The Wizards of Ozymandias

I continue to receive responses from readers who cannot understand why I do not have a “what can we do?” answer to the problems that beset not only America, but the entire world. There is a sad, childlike quality to many of these e-mails, as though there were some authority figure—be it a politician or a writer—who could offer a magic solution to any difficulty. When I suggest to them that there is nothing that anyone “in authority” can do to change any of this, and that the only change that can begin to correct our present course is to be found within their own thinking, their shattered confidence in me to offer yet another “bold new program” turns to frustration and anger. We have for so long abdicated individual responsibility for the direction of our lives, that any suggestion that it is now timely to reclaim it meets with cries of contempt.

For those who have not yet gotten the message that our present condition is beyond institutional repair, and that civilization itself has run out of “solutions” to the problems it has created and is now in a state of collapse, you might wish to consider the warnings of a top CIA official. In an address at Duke University on April 11, 2002, CIA Deputy Director for Operations, James Pavitt, declared: “Now for the hard truth. Despite the best efforts of so much of the world, the next terrorist attack—it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”1 Even though, today, his agency has “more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA,” Pavitt noted that “with so many possible targets and an enemy more than willing to die, the perfect defense isn’t possible.” To his credit, he added that increased counter-terrorism measures would require the sacrifice of so many liberties as to turn America into a system “not worth defending.”

Pavitt’s words confirm one of the central theses of “chaos” theory: complex systems are too unpredictable to be controlled in furtherance of a given objective. This is why the Soviet Union and other systems of pervasive state planning have either collapsed or are in a state of disrepair. When this man declared “we in the government of the United States could (sic) neither prevent or precisely predict the devastating tragedy of the September 11th attacks”2 he was, knowingly or not, confirming the irrelevance of the state in a complex world.

There you have it, from someone at the top of the political food-chain: short of turning America into the kind of vicious police-state so familiar to KGB and SS operatives of the past, there is nothing that the most powerful nation-state in the history of the world can do to prevent more attacks such as occurred on September 11th. Out of respect for this man’s candor, please do not deluge him with e-mails berating his stance. Take his words as yet another wakeup call to your own sense of responsibility. You and I are the only persons who can bring about any fundamental changes in the butcherous madness that now besets our world. And our only means of doing so requires you and me to go deep within our own thinking, in order to identify—and discard—the divisive, conflict-ridden, and destructive assumptions whose ancestral voices we continue to channel.

Each of us must learn to energize our minds, to give up our habits of passively recycling the lies that are told us—as well as the truths that are withheld—by institutional voices. We must cease the practice of allowing others to formulate what should be our questions, heeding the warning of Andre Malraux: “[A] civilization can be defined at once by the basic questions it asks and by those it does not ask.”3 We must also give up our eagerness for quick and easy answers—which any sharpie is well-equipped to provide—recalling the words of Milton Mayer: “the questions that can be answered are not worth asking.”4 In short, each one of us must pursue what we most dread in this world: our own sense of responsibility.

The apparatus of the state has neither the capability nor the inclination to protect any of your interests. To the contrary, you are expected to provide the means—including your very lives—in order to protect the state. This is why wars have always increased the powers of political systems as they diminish individual liberties. The state is as dependent upon wars as orthodontists are on overbites, or lawyers are on disputes, or physicians and nurses are on illness.

While the ostensible enemy is always portrayed as faceless “others,” in reality every war is conducted by the state against its own citizenry. If you doubt this, ask yourself these questions: whose liberties have been more greatly curtailed since September 11th, members of al-Qaeda or yours? Whose belongings are being searched at airports and other public buildings; whose telephone, computer, credit card, medical, bank, and employment records are being monitored: terrorist operatives or yours? Whose taxes will be increased and whose children will be called upon to die in this eternal war: leaders of the Islamic Jihad or yours? And who does the state have in mind as the object of a current federal bill to require driver’s licenses to contain computer chip records of the details of your life: Saddam Hussein or you?

If you have not already figured out the essential nature of the state, it is time for you to do so. Every political system is a racket, run by and for the benefit of the most disreputable people in any society, and employing those methods that, to any decent folk, represent the lowest qualities in human behavior. Lying, threatening, coercing, killing, corrupting, deceiving, are such common characteristics in political life that we scarcely comment upon it anymore. And yet, if your child grew up exhibiting such traits, you would rightfully regard yourself as a parental failure!

