Tag: Politics

Gustave Le Bon: secular reactionary

Gustave Le Bon (1841- 1931) is among the most undeservedly neglected modern social writers. It is not hard to see why this is the case. Gustave Le Bon was not a religious man but he was skeptical of top-down social engineering and revolution. He relied heavily on biological concepts and firmly rejected the idea that human nature could be fundamentally changed by altering the social environment. He had a disdain for mass politics and democracy but also rejected scientific socialism and intrusive regulation. As a consequence, his ideas cannot easily be reconciled with traditional (religious) conservatism, socialism, or progressive liberalism.  The recent rise of interest in the Secular Right, the Alternative Right, and counter-modernism may change this sorry state of affairs. For example, an interesting article that contrasts Gustave Le Bon’s views on revolution with those of Albert Camus was recently published at the Brussels Journal website.

A selection of quotes from The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind will help the reader to get a basic understanding of Le Bon’s views:

On heredity and human nature:

Environment, circumstances, and events represent the social suggestions of the moment. They may have a considerable influence, but this influence is always momentary if it be contrary to the suggestions of the race; that is, to those which are inherited by a nation from the entire series of its ancestors…The biological sciences have been transformed since embryology has shown the immense influence of the past on the evolution of living beings; and the historical sciences will not undergo a less change when this conception has become more widespread. As yet it is not sufficiently general, and many statesmen are still no further advanced than the theorists of the last century, who believed that a society could break off with its past and be entirely recast on lines suggested solely by the light of reason.

On national identity and social institutions:

A nation does not choose its institutions at will any more than it chooses the colour of its hair or its eyes. Institutions and governments are the product of the race. They are not the creators of an epoch, but are created by it. Peoples are not governed in accordance with their caprices of the moment, but as their character determines that they shall be governed. Centuries are required to form a political system and centuries needed to change it. Institutions have no intrinsic virtue: in themselves they are neither good nor bad. Those which are good at a given moment for a given people may be harmful in the extreme for another nation.

On individuals and crowds:

…by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

On education and egalitarianism:

Foremost among the dominant ideas of the present epoch is to be found the notion that instruction is capable of considerably changing men, and has for its unfailing consequence to improve them and even to make them equal. By the mere fact of its being constantly repeated, this assertion has ended by becoming one of the most steadfast democratic dogmas. It would be as difficult now to attack it as it would have been formerly to have attacked the dogmas of the Church.

On religion, ideology, and fanaticism:

A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.

Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source.

On the sovereignty of crowds:

The dogma of the sovereignty of crowds is as little defensible, from the philosophical point of view, as the religious dogmas of the Middle Ages, but it enjoys at present the same absolute power they formerly enjoyed. It is as unattackable in consequence as in the past were our religious ideas…The dogma of universal suffrage possesses to-day the power the Christian dogmas formerly possessed. Orators and writers allude to it with a respect and adulation that never fell to the share of Louis XIV. In consequence the same position must be taken up with regard to it as with regard to all religious dogmas. Time alone can act upon them.

On politicians:

The general characteristics of crowds are to be met with in parliamentary assemblies: intellectual simplicity, irritability, suggestibility, the exaggeration of the sentiments and the preponderating influence of a few leaders…It is terrible at times to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige.

On government by experts:

All our political economists are highly educated, being for the most part professors or academicians, yet is there a single general question — protection, bimetallism– on which they have succeeded in agreeing? The explanation is that their science is only a very attenuated form of our universal ignorance. With regard to social problems, owing to the number of unknown quantities they offer, men are substantially, equally ignorant. In consequence, were the electorate solely composed of persons stuffed with sciences their votes would be no better than those emitted at present. They would be guided in the main by their sentiments and by party spirit. We should be spared none of the difficulties we now have to contend with, and we should certainly be subjected to the oppressive tyranny of castes.

On taxation and psychology:

…should a legislator, wishing to impose a new tax, choose that which would be theoretically the most just? By no means. In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses. Should it at the same time be the least obvious, and apparently the least burdensome, it will be the most easily tolerated. It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted by the crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions of a farthing on objects of consumption, it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest. This arises from the fact that a sum relatively high, which will appear immense, and will in consequence strike the imagination, has been substituted for the unperceived fractions of a farthing. The new tax would only appear light had it been saved farthing by farthing, but this economic proceeding involves an amount of foresight of which the masses are incapable.

On regulation, liberty and decline:

This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more than vain shadows, passive, unresisting and powerless automata.

Arrived at this point, the individual is bound to seek outside himself the forces he no longer finds within him. The functions of governments necessarily increase in proportion as the indifference and helplessness of the citizens grow. They it is who must necessarily exhibit the initiative, enterprising, and guiding spirit in which private persons are lacking. It falls on them to undertake everything, direct everything, and take everything under their protection. The State becomes an all-powerful god. Still experience shows that the power of such gods was never either very durable or very strong.

