The Real Divide in Human Affairs
It's not liberalism versus conservatism, or even capitalism versus socialism.
John Nolte’s first novel Borrowed Time (2023), which I highly recommend and hope to review in full in a week or so, contains the following illuminating paragraph. I blocked out the curse in the final paragraph; the rest is unedited.
Mason didn't believe in God, religion, politics, or country. Instead, he broke the world into two groups: Those Who Wish to Be Left Alone and Those Who Push People Around.
He was a lifetime member of the former. He'd seen it too many times.... How Those Who Push People Around brought only misery and ultimately war to Those Who Wish to Be Left Alone. He'd seen it happen within families and tribes, in cities, and across continents. So he knew the warning signs.... As Those Who Push People Around started to grow in numbers and a self-righteous certainty about how the other fella should live, speak, worship, and think, oppression and violence soon followed.
Everyone talked about wanting world peace. But no one was willing to do what was necessary to achieve it, which was simply this: Mind your own g******ed business. How difficult was that? Well, if you read a history book, you'll see it's impossible.
Read that twice. You’ll see why I want to review the book, once I’ve given it a second read.
Nolte, who writes regularly for Breitbart.com, nails a distinction I was working to articulate long before this Substack existed. It’s the same distinction on which Lazarus Long, created by science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, opined:
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
I’d like to discuss this distinction in light of a second one: the difference between those who have at least a partial clue how the universe works, however intuitive their grasp, versus those who don’t know and don’t care.
This is the Great Divide in human affairs … small and large, national and international, independent of science, religion, or political economy, seen as organizations with systems. It’s not a firm division. It’s a continuum. The grade school bully will probably never be invited to join the World Economic Forum when he grows up … but he’ll cause plenty of misery in the spaces he dominates. Or: the federal bureaucrat who bullies a small business owner, threatening a lawsuit because he thinks the ethnic composition of the business’s workforce should be more “diverse.”
The bullies atop the political class, a Nancy Pelosi, or CEOs of a corporate octopus like BlackRock, are just extreme cases.
My bullseye insight came one morning back in the mid-1990s, a literal bolt out of the blue. I think I was in the shower. I hurried so I could write it down. As I put it then (this is embarrassingly primitive): The fundamental unsolved problem of political philosophy: How does society control power? That soon evolved into: A minority of persons in any population is fascinated by power; that minority’s entire value system revolves around attaining and maintaining power. How — what institutions are necessary — do the rest of us identify and contain that minority?
Since control and constrain are power words, it soon became clear, I’d opened a thinker’s Pandora’s box.
It’s not like I was the first to ask this, of course. The founders of the U.S. weren’t the first to grapple with it when they penned the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when Americans who Wished To Be Left Alone fought for that right against the British who Pushed People Around.
Then Americans began to exemplify the same divide, in forms ranging from chattel slavery through the rise of our own elite class shaping “public opinion,” all the way down to today’s campus and media wokesters.
The problem goes back at least as far as Plato.
The Political Economy of Those Who Push People Around.
Plato’s answer (from his Republic): in the perfect polis, a polis with nothing fundamentally wrong with it, there will be a place for everyone and everyone will be in his/her place, and only when philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers will this be.
The Enlightened will realize this and get with the program!
There it is in a nutshell: the belief by some that they are especially wise and suited to rule over others, that this select few can be identified, and that they should be handed the reins of power. The commoners are then obligated to fall in line.
This became a model for Utopians of all stripes. The bullies of the world leaped at the idea.
For Karl Marx, the ‘select few’ became the dictatorship of the proletariat. For the Nazis, it became themselves — because the commoners could be controlled through emotion and because they could.
Sadly, those who rejected Utopianism often embraced the view of Thrasymachus, Socrates’s antagonist in Book II of The Republic, that “justice is the will of the strongest.” A more modern way of stating what he was driving at: justice is a word in our vocabulary, and its meaning will be decided by whoever writes the dictionary.
Still another way of saying this: no relationship exists between politics and morality. An obsession with the latter is more likely to interfere with the needs of the former. This was Niccolo Machiavelli’s view.
Today’s Machiavellians fill well-heeled “think tanks” (e.g., the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council), semi-secret organizations (e.g., Bohemian Grove, the Bilderberg Group), and sometimes public ones (e.g., the World Economic Forum). We now know about the annual meetings where Those Who Push People Around set out to divide up the world and decide the economic destinies of Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone.
Their consistent theme: we’re most fit to rule, and if you peasants are wise you will bow before our superiority!
That’s the ethos of Those Who Push People Around.
No need to recognize any native wisdom on the part of Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone, based on longstanding practices that have worked over time, cemented by longstanding trust! When Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone try to mount limited rebellions, they’re labeled populists. That’s when the spokespeople for Those Who Push People Around are being polite.
Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone: A Closer Look.
Which ideas and worldviews, which institutions, which activities, have moved civilization forward?
One must believe that when all is said and done, the world makes sense. We can disagree over specifics, but observations and events can be explained in terms of causes and effects. They aren’t the products of chance any more than they are directed by whimsical “nature spirits” or what-have-you.
