CCLXV – Liberalism Colored Glasses

My previous article generated more discussion in the comments for which I am grateful. I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to chime in while it was going on but now that I’ve had some time to think on it and have a moment to write, I will comment here. The discussion covered a lot of ground but there’s a common thread that is worthy of comment.

“Right” and “left” as political appellations are unhelpful for discussion of ideas which transcend them. We have to be very particular with our terms because it is very easy to get turned around. When we are talking about Liberalism, we are talking about the political philosophy. In American politics, the reason we refer to republicans and democrats as “right liberals” and “left liberals” is because both republicans and democrats beg the question of liberalism as a political philosophy. Given liberalism, their attitude is right or left. “right liberal” and “left liberal” is helpful as a way of aggregating other flavors of liberalism, so we don’t get confused by their names, because they are all merely kinds of liberalism.

My articles on Sovereigns transcends liberalism, and so makes it difficult to use the language of liberalism. I don’t know what exactly to call it, but I’m proposing to step outside the paradigm and look back in. If we stay inside the paradigm, it obscures the discussion. For example, when I suggested that the People writ large are sovereign in a democratic nation, it was counter-proposed that only the majority is sovereign–this immediately leads to quagmire in the left-right-liberal divide.

It is important to be able to ignore left-right-liberal thinking because it will allow us to see more-or-less honestly what is actually happening in our contemporary politics. For example, the problem is not that left-liberals have some number in the legislature, nor that right liberals have the state houses, but that both left liberals and right liberals are committed to the political philosophy of liberalism.

The political philosophy of liberalism is what is the problem. I think that’s why there’s some measure of talking-past-each-other among the traditionalist-reactionary circles. In the Zippy School, liberalism is plainly observable and problematic and the problem becomes one of how to co-exist in a society committed to liberalism and what can be done to protect oneself and ones community from the liberal Cerberus on a fraying leash. The other side, which due to recency bias I will call the Roebuck School, has observed that something is wrong and has identified left-liberals as part of the problem but which retains the commitment to liberalism. In the Zippy School, liberalism is the enemy and spells doom. In the Roebuck school, liberalism is the enemy in the hands of left-liberals, but can be redeemed by right-thinking right-liberals.

The Roebuck school can’t see outside the liberal paradigm, and so operates within it. The same way I can’t see my eyes because they are a part of me, they can’t see liberalism because it is a part of them. I don’t begrudge their well intended beliefs, held sincerely–but they can’t address the problem, properly construed.

In the comments, JMSmith makes the point that “Democracy must always tend towards the abolition of private property and the establishment of communism.” Democracy is the petri dish in which liberalism thrives, so the following syllogism is valid:

Democracy tends to abolish private property
Democracy is a kind of Liberalism
Liberalism tends to abolish private property.

It is not merely left-liberals that tend to the abolition of private property, but all liberalism. This is the key point:

Right-liberals, while anti-communist in posture (right now), are committed to the eventual abolition of private property through their commitment to liberalism. Right liberals are not fighting against liberalism, they are fighting to control liberalism so they are the ones in charge when private property is abolished.

This is a counter-intuitive thought. How can a well-intended right liberal, who is anti-communist, be committed to the abolition of private property merely through being right-liberal and having taken no action towards that end?

Let me help clarify by restating it.

How can a well-intended accountant, who is anti-abortion, be committed to killing babies merely through working for planned parenthood, even though he has taken no action towards that end?

By materially supporting the political philosophy all actions undertaken will work towards perpetuating that political philosophy. This is not a question of left-liberal control or right-liberal control, this is a question of material support for the problematic political philosophy.

And so! What can be done about it? DavidtheBarbarian says:

I disagree with Scoot, to paraphrase, that there is no way to participate in the decline to slow or guide it towards some “safe space.” I think it is like mucking out the Augean stables. It is dirty and it requires heroic virtue to accomplish and not become dirty thereby, but it is worthwhile.

I would suggest that David is operating under the misapprehension that the problem is left-liberals and not liberalism as a whole. In that case, “participating in the decline” cannot help but perpetuate the political philosophy which is the real problem. To paraphrase Bruce Charlton in a comment from Orthosphere, it is the Boromir Option: trying to use the one ring against Sauron. You can’t fix a broken car while you are driving it. Ceasing to vote, which is the choice I have made, serves at least to cease perpetuating the political philosophy of Liberalism.

