Chapter 2: Barbaric Civility

While nature does not have a sense of good and evil or moral and immoral acts, feedback from man’s conduct has led to a vocabulary that describes them. We call conduct “good” and “moral” when it leads to our well-being and “evil” and “immoral” when it leads to unhappiness. The Golden Rule1 and certain tenets of the Ten Commandments reflect the codification of millennia of observed relationships between conduct and consequences (i.e., feedback). Most significant is natural selection, which sculpts our brains (minds) and bodies with greater fitness given changing climates, available resources, and competing life-forms.

The fitness of our brains is suited to living in small groups of fifty or so, the condition that prevailed from the time hominids emerged some six million years ago to just a few millennia ago. As a result, when we interact with others in small groups, our instincts tell us — without much deliberation — that we can achieve our goals with less effort and conflict when the means to achieve them align with the Golden Rule. In a family, neighborhood, business relationship, or similar small group, most of us will instinctively use the principle of the Golden Rule as our guide. In small settings, people see acts of aggression against fellow humans as uncivil, yet many of them accept such behavior as civil conduct when applied to larger social groups.

Ironically, even those who are deeply entrenched in politics act quite civilly in their own social settings of family, friends, neighbors, and associates, but abandon such conduct when dealing with those outside their personal settings. The most politically minded person would never consider extorting funds from one neighbor to aid another, but will eagerly endorse every form of extortion when the enforcer and the victim are personally unknown. The most paradoxical of such dichotomous behavior is exhibited by those of religious faiths, who celebrate the godliness of brotherly love and condemn the sinfulness of theft and killing but nevertheless endorse the political state and its inherent nature of coercion, theft, and war.

Those who conduct themselves one way in a private setting while endorsing the opposite behavior in a public (political) setting don’t sense the dichotomy. In a public setting, they are mindful of the intent to solve problems and help others, but are totally unmindful of the uncivilized and destructive acts involved which they would clearly condemn in a private setting. The inability to sense the dichotomy between the abhorrent use of dicta and force in personal affairs and their advocacy in public affairs is unsurprising, considering the relentless political rhetoric that desensitizes our ability to discern the difference. We are awash in double-standard political jargon that manipulates our minds into transforming uncivil private behavior into civil public behavior. Moreover, we are taught to revere a constitution that authorizes those very intrusions into our lives we are told it was designed to prevent.

In political parlance, behavior depends on the actor, not the act. The same act that would land a private person in jail is praised when done by a so-called public one. The first actor is viewed as a criminal and the second a civil servant. Yet such an adopted double standard does not alter the negative effect on society from similar acts of conduct, irrespective of their source. Only individuals act: cities, states, and nations are incapable of doing so. Similar acts, whether by a private hoodlum or public servant, have similar social and economic consequences. Given that the use of force doesn’t work in the private sector, it will not work in the public sector either, regardless of whether someone is trying to reduce poverty, improve medical care, aid the needy, or render justice.

Why do people today have a deeply held conviction that slavery is inhumane and demeans the very essence of life, yet will condone and even enthusiastically endorse enslavement when the state is the master? To condemn a plantation owner for reaping the fruit of another man’s labor against his will, while commending the state for doing the same is an obvious contradictory stance, unless one considers slavery to be humane if given the “right master.” Slavery in any form is demeaning to life, and those who subordinate themselves to a ruling master — whether that master is a king, statesman, or plantation owner — demean their own lives in particular. This does not suggest that one should simply ignore the demands of a master or ruler, since the consequences of disobedience are often worse than those of obedience. However, obedience to a master or ruler does not imply that it is their due.

In time, the idea of a righteous political master will become an anachronism, as has a righteous slave master — not because of any concerted effort, but simply due to the futility of trying to suppress the human spirit with threats of punishment. As strange as it may be for people today to envision civil life outside the political box, their distant descendants will likely find the same strangeness in the idea of civil life within it.

Our inherent moral compass guides us toward volitional cooperation as a superior, self-serving means to enhance our personal well-being and, subsequently, social well-being. We instinctively sense the use of force as a risky and less rewarding means to well-being. This natural inclination toward cooperation and away from force tends to bring out the best behavior in people. In direct contrast, government authorities insist that dicta, obedience, and punishment are necessary to bring out the best behavior in people who, if left to their own volition, would become savages in a lawless society. There is abundant literature to dispel this notion which we will touch upon in chapters 6 and 8.

By demanding that every child attend school and by making so-called free public schools available, government authorities create a perpetual forum to indoctrinate the young as they proceed through their chambers, convinced that good citizenship means respect for political officials and obedience to their demands. Without this subtle mental conditioning, governments would be unable to maintain obedience to their dicta since brute force alone is too obvious, inefficient, and costly.
For the most part, all that is required to assess the beauty and wonderment of liberty and recognize the disutility of political dicta and force is common sense — a gift we inherited from our ancestors. We are not born with an empty slate, as John Locke suggested, but begin life with myriad built-in instincts and common sense that evolved through natural selection. Selfishness is the nature of life, and it drives us to acquire resources and secure mating opportunities in ways we perceive to be the most optimal. Nature’s culling by way of feedback slowly worked its way to favor our ancestors using cooperation in lieu of force as a more adaptive behavior for survival and propagation. That process continues, and recognizing it can help us see through the charade and disutility of political governments with their doctrine of punishment for disobedience to their dicta.

• 1At the British New Testament Conference in 2007, it was noted that most often in the literature of the early church, the Golden Rule appears in a negative form: “Don’t do unto others what you would not have them to do unto you.” The more common version today is in the positive form: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The positive version can be problematic because it implies that it would be acceptable for a person to meddle in the affairs of another provided the meddler would likewise appreciate the same thing done in return.