehicle for hypocritical power-seeking, really does follow the democratic model. Someone who says, “I oppose the Cathedral but support democracy,” is terribly confused. The Cathedral is democracy, plain and simple; you cannot disentangle the two.

Populism, on the other hand, is a tactic or tool, even an outright trick designed to give a single person or small group of people power outside of Cathedral structures. If a populist later accommodates himself to the Cathedral, then democracy is secured and perhaps even strengthened if he brings new groups into the Cathedral fold. A populist who persists in operating outside the Cathedral, however, is a threat to democracy.

There are two main lessons to draw from the foregoing. The first is that appeal to the people does not necessarily go hand in hand with democracy. Peisistratus was and Putin is very popular with their respective peoples, but that does not make them democrats. We shouldn’t expect anything substantial to come from Donald Trump, but a single charismatic man or group of such men leading a popular movement may be the most effective challenge to the Cathedral.

The second lesson, one that cannot be repeated enough, is that the Cathedral is democracy. If you think the people at large should have some role in their government, that’s great, but jettison the word “democracy.” To support democracy is to support the Cathedral; to oppose the Cathedral is to oppose democracy. This is as much the case now as it was in Classical Athens.

The post The Cathedral Is Democracy appeared first on Social Matter.

Okay, you can stop chuckling. Such hypocrisy is at least a little bit refreshing. Would that all our enemies were so awful at disguising their aims. Libertarians want everyone to be just like them, allowing differences of opinion and behavior only in areas that don’t matter. The only reason libertarianism has had any success at all in public opinion is that it does pretend to not care about how you live your life. For the anarchist libertarians this might actually be true, but the minarchists hold in their hearts the utopian dream of the night-watchman state.

Libertarianism does have its advantages, at least on intellectual grounds, not least of which is the strong rationalist strain. This makes it relatively easy to understand and analyze. I want to use this relative clarity to look at a peculiar Leftist notion that I’ll call “state-society.”

Imagine, if you will, a libertarian state. There is a body of law—let’s call it the Constitution—that embodies libertarianism and also prescribes the various details of the government functions when libertarian theory is silent—how votes are counted, when juries are empaneled, that sort of thing. The state deploys officials to enforce this law and only to enforce this law; they abide perfectly by the terms of the Constitution. As long as people follow the Constitution, or when they don’t, their offenses are dealt with according to the terms of the Constitution, they are free to go about their business without any interference from the state.

Notice the sharp distinction between the state and the rest of the society. The state enforces libertarian norms and nothing else. The state is supposed to provide a framework within which society goes about its business without interacting with society at all. State employees have no interest beyond their Constitutional duties, and non-state agents have no effect on the operations of the state. This is state-society.

State-society doesn’t have to be libertarian. Conceivably the Constitution could have rules touching every aspect of people’s lives. The only requirement is that these norms don’t ever need to change. The state does not concern itself with changing affairs: there are no challenges to its power, no properties for it to manage, no crises it needs to address. Or if circumstances do change, the state responds in the manner prescribed by the Constitution. The state also hears no cries for help or relief, since it already aids or oppresses according to desert.

Out of necessity the state has to be manned by humans, but this is not ideal. Indeed, robots programmed to follow the Constitution precisely would probably be better. Robots have no families to care for, no religious affiliation, in general no personal attachments that might interfere with or distract them from their Constitutional duties.

Deism is the theological reflection of state-society. The state is like a disinterested god looking down upon society. Having established the laws of the universe, he simply sits back and watches everything unfold within them without interfering.

To understand just how strange state-society is we have to compare it with alternate arrangements. Start with a small tribe: you’ll have some elders and a chieftain who leads the men in war. Since division of labor is extremely primitive, you won’t have a distinction between state and society at all. The people who wield authority within the society will also be the ones who direct violence.

With larger populations and more specialization, matters change. Take a Greek city-state, for instance. Here there is an armed citizenry that controls and participates in the government of the city’s territory. In the smaller cities, almost all residents were citizens, so this was effectively a scaling-up of the tribal organization. Larger cities had substantial non-citizen populations whose opinions are not well-attested, but no one appears to have imagined the state as separate from the citizenry. The slaves and resident foreigners might have resented their rulers, but they never imagined a “state” distinct from “the Athenians” or “the Lacedaimonians.”