So that leaves the question of “what can be done” unanswered. Here’s what I say: Serve your community. Improve yourself. Perform the Works of Mercy. These will do more to soften the blow than any vote you could ever make. Even if you still want to vote, if you commit to these things, you will improve the world around you.

But I still think you shouldn’t vote!

AMDG

CCLXIV – The Sovereign People, Cont’d

David the Barbarian and JMSmith are having a great dialog in the comments of my previous article. They touch on a lot of points so rather than interrupt the flow of things I thought I would offer clarifications/ my POV in another article, since the conversation has broadened in scope.

I. Sovereign Majority

JMSmith clarifies a point he made about the majority being sovereign, rather than all the people:

That the majority is, in fact, sovereign becomes clear when we look at a multi-racial state where the races vote as blocs and the minority race always loses. If my candidates and policies never win, I have a very odd sort of “supreme power.”

David joins:

I wonder if we should rather say, Team Red or Team Blue is sovereign at any given time. Democracy is a contest for rule, a game of who can stack the bigger pile of rocks. The people are the rocks, but we can say they have power in a sense because they (individually) pick which pile they go into, but not actually whether their team wins. If the winning team is sovereign, the people are like the fans of each team, who do in some sense say “we won” but more accurately said for the coaches, players, etc. who divide the spoils

My disagreement with JMSmith is on the basis that the people qua sovereign cannot be subdivided. This is confusing because when we look at democratic systems we see only the choices of the majority winning and so think only the majority had a say. We can look at this like the stock market. The price of a given stock doesn’t just reflect the value proposition of the people who decided to buy it. It also cooks in the value proposition of the people who decided not to buy it. The people who decided not to buy drive the price down. The people who decide to buy it drive the price up. The equilibrium is of both price and quantity. The price equilibrium is that above which fewer people would decide to own the stock and below which more people would decide to own the stock. The quantity equilibrium is the number of people above which the price would seek to decrease, and below which the price would seek to increase. The key is that for there to be an equilibrium at all there needs to be some number of people who own the stock and some number of people who do not own the stock.

Likewise, when I’m talking about liberalism we need to get into a mindset that is not focused on the party. Liberalism has two attributes: First, People vote; second, people abide by the outcome of the vote. There can be two parties, five parties, one hundred million parties. It doesn’t matter–what matters is that people are voting. The party system describes what motivates people to vote–kind of like a specific stock in the stock market example. For there to be a majority at all implies there is a minority. Otherwise there is no need to consider that the minority exists.

In JMSmiths example, talking about the multi-ethnic state where voting blocs are organized around race, this is a real problem that happens especially in post-colonial countries. The problem is that when one party, group, team, or race, has a permanent majority then they are the permanent sovereign and all other parties are subject to that party. Especially if the system is structured to favor the one party. The only other alternative is that the minority party who always loses represents a nation-within-a-nation. If that nation becomes big enough, they will (and must) either secede or revolt. It becomes unstable. If they succeed they will form a new nation, if they lose they will be crushed and integrated into the establishment state. This is a consequence of the American Civil War, that the minority was crushed and her people assimilated. The nation-within-a-nation was extinguished and they became simply a minority of voters.

It’s important to note that Catholic social teaching bears the idea of a custodial majority which cares benevolently for the minority, like an elder sibling. That may be an ideal of a Perfectly Formed Catholic (PFC) Society, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be aspired to.

II. Cyclical Sovereignty

David makes this point:

Aristotle defines democracy, or more precisely, the constitutional state, as something like friends ruling each other in turn. That “in turn” seems to me to be the defining feature of democracy from other forms, that there is a regular turnover in rulers, selected from a whole population. But in a constitutional state, I would say whoever’s turn it is to rule is the sovereign. Ochlocracy, which Aristotle calls democracy, is mob rule.

Which JMSmith Joins:

I think DtheB is right that popular sovereignty requires periodic change of government, although we all know that a loyal bloc of voters can be neglected by the party they vote for.

