Dr. Roche, who has taught history and philosophy at the Colorado School of Mines, now is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education.
Such concepts as humanity, mankind, society, or nation are all modern in their origin. Ancient and medieval men tended to view man as an individual unit. They usually thought of larger collections of men as being merely larger numbers of single individuals. Thus, such words as mankind or society did not, until modern times, convey a difference in meaning, but instead implied only a difference in quantity. It is instructive that our modern patterns of thought now give such words as society or humanity or nation a new meaning, no longer connected directly with the concept of the individual.
What modern society seems to have forgotten, in the words of Frank Chodorov, is that, “Society are people.” Within the traditional Western framework of Natural Law, our forebears have generally recognized a realm of spiritual value, beyond the laws of natural science and beyond the trappings of society. It is this recognition of the spiritual dignity of the individual person which gave birth to the concept that each individual had certain rights which no other man or collection of men would be justified in violating.
Modern society, acting in the name of “the people,” has been increasingly willing to override such guarantees of individual freedom. In the process, absolute power has steadily replaced absolute rights:
Having agreed that the majority should prescribe rules which we will obey in pursuit of our individual aims, we find ourselves more and more subjected to the orders and the arbitrary will of its agents. Significantly enough, we find not only that most of the supporters of unlimited democracy soon become defenders of arbitrariness and of the view that we should trust experts to decide what is good for the community, but that the most enthusiastic supporters of such unlimited powers of the majority are often those very administrators who know best that, once such powers are assumed, it will be they and not the majority who will in fact exercise them.1
Just as it is true that the fate of a book is dependent upon the reader, it is equally and painfully correct that the meaning of a political idea stems from the group which appropriates it. The meaning given to “democracy” and the application of the tremendous power unleashed by the new definition of “popular rule” have paved the way toward an exercise of power never dreamt of before modern times. Yet, 50 to 75 years ago, those most enthusiastic concerning modern democracy believed that all dangers from power were past, since the power of the future, represented by the concentrated power of the modern state, was to be used only in the advancement of the material interest of the common man.
State and Society
Some astute observers, such men as Nietzsche and Burckhardt, were warning as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century of the dangers stemming from the new mass-man and the new mass-state. Social critics of our own time, of the stature of Wilhelm Roepke and Ortega y Gasset, have pointed to more and more signs of the dangers inherent in the centralized modern state. Meanwhile, the consolidation of power in the new dispensation has steadily advanced:
The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between State and Society, conceptually or institutionally. The State is Society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education, communications, and all things coming under the head of “the pursuit of happiness.” In theory, taking college textbooks on economics and political science for authority, the integration is about as complete as words can make it. In the operation of human affairs, despite the fact that lip service is rendered the concept of inherent personal rights, the tendency to call upon the State for the solution of all the problems of life shows how far we have abandoned the doctrine of rights, with its correlative of self-reliance, and have accepted the State as the reality of Society.²
Such a system gives far too little to man’s freedom or personality. The state swallows the individual. Even if such centralization were efficient in the satisfaction of human wants, which it is not, the means used to achieve the end would still be unacceptable simply because they are incompatible with human freedom.
Even more dangerous, perhaps, is the risk that the very concept of freedom itself can become so misused and distorted within such a society that no individual dare lay claim to any rights or dignity having a higher source than the society in which he lives. At that moment, the guarantees developed by Western civilization to protect the individual from the arbitrary exercise of power have in effect all been swept away, no matter what label that society might give itself.
Once such checks upon the exercise of power have been removed, all the internal vitality and freedom within such a society are open to destruction in the name of “order.” Soon the preservation of “order” or the pursuit of the “greatest social good” is identified with whatever action the wielder of centralized power deems suitable. Resistance against the exercise of such power comes to be viewed by society not as an expression of human individuality and free choice, but as an assault upon the public good, a crime of the selfish individual against the selfless community.
The Authoritarian Personality
A new type of personality soon comes to the forefront in such a society. Many who would tend to go largely unnoticed in a freely competing society soon begin to exercise centralized power to invade the market place and the private sector in an attempt to manipulate individual decisions to achieve “social goals.” In a society in which officials wield such tremendous power, they come to occupy a larger and larger place in the public eye and in their own self-esteem.