The tribe and the city-state are relatively demotic situations; what about a king, tyrant, or emperor? Until the modern era at least, no one would have ever separated the state from the person of the ruler. The tyrant’s word may be law but it is his word, and no one imagined that the king did not care at all for his family or his property. Indeed, these were the very things which gave him the right to rule. Though the king claimed a monopoly on violence, he was still embedded within the society he ruled.

When Louis XIV proclaimed “I am the state”, he was simply announcing that his personal authority permeated all of France; when Frederick the Great proclaimed “I am the first servant of the state”, he was inventing this “state” which belonged to no one. In actual fact, there has never been state-society nor will there ever be. It is a myth, a fantasy, albeit a distinctly modern fantasy.

There is nothing wrong with state-society beyond the fact that it can’t possibly exist. As long as you find the ideals embodied in the Constitution congenial, it could conceivably be quite nice. But it is impossible. The state is always a part of the society it rules; there is always a ruling class within a society which controls the application of legitimate violence.

A common variant on the idea of state-society is democratic society—which is different from democracy the political arrangement. In democratic society, the state is imagined to be the agent of the citizenry. In a small and cohesive society this might actually be the case, much as in a Greek city-state, but in large and diverse populations the notion breaks down. That doesn’t stop the ruling class from pretending, of course. In this world, the Constitution and the various decisions of the state are supposed to express the will of the people, but only on those matters where there is widespread agreement. You’ll usually see this version expounded by Leftists in order to justify their latest pet project, usually invoking an “evolving consensus” in which your opinion is, of course, not included.

Leftists, libertarians included, use the notion of state-society to great rhetorical effect. On its face, state-society sounds pretty good; the biggest plus is that there’s no corruption, but all other problems have been solved as well. Everything works perfectly according to the imaginer’s design. What the Leftists fail to mention is not only that their idea of perfection is probably rather different from that of a non-Leftist, but also that their current proposal will not bring about that perfection either. They’ll be back tomorrow with more demands.

The ideal of state-society allows the Left to summon hordes of imaginary hobgoblins to constantly menace their followers and keep them in a state of alarm. This confers advantages in democratic politics, as people with more mundane motivations than immanentizing the eschaton lack the same fervor and interest, but it also distracts from more practical concerns. It does not matter to the Left that introducing women into combat arms will reduce their effectiveness, nor are libertarians much concerned with demographic replacement brought on by open immigration. The Constitution must embody their ideology; the functioning of society is a lesser concern.

Unfortunately, there is no good rhetorical counter to dreams of state-society. Deconstructing it and showing it to be utopian is a good plan, but even then many will support it. Utopianism, effectively expressed, will always triumph over pragmatism in the realm of words. Fortunately, speeches and majority decisions don’t actually decide things in the long run. For that you need iron and blood.

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As is so often the case, Plato is misunderstood. He was not truly inventing anything but rather critiquing pre-existing Greek religious ideas.

Plato presents the “noble lie” in three sections. The first tells what kind of story it’s going to be: a “Phoenician tale,” something supernatural, the sort of thing that happened in olden days but doesn’t happen anymore. As we see momentarily, this is a mythic origin story for the ideal city. Every Greek city-state that was not a colony of another city had a myth such as this.

The specific myth that Plato proffers is that all the citizens sprang up out of the earth with all their education and equipment. They are thus all brothers, children of the earth, and charged with defending their sacred birthplace. Strange as this story may seem, both Athens and Thebes had origin myths almost identical to this one.

The final section elaborates on the myth of the autochthonous citizenry, claiming that the people have metals in their souls fitting them for certain roles within the city: gold for the rulers, silver for the soldiers, bronze and iron for the laborers. For the most part, these soul-metals are passed down from father to son, but every now and then someone is born suited to a different role from his father. Any Greek reading this passage would have immediately noticed that Plato was appropriating Hesiod’s myth of the Five Races of Mankind for his own purposes. Plato’s version stands in contrast to conventional stories which conferred divine origins only on the Eupatrid families.

By calling this tale a ψεῦδος, a lie, Plato echoes the growing religious skepticism of his day. Fifty years before Plato, Herodotus did not dare to call even the most fantastic of his accounts lies; fifty years after the Republic, blatant corruption and politicking had destroyed much of the authority of the old Greek religion. People still believed in the gods, of course, but their religious observances were largely perfunctory and they sought new ways of understanding and connecting with the divine.

Plato did not believe the foundational myths of his own city in a literal sense, but he accepted that they were useful. People need a sense of group identity and group feeling, asabiyah, in order to cooperate and accept mutually beneficial social arrangements. The main point of his proposed myth, the way in which it is different from all the others, is that he believes status should be conferred based on merit rather than birth, though he holds the two to be closely linked.