This progressive restriction of all liberties in the case of certain peoples, in spite of an outward license that gives them the illusion that these liberties are still in their possession, seems at least as much a consequence of their old age as of any particular system. It constitutes one of the precursory symptoms of that decadent phase which up to now no civilisation has escaped.

On elites, crowds and civilization:

Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture — all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which  hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.

NO

Experimental artist and writer Boyd Rice is often identified as a social darwinist or fascist. His recent collection, NO, with short entries on various subjects resists such simplistic feel-good accusations. If there is one common thread in this collection, it is his attempt to describe reality as it is, regardless of what people would like it to be. Like Jim Goad, he often takes aim at the self-congratulatory and delusional progressive underground culture and the empty rhetoric that masks the will to power:

If a despotic form of rule wanted to keep its populace in line, only the most foolish regime would tell its people: “Do as we say, or you’ll be punished.” No, the surest way is to inform them they’re free and equal. That they are all unique individuals.

On the idea that we have “rights”:

If rights are an inalienable bestowal upon us by the Creator, how could we be deprived of of them either by men or courts? Unless, of course, they are as much an abstraction as any of the other pillars of our contemporary consciousness, such as equality, individuality, or what have -have-you.

He has little patience for the “Dreadlocks sporting young “anarchist” who lives in his parent’s home in the suburbs”, “calls police fascists”, and thinks we are living in a “police state”:

Some fear the coming of a new police state. If so, current trends don’t portend such a situation. Quite the inverse, in fact. If things proceed along their current path, there may be exponentially more laws, none of which will ever be enforced to any meaningful extent.

As a matter of fact, the transformative nature of politics is greatly exaggerated by political junkies, left and right:

Those on either side of the fence are precisely similar in their almost childlike optimism about the political process, in their faith that it has the power to transfigure both our nation and our lives…Foolhardy men wish to change the world , as a precondition to changing their lives…Any attempt at exercising  control over the world is an exercise in futility. Exercising control over ones life is the simplest of matters. And the results it yields are both immediate and demonstrable.

Boyd Rice writes that “perhaps the rarest individual is one that is genuinely apolitical.”

NO is currently sold out but an expanded edition is forthcoming.

Common political fallacies

In Cato Journal, Volume 28, No. 1 (Winter 2008), the independent scholar Anthony de Jasay reviews four common fallacies (as presented in the works of John Stuart Mill, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Armen Alchian) that many social scientists and political journalists keep repeating without rigorous analysis.

The first fallacy is that production should be governed by the laws of economics, but that distribution needs to be decided by society. As de Jasay points out,

“Output is distributed while it is produced. Wage earners get some of it as wages in exchange for their efforts; owners of capital get some of it as interest and rent in exchange for past saving. Entrepreneurs get the residual as profit in exchange for organization and risk bearing. By the time the cake is “baked,” it is also sliced and those who played a part in baking it have all got their slices. No distributive decision is missing, left over for “society” to take.”

Although these slices can be distributed again by society, this will constitute a secondary redistribution, usually involving coercion.

The second fallacy is that the aim of public policy should not be equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity. Such “equality at the starting gate” assumes that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome can be separated. But unless opportunities are equalized at the point where acquired advantages are at a minimum (at birth), maximizing equality of opportunity would require stripping away the advantages people have acquired before the starting gate, and continuous intervention in outcomes to equalize opportunities between generations.

The third fallacy is that in a just society individuals must have a right to the greatest possible liberty compatible with the same liberty for all. As de Jasay has pointed out in detail in his writings, the proviso “compatible with the same for others” is meaningless because it is without substance. In its current form it means that I am at liberty to do anything I want (including violence and theft), provided others have the same liberty as well. Clearly, this is not what advocates of this position intended. More troubling to de Jasay is the fact that liberty is presented as a “right”:

“What is deeply worrying about this thoughtless misuse of the word “right” is that it can be straightened out at a single stroke by simply assuming that every feasible act is prohibited unless we are somehow granted a “right” to perform it, in which case it becomes a liberty. It takes a right to lift it out of the universe of prohibitions.”

The fourth fallacy is that society has a right to modify, transfer and revoke property because property rights are granted and defended by “society.” As has been discussed in the first fallacy about production and distribution, redistributing property would be tantamount to ignoring the fact that all who have helped to produce property have already been remunerated in the process. As in the case of a “right to liberty”, the “right to” part is redundant:

“Like all liberties, the kind we call property exists and is exercised within the rules that prohibit certain wrongs (torts). Staying as it does inside the rules, it needs no separate right to exist and be exercised. Nor does it make sense to think of an obligation imposed on all not to do against property what the rules prohibit them from doing anyway.”

Anthony de Jasay: Parrot Talk: The Repetition of Common Fallacies (PDF)

The politics of travel guides

In a politicized society one should not be surprised to find politics in the most undesirable places. One would not expect political bias in travel guides. After all, most travel guides are published to sell as many copies as possible and therefore need to be factual and “inclusive.” Strangely enough, most travel guide writers seem to interpret this mandate as a stamp of approval to show disdain for any developments in a country that are not deemed cosmopolitan enough. The social and political history chapters in travel guides are so predictable that it makes you wonder if all travel book writers work from the same template and just tweak the details for each individual country or city. In the worst travel guides, social history is political history and the only exception to this rule is the obligatory discussion of the protest generation, which is generally discussed in a favorable light as a form of enlightened protest against cultural oppression instead of the start of a power quest of a spoiled and entitlement-seeking generation.