Government schools have conditioned us in the belief, long ago stated by Thomas Hobbes, that without the direction and supervision of the state, our lives would be “nasty, brutish and short.”5 Might this man have been doing anything more than projecting onto all of mankind his own “dark side” fears? How is it even conceivable that a society organized not around the political principles of monopolistic violence, but of voluntary cooperation and exchange, could begin to match the dehumanizing horrors that define the history of states? Might the surviving victims of the massive bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo, London, Hamburg, Wurzburg, Vietnam, Iraq, to mention the more familiar examples, have anything to tell us about Hobbes’s delusions? Might any of them raise the question unasked by this dystopian speculator, namely, what individuals—not enjoying the collective power to forcibly direct the lives or exploit the wealth of others—would have either the capacity or incentive to produce the weapons, prisons, torture facilities, or other dehumanizing and life-destroying tools? The trillions upon trillions of dollars necessary for such a system would depend upon practices that could only reduce mankind to the dreary image foreseen by Hobbes.

We have been told that, while we are incapable of managing our own lives, we are capable of electing wise leaders to do this for us! We have learned how to recite all of our socio-political catechisms with nary a glitch in meter. We laugh at notions of “political correctness,” not realizing that the joke is on us: our minds have become little more than a mélange of contradictory beliefs and bromides about the necessity for the political domination of our lives. How many among us, while chortling over some bureaucratic nonsense, are prepared to admit to the absurdity of all of politics? “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a story that every parent should not only read to his or her children, but should discuss with them its significance.

The “War on Terror” is the clearest expression of the failure of the state to foster a harmonious and orderly society. Having a diminished appeal to the minds and souls of increasing numbers of people, the American state has had to resort to ubiquitous fear and violence in an effort to sustain its authority. In so doing, it has revealed its own terrorist inclinations, the “dark side” of its character that it prefers to project onto others.

There are many otherwise intelligent people declaring that the attacks of September 11th were occasioned not by policies and practices of the United States government, but by some combination of “evil,” petulance, and cultural envy! According to this view, some dozen and a half “terrorists” carefully plotted and carried out the destruction of the World Trade Center—knowing full well that they were going to be killed in the process—for no other reason than resentment of the fact that we have MTV and Calvin Klein jeans and women who can go out into public without being covered by a tent. In the end, their sandbox syllogism comes down to nothing more than this: “we” are “good,” but “they” are “evil.”

These same babblers are quick to condemn any who would doubt the validity of the party line. To suggest that these attacks were brought on by American government policies, they intone, is to justify them; a proposition reflecting not only an intellectual bankruptcy, but their ignorance of Newton’s “third law of motion” (i.e., that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction). The men and women who died in the WTC collapse no more “deserved” to die than did those killed by an earthquake or tornado. If one is to speak intelligently about such matters, he or she ought to have proper respect for distinctions between causation and justification.

But intellectual clarity is not what these apologists for statism have in mind. I suspect that they are aware of the deeper implications these attacks have for the future of the state. The order and liberty that most people have been conditioned to expect from hierarchically structured political systems has been called into grave doubt by a handful of men armed only with box-cutters. Many of those who had been trained to believe that an all-powerful state could protect them from any threat, are now beginning to ask the sorts of questions left behind on government school playgrounds.

Having just completed a century that witnessed the state-caused deaths of some 200 million human beings in wars and genocidal practices; and having become aware of how politicians have manipulated wars and other crises in order to advance state powers, many of us have been looking elsewhere for the peace, liberty, and order that is not to be found in political systems. But to the statists, such inquiries are to be discouraged. And so, we are witnessing a spate of attacks upon “libertarian” thinking of late—some of it even coming from those with pretensions of libertarian sentiments. Those of us who understand that war has always been the greatest threat to liberty, have been accused of being “people who hate America,” “delusional,” “anti-American,” “naïve,” and “anti-business,” by men and women with a more restricted sense of what it means to live freely.

One can only ponder the vision of humanity shared by those who can, simultaneously, support the marketplace as a regulator of our economic needs while embracing the war system that negates the value of human beings. Do they believe that the collective exercise of deadly force is the essence of human values? Are missiles, invading armies, and F-16 fighter-bombers what they conceive of as market forces? Shall this become the mantra of the incestuous marriage of political and economic systems—to be emblazoned on allegedly “libertarian” think-tank T-shirts—“General Electric: Love It or Leave It”?