Another criticism Plato makes of Greek religion is the emphasis it placed on Homer. In tradition there was a contest between Homer and Hesiod, the former producing long epics of heroes and adventure, the latter shorter poems about the gods and common people. Plato’s hostility toward Homer is well known, considering that Plato banished Homer from the ideal city, but here he takes the side of Hesiod. Plato didn’t care so much for the stories of high adventure that inspired the Athenians to send out his friends and colleagues to die on vainglorious imperialistic expeditions. Far better, he thought, to stay at home, living peacefully and virtuously and not meddling in other peoples’ affairs.

One thing Plato absolutely did not advocate is constant manipulation of the populace through politics and propaganda. On the contrary, this foundation myth for the ideal city is a one-and-done sort of affair: the citizens believe it and act on it and don’t need any additional persuasion to defend their city from external or internal threats. There is no Ministry of Truth in the ideal city of the Republic.

Real Greek religion, however, did involve that kind of constant manipulation. Herodotus tells how the pronouncements of oracles were carefully interpreted, sometimes even outright bought, so as to yield particular conclusions. The most notable example is the plot by the Alcmaeonidai to incite the Spartans to overthrow the Peisistratid tyrants, which they did by bribing the priests at Delphi. By the opening of the Peloponnesian War, the cynical knew that the Delphic oracle was owned by the Spartans, and by the end most survivors were cynics. Socrates was a notable exception.

It is at times difficult to determine to what extent the Greek leaders were aware of their manipulation of religion, but sometimes gaps appear in the pious façade. During the battle of Plataea, for instance, the auspices for a Spartan advance were repeatedly unfavorable until they all of a sudden turned favorable. It is certainly possible that this indeed was the case, but more likely Regent Pausanias was waiting for the light Persian infantry to move too close to his own lines. When the enemy was in the proper position, he launched a rapid charge and caught the Persians before they could run away. To the Greeks, however, that didn’t make as good a story.

A “noble lie” is a people’s origin story. Plato proposed one version; Athens, Thebes, et al. had their own; the Hebrews had one; the Babylonians, Persians, and Egyptians had their own; the Romans had theirs and so did the German tribes that destroyed the Roman Empire. The formulation of an origin story is easiest when it lies outside of historical memory, but even America has the tales of the Revolution and the Founding Fathers.

The point of the “noble lie” is to distinguish the society from those around it, to encourage the people to live together relatively peacefully, and to inspire them to resist attacks by outsiders. Any society that fails to do at least these three things is doomed to perish and quickly. If a lie of some kind does the job, then it is indeed noble.

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The Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges has spawned riots of color all across the country. People are raising rainbow flags here, there, and everywhere. At the same time, the Confederate battle flag is being lowered and removed from all corners of respectable society. This now famous graphic illustrates the noble triumph of Love over Hate.

Wait a minute. “Triumph of Love over Hate”? Aren’t love and hate emotions that everyone feels at one point or another? And isn’t it the direction of these emotions, and the actions motivated by them, that’s important?

Not if you’re a Leftist. In that case, you are on the side of Love, while your enemies are on the side of Hate. The Love-Hate Dichotomy defines how you think, how you look at other people, everything.

The first thing to remember is that Love is not merely love and Hate is not merely hate. Love and Hate are not only emotions but cosmic forces and eternal forms. Well, Hate isn’t eternal: we’re in the process of stamping it out.

The Leftist dichotomy is nothing like that of the Greek philosopher Empedocles. Way back before Socrates, Empedocles theorized that the universe passed through several phases according to the waxing and waning of φιλότης and νεῖκος, Love and Strife. In Empedocles’ system, Love is an attractive force while Strife is a repulsive force, and both of these forces are masculine. Empedocles seems to have believed that men naturally rule the world, a belief which firmly plants him in the camp of Hate.

Hate is pretty easy to define, and we are all familiar with the general outlines: Hate is what we believe, what normal people believed ten, twenty, fifty or more years ago. The 1950s were the darkest days of Hate in living memory, but since 1964 or so, Love has been gaining ground through the gradual dismantling of racism, sexism, homophobia and heteronomativity, transphobia and cis-normativity, fat shaming and body shaming in general, and whatever is cooked up in the coming months and years.

