The Problem of Politics

Where I channel the spirits of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken

It starts with decision making, individually versus collectively. I will give you the world’s simplest example of collective decision making: what are the dinner plans you and your significant other have made for tonight? That is as simple as it gets, and yet how much vacillation and negotiation went into that? How many full blown arguments have grown out of attempting to answer that simple little question? How many times has one party just surrendered all control (but not without harboring resentment) about the decision? This is a simple, fucking question - involving only two people; what happens when we talk about bigger decisions with more people having a stake?

You probably have not read Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions, and I can only recommend that you do. It is arguably his best work, and he didn’t do any bad work. It takes a simple observation from Mises and explores it in depth. It demolishes the conceit that any human, or collection of humans, or machinery of human artifice (including the much ballyhooed Artificial Intelligence), is capable of knowing what is fundamentally not knowable. Those who have a strong scientific bent to their thinking will not believe this - after all, it’s only a question of data (in their minds). Those who have an unbreakable belief in fantasies - often dressed up as theory¹ - won’t believe this either. The only group that might believe this - about humans - will solve the problem by attributing this knowledge to God (where it may be inaccessible to us, but at least it exists there). This is one of the consequences of the Enlightenment, and rationalism and the scientific method - the belief that our knowledge, collectively if not individually, has no bounds. It is why reason and faith can never be adequately reconciled, for the former never grants permanent relief to the latter - all things are subject to rational inquiry. You may yourself devise a boundary, but it is arbitrary and only a defense mechanism to sustain your own faith from the assault. The subtle part is that reason is its own faith², and that is why it undermines any other.

So why does this mean politics is a problem, after all, it is politics we engage in to perform collective problem-solving, right? That lovely saying about government - it’s just what we all do together³? What if I were to tell you that politics is actually about creating problems, not solving them? That the very idea that we have a “political problem” isn’t that a problem exists which needs to be solved by political means but only exists because of politics? If you take politics out of the equation, the problem itself ceases to be a problem? I can sense your resistance, even across time and space.

There are the two fundamental issues I outlined in the first two paragraphs: decision-making between two (let alone more than two) people, and the limitations of knowledge both individually and collectively. In the decision-making case we only wanted to “solve” a simple “problem” - what to have for dinner. When two people first meet and don’t know each other, they have no knowledge of food preferences; over time we learn those - and can still be challenged to reach a decision. Now we take those two issues and overlay what makes politics, politics. That is the enforcement of a decision on parties that were not part of the decision-making.

To extend our first decision-making case, we will add in some third parties; they could be our children, or our friends. We announce what we (ourselves and our SO) have decided on for dinner, and that these additional parties are now going to have that - regardless of their own desires. Since this is now an exercise in politics, these additional players don’t have a say, even if they are footing their own share of the bill for dinner. Whether they are or are not doesn’t really matter, the decision has been made and they are given no choice about going along with it. We aren’t re-opening the discussion and taking into consideration their views and we aren’t allowing them to opt out and go their own way. As soon as they have such an option, it isn’t a political question any longer. Politics is about the enforcement of decisions, and the consequences for going against the decision. We would likely tell our children that if they don’t want to eat what we decided on, they can go to bed hungry. Our friends might grudgingly agree on the presumption that they will have a turn at the decision making and can make us ‘suffer’ accordingly⁴.

A family isn’t a democracy, and our friendships may dissolve if we relentlessly impose our decisions on our friends. So as political examples, these are extremely limited, but they should limn out the notion. What decisions need to be enforced versus those that can acquire acceptance via persuasion and consensus. The social condition of the latter, where we all operate in accordance with a decision, even if we didn’t participate in the decision-making is not political - because we aren’t obligated by force to abide. A common error of those who believe in their own politics is that coercion is only necessary - temporarily - until everyone abides of their own will (because the obvious moral rightness of our decision must eventually come to everyone). That is narcissism married to nihilism, and it is found as much on the right as it is on the left - because it is just a very human thing.

Now, if you are anticipating correctly, you may think I’ve just made the case for anarchy. I haven’t. Anarchy and totalitarianism are the sides of a coin called impossible-to-sustain outcomes. They both presume near absolute conformity, just under different conditions. One is the absence of coercion, the other coercion so oppressive that it can’t be tolerated. It turns out some decisions do need to be enforced, but not all (or perhaps even not many). This isn’t really a binary as a coin flip implies, or it is one where the edge of the coin needs to provide more probability/stability than landing on either side (which implies a rather strange looking coin).

Coercion is necessary in politics, but like many substances, it isn’t toxic in small doses but it is the large dose that is deadly; even more so it is like water, too little or too much and you die. This is the problem with Nietzsche’s critique of morality - that it comes in two flavors based on coercion, master if it based on moral norms of coercing others, slave if the moral norms are derived from being the coerced. Basically, is it good to oppress or bad to be oppressed. Humans don’t thrive under either and we need a morality that transcends the small-minded view of this is good because it is like me and those like myself (which is the basis of Nietzsche’s view in both cases) and bad (or evil) because of the other. In Nietzsche’s defense, his correction to his own error in The Genealogy of Morality is found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra is neither oppressed nor oppressor. This did not resolve his transvaluation of the values, but it does point at a way, and one that isn’t blinded by a limited view of our past. Looking only at how we use coercion, blinds us to what we can agree to without it. Looking at only what we can agree to, without requiring some degree of conformity (and the use of coercion to enforce that) likewise blinds us. To riff on the saying about the land of the blind (where the one-eyed man is king) - in the land of the one-eyed, only the man with two eyes sees it all.

But politics is truly the land of the one-eyed, because it is all about using coercion, and likewise the rebellion of those who don’t want to be coerced in some particular regard. A politics that has a program of lebensraum - where it must dominate more and more space - is a politics crowding out all other social options. The left needs to hear this even more than the right, because they are the most committed (and with that commitment are creating the backlash that will come from their moral opposites). The backlash is inevitable, and the only way to moderate it is to moderate the relentless push to politicize that the left is deeply engaged in. By depoliticizing, we create breathing room for non-coercive social dynamics. But this requires you getting off of your own moral high horse about why your politics must dominate.

And that my friends is the problem of politics.

1. Yes, this is a shout-out to the quasi-Marxists that aren’t actually reading this.

2. This seeming contradiction isn’t one at all - the belief that the universe is rational (and orderly and can be understood by the human mind) is nothing but a statement of faith - just one without a higher mind (i.e. God).

3. I have over the years developed a rather violent reaction to that thoughtless slogan.

4. The true nature of democracy - that 50%+1 of us get to make the 50%-1 do what we want. If you think it is anything more than that, you are a damn fool. You probably don’t believe you would ever be part of the minus 1, or at worst, just for a very limited time, but you simply can’t know that, or trust that a majority is actually right about something, ever.