Democracy just is liberalism. The essence of liberalism is this bottom-up conception of political authority, the bottom being the people and the political authority being given to agents of the sovereign. Whether it be iterative rule or oligarchical or Ochlocrical, we need only look for the two attributes of liberalism: People are voting, and abiding by the outcome. I think JMSmith has causality backwards, given what i’ve described in Part I: Popular sovereignty doesn’t require periodic changes of government, but causes periodic changes of government. This is destabilizing, again, for the reasons noted already: We end up with a bureaucratic tree with many layers which repel and work against each other.

The “friends” idea noted by Aristotle implies an understanding of a custodial majority and not an oppressive majority.

III. Rights, Mob Rule, and Enforcement

David continues:

I just reread your original piece and I am groking what it means, I think. The constitutional state is “the people” with “rights,” mob rule is “the people’s sovereignty.” Liberalism is/was the tension between those two. Now looks rather like we are moving to a mix of mob rule and oligarchy, what is now called anarcho-tyranny.

To which JMSmith Adds:

I cannot decide if rights granted by the true sovereign are really sovereignty. The sovereignty of the U.S. government rests on the fact that the U.S. military will fight anyone who try to overrule that sovereignty. If I have a sovereign right to decide what medicines I take, that also rests on the fact that the U.S. military will (for now) fight anyone who try to overrule that sovereignty.

David has misunderstood my point but only a little bit. First is a conflation of the state and the sovereign. The constitutional state is ruled by the people, who are sovereign over the state. Rights are privileges which are granted to a people by the sovereign–the bill of rights in the US Constitution is not a declaration of anything inherent about us, as people but a standing order of permissible acts by the sovereign (which is the people). I mentioned mob rule as a simplification to help understand the concepts I am talking about, but am not proposing that mob rule is a contrary force to liberalism. Honestly, mob rule is probably more purely liberal than a constitutional state.

These clarifications affect JMSmith’s point a little as well. Look at it this way: The sovereign embodies all powers of the state. Agents of the sovereign have authority delegated to them but which does not abrogate the authority from the sovereign. The enforcement of the current establishment of liberalism is a responsibility delegated to the military. It used to be delegated to a well regulated militia (see the Bill of Rights), but that permission was rescinded and has been retained by the professional military class ever since. The US Military is tasked with defense of the nation from threats by external forces and defense of the sovereign peace from threats by internal forces. This is not the root of sovereignty but an attribute of sovereignty. A stable sovereign must be able to enforce his reign, an unstable sovereign cannot enforce his reign.

IV. Tyranny

JMSmith introduced the concept of Tyranny, which David had this to add:

The definition of tyranny I would offer is simply abuse of authority

To which JMSmith had this to say in reply:

If the sovereign is the ultimate authority, he, or she, or it cannot “abuse authority.” Sovereignty is ultimate and this means it is under the judgment of no one (except perhaps God). If I accuse the sovereign of “abuse,” I place myself above the sovereign and effectively declare war on the sovereign.

The reason I kept my definition of Tyranny limited to “positive assertion of some moral evil as a moral good and vice versa is because it captures this idea of abuse as well as Zippy’s original definitions. Zippy’s original was that Tyranny is “a false pretense of authority”. Asserting a claim to the sovereign without legitimacy or licity is not a moral good (I hesitate to call it a moral evil but it is certainly not good). Being a prodigal, oppressive, bellicose, incompetent, improvident leader is also not a moral good–when it rises to an extreme these would be moral evils as well. These would all be examples of Tyranny. It sounds like it’s the same but it’s different in this key respect: Tyranny is based in the morality of the sovereign and not in whether we like them or not. Do you see how “Abuse of authority” is squishier than “asserting moral evil”? The former would change from person to person (see Trump), while the latter has a very high bar for determining what counts as evil.

V. On the Authority of Evil

David and JMSmith have an interesting exchange at the end of the comments thread as it stands right now.

David says:

The command to do evil has no authority. The modern sovereign can no more command evil authoritatively than it can demand authoritatively that I believe 2+2=5. It is an impossibility.