Love is a trickier concept. It can just mean Leftism, but the political and social angle is only part of the picture. Love is the ultimate reason for doing anything. You should always aim to do that which you love. If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life, or so they say. The flip side of this notion is that you shouldn’t do things you don’t love doing. If circumstances force you to do things you don’t love, then your circumstances need to change. Love informs Leftism as much as it is a synonym for Leftism.

The ever-expanding welfare state is one outgrowth of this view of Love. If someone has to work long hours in unpleasant conditions for low pay or can’t get medical care, then obviously they can’t do what they love, whatever that may be. If a woman doesn’t have birth control and so might get pregnant when she has sex, then she can’t go out and do all the loving she wants. If a person can’t go to college, then they can’t get the job they would love. Any financial obstacles you might face need to be eliminated so that you can pursue Love freely.

Leftist social views also flow from the Love-hate Dichotomy. People should love each other and so should abolish barriers that separate each other. Barriers, differences, separations, and partitions: these things cause Hate and are exempla of Hate; either way, they must be destroyed.

People should be allowed to do whatever Love commands of them too. If two people love each other, then they have to be allowed to have sex with each other. They also have to be allowed to marry each other because marriage is the highest expression of Love. There’s nothing magical about the number two, of course, and that restriction will someday be eliminated and omniamory will reign.

(I should mention that you should never judge anyone for doing what they love, as long as it’s not Hate, of course. And by “judge” I mean “judge negatively.” To judge someone positively is to celebrate them, not judge them. Love must be celebrated; Hate must be judged.)

Love involves sacrifice: the lover is willing to sacrifices his happiness for the sake of his beloved. This means that Leftists, who love oppressed peoples, must be prepared to sacrifice their own well-being to improve their standing. Activism is not sacrifice, mind you, since Leftists love to engage in activism, but if anyone mentions that they and their families and friends will suffer if Leftist proposals carry, well, that is a sacrifice they say they are willing to make.

Fully fleshed-out, the Love-Hate Dichotomy is transparently artificial and insane, but that does not mean it completely lacks plausibility. Doesn’t it make sense that you should love people, treat them well, and not to hate them for no good reason? Should people strive after something other than what they love? The success of the Love-Hate Dichotomy is largely due to its appealing simplicity.

The biggest logical problem for the Love-Hate Dichotomy is precisely that it is a dichotomy. As emotions, love and hate are not completely opposite feelings; indeed, they are both a kind of obsession, often occurring simultaneously. There is a whole range of attitudes one might have about any given object that are neither love nor hate.

Adding to the confusion is that “love” is often used as an intense form of “like,” so to say “I love chocolate ice cream” simply means “I very much enjoy eating chocolate ice cream.” “Hate” has a similar secondary usage as an intense form of “dislike.” These two feelings, “like” and “dislike,” are not dichotomous either: “I like Jim most of the time, but he’s a real party-pooper”; “Sweetie, you know I hate it when you leave your shoes lying around”; “Wow, she’s looking good tonight; too bad she’s completely nuts!” Complexity typifies emotions, not simplicity.

Simplicity, however, appears to work.

The post Love Versus Hate appeared first on Social Matter.

I’ll wait.

Now you’ve seen the movie. Aside from exulting in the experience, you’re probably wondering: just what was supposed to be feminist about that film? I can’t answer that question, but I do know that it poses very serious problems for those of us of the “the only morality is civilization” school of thought. Fury Road, if taken as a morality tale, teaches the exact opposite, namely that morality requires tearing down civilization on account of the injustices entailed by building it.

To start, let’s look at the world of Fury Road. The first Mad Max showed us a civilization in the midst of collapse: society was clearly breaking down, but people could stick their heads in the sand and pretend that it wasn’t happening. Later films dispensed with the pretense of civilization, providing instead a post-apocalyptic landscape and imaginative attempts to carve civilization out of the waste.

Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne)—the bad guy—has made such an attempt. He controls a rock fortress called the Citadel, which can only be accessed by a mechanical elevator. On the top of the Citadel, where the ground has not been poisoned by radiation, Joe grows crops with which he feeds a substantial army of “warboys” and support staff. Joe also pumps water up from underground and maintains an impressive stock of armored vehicles. A great mass of people lives below the Citadel relying on Joe for sustenance and protection.

