Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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War is the Ailing Health of the Nation-State

The content of this post is heavily reliant on The Rise and Decline of the State by Martin van Creveld.

The nation-state emerged during the twilight years of the absolute monarchies because it offered a competitive advantage in large-scale warfare between governments. The European governments that did not adopt the methods of the nation-state perished or were otherwise absorbed by those that did. To the extent that different governments adopted large, hierarchical bureaucracy supported by mass conscription, they tended to succeed.

The broad adoption of this method of government also created broader diplomatic and trade compatibility within Europe, particularly after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The climax of the nation-state occurred with World War II, the largest global conflict between states ever before seen. After the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, it became crucial for states to put an end to war at scale between ‘first-rate’ states that could credibly threaten the annihilation of its opponents even when losing a war.

Since then, at least internationally, states have ceased to experience strong competition from other states. The check upon corruption used to be that, if your state became too backwards in terms of technology, economy, and bureaucratic efficiency, it would be conquered and subjugated by neighboring states. A nuclear arsenal makes it so that no matter how incompetent and miserable the state, it can maintain itself until internal dissolution pulls it apart, sometimes pushed by indirect competition between states.

The critical competitive advantage of the state was in the field of war. Because the state was capable of fielding a large, mass army of capable fighters on short notice, it was able to overwhelm small kingdoms, republics, and city-states that were not capable of doing such a thing reliably. This competitive atmosphere was generated in Europe in part by the continual weakening of the nobility and the papacy, combined with over a century of religious warfare between Christian factions. Consolidating war-making power within fewer hands was adaptive.

This is why when, if you propose a return to monarchy or to some other alternative to the nation-state, most educated people will scoff at you. That habit of scoffing at the proposal made a lot of sense for the last few hundred years. The mental lives of people who can conceive of nothing outside the state are considerably different from the mentalities that existed before. I would say that our minds are structured differently from the type that was common before the state became dominant.

Mass Overcame Quality. Now Quality Overcomes Mass.

The advantage of the aristocracy in military affairs used to be concentrated in its ability to bring together highly skilled, highly mobile, expensively armed professional soldiers, and to be capable of deploying them to defend far-flung, non-contiguous territories on short notice. Reigns of many sovereigns were spent largely on campaign. Standing armies were rare. Instead, aristocrats and kings would hire mercenaries when they hired ‘regular’ professional soldiers at all. Wars between Europeans were fought primarily for profit, and secondarily for glory, recreation, or for religious purposes.

Although it is difficult for most of us to understand, before the era of the state, war was an entrepreneurial activity, perhaps the primary entrepreneurial activity. Tax collection, thief-catching, and other activities were also often run privately because bureaucracy was still limited, non-standardized, and statistically illegible. Much of colonial activity was conducted by corporations and privateers. The first corporation ever was the British East India Tea Company, chartered by Queen Elizabeth and funded by worthy noblemen and merchants.

This company and its privately-owned army and navy subjugated the prime nations of Asia and brought modern civilization to them. The behavior of this company and that of countless other similar ventures ranging from pirate sloops to mighty corporations is one of the reasons why a lot of people find notions about corporations that magically respect the ‘non-aggression principle’ to be a little goofy: because the historical record shows that corporations, let off the leash by governments, proceed to not be all that squeamish about aggression when there is profit in it.

The United States has its roots in this historical trend, and is one of the reasons as to why it took longer for the nation-state to properly take root within the country relative to European developments. Competitive isolation from European wars also helped to keep Washington backwards relative to other European capitals until the state fractured through the secession of the Confederacy, and mass conscription became necessary to restore its territory.

With the rise of the nation-state and nationalism with it, the state subsumed all war powers within itself. The aristocracy was destroyed in parts from the late 18th century until the interwar years of the 20th century.

After World War II, conscription became unpopular, as general fears regarding nuclear conflict and regret for the 20th century record of mass slaughter fueled by competing nationalist doctrines created a new sort of mass-pacifism. The necessary bureaucratization of states, originally motivated by the need to wage war, had also necessarily resulted in pacification. You can’t have a bureaucracy that trains people to be obedient to arbitrary pencil-necked authority, non-violent, and eager for paper-work and also have a population that is eager to fertilize the grass with blood.

Another unforeseen consequence of determining elite status through meritocratic advancement within the nation-state’s universities is that it has tended to cultivate a leadership class eager to avoid personal risk and violence in general. When you select for leadership on that basis over a period of generations, and subordinate military leadership entirely to civilian leadership, it’s not surprising that the nation-state has tended to retreat from direct conflict since 1945.

In the US and internationally, this lead to the institution of the all-volunteer military — a rebuke to the state’s reason for being, which is to grant a competitive advantage in mass warfare. Technological shift temporarily granted an advantage to mass warfare, and it has reversed owing to technological shift.

Why Personal Government Is Returning

The nation-state’s critical difference from previous forms of government is that it is both an abstract legal entity and that it is not owned by a particular person or group of people. Ownership pressure is replaced by a collective sense of fellow-feeling combined with the administration’s sense of ownership over itself. This is particularly distinct in a fully abstract nation-state that is not the informal property of a dictator or his family.