Cultures which did not develop the idea that the world is intelligible did not develop science, and their techniques remained crafts rather than developing into advancing, problem-solving technologies.
Nor do those in such cultures develop any sense of themselves as free beings whose interactions can be chosen instead of coerced.
The marketplace is just people interacting voluntarily with one another undertaking specific actions: making things, providing services, in general trying to make their own life and the lives of others better: happier, healthier, more convenient. Ideally, markets are large arenas of people solving problems for people.
Christianity sees the world we inhabit as a created entity, and us as created in God’s image. Hence our rationality and moral agency.
Stoicism, about which I wrote earlier this month, doesn’t make specific pronouncements on God as having a personality, but it does invoke a Logos or fundamental “logical order” able to be grasped, at least in part, by human intelligence, divisible into problem areas, specialties, and skills or know-how.
Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone have usually mastered one or more small aspect of this Logos: farming, for example; or weaving clothing (in pre-industrial societies); later, inventing and operating machinery of various sorts, solving all manner specific problems: food preparation, designing and putting up houses and buildings, electrically wiring them, securing sources of water and putting in plumbing, creating art for their walls, sculptures for their hallways, record keeping, and so on.
Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone have often been the world’s problem-solvers — many of them unsung heroes as they sustained themselves, built families, quietly passed their skills on to their offspring.
We owe these people civilization. I’m not an advocate of either the Great Man theory of the rise of civilization, or of the idea that “blind historical forces” have done it, even if there have been great men and even if structural forces both exist and have shaped important aspects of industrial civilization.
The truth, it seems to me, is far more diffuse than that. Hundreds of thousands of “little people,” by understanding some small domain in which they operate — consciously or not — built the West.
Ideas provided the backdrop. Typically, explicitly Christian principles operated around (I would argue) an implicit Stoic realism about what they could control of the world’s workings.
Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone haven’t been followers of a single “ism”: be it capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, syndicalism, libertarianism, Americanism, anarchism, voluntarism, etc.
Voluntarism … Or Not?
A friend of mine — first name Jack — defends the last item in the above list as the regulative ideal for Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone. It’s a nice ideal, I must admit. I wish it, or something very much like it, were fully defensible.
The problem: it’s a form of liberalism, in one form or another the unofficial ideology of Western modernity.
To liberals (in the classical sense, obviously), the individual is society’s most fundamental unit. All forms of liberalism set out maximize individual autonomy, independent of all familial and societal influences (again without asking him/her, the drawback of all ideologies). The individual is not fundamentally a family member (e.g.), but a Cartesian “thinking thing,” a homo economicus, etc., etc.
In terms of social metaphysics, the individual is isolated and freed to do essentially as he pleases. Critics of the idea (such as Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Daneen), have concluded that liberalism undermines institutions necessary for any society to sustain itself, including societies of Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone.
Take the family, for instance. To voluntarists, who seem the most consistent anarchists while also embracing the liberal idea of absolute individual autonomy, the family is fundamentally authoritarian. Voluntarists reject authoritarianism in all forms, not just that of governments. So they want us to transcend families.
Paul’s letters outline conceptions of the Christian family that, in my view, escape this allegation. The father is the head of the house, yes, but this status comes with responsibilities, not a license to run the household as he sees fit. Anyone who doesn’t grasp this has not grasped New Testament Christianity.
No, families aren’t perfect. But as entities who come into the world naked, helpless, crying, we’ve no viable alternative. Attachment theory supports the idea that unless proper nurturing (attachment, e.g., between infant and mother) occurs in those first months and early years, the child will fail to develop normally. (Attachment theory is something I also have from Jack, whom I mentioned above.)
Libertarians, anarchists, and voluntarists all affirm the Non-Aggression Principle, which asserts (there are variations on this): “No individual is morally permitted to initiate physical force against another individual.”
It’s another of those abstract principles that looks great on paper, but would it give Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone what they really want?
A world based on causality operates according to indifferent rules, which are either learned or one suffers the consequences. This means constraints on undesirable (because dangerous) behaviors.
When a parent anxiously pulls a child by the arm back and prevents her from stepping into a busy street, has the parent “initiated force” against the child?
When I strongarmed my own father into a care facility because he’d been showing increasing signs of dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s disease, was I exercising “physical force” against him?
When a local, regional, or national government passes laws against driving drunk, or driving while texting on a smartphone, the intent is prevention through threat of penalty. Does this constitute “physical force”? (Most of Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone support such laws; I myself was almost hit head-on driving on a two-lane by someone who couldn’t put her damn phone down.)
Should there be restrictions on what can be sold in the marketplace, and to whom? Behind this question is a longstanding quarrel between liberals of multiple stripes and conservatives who are acutely uneasy with unfettered markets.
Answer me this: would you want someone trying to sell your kids fentanyl?
Hey, there’s a market demand for it, or it wouldn’t be on the streets in such large quantities!