In order to more effectively provide this protection, Joe has subjugated two other territories: Gastown, which produces gas, and the Bullet Farm, which produces bullets. With the resources of these fiefs, Joe patrols a sizeable area, killing or enslaving anyone who wanders in uninvited—this is how Max (Tom Hardy) enters the story. Joe maintains his hold on the army by preaching a kind of warrior’s gospel: his troops revere him as a god who promises eternal life in Valhalla. However, Joe is old and so doesn’t ride with his troops very often. Instead, he has lieutenants like his son Rictus and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron).

All this is impressive enough, but Joe has other ambitions. Specifically, he wants an heir who is not genetically deficient. Radiation has not only poisoned the soil but also caused widespread mutations—Rictus, for instance, though incredibly strong, requires a life-support system strapped to his back and is also not the sharpest tool in the shed. Joe keeps a number of women as breeders and milk-producers, but their offspring are not good enough for him. In order to acquire an adequate heir, Joe has (presumably) purchased five flawless women who serve as his concubines.

These women plot with Furiosa to escape. Understandably, they resent Joe for enslaving them and want to raise their children (two of them being pregnant) in a more peaceful environment. Furiosa was kidnapped as a child (geography suggests that it was not by Joe) from an idyllic land called the Green Place, and she agrees to take Joe’s concubines there. The film centers on their escape attempt and Joe’s pursuit.

Max joins the women when he is brought along by one of Joe’s warboys Nux (Nicholas Hoult) but escapes. His skills at driving and fighting prove invaluable, but he never considers himself a part of the group. When they learn that the Green Place of Furiosa’s memory no longer exists and decide to ride into uncharted territory looking for somewhere to settle, Max initially declines to accompany them. He only goes after them when his conscience refused to allow him to let them die when he has the power to protect them. He convinces Furiosa to return to the Citadel, the one place where they know there is water and life.

Max and Furiosa are the only two characters with any kind of moral code—all the other characters are simply too shallow. They are mirror images of each other: Max is primarily a survivalist who is pulled by his conscience to help others; Furiosa is primarily compassionate, forced by circumstance to do harm to others.

Now consider each of these moral perspectives in the context of the world the characters live in. Max’s ethic makes a fair bit of sense: if you don’t do what you have to in order to survive, well, then you don’t. His conscience is a holdover from civilized times when the strong were supposed to protect the weak. Furiosa’s perspective comes out of her upbringing at the Green Place where violence was rare. When she was taken from her home, compassion was a luxury she could ill afford. Though forged by the world in which they live, they remember a lost paradise, and that memory influences their outlooks.

In his own way, Immortan Joe is in a similar situation, but he takes a decidedly different approach. He remembers the fallen civilization and tries to preserve it. He engages in settled agriculture, maintains physical capital, establishes religion, protects his community, and even works to mitigate the unquestionable genetic degradation of his people so that there will be future generations. In all of these endeavors except the last he is remarkably successful, fielding a large army and supporting the largest aggregation of people for hundreds of miles.

What makes Immortan Joe a villain is not that he maintains a measure of civilization but that he is apparently more free-handed with violence than with the benefits of civilization. He engages in slavery; he attacks people who simply wander into his territory; he withholds water from the people below him; he restricts immigration up to his fortress. All these things are supposed to feel wrong to us modern, Western viewers. Instead, we’re supposed to sympathize with Furiosa and company’s dream of escaping Joe’s tyranny. When the gang returns to the Citadel with Joe’s corpse strapped to the front of their car, there is much rejoicing as the crowd tears Joe’s corpse, the women carry people up to the fortress along with them, and the women already up top release water for the people below.

What we do not see is that the food supply is still meager, the people overuse the water and eventually run out, and a rival warlord seizes Gastown and the Bullet Farm and lays siege to the Citadel, killing or enslaving everyone he gets his hands on. The women’s dream of a better life for themselves and their children proves illusory. Max, understandably, doesn’t stick around to watch all this unfold.

The thing is, Immortan Joe’s dream is almost as illusory. Even if he rations the water, it will probably run out before too long; even if he has a couple children “perfect in every way,” they are unlikely to make it to adulthood or substantially improve the genetic stock of the whole population. There is no new territory he can conquer to increase agricultural production and expand his society’s population. In short, the world is dying, and Joe’s attempts at preserving civilization are ultimately in vain.

In a post-apocalyptic world, why should anyone bother with “civilization”? If building society means hurting people and not even providing long-term benefits, then humanitarian-moral calculus tells us that we should focus on being compassionate, adopting an ethic focused on helping those in need individually, rather than socially. The only other acceptable consideration is the one we can’t live without: survival. Max and Furiosa, survivalist pragmatism and humanitarian idealism: these two principles bookend the spectrum of what is “good.”