The exercise of power thus becomes a gratifying and expansive experience. The wielder invariably flatters himself that he is undertaking a tremendous burden “for the good of” those over whom he exercises power. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor, who felt he had taken upon himself “the curse of the knowledge of good and evil” to achieve the happiness of “thousands of millions of happy babes” has been re-enacted time and again throughout human history, with ever-increasing frequency in our age. Such wielders of power soon lose themselves in their dedication to “service,” forgetting their underlying motivation of self-aggrandizement. In all probability, Napoleon was sincere in his famous remark to Caulaincourt, “People are wrong in thinking me ambitious — I am touched by the misfortunes of peoples; I want them to be happy and, if I live ten years, the French will be happy.”
Further, the manner in which the modern state opens the exercise of power to men of ambition from various walks of life tends to make the exercise of that power and, indeed, its further extension, all the more acceptable to the mass of people. In the older era of kings and aristocrats, few men had the slightest hope of achieving a share of power. But in a modern society in which any man is a potential wielder of power, many who should and perhaps do know better will still allow the exercise and extension of power on the assumption that they themselves are capable of wielding such devastating and corrupting force. It is from this complicity in the crime of power that modern democracy especially suffers, since so many among us believe that to achieve the good society we need only “throw the rascals out” and replace them with “good men,” men who would wield power properly.
The Intellectual
One of the groups within society especially at fault in the encouragement of the accumulation and exercise of power has been the “intellectual.” Seldom has the case been stated more clearly than by the distinguished journalist, George S. Schuyler:
It unfortunately has become fashionable for the artist in modern society to quibble over this issue of freedom. He says on the one hand that he prefers a society which emphasizes physical security for all (which necessitates in technological civilization a degree of regimentation which endangers freedom). At the same time he properly wants a society where he is free to write, paint, and compose as he wills. He fails to recognize that the artist is so influenced by the society of which he is part, that he cannot remain free when all else is controlled.
The error of the intellectuals of the West for the past two centuries has been advocating a society actually slavish but paraded as freedom. This means, then, that along with free art (and indeed the very basis for it) must be free political institutions, free economic enterprises, and a society free of onerous restrictions.
The tragedy of so many intellectuals in the contemporary world is that while opposing extreme forms of totalitarianism, they are themselves half-totalitarian; that is to say, they express a desire for a society which is half-controlled, half-regimented, half-planned, part capitalist, and part socialist. This strange hybrid they will find (indeed, have found) to be a Frankenstein monster which, ironically, they have a great responsibility for creating.³
Unchecked Power
However the centralization of power may have come about, its existence and its exercise are painful realities in our society. The unchecked power of labor unions, backed by coercive political legislation, has been used against private property, the general public, and, above all, the union members themselves. The ill-concealed pressures exerted by centralized power through the large and growing numbers of regulatory agencies and “administrative” legal decisions have left private property and the businessman literally at the mercy of forces beyond either his comprehension or his control. The levels of taxation within our society closely circumscribe the range of choice for the individual citizen in the disposal and use of his property. The end result of the use of power is always the same: curtailment of individual and social freedom of choice.
Examples of unchecked power infringing upon the private sector and the individual within our own society could be multiplied almost indefinitely. How does it happen that such extensions of power and curtailments of liberty have taken place with little or no public outcry? The answer is a painful one for the friends of man: most people are unaware of liberty and its benefits. Indeed, if the loss of freedom and the expansion of power is sufficiently gradual, it seems that the citizens will not rise in protest. The conversion of the private sector into the public sector, of the individual’s power to make decisions into the state’s power to coerce decisions, has proceeded more gradually here than in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the Fascist experiments of Italy and Germany. Yet, such accumulation of power and attrition of liberty, however unspectacular its progress, has been under way in this nation.
The process whereby power has come to dominate our society was outlined well over 100 years ago in Alexis de Tocqueville’s oft-quoted warning:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus, it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successfully taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.4
Acceptable Power?