Where does one draw this line? It’s not possible to draw in the abstract, because situations and behaviors change over time. Speaking with appropriate generality: the more irresponsible people are, the more preventive laws will be needed against unwanted behaviors.
I know of no way to do this absent allowing, as much as possible, Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone the freedom to hammer out solutions to the conundrums that actually come up in their communities, even if some of the results seem to violate an abstraction pushed by intellectuals.
God, Logos, Rules.
If you believe the world was created, is sufficiently intelligible for us to solve problems in our worlds, and that morality begins with God, what follows, in terms of how we ought to live our lives?
First, I’ve read or known of “existentialists” whose views boil down to: God doesn’t exist and the world is a meaningless, unstructured chaos. I don’t know how to reason with someone who sincerely believes that, but might tell them, have a nice life if your worldview permits it.
Assuming the former, surely: learning to do, consistently, the things He tells us to do, and refrain, as much as possible, from doing the things He commands us not to do.
In an imperfect world this means rules, and systems of enforcement.
Again, this is because the universe works according to rules. Logos again.
We don’t have to wax philosophical here, though.
All I need do is point out: should you step off my 10th floor balcony thinking you can fly if you try hard enough, the laws of physical nature ensure that you’re going to fall and almost certainly get killed.
If you ingest cyanide, likewise: since your body systems can’t process that chemical which sabotages some of them instead, again you’re going to die.
Some laws of nature rules exact consequences immediately; some take time. Smoking increases your predisposition to getting cancer. Poor nutrition slowly ruins your health.
Some are “in-between”: If you get drunk, your senses and judgment will be impaired, greatly increasing your chances of killing yourself and possibly someone else if you drive. It happens; and the fact that it did not happen last night doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow night. If you text while driving: since you can’t give your full attention to both at once — driving and texting — same result. You might get lucky … or not.
Persons and societies either recognize and adapt to the rules governing reality, which we call laws of nature for a reason, or they suffer the consequences. Just as there are laws of physics, there are right ways and wrong ways of arranging families, and right things versus wrong things to do in markets, independently of anyone’s wishes or personal, subjective values.
If most of a population ignores reality long enough, it unravels. A huge market for escapism of various sorts is not a good sign!
Real conservatives make these points incessantly. (It saddens me that so many people professing that label promote foreign wars and support unbridled neoliberal capitalism. They play right into the hands of Those Who Push People Around.)
The best educational plan for Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone would be to encourage a set of principles in children that become habitual. The obvious ones: don’t hit other kids, don’t tell lies including about others, don’t steal; be kind, be truthful, be helpful and generous where possible, be respectful.
Are these not common horse sense?
So why do I feel so strongly the necessity of repeating them?
Because whether we blame original sin or something else, they’re not our default setting. This is why we need an educational path we continuously monitor. Our default setting is pure ego. Trying to get as much as possible making the least effort. We become civilized to the extent we put our egos aside, see all others as having the same intrinsic value we arrogate for ourselves, and adopt both practical and moral realism.
Concluding…. Whether there’s a God or not: We’re Not God!
Summing up: Those Who Push People Around, now embodied as a globalist minority of power-hungry elitists who go so far as to think they can redesign humanity (transhumanism), seem not to have thought about the suffering and misery that their ilk has already inflicted on the world. Their legacy may very well be Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone struggling to rebuild in a ruined world!
We’re not God! We have no means of becoming God! These are the first realizations of the truly wise!
The real danger of atheism, in my opinion, is that There-is-no-God opens doors to the belief that one can become God (or a god, if you prefer), bending reality to one’s will through force of will.
This always results in disaster.
If Those Who Wish To Be Left Alone had a single guiding philosophy, it would begin with:
I am not God! And My perceptions are limited!
Including even the smartest, most educated, and most able of us.
Wisdom means humility in the face of a vast universe — whether you see it as created or not.
Limitedness of perception, and humility, suggest not policy recommendations but the repeal of a great many existing policies (including those of conservatives if and when they go overboard, as everyone sometimes does).
The guiding principle: leave people alone, as much as is possible. A more polite way of saying, Mind your own effing business!
Don’t hurt people! Or through inaction, where physical danger is clearly immanent, allow them to come to harm!
Guide others in the difference between right and wrong, and try to correct errors you see, but in the absence of clear and immediate physical harm being done, let them decide what to do. You can’t control their choices, anyway.
That’s the key to “controlling power,” by the way. It starts with controlling oneself and showing others the benefits of self-mastery.
Recall that one of Stoicism’s fundamental principles counsels: distinguish between what you can control from what you can’t control; focus your life energies on the former.
Surely this adds something to Jesus’s call to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (Matt 22:39).
Does this solve every conceivable problem or answer every possible question? Of course not. But thinking on these things, if anyone can be bothered to notice, should put a person on a path towards living more peaceful, more personally controlled, and therefore more abundantly. If enough people came to understand and practice such principles as these, which unite a Christian worldview grappled with in good faith with the Stoic one grappled with in good faith, the world we all share might become a better place for all of us.
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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