An email from a correspondent, who is not in Guam, reminds me to remind gentle reader of a truth I take for self-evident, but perhaps others don’t. We personalize the State. I do myself, when I refer to it as Big Brother, Big Sister, Twisted Nanny, &c. But this is a conceit. As anyone caught in the jaws of Big Shark should realize, it doesn’t think like a human. It thinks more like a mechanism. Of course, when the mechanism has selected one’s own person for food — I am thinking here of the Revenue Department, but government agencies are all much the same — little can be done. One might beg for mercy, but the thing is not designed to dispense mercy. That is not its function. Its function is to absorb protein.
Guvmint agents themselves — the cells and their switches — are task-oriented. Each signed off his right to make humane judgements when he took the job.
We used to have reactionary courts, to restrain the creature. Now we have progressive courts, to urge it on.
Among the foibles of democracy, is the notion that “the peeple” are somehow in control. The people, however, consist of persons, with their quite various moral flaws, which tend to cancel each other. They elect politicians for show. This helps them put a human face on the enterprise, so they have someone to blame at the electoral intervals. It is true that a government with a majority and a will can alter the course of history: usually by putting more sharks in the tank. And that the policy wonks are, arguably, human. But they are cells themselves, within Leviathan.
We live, I say from time to time, in an age of “total war” and “total peace.” The one condition resembles the other: a command economy, focused on results. We have, as it were, totalitarianism with a human face. It is a kind of smiley face, painted on the tip of the missile.
David Warren, “Notes from the sheepfold”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-08-11.
September 25, 2019
QotD: Big government is not human
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