Owing to its decline, the nation-state now asks for more in terms of material resources while providing less. Its statistics are becoming unreliable (or perhaps just less reliable than they have been in the past). Its standards provided for trade and finance are becoming antiquated, and too expensive to reform. Its critical advantage in warfare has eroded, and many states have become reliant on private security firms to provide physical security, intelligence, and logistics whereas before they were able to rely on nationalist zeal to provide all of those services at an unusually low price.

Further, the internal systems developed to regiment the population, to regulate the economy, to make it suitable for funding regular mass warfare, to sustain loyalty, and to maintain a zealous nationalism, are breaking down owing to financial mismanagement combined with a lack of general will. Because no particular people own the governing structures of the Western governments, no particular people have strong, personal incentives to properly maintain those governing structures.

How to React

The facts in question are not in much dispute. There are several ways in which educated people have reacted to the facts:

  1. Magical thinking: repeating the monetary and fiscal policies of the 1970s at larger scale will rescue the state, permit it to meet all of its obligations with some minor tweaks to social programs, and result in a new golden age of innovation guided by our wise institutions. It will be difficult, but with faith and common commitment to a global mission, we can succeed.
  2. I don’t care! I’m going to make money. Screw the rest!
  3. The world is going to hell, which is why I’m hording guns and gold bullion.
  4. If our political faction can win, we can manage the state to a new period of prosperity. If only our opposition were defeated, we could succeed.
  5. We must get to work constructing an alternative order.

I am in camp number 5. Neoreaction is in some mixture of camps number 3 and 5 with some flirtation with number 4.

The politically partisan press is in camp number 4. The establishment press is in camp number 1. The business class tends to be in camp number 2 with some mixture of numbers 3, 1, 4, 2, and 5.

The key opening for camp number 5 comes as different sections of the nation-state fail, and the people that rely on those sections seek alternative providers for the services that the state once monopolized. In pursuing that goal, history can be a useful guide to learn about methods that once worked under previous political conditions, that can be again re-applied in different ways fitting modern circumstances.

The tendency among people who have been raised in the mindset of the state (which includes me and everyone reading this) is to associate the failure of the nation-state with apocalypse, because what might come after is inconceivable to us.

The key to providing hope to people, towards explaining a positive vision of the West’s political future, is to conceive of goals worth fighting for that go beyond mere indefinite holding actions, and to put forth some useful templates for political strategy that can be adapted and used to local conditions in an amorphous way.

Filed Under: War

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How Crowds Go Mad

We live in the age of the triumphant crowd. Liberated from the need to have every person be useful thanks to machinery, electricity, and human ingenuity, each person finds themselves at the center of a magical electronic universe. A feed of pictures, words, and sounds flows into their minds, mediated by soft glass screens responsive to touch.

We humans rely upon our fellows and their thoughts to us what is true and what must be done. If everyone around us believes something to be true, we also must believe it to be true as a short-cut, because complex thinking is expensive and not everyone is capable of doing it.

Today, technology permits people raised as people who go from crowd to crowd to pick and choose which crowd to join at will. Because it is nearly illegal to organize based on anything other than the crowd-principle, few people know anything but the crowd way of life. We accustom people as children to be broken up from their family and friends continuously — at least each year. The chiming of the hourly school-bell disrupts any line of thought that might lead to deep focus and learning. In the workplace, profit and innovation are usually subordinated to the crowd principle, because the notion of genius disturbs the democratic mind more than anything else.

Unfolding how crowds go mad is a trick statement: the default status of the crowd is to be mad, that is, in the terms of Thomas Szasz, to be morally ill relative to the historic standard of social health. The anonymous crowd is a maddening condition because it is alienating for people to be strangers among strangers who have no inkling of their true history, their relationships, or their character.

In this, the crowd is as much of an incubator for moral sickness as it is a risk factor for the sort caused by micro-organisms. To say that it is forbidden to restrict entry into any formal organization for any reason is to annihilate any possible form of organization other than the crowd.

Although it may be possible to form a dazzling, temporary group based on alternate principles, the pressure of crowd-society always rams its way inside, bloating & overwhelming the healthy host.

And the crowd is inherently unstable, tending towards crazes, as there is no authority that can speak to the crowd in order to convince it to end its rampages. The crowd listens to whatever voice hurls it into greater ecstasies. This climaxes reliably with righteous mass-murder.

A restoration of community rights, enumerated in law, enforced by good government, is the only political action that can hold the menace of the herd at bay. In the social structure of the community, the individual is no longer the absolute arbiter of reality, and it becomes far more challenging to deceive either oneself or others, because most members know one another intimately. It was this sense of community that formed the basis of English liberty, and the destruction of the former lead to the destruction of the latter.

There is hope yet for a return to health.

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Egalitarianism Destroys Labor Markets

I dislike the fashion among economics writers to say that technology has rendered most laborers ‘obsolete.’ That I dislike it does not necessarily make it false. But I will make the case for my beliefs here, nonetheless.

In this post, I will hash out why the ideology of human equality floods labor markets with unqualified workers and ultimately undermines the market system by generating destructive political feedback loops.