To which JMSmith replies:

Who gets to say what God wants? You, or the sovereign? He answers only to God, you to both God and him. I don’t for a moment deny that a man can, and in some cases must, declare himself a conscientious objector. But he cannot then tell the sovereign how it must deal with a conscientious objector.

I take David to mean that if King Doe orders you to perform an abortion, he has no moral grounds with which to compel you. You have a duty to disobey his order. What JMSmith notes is that if King Doe is otherwise validly, legitimately, licitly King, then he does have the authority to give you commands. So to my reading, a revised rendering of David’s point would be this: The sovereign can command evil but that makes him a tyrant; but as evil the sovereign creates no moral obligation to obey. The sovereign has coercive power qua authority, but cannot compel the citizen on moral grounds.

Big, big thank you to JMSmith and Davidthebarbarian for interesting and thoughtful contributions. I hope this adds some tinder to the fire, I’m enjoying reading your thoughts.

AMDG

CCLXIII – The Sovereign People

Wood, in the comments at his blog, proposed a definition of sovereign as the adjudicator between conflicting claims. I counter-proposed that another definition of sovereign is the “prime lawgiver” (analogous to “prime mover”).

It is important to be able to clearly distinguish who is sovereign because it shows who is running the show. If I went into a grand estate and mistook the butler for the lord, the butlers behavior would be very confusing to me. The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name, so lets figure out how this works in general and in a democracy specifically.

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The foundation of all of this is Zippy’s article on authority, please read it here.

We know some things about a sovereign already.

1. They are holders of a specific office.
2. The Office comes with Power and Authority in the context of governance.
3. They received the office through legitimate means following licit forms.
4. There are people subject to them.

We also know a few things about Governance

1. The sovereign is responsible for choosing (or obliging to be chosen) this thing or that thing.
2. Certain among the areas which the sovereign is responsible for making choices is the national defense, public peace, and treasury.
3. The sovereign is responsible for selecting agents to represent him where he cannot be, and to choose (or oblige to be chosen) as he would choose.

Lets make a few other key clarifications.

1. The Public Peace involves both legislating and enforcement of that legislation. The sovereign sets the legislative agenda and is responsible for enforcing the resultant laws.
   • NB: A “pure” sovereign rules by decree so just is the legislative body; in other governing systems the legislative body is delegated out but still falls under the purview of the sovereign.
2. Justice also falls under the “public peace”, namely the administration of justice and what Zippy liked to focus on, the enforcement of contracts. Public Peace is an expansive term so these clarifications help to show that nothing is missing, it’s just all lumped together.
3. Tyranny is the positive assertion of a moral evil as a moral good or vice versa. A lot of times the word Tyrant is used to denote “a sovereign I don’t like” but we need to have clarity of meaning for the words we use and this definition goes a bit further than Zippy’s.

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A keen observer might think that I’m begging the question in my assumptions. My “NB” notes that lawgiving is included in the responsibilities of the sovereign, which was my point; yet adjudicating between claims is a subset of administering the public peace. So Wood and I both are focusing on some aspect of a sovereign.

In my original article thinking about this, I argued that in a democracy the people are acting as Sovereign. We can evaluate this claim based on the rubric I have described above.

The first hurdle is whether the people occupy an office. I’m going to argue yes but it’s obviously not clear. The fundamental assumption in a liberal democracy is that governance is a social contract, and a contract is where one party gives something to another party, in exchange for some consideration. In this case society gives the government the authority to govern as agents. We can see this in the language of the US Constitution–it opens by invoking the source of it’s authority, We, the People. We the people do hereby establish this government to act on our behalf. “The people” is the office. More specifically, “the voting people” because voting is the consideration for the social contract.

The office comes with power and authority. Power, per Zippy, is the capacity to make this thing happen rather than that thing–say, choosing an agent. Authority is the ability to oblige a subject to choose something. Actually, now that I think about it, this is where it gets tricky. Once we choose an agent they would not be a very good agent if they asked us what to do at every turn. Before technology, a Governor might go off to rule some far flung region of a kingdom and have to operate without direct connection to the King. Once the Governor is appointed by the king, if the governor makes bad decisions the King might not know or might not be easily able to recall the governor. So the office of the people still has authority but that authority is delegated to the agent and the agent operates remotely.