Perhaps the silliest attack on libertarianism came from the conservative Francis Fukuyama, a man whose earlier misprognosis of “the end of history” has not dissuaded him from offering this self-contradictory twaddle: after noting “the hostility of libertarians to big government,” he declared that

Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon.6

One must accumulate the benefits of many doubts in Mr. Fukuyama’s favor in endeavoring to explain this absurd paragraph. Perhaps he was lacking in the study of both history and evolutionary biology when he declared, earlier, that human history had come to an end; or perhaps he has an insufficient understanding of basic physics, chemistry, or engineering, giving him a diminished understanding of causality. Then, again, perhaps his parents never read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to him when he was a child. That he could fail to recognize that his own words confirm the libertarian critique of the state is remarkable. “The terrorists were attacking . . . symbols of American power” on September 11th, and this is why the libertarian criticism of state power is flawed? Perhaps Mr. Fukuyama should read Mr. Pavitt’s assessment not only of September 11th, but of the capacity of the state to prevent future attacks!

There is desperation in the voices of those statists who hope that, by declaring libertarian thinking dead, they will have a clear field for what is the core premise of their social thinking: the subjection of human beings to domination by the state. They may have differing ideas as to how much leg chain to give to each of us—so that we may enjoy the illusions of liberty—but share that attribute so well observed by Hayek: “a fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces.”7

In this outpouring of writings about the demise of libertarian thinking, one is reminded not only of Shakespeare’s admonition about people who “protest too much,” but of Mark Twain’s retort that reports of his death had been “greatly exaggerated.” There is more wishful thinking than credibility in such assessments, not unlike that of the Elvis worshippers who would have us believe that he is really alive.

By any standard with which you judge the efficacy of any system, the state is irrelevant. Neither your health, economic well-being, the education of your children, the protection of your life and property, are in any way facilitated by the state: to the contrary, such interests are threatened by political institutions. Every political system is constructed on a rationalization for theft, and depends upon a recognized sovereign authority to compel obedience. In one of those last remaining functions that defenders of the state have clung to—i.e., national defense—events of 9/11 have shown the utter uselessness of the state, a fact that finds confirmation in the remarks of the CIA’s James Pavitt.

The state may not be able to survive in a world of instant global communication, decentralized decision-making, and computerized “virtual realities.” If so, its demise will come about not through “terrorists” or violent revolutionaries, but out of a sense of boredom; it will simply cease to entertain. The statists understand this. They know that, in a world of competing amusements, they must stage a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza—a never-ending war against the entire world—if the boobs are to be induced to keep buying tickets.

While working on my uncle’s farm as a child, I recall seeing him behead chickens. The birds flapped and fluttered about, spattering blood wherever their dying bodies took them. They made a mess of everything and a lot of noise, giving every appearance, to a young child, of purposeful behavior. But the chickens’ fates were sealed. So too, I believe, is that of the state, which insists in going out with the same bloody fanfare as the chickens.

In this age of decentralizing systems, there remains only one state function of which free men and women would readily approve: to go out of business. Its functions are no longer relevant to a complex and interrelated world. Politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, judges, prison officials, tax collectors, one and all, would then be freed up from the burdens of “public service.” In the words of Lysander Spooner, they could then return to their homes, and “content themselves with the exercise of only such rights and powers as nature has given to them in common with the rest of mankind.”8

9Rense.com/general24/cc.htm; Central Intelligence Agency: Speeches and Testimony. cia.gov/news

10Ibid.

11Dev.iwise.com/ykeiM

12Milton Mayer, Man v. The State (Santa Barbara, Calif.: The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1969), dedication page.

13Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), in William Ebenstein, Great Political Thinkers, 2nd ed. (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1956), p. 346.

14Francis Fukuyama, “The Fall of the Libertarians,” Wall Street journal, May 2, 2002, (emphasis added).

15F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 400.

16Lysander Spooner, “A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard,” in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (Larkspur, Colo., 1966), p. 69 (letter originally published 1882).