The dying world scenario is what makes this scheme plausible, but it really just throws into sharp relief elements of real life. Eventually, everything will die. You, your children, your children’s children, your society, your species, your very world will all turn into dust. Everything flows; nothing abides. The morality of the dying world must be the same as the morality of the living world. Therefore, we living today shouldn’t bother maintaining civilization, either.

The Leftist finds this proposal completely agreeable. Indeed, she already lives in the waste of a dying world—Western civilization—and she exults in its demise. Watch Furiosa overthrow Immortan Joe in the theater, then go outside and overthrow white supremacy, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, and whatnot. Answering pesky questions like “what will happen to white people after their society has been ground into the earth?” is not on her to-do list because she doesn’t care what happens after.

So how should view this film? Should we identify with Immortan Joe rather than Max? Doesn’t the movie dramatize, indeed glorify, the overthrow of civilization in the name of humanitarianism while ignoring the consequences?

Yes, it does, but that’s not the point. There’s a very good reason that I had to explain the world and how it works in this article. It’s the same reason why the film doesn’t show the fallout from Immortan Joe’s defeat: the movie doesn’t care; all that’s just scenery. The story is about Max, his deeds, his journey. We should praise or blame the film based on how it portrays those things—which it does well—not its more ethereal implications.

Max is a masculine archetype, kin to the knight-errant of olden days: he is a wandering warrior with a personal code of honor and a sweet ride. What makes Max distinct is that instead of traversing a medieval kingdom he travels a wasteland. The knight wanders a civilized world, a world filled rules and authorities. His personal code does not run contrary to the order of civilization—he is not a barbarian—but he does have a streak of barbarism, a willingness to break the rules and defy authority, and his intervention can help people solve particular problems that have proven otherwise intractable. The knight-errant does not seek to destroy his society but to prick its feet and keep it from falling into complacency.

Max wanders the wasteland, a place where there is no civilization, no order. This is a low-trust setting, where no one really cares about anyone else. Narrow self-interest reigns alongside violence and terror. Max is a creature of this world, but he has a streak of civilization to him–the sense that you should care about people beyond yourself. He doesn’t care about the inherent dignity and rights of Man (and Woman … and Whatever); he doesn’t believe in compassion for compassion’s sake; he doesn’t so much as bat an eye at things like “law and order,” at least not anymore. It is only a little thing that distinguishes him from those around him, but that still allows him to save a few people from themselves.

(As an aside, if anyone claims that Mad Max is supposed to be a cautionary tale about overpopulation, nuclear war, and global warming, you can tell them that they’re missing the point. The futuristic realism of the setting is a conceit: in a future film, Max might be magically transported to Athas and that would change nothing of importance.)

Compare Max to another uncivilized hero near-and-dear to the hearts of many neoreactionaries: Conan the Cimmerian. Conan kills, rapes, and steals as the desire strikes him and prudence permits him; he has no respect for private property, law and order, or any authority beyond power. He has a barbaric code of honor that places great emphasis on personal ties and obligations, and while that code often makes him more admirable than his civilized antagonists, it is not sufficient to support a civilization.

Like Fury Road, the stories of Conan are straightforward action-adventures. We don’t read them for any kind of morality play but rather because we want to see a man facing adversity and triumphing through strength and cunning. When Conan strangles the tyrannical king of Aquilonia and seizes his throne, we are not supposed to take this as social commentary and definitely not supposed to go out and try our own hands at Hyborian rapine.

The value of Max and Conan, as well as heroes from James Bond to Luke Skywalker to Odysseus, is to exemplify various masculine virtues and to show us the great deeds that can be accomplished with them. Their stories inspire us to live out those same virtues; they teach us how to be men. This kind of instruction is badly needed these days.

Mad Max: Fury Road should be watched as an action-adventure film. There is no need for us to seek a deeper meaning to it. But if people want to see it as a morality play and to sing the praises of Furiosa, the strong, independent woman who still needs a man, we can explain how Joe was a benefactor to his people and that by destroying him, Furiosa has led them all to death and desolation. Normal people do not wish to live in the waste; they will recoil from these thoughts.

It’s just an action movie, you sick bastard! Sheesh!

After showing them that going forward leads to destruction and that survival requires taking society back to the place from whence we came, just walk away.

The post A Review Of Mad Max appeared first on Social Matter.