I think the rest of the items as far as sovereign follow naturally if you accept this interpretation of things.

One interesting aspect of this is that since the people occupy a common office, it coheres with the problem of voting. The People are an aggregate office and so the people make an aggregate decision. If you vote and the candidate you want loses, the candidate you don’t want is still your choice. If you agree that voting is a legitimate mechanism for deciding agents of governance, then you are bound by the outcome or to schism against it. You are bound by the outcome not just as a consequence of having voted, but are bound to accept the outcome as your own choice.

The accidents of governance–the presidency, the house, the senate, the supreme court–are all agents, or agents of agents, of the Sovereign People. This is a logical consequence of “bottom up” legitimacy. There can be no kings because no one believes in obedience to authority. The socialist Huey Long was ultimately right: Every man a king!

Democracy is unstable because the Sovereign People are an aggregate and if the Sovereign People cannot decide unambiguously then the authority of the Agents is shaky at best. President Trump won by a narrow margin and he was hampered at every turn, because his boss didn’t 100% trust him.

Here’s another consequence of having a government filled with Agents. Each Agent receives their mandate and then is left alone to operate remotely. They appoint agents. Those agents appoint agents. Then we get a bureaucracy, like tree-rings, who received a commission from an iteration of the Sovereign People that no longer exists. So you end up with an unstable governance because all the agents appointed in the past are not swept out and replaced with new agents with a new commission. This is most obvious in places like the Supreme Court, where left-liberal Judges appointed by left-liberal Presidents appointed by left-liberal Sovereign People last for decades upon decades and influence the administration of justice even when the Sovereign People switch to right-leftists.

AMDG

CCLXI – Veritable Heritability

Over thanksgiving […] I visited my family and […] enjoyed watching a television show called Downton Abbey. It’s good harmless fun and served as a macguffin for a lot of good conversation. During one conversation about the TV show, one among my family made a comment to this effect:

I don’t respect inherited wealth or titles because the recipient did no work to earn it. Inherited wealth and titles leads to decadence because hard working generations beget spoiled and comfortable generations, which squander the wealth and didn’t learn how to earn it. That’s why I don’t respect Monarch’s and such, too–they didn’t learn to rule they were just given authority.

My immediate reaction was to think about why I have such a fondness for Monarchy. Monarchy with a big caveat–rule by a Perfectly Formed Catholic (PFC) Monarch. That’s a tall order even on a good day. But still–in contrast to democracy, is it better to be given authority by birthright or is it better to be chosen by a game theoretical contest? Does asking people for authority select for better rulers?

The chief virtue in my family members opinion is work ethic–one cannot inherit work ethic, it must be chosen individually and in their imaginings the hardest working will be the most successful.

I think this is not true even if we assume a society of PFC‘s and ignore any deliberate evil in our fellow man. In a perfectly competitive market of individuals, sometimes the first to work will come to dominate other hard working late comers. Hard work is good, but material success does not imply virtue. There are people in the world working diligently for the ends of evil. That is why it is not enough that one works hard.

Inherited wealth is not inherently bad–nor are inherited titles. It’s merely a mechanism for transferring stuff from one person to another. Legitimacy is all about following the proper forms for transfer. In America, our proper forms involve game theoretical contests on a massive scale. In Medieval Europe, the proper forms involved coronation Masses and bloodlines. Both are semi-arbitrary but neither is better. Assuming our forms of legitimacy is better is just current-year-ism. Good rulers can certainly come from weird but legitimate forms–but so can bad ones.

CCLIV – Thought Experiment

Expanding on the seed of an idea in a previous post:

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I’ve acknowledged before the seeming paradox of a liberal democracy: Who is sovereign in a democracy? Is it the President, or the people that appointed him? Who has to listen to whom? In this thought experiment, let’s resolve this paradox definitively on one side and see how it looks.