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
• 3See, e.g., James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984); Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
• 4I use the word “individual” not to denote activity isolated from other persons, but to refer to persons acting as autonomous, self-owning beings who, more often than not, voluntarily associate and cooperate with others, but who are free not to do so.
• 5Henry Hodges, Technology in the Ancient World (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1970), pp. 209–10.
• 6Paul Bonnefon, Oeuvres Completes d’Etienne de la Boetie (Bourdeaux: C. Gounouilhou, and Paris: J. Rouam et Cie., 1892), p. xlvi.
• 7Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier In American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920).
• 8Lucien Price, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954), p. 50.
• 9When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
• 10If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”
• 11The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are subject to far too many interconnected and inconstant variables to make it possible to control events in order to achieve predictable outcomes. The ability to predict outcomes in a complex system rests on a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” meaning an awareness of the presence and strength of every factor that could affect the result. In other words, our efforts to describe or to prescribe those patterns of regularity we define as “order” are limited by complexity itself. Events in our world are generally produced by countless networks of influences that make it difficult to identify causation. What may appear—if seen at all—as an inconsequential factor can produce damaging results (thus the nursery rhyme about “the want of a nail” leading to the loss of the war). We also discover that our faith in linear processes to produce anticipated results is often upset by the intervention of nonlinear influences (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”). The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.
• 12It is difficult to think of the dynamics of Western Civilization without identifying its individual creative producers. When mention is made of this culture, do not the names and accomplishments of Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Gutenberg, Beethoven, Galileo, Sophocles, Leonardo, Roger and Francis Bacon, Homer, Austen, Dante, Edison, Kepler, Carnegie, Michelangelo, Alcott, Locke, Curie, Rembrandt, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Emerson, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Milton, Bach, James Watt, van Gogh, Montessori, Pasteur, Darwin, Van Eyck, Einstein—to identify but a scant few individuals—immediately come to mind? Do we not think of such persons as the creators of our civilization?
• 13While the works of such people make up so much of the substance of our culture, their efforts, standing alone, would have been insufficient to produce a civilization. What other conditions were necessary to such ends? A factor I have long considered a major contributor to the emergence of highly productive societies can be found in what I call the “power of place.” Why, for instance, did technological inventiveness, standing alone, not produce industrialized societies in such places as ancient Greece, Baghdad, and Rome? In the 1st century AD, the Greek scientist, Hero, invented what we now know to be a steam-engine. He drew upon the works of earlier Greeks Vitruvius (80 BC-15 AD), and Ctesibius (285-222 BC) to create an instrument which, as far as is known, was used only to open and close temple doors. Another Greek invention, the Antikythera mechanism, was created in the second century BC, as a system of gears and cogs used, apparently, to calculate astronomical phenomena. While this device is often referred to as the earliest known computer, its appearance did not transform the pre-Christian world into a “Silicon Valley.” Was the two-thousand year-old copper cylinder found near Baghdad—believed by some to be an ancient electrical device—just another technological cul-de-sac that would await development centuries later? Did the glass industry of ancient Rome suffer from governmental restraints on technological innovation, thus impeding its development?
• 14In order to more deeply explore the dynamics involved in the development of this culture, I would like to focus on one of the major contributors to Western Civilization, one that had a profound impact on my own life. At some point in my youth, I became aware of the long-standing practice in such countries as Austria of many students graduating from college and then going on to law school. Following their legal studies, they would undertake careers that may or may not have involved the practice of law. During my college years, I became very interested in going on to law school, although at no time—whether before, during, or after law school—did I have any intention of practicing law. I wasn’t certain as to what kind of work I wanted to do, but law practice was not one to which I gave serious attention: law school, for me, was to provide the opportunity to synthesize disparate subject areas of learning—what used to be termed a “liberal arts” education—and to develop critical, analytical thinking. This approach was well-expressed by one nineteenth-century writer who observed that the study of law was “a sort of search for truth, carried on by teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly undertook, opening up an endless field for philosophic speculation.”
• 15The processes that allow the genius and creative energies of individuals to merge into a prolific civilization, include such powerful domains as frontiers. The course of American history has led many of us to think of a frontier in geographic terms, as an unknown and uncertain territory existing beyond the known and established. Frederick Jackson Turner has written of the pivotal role played by a politically unstructured environment in which people were free to explore and innovate and, as a consequence, generate a free and productive society. States whose political systems were too restrictive and structured found themselves in competition with an ever-expanding “west,” to which creative persons were attracted. The presence of reasonably accessible and less-regulated environments also served to temper state efforts for control.
• 16Of greater significance than geographically defined frontiers are the psychological and intellectual dimensions—the “state of mind”—of people who either accept or disregard the restraints placed upon their behavior by external authorities. As Alfred North Whitehead expressed it, “the vivid people keep moving on, geographically and otherwise, for men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.” There is a vibrancy in the life process that manifests itself along the boundary lines that separate the known from the unknown; the stable from the changeable; the familiar from the novel. In the interplay between the conscious and unconscious minds—often experienced when the brain is in an alpha state—we can experience this dynamic of creativity.