As the state thus accumulates all power unto itself and increasingly absorbs the private and the individual sector, a tendency to acquiesce in the situation seems to develop among the people. We can see this process at work in our own society in the tendency of each new generation to accept an ever-widening area of governmental involvement in the lives of its citizens. Today’s young people are willing to accept displays of governmental power which were anathema to the young people of thirty years ago and were absolutely unknown to the young people of sixty years ago. As the state accumulates this power, it tends to rationalize its position, using its newly acquired controls as a tool by which the “social benefits” of the new order are advertised.
There are occasional outbursts of protest as this process develops. Even many of the advocates of centralized authority are currently alarmed about the dangers implicit in the new Federal Data Center. They recognize that a Federal government with a computerized source of complete information concerning every citizen is indeed a potentially powerful agency, but they are really only complaining about an increased governmental efficiency. Whether or not the material was gathered in a single place, and whether or not it was computerized, the fact is that the central government has long had such information available to it. In effect, many advocates of enlarged governmental powers are now complaining because the government appears closer to the exercise of those powers.
The Growth of Power
What sort of a centralized apparatus has grown up for the exercise of this new power? In the 89th Congress alone the extension of “domestic aid” programs was fantastic: James Reston has reported “twenty-one new health programs, seventeen new educational programs, fifteen new economic development programs, twelve new programs for the cities, seventeen new resource development programs, and four new manpower training programs” (New York Times, Nov. 22, 1966). In this single area of “domestic aid” programs, these new additions contribute to some startling totals: some 170 Federal aid programs currently enacted into law, financed by over 400 separate appropriations within the Federal budget, administered by 21 separate Federal departments and agencies, assisted by over 150 Washington bureaus and over 400 regional offices. Power? Yes, indeed! Multiply these statistics by the other areas of government intervention in taxation, in land ownership, and in its far-flung regulatory activity, controlling our business, communications, food supply, money supply, transportation, housing, and nearly every other aspect of our lives, then add the additional forays proposed into our educational system and virtually every other area of the private sector, and you have a formula for total political control.
The result? As Samuel Lubellhas phrased it in The Future of American Politics:
The expansion of government to its present scale has politicalized virtually all economic life. The wages being paid most workers today are political wages, reflecting political pressures rather than anything that might be considered the normal workings of supply and demand. The prices farmers receive are political prices. The profits business is earning are political profits. The savings people hold have become political savings, since their real value is subject to abrupt depreciation by political decisions.
What are the prospects for freedom within such a totally politicalized society? The unlimited power of coercion present in a society so tightly tied in economic bonds has been plainly stated by one of the modern theorists of the total state, Leon Trotsky: “In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”
The threat to liberty produced by Tocqueville’s predicted “enervation” and Belloc’s “Servile State,” because of the insidious quality of such gradualist, ameliorative, “humanitarian” regimes, may be most dangerous of all.
Liberty is increasingly weighed in the balance against equality and is found wanting by those who offer themselves as “friends of the people.” One of these advocates of the new order, Gunnar Myrdal, has written in An American Dilemma:
In society liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for others… In America… liberty often provided an opportunity for the stronger to rob the weaker. Against this, the equalitarianism in the (American) Creed has been persistently revolting. The struggle is far from ended. The reason why American liberty was not more dangerous to equality [in the early days of the nation] was, of course, the open frontier and the free land. When opportunity became bounded in the last generation, the inherent conflict between equality and liberty flared up. Equality is slowly winning….
Absolute Power
Power becomes absolute when it becomes the agency through which society chooses to solve its problems. There are many signsthat such a choice has been made in our own society. Not only has the accumulation of power proceeded dangerously far in our governmental structure, but, perhaps far more dangerous, the rationale justifying that accumulation of power has made great progress among the individuals composing our society.
What is in store for a society in which power has become so centralized?
The social hierarchy is in ruins; the individual members are like peas shelled from their pods and form a numerical whole composed of equal elements. The state is the beginning and end of organization; it must apply itself to the task with the highest degree of authority and attention to detail. But is that to say that there are no longer any privileged persons? There are indeed; but as regards the state they are no longer privileged as men, preceding its authority. They hold their privileges in and from the state.5
Such a centralized authority soon comes to take upon itself the power of totally reordering society. The concept of law is stripped of a higher meaning and utilized as an enabling act for the achievement of that total reordering of society. To do all, power must be master of all.