The reason why debates about labor markets take on such urgency in the Western world is that so many people are in desperate or at least insecure states of personal economy. Savings rates are perilously low, particularly among young people. Labor markets are chaotic, with too many people in inappropriate jobs, and plenty of fields besides that have labor shortages that spike wages. This is all exacerbated by a diversity human resources regime that forbids effective filtering of employees  and a social welfare system that seizes large portions of wages paid to labor.

First, it was a grievous mistake to purge the vestiges of feudal culture. While it is hard for me to make a positive argument for chattel slavery, assigning the exact same level of legal rights to all men and women over 18 rests on a lot of faulty assumptions about the intrinsic moral and intellectual capacities possessed by each person. It also neglects to provide people with individual choices about how many legal rights they ought to have.

While one might suppose based on a lifetime of propaganda that no one with the option would surrender their freedom in return for something, in practice, we have seen such arrangements take place throughout history and in the current day. Student loans permit you to indenture yourself to either the government or an authorized lender provided that you enroll within an accredited institution. Husbands and wives, even today, surrender some of their rights in return for a contract and certain soft privileges.

As this relates to the labor market, democratic courts forbid the restrictive apprenticeship contracts that were common even in the American colonies up until relatively recently. The need for skilled workers has not abetted (if anything, it has increased), but the historic legal framework that bonded apprentices to masters is no longer present.

Even in the construction trades, we see the consequences in the differences between pre and post-war architecture. The stonemasons that carved the ornate facades on New York City buildings built before the New Deal are no longer maintainable because that trade has shrunk to almost nothing. No one remembers the lost art. Skilled furniture makers have similarly been replaced by mass pulp manufacture, not necessarily because the latter produces better products.

It is my intuitive sense that it has more to do with the spiritual differences between mass-man and the old type of man that existed before the standardization of culture pushed through by the mandatory education system. IKEA would not appeal to a culture that still produced large numbers of skilled artisans capable of producing beautiful furniture at an affordable price.

Particularly as mass education has turned to promising a life of bureaucratic mind-work to everyone regardless of intrinsic capability, useful trades of all kinds need to be subsumed by automated substitutes.

Mass democracy has flooded labor markets in certain parts of society while either ignoring or heavily discouraging entrance into other segments, based on the temporary enthusiasms of education bureaucrats, mayors, and presidents.  Markets equilibrate to the political system, outside of conscious design.

Second, the ochlocracy pushes far more people into the labor market than ought to be there. The frogmarching of women into the workplace throughout the 20th century, which became a high state priority in the late 1960s, is a key example of this. The state attempts to push as many people into work as possible because wage labor is easily taxed, whereas household labor is not.

It is entirely possible that there are many people who would be better off working as gardeners, maids, and nursemaids in a bonded servant relationship rather than in an expressly wage-labor relationship. But the state prefers to reward the 40-hour-a-week format for standardization, ease of taxation, and in a vain attempt to create a worker’s paradise on Earth. The notion that ‘full employment’ is even desirable rests on a set of strange quantity-before-quality assumptions about the nature of work and human society.

It is also a difficult frame to smash: it is shared by all the people of quality, and only rogues believe otherwise.

What it ultimately does is create a dispirited, demoralized, Soviet-like population of ugly, fat, slutty, and unhealthy people. The property of the middle class gets routinely redistributed through various tax-and-inflation policies, keeping them in the labor market for too long.

Idiots mix with the capable, destroying business productivity. Young people do not enter the skill-building relationships that they need to, because they are illegal. Shortages and gluts appear regularly, which generates political chaos, and because democracy is incapable of producing effective leadership, the solutions chosen only exacerbate the underlying structural problems.

Modern economics writers will almost never broach these topics. No one wants to tell a generation of ‘strong, independent women’ that they probably cause more chaos and damage to the business world than is warranted. A hardworking housewife reduces the amount of cash income that a man needs to bring in to provide for his family.

The technology argument here is, again, a lazy argument to make (partly because it is force-fed to Western students in the schools as an explanation for various enormous 20th century changes). You can always spend more time cooking a better meal, working on an art project with a child, beautifying a home, sewing a dress, or otherwise discovering new ‘jobs’ within the household that improve quality of life.

No one wants to tell mediocre people that they would be better off as bonded servants, monks, or enlisted soldiers than as skilled workers. It is easier for someone like Tyler Cowen to instead say that they ought to be all ‘taken care of’ by magic welfare fairies that will somehow not cause any negative effects (to say nothing of the dysgenic impact). It says a lot about the failure of imagination and historical memory that the only solutions that our famous fatheads can come up with involves handing out more magical debit cards filled with digits to any low-life with a pulse.

The Marxist slogan ‘to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability’ has been diluted to the point where no one expects ability from anyone, and the new needs claimed by everyone reach to infinity. Fortunately, the world has limits.

No one respectable wants to admit that in areas like the arts and the skilled trades, America has declined in a shocking way in the post-war era. The narrative that must be maintained at all costs that every chart that anyone be allowed to look at in any circumstance must always be going from the lower left to the upper right without exceptions.

By telling people that they are all equal, we guarantee a steady progression of