Vox Imperii

The people, collectively, are the Imperial Sovereign. The People rule by fiat, their edicts have the force of law. The legislature is a court of appointed nobles–nobles appointed by the collective Emperor. As the court of nobles, they clamor for the affections of the sovereign and seek to formalize his edicts. The President is the chief counselor of the bureaucracy–the prime minister, after a fashion. He represents the interests of the bureaucracy to the collective Emperor, reporting on troop dispositions or the reserves in the treasury, or the various other necessities incurred by a far flung population. The collective Emperor is hard to appeal to, so the President must enlist the help of the court of nobles, and advocate for the bureaucracy in the legislative agenda. Effectively, the legislature is where the will of the collective Emperor and the will of the governing bureaucracy interact. The president can seek to influence, but the Emperor has true power. The Supreme Court then represents the interests of the bureaucracy across time, and validates contemporary issues against the collective Emperor’s past edicts for consistency.

The system of checks and balances only works if each of the branches are independent and disinterested. There is a fourth branch that is, per se the Masses, and it is uncontrolled for. The Masses then can grow out of proportion with the other branches, and tip the scales. If a rodent can push a button to get a pellet, it will learn to do so even to it’s detriment. The Masses don’t have a button to push, but can use their uncontrolled influence of the legislature to indulge itself and enable every ill it desires.

A natural follow up question: how do you control for the 4th branch?

I think the answer is simple: A strong executive.

AMDG

(f) – The Herald of the Change

Proclaimed henceforth on this day the second of November, the year of our lord two-thousand twenty-one, before God and man, let it be known that the people of the United States of America, the Vox Imperii, have so decreed: That the reign of Duke Northam over the Imperial province of Virginia shall be ended; and that the reign of a new Duke (to be determined shortly) shall commence.

CCLII – Vote for Fiefdom

My trail of thought for how I got here started with Dune. I’m going to see that film this weekend and I loved the book and so I looked it up and refreshed my memory with some of the fictional politics. In the book, certain noble houses hold planets in fief, and the triggering action for the book is that the fiefdom of Arrakis is transferred from House Harkonnen to House Atreides. There’s a computer game called Crusader Kings which I played some years ago which allowed me to simulate royal politics of crusade-era Europe. Transitions of power were always destabilizing–when a Duke died then getting the next Duke to stabilize his reign was always a challenge. Usurpers from other demesne, peasant revolts, incompetence, all of these things came together to make transitions challenging. I know this was a game so maybe it was simpler in real life, but I’m not very familiar with the realities of crusade-era Europe. If there is a resource someone knowledgeable thinks I could read, please let me know.

I connected this thought to American politics, thinking about “foreigners” running for political offices in different states. The Bush family was not from Texas, yet George W. affected Texan charm for political ends. In the Virginia elections ongoing right now, Terry McAuliffe is from New Jersey as I recall, yet is pitching himself as a Virginian. It feels like fiefdoms. Yet, with the cleverness of voting, the political aparatus known as Liberalism gets to suggest two Dukes to Virginians and we get to vote for the one least likely to be destabilizing. It’s a very clever process–Liberalism determines that there will be a change in power; if Liberalism puts anyone they like in power, they risk destabilization and peasant revolts; if Liberalism offers two Candidates then the peasants can choose the least bad one; if peasants choose then they have to live with their choice, even if it’s a bad choice. All the liberal apparatus must do is proffer two options for the peasants to choose, and it guarantees stability unless something dramatic turns the peasants against them.

This is another way in which voting at all endorses the mechanism of Liberalism. There is no vote you can make to diminish liberalism. It’s like tweeting about how bad twitter is: You can complain all you like as long as you complain using their tool.

AMDG

(e) – Afterthought about Bad Sovereigns

It is easy to be obedient to a good Sovereign. It is hard to be obedient to a bad Sovereign. But the bad Sovereign needs our obedience more because our obedience (and also our forbearance) lends itself to both social stability and our sanctification. There are many stories of Saints whose path to holiness passed through a monastery with an ill tempered superior.

Our duty of obedience goes up to and no further than the point of Tyranny, where they become an evil Sovereign by enforcing some moral evil as truth, and our duty becomes one of disobedience.

I’ll leave you to figure out how that works in a Democracy.

CCXLIX – Winning With Parasitism

Wood over at his blog made a quip about liberalism, to which I had this to say:

“Liberalism wins by making you think that liberalism is a means to winning and not the end to be won.”

I want to follow up on this idea by thinking about what we mean by winning.