Soon such a state recognizes no authority beyond itself. All functions, public and private, all actions, no matter how individual, are subject to mass control as a part of the exercise of total power.
Such is totalitarianism in its essence. It is not merely an oppressive regime; indeed, in principle, it does not have to be particularly oppressive at all, at least not to large sections of the population. What is involved is something much more fundamental. The old-fashioned despot demanded obedience, taxes, and manpower for his armies. The totalitarian regime wants much more: “It’s your souls they want,” as someone once put it, referring to the Nazis. It’s total possession of the whole man they want; and they will brook no rivals in engaging man’s loyalties, hopes, and affections.6
The New “Individual”
The living man, the individual with a source of dignity which earlier societies had viewed as transcending the state, is scheduled to have his creative capacities, his dignity, and his personality sacrificed to the new abstraction of collective power. Bureaucracy and the statistical evaluation of mass-man become the new means of social sacrifice, making burning at the stake appear inefficient by comparison.
What Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor achieved through authority and mystery, the scientists of Huxley’s Brave New World achieved through scientific control of life forms. More recently, in Skinner’s Walden Two, behavioral psychology updates the latest vision of the controlled society, suggesting that, with sufficient conditioning, the individual will be so free of frustration or the necessity of decision as to be finally free of the responsibilities of freedom. The new society which has arisen in conjunction with the modern centralization of power has brought with it the tools of mass-conditioning necessary to bring about such a perverted view of “freedom.”
Does Power Truly Corrupt?
Even while such concentrations of power and such a conditioning process rob the individual citizen of his liberty, thus destroying the individual’s creative capacity and in effect penalizing both the individual and his society, the greatest corruptions of all are likely to occur in the very institutions and men called upon to exercise this vast new power. The subjection of other men’s wills to a man’s purposes, no matter how well intended, is even more dangerous to the power wielder than to those over whom the power is exercised. Coercion begets coercion, producing a greater and greater necessity for the application of centralized power in society since it simultaneously disrupts the private sector and justifies its own extension to solve the problems stemming from those disruptions. A man cannot stoop to using coercion against another man without allowing the corrupting influences of that power to work its corruption upon him. However politically necessary such interventions into the private sector of society may appear to the ardent collectivist, the potential wielder of such power must first of all make an ethical choice to violate the decision-making dignity of another individual, thus arrogating power to himself over the lives of others in an ethical area where individual conscience should be supreme.
A power-oriented society tends to become more and more monolithic, producing an enmassment which removes all decision-making further from the individual citizen. Such a society produces a citizenry which tends to regard the technical and social achievements which it sees around it as something stemming from the exercise of centralized power, rather than from the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals. At that point, the mass-man comes to identify himself with the state and becomes as corrupted by power as those who themselves exercise that power. In such a society, so completely divorced from the creative capacity of the individual, the way is paved for a social decline of great magnitude.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself.7
The Destruction of Society
Once Natural Law and a decentralized society are no longer accepted as the bulwarks of the private sector, soon power, appetite, and will begin to find every area of society a proper sphere for a further extension of coercive authority. Intervention is piled upon intervention and power both encourages and feeds upon the strife between factions of society as they struggle to prosper through the intervention of power in favor of their particular group. As the exercise of coercive power grows steadily greater and steadily more damaging to society, the strife between factions to benefit from the exercise of that power becomes equally destructive to the fabric of a true society. Thus, the exercise of power is in the last analysis antisocial, destroying the society in which it occurs.
The individual citizen within such a society, already stripped of any higher dignity which does not emanate from the state, is offered an illusory social welfare, the promise of better things to come, for his acquiescence in the new system. All man’s ills are now to be solved by the passage of the proper law, by the proper use of coercive power.
Irresponsibility
Such a society, abandoning individual dignity and responsibility for self in return for the promises of the new collective ethic, tends to breed a new form of social being. If the individual is not responsible for self, then a society formed of such individuals is also not responsible. The way has been paved for a new ethic of total irresponsibility on the part of individual members of that society.
Surely we witness the results of such thinking in our own time. Every conceivable crime and failure in our society is attributed not to the individual but to some failure or another of society to care properly for the individual.
