The Mainspring of Human Progress

Chapter 6

THE LIVING AUTHORITIES

The pagan may lose confidence in one particular kind of authority. When his faith begins to waver, he is more likely to change the name of the imaginary authority – or to assume that it controls everyone except himself – than to accept the nonpagan view that human beings are self-controlling. Old World minds have rarely doubted that they are controlled by some authority outside themselves; but down through the ages, they have become inclined to the belief that the authority resides in a human form – either a living god or some exalted person who, by reason of birth, ancestry, class, race, or color, is endowed with divine or supernatural attributes which make him the living embodiment of God.

The pharaohs of Egypt, the Roman emperors, and the Japanese mikados were believed to be gods in human form. Until 1911, the empress of China was a sacred being. The Tibetans still believe that God is incarnate in their Grand Lama. In 1776, Continental Europeans, South and Central Americans, and most North Americans believed that their kings were God’s appointed agents, ruling by divine right. As recently as the first World War, most Europeans and all Asiatics took it for granted that anyone of royal blood was endowed with divine qualities.

In all cases, such beliefs rest on the pagan superstition that the individual is not responsible for his acts; that he must depend on these superhuman persons who have both the right and the power to control the lives of people assumed to be their natural inferiors.

Whether the monarch is looked upon as a living god or as God’s personal agent, all property is at his disposal; and in practice, he bestows great wealth and the exercise of some authority on a few persons, who then form a superior class – nobles, samurai, aristocrats, bureaucratic ministers in control of this, that, and the other. Such men, headed by their emperor, their king, or their queen, are looked upon as the government.

Theory versus Practice

In theory, the change from ancient communism to an “omnipotent” living authority should not make much difference in the lives of the people; but in actual practice, it usually brings certain benefits. Those who rule by “divine right” are inclined to accept their inherited authority as a matter of course. Generally speaking, they do not have the ruthless ambition of the self-made dictator who rises to power in a collectivist society. And again generally speaking, they are not so remorselessly armed with the mystical self-righteousness of the “humanitarian with the guillotine.”

The superficialities of court life provide an outlet for royal energy that is less harmful, and far less expensive, than unintelligent meddling. The monarch does not live forever. He dies, and another monarch takes his place. Such interruptions, in contrast to the communistic state, are usually accompanied by changes in rules and regulations. The static routine is broken. Mystical fanaticism is reduced, and individual energy tends to assert itself to some degree.

So whenever and wherever any large number of persons has broken away from the changeless routine of ancient communism, their energies have worked a little, by fits and starts, to improve their living conditions.

For instance: During 60 centuries, human energy (already having the wheel) managed to get a cart onto two wheels and to attach knives to them in order to kill the subjects of their king’s enemy-king. Then, after a lapse that almost lost the wheel, human energy finally got a cart onto four wheels. But up to the time of George Washington, all the efforts of men to improve transportation had only been able to produce a coach – and only for the very rich. Gilded and supported on leather straps above four ironshod wheels, you may see it today in the carriage house at Mount Vernon.

Another instance: Three thousand years ago in Greece, men knew the principle of the steam engine. The Greeks spread their civilization over the known world after the Macedonians conquered it. Yet today on the Tigris and the Euphrates, men are still paddling logs hollowed out by fire or are drifting downstream in bowls of rawhide stretched on saplings. And from Baghdad, they walk back upstream for a thousand miles, just as American flatboatmen in colonial times used to walk back from New Orleans to Pittsburgh.

Another instance: For 40 centuries, men sailed boats. In addition to sails, the Phoenicians used oars. The Romans went a step further, using two or three banks of oars with slaves chained to each oar. Through overseers using whips, the captain had some control of the boat’s direction and speed. This questionable advance was lost, and Columbus sailed in ships dependent wholly on the winds. But by 1776, the French were again using the Roman galley system, with convicts chained to the oars.

Cause and Effect

The above are only a few examples illustrating that, under the living authorities, human energy has worked in jerks, so to speak. In any few hundred years of Old World history, we find a succession of convulsive efforts and collapses – as if a living thing were roped down and struggling.

That is precisely what was happening. Human energy could not get to work at its primary, natural job of producing and distributing the necessities of human life. Whenever men began to develop farming and crafts and trade, government stopped them.

Mind you, the government never intended to stop them; indeed, its honest aim was to help them. But the effect was the opposite, for the simple reason that efforts to help were based on the false notion that human energy and individual initiative can be directed and controlled through an overriding authority, using the brute force of military and police power.

Force and fear have their uses–we will come to that in a moment – but they are ineffective in stimulating ambition, initiative, creative effort, and perseverance. Threats of the concentration camp or the firing squad might make a man run a little faster or work a little harder – at least for a time – but fear reduces endurance and hastens fatigue. It also works at cross-purposes to mental development and moral growth. It depresses the higher nerve centers, and its continued use tends to paralyze the normal processes of thought.

Thus it is that slave labor has never been able to compete with free men in occupations requiring a high degree of initiative, resourcefulness, and persistence.

Furthermore, the unbridled use of arbitrary power, maintained through force and fear, always has a demoralizing and degenerating effect on those who use it. It breeds arrogance, intolerance, and sadism. Like the dope habit, it may start out innocently enough; but it feeds on itself, and things go from bad to worse. The more a person relies on it, the greater the temptation to increase the dose. Thus the “temporary” remedy becomes a pernicious habit, and it is almost impossible to turn back.