I think what Wood meant in his original post was political victory. By engaging in Liberalism–i.e. liberal institutions and rituals–any given group can achieve victory. It’s the “embarrassed millionaire” theory of politics. John Steinbeck said “In America, there are no poor, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. This was an economic point, but likewise, with liberalism, there are no lay-folk, only temporarily embarrassed Presidents. Winning in this sense means taking control of the political system through liberalism.

I added to Wood’s point by suggesting that, beyond serving as a means to winning (political victory), Liberalism is the end to be won. I wasn’t thinking about anything specific but considering it now, this takes a Darwinian sense.

If political ideologies are in a basic world and competing for fitness to survive, then Liberalism wins by reproducing. We know by discussing our faith that Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi can help us to be intentional about our faith life. It works with political ideology too: Your actions influence and are influenced by your beliefs and your prayers. In other words, Liberalism cares that you vote and not who you vote for because when you vote you consent that the mechanism is appropriate to address the problem foremost in your mind.

Lets keep the Economic metaphor going for a moment. Entrepreneurship is a mechanism for mobilizing resources to satisfy some unmet demand. If I demand clean gutters, an Entrepreneur can come along and offer to clear them in exchange for money. If I pay him, I am consenting that the exchange is appropriate to resolving the problem. Exchanging goods (money) for services (clean gutters) is a reasonable way of solving the problem.

If I offered the entrepreneur high-fives in exchange for clean gutters, and the entrepreneur accepts, then the entrepreneur has established that high-fives are a reasonable means of solving problems. The entrepreneur must accept high-fives both from the next customer and the next engagement with the same customer, or else be inconsistent with his own beliefs. Likewise, because one problem has been resolved with a sequence of high-fives, you have learned that high fives are reasonable and will try to solve other problems by offering high-fives as payment.

Likewise, if the problem you have in mind is “the tax rate is too high” and politicians offer to lower taxes in exchange for your vote, then when you vote you are consenting that voting is a reasonable means of exchange to resolve that problem. But really–politicians can’t promise to lower taxes the way the entrepreneur can promise to clean your gutter. So the politician can promise to try to lower taxes.

Both the voter and the politician are bound by that exchange. You agree that votes are reasonable compensation for attempting to solve a problem; the politician agrees that attempts at solving a problem are worth a vote. Both parties have consented and both parties must live by that consent.

Liberalism then perpetuates it’s species by inducing little acts of liberalism which allow the ideology to lay it’s eggs in our brain. Repeated acts of liberalism feed the parasitic eggs, and eventually the eggs hatch and larvae eat us out from the inside and we become empty husks with single minded loyalty to liberalism as an ideology. Liberalism has won.

Voting is a good macguffin for Liberalism because it is the primary means of exchange, just as money is the primary economic means of exchange. This is why when I refused to vote for the first time, I felt liberated. Some eggs in my brain atrophied and died, and liberalism as an ideology lost the battle for survival in my brain alone.

Another question becomes natural from this point: What other ideologies are competing for attention? What are their means of exchange?

A barter system is where both parties to a transaction receive some solution to a problem in exchange for giving some solution to a problem. I need a cow, you need a pig, I will give you my pig for your cow. Money is not essential to productively solve problems, but economics is fundamentally about solving problems and meeting demand. For lay-folk, politics is about our relationship with government, and just as money is not essential to solving problems, neither is voting essential to the relationship with government. So the alternative which I subscribe to is what I will call Neo-Feudalism. The problem to be solved is administration of the Public Good; the means of exchange is obedience. I want the public good to be maintained, the Sovereign promises to do so and in exchange asks for my obedience. I am bound by this exchange, so the next sovereign that comes in I must make the same offer and so make the same exchange, or else be inconsistent with my own beliefs.

AMDG

CCXLV – Keeping Up with President Jones

A feature of democracy is that anyone can rule. It is also a flaw.

When even Joe the Plumber can be King, instead of thinking of obedience to the King, everyone thinks “well if he can do it I could surely do much better”.

Democracy kills the relationship between Sovereign and Subject because instead of the subjects learning to love their sovereign, they begin planning to do his job better. It’s like keeping up with the Joneses but the Joneses are King so the only way to one-up is to be a better King.