With Dr. Johnson, we might admit, “We cannot pry into the hearts of men, but their actions are open to observation.” Surely the observation of an increasing number of the actions of men in our time would indicate some failing in their innermost being. The statistics are distressing: Crimes against property have increased (relative to population) by over 300 per cent in the past twenty years. Crimes against persons have doubled in the same period of time. Even these alarming statistics do not reflect the wide acceptance of public immorality in areas not categorized as crime. The subsidized illegitimacy of the Aid to Dependent Children program or the wide acceptance of cheating on so many college campuses are only two of many such symptoms of moral decline.
The steadily growing trend toward moral failure seems to advance at the same rate as the older ideal of self-responsibility continues to decline:
The American has never been a perfect instrument, but at one time he had a reputation for gallantry, which, to my mind, is a sweet and priceless quality. It must still exist, but it is blotted out by the dustcloud of self-pity. The last clear statement of gallantry in my experience I heard in a recidivist state prison, a place for two-time losers, all lifers. In the yard an old and hopeless convict spoke as follows: “The kids come up here and they bawl how they wasn’t guilty or how they was framed or how it was their mother’s fault or their father was a drunk. Us old boys try to tell them, Kid, for Christ’s sake, do your own time. Let us do ours.” In the present climate of whining self-pity, of practiced sickness, of professional goldbricking, of screaming charges about whose fault it is, one hears of very few who do their own time, who take their own rap and don’t spread it around. It is as though the quality of responsibility had atrophied.8
Something of such disastrous social results was predicted over 100 years ago by the British historian, Lord Macauley, when he warned that the twentieth century would be as disastrous for America as the fifth century had been for the Roman Empire, with the difference that the Huns and Vandals who had destroyed the Roman Empire had come from outside the system, while America’s Huns and Vandals would be engendered within the American system by our own institutions.
Generation of Zeros?
As self-responsibility within our society has atrophied, what sort of a nation have we become? One social critic, Philip Wylie, has developed the idea that we are becoming a nation of nonpersons, engaging in “nothing education,” “nothing readership,” “nothing citizenship,” “nothing art,” and “nothing music.” He describes our society as a “generation of zeros,” produced by an educational system which avoids the creation of any “trauma” for the individual student, from which all competition, all discipline, and all possibility of low grades have been removed from the student’s path. He cites television as the creator of a generation of nothing readers. He cites the current student population who all too often are for nothing and who often assume no role or responsibility in their society except that of criticism and nihilism as nothing citizens and eventually nothing persons. He finds the total absence of creativity in much of modern art as a demonstration of nothing art and levels much the same charge against modern music. He cites the noninvolvement of the members of our society, people who are unwilling in case after case to offer aid or even call the police in times of crisis, as for example in the Kew Gardens, N. Y. murder of a woman, witnessed by some thirty-eight people who did not want to become “involved.”9
Thus the history of unrestricted power is again borne out. When the centralized power of the state reaches a certain point of concentration, the society it governs will tend to disintegrate. Individual action, the spark of creativity, and human charity, all decline as the exercise of power becomes the dominant solution to all problems. Voluntary human action is increasingly destroyed in preference for coerced human action.
Yes, power does corrupt, a fact amply borne out by the Bobby Bakers who increasingly inhabit the seats of power. Yet such men are nothing more or less than a mirror held up to the citizenry of America, a mirror all too graphically depicting the moral decay of our society. Professor Ortega y Gasset has predicted the final result of such decay:
The result of this tendency will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.¹º
The next article, concluding this series, will concern the prospects for dealing with the threat of power.
—FOOTNOTES—
1 F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 116.
2 Frank Chodorov, The Rise and Fall of Society (New York: Devin-Adair, 1959), pp. xix – xx.
3 George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1966), pp. 319-320.
4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., Vintage Books, 1958), Vol. II, pp. 336-337.
5 Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949), p. 175.
6 Will Herberg, “Christian Faith and Totalitarian Rule,” Modern Age, Winter, 1966-67, p. 69.
7 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene 3.
8 John Steinbeck, “America, Where Are You?” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 20, 1966
9 Philip Wylie, “Generation of Zeros,” This Week Magazine, Feb. 5, 1967.
10 Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Publishers, 1946), p. 151.