In most travel books there is one specific phenomenon where all attempts to be neutral are consciously ignored. Most European countries have witnessed the rise of social movements and political parties that challenge the ethnic and cultural egalitarianism of the political class (the political class now being the “protest generation” discussed earlier). The associated parties are almost invariably designated as “far right,” “ultra right,” and “xenophobic.” Upon reflection, there is something strangely incoherent about the way in which such cultural and political movements are treated. Travel guide writers usually pay lip service to the importance of countries preserving and cultivating their traditions and strongly encourage tourists to respect those traditions as well. But at the same time, any cultural or political movement within those countries that seeks to preserve those same traditions through means such as restricting immigration or discouraging the practice of non-traditional religions are treated as a bunch of unenlightened neanderthals. Some writers must sense the incoherent nature of their perspective and resolve this by postulating that the essence of the country or city that they write about is its “tolerance “or “diversity.” What started out as a review of a region’s unique culture culminates in the idea that the essence of that culture is to welcome and celebrate its own demise.

At this point, one wonders if those writers really fail to understand that the simplistic self-congratulating cosmopolitanism that is implicit in their writings contributes to the very homogenization of culture that makes so many big cities in different parts of the world so culturally indistinguishable from one another.  The most amusing example of this phenomenon can be found in the discussion of  “diverse” neighborhoods. These high-crime, high-unemployment neighborhoods are invariably being praised for being “colorful,” “exciting,” and “innovating.” This sounds appealing until you discover that the descriptions of such neighborhoods are nearly identical, regardless of the city or country being reviewed.

It appears that most writers of travel books think that the identity of a country or region is simply the joint acceptance of a set of abstract cultural norms and folklore. Of course, in modern Western societies there is anything but the joint acceptance of cultural norms and practices. One does not have to be a rabid right winger to observe that you cannot just replace one group of people with another group of people and expect no effects on the culture and traditions of a city. Surely, one can claim that such a development is dynamic and that cities have always been vehicles of change. In this case, however, that change is not a spontaneously evolved response to new technological and cultural events of a people, but an authoritarian top-down engineered experiment of a self-righteous political class with cosmopolitan aspirations.

It may be too much to expect that travel guide writers and editors restrain their political biases, but surely, there must be something better than travel guides, where substantial segments of the native population of a country are pictured as ignorant buffoons and cosmopolitanism is celebrated as the country’s defining identity.

Is politics neutral?

One assumption that has greatly contributed to the growth of government is the belief that the practice of politics as such is ideologically neutral. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the most abstract level politics concerns the making of non-unanimous collective decisions. To endorse and participate in this practice undermines a strict interpretation of liberalism. Similarly, political democracy is not compatible with liberalism either. Is is therefore not surprising that the objective of classical liberalism/libertarianism is increasingly being recognized as the depoliticization of society.

At a more practical level politics is far from ideologically neutral either. The low probability of affecting the outcome encourages rational individuals to abstain from voting. After being elected to office, politicians are routinely accused of selling out and becoming part of the system. Considering the incentives elected politicians face this should not be surprising, but this aspect of politics is not neutral in terms of ideology either. When a limited government politician sells out, the result is invariably more government. But when a “liberal” politician sells out the result is  generally not less government  but  more opportunism, corporatism, and political calculation.  There are few examples of elected politicians reinventing themselves during office to pursue a less interventionist agenda but there are many examples of elected politicians betraying their small government rhetoric.  The typical conservative response is “this time is different.” There is little recognition among most conservatives and many libertarians that the practice of politics itself is biased towards undermining their goals.

Faced with a system that encourages  irrational behavior and that is biased towards the growth of government the only remaining  response for an advocate of strict liberalism is to sell his vote. Unfortunately, the selling of votes is not permitted. Such an obvious feature of democracy becomes a little more mysterious if one considers that  politicians routinely buy votes by promising certain segments of the population redistribution of taxable income. As Randall Holcombe writes:

While at first one might be uneasy about selling votes, it happens in Congress all the time.  Senators and Representatives will agree to support a bill only if it has some specific special interest benefit added to it, and often special interests pay for that support through campaign contributions or other payments to the legislator.  People take this for granted, as the way politics works.  If it is OK for elected officials to trade or sell their votes, it is not immediately apparent that ordinary citizens should be prevented from selling theirs.

Not voting is not much of a political “strategy.” From an individual perspective not voting is just as ineffective as voting. But there are not many “activities” that convey the core message of classical liberalism as clearly as not endorsing, or participating in, the political process.  When attempts are made to overcome the addiction to politics, more fruitful means to restore individual liberty can be explored.

Further reading:

The calculus of voting
The addiction to politics
Beyond politics