It is true that man has not yet attained the degree of intelligence which makes it possible to do away entirely with the use of force. When one man or a small group of men reverts to animal-like violence, decent people have only one choice: They must use force as a means of neutralizing the misuse of force.

Policemen are needed to deal with the occasional criminal, robber, or killer who hinders the constructive work of the majority. Where there is no police force, every man must be ready to defend himself and his property; and this takes time away from useful work.

Vigilance Committee

In the pioneer days of our own wild West, each man carried a gun. The need for force was rare, and few of them ever shot anybody. But everyone had to be armed and ready, on the off-chance that he might have to shoot it out with a “bad man.”

Being normal men, they did not like to lug guns around; they wanted to get on with their natural jobs – clearing land, planting crops, raising cattle, drilling oil wells, building towns. To do their work in security and peace, they had to get rid of the outlaw. So when emergencies arose, they would organize themselves into a vigilance committee, go after the outlaw, and string him up. They did this clear across the continent, from the Yadkin to the Rio Grande, the Golden Gate, and the Columbia.

Although the vigilance committee was created by honest citizens as a means of stopping thieves and murderers, it sometimes resulted in gangsterism. The right-thinking members were inclined to drop out as soon as the emergency was over because no right-thinking person likes the idea of killing a fellow man. But the less scrupulous would stay in; and once having broken the bond of human kinship that protects men from violence against each other, some of them became killers. Thus, it frequently happened that the vigilance committee degenerated into a group of lawless gangsters, and the situation was worse than before.*

Orderly Solution

So it was only natural that peaceful men should organize a legal force to make a regular job of preserving law and order. They selected a few of their number and said to them, in effect: “You keep the peace. Sheriff, you carry the gun for all of us from now on. You, Judge, call on 12 of us to decide what to do with any ‘bad man’ that the sheriff catches alive. It’s your job to preserve law and order so that the rest of us can get our work done without interference. You give your whole time to it, and we’ll supply you with food, shelter, and other necessities.”

That is a good example of government stripped to its bare essentials. It is a justifiable use of force because it increases the general well-being and the productive output of normal citizens by enabling them to use their energies to the best advantage, without interference.

Moral versus Legal

Human energy cannot operate effectively except when men are free to act and to be responsible for their actions. But liberty does not mean license; for no one has a right to infringe upon the rights of others. Certain restraints are necessary, and they are provided in two ways:

1. Legal restraints – the passing of laws to be administered by governmental agencies and enforced by police power.

2. Moral restraints – which depend on individual self-discipline, logical reasoning, good sportsmanship, and a consideration for the rights of others.

Legal restraints, as already pointed out, are useful in curbing activities which are clearly injurious and which are generally recognized as being opposed to the best interests of all decent people. But legal restraints are inadequate when we get over into the area of questionable practices which cannot be sharply defined, or which are not easily detected, or which are not generally disapproved.

It’s easy to say “Let’s settle this or that by passing a law.” But laws on the statute books can never be an adequate substitute for moral restraint based on enlightened self-interest – which means a recognition of one’s duties as well as of one’s rights.

The extension of laws into areas where they cannot be enforced does more harm than good:

1. It takes emphasis away from personal responsibility and promotes the dangerous notion that legalized force can be used as a substitute for self-control and individual morality.

2. It increases red tape and government overhead, without accomplishing the intended result.

3. It weakens respect for the really necessary laws.

4. Law observance breaks down, and remedy is sought in bolstering the penalties and in passing additional laws.

5. Along with it all, the administrative and enforcement facilities are further increased, which means taking more and more people away from productive work.

Any attempt to give to government the responsibilities which properly belong to the individual citizens works at cross-purposes to the advancement of personal freedom. It retards progress – morally as well as along the lines of greater productivity. Look at it from any angle you please, but there’s no escaping the conclusion that moral restraints are more efficient than legal restraints – which, incidentally, is just another way of saying that honesty and decency are profitable.

Right here the objection may be raised that “to depend on moral restraints calls for quite a change in human behavior.” I won’t attempt to argue the point – except to say that changes and further improvements in the direction of enlightened self-interest and personal responsibility are not nearly so difficult to attain as the unnatural changes that are advocated by those who would repress individual development and reduce human beings to the status of the beehive.

Progress lies in working in harmony with the fundamental nature of man, not in reverting to the pagan superstition which, for over 6,000 years, has suppressed individual initiative and kept human energy in a strait jacket.

Regimentation

In modern times, this pagan superstition is known by the persuasive name planned economy, which is nothing more than a weasel word for socialism or communism or fascism. Call it anything you please, but it is still the pagan concept, based on a misunderstanding of human energy. It is an attempt to make a static world in a dynamic and changing universe. It is an attempt to make the gasoline engine run on steam or the steam engine run on gasoline. In brief, it is an attempt to do the impossible.

It is difficult for Americans to understand the stagnating effects of regimentation and how it leads to greater and greater oppressions. It is generally outside the range of our experience because we have lived in a new kind of world where human energy and initiative have usually worked under the natural control of the individual – which is the only way that they can ever work effectively.

For 160 years, during the greatest demonstration of progress that the world has ever known, each American has been mostly free to decide for himself how to earn money and whether to save or spend it; whether to go to school or go to work; whether to stick to his job or leave it and get another – or go into business on his own; whether to plant cotton or corn; whether to rent or buy or build a house; how much he would, or would not, pay for à shirt or a car; and what he would take for the Jersey calf or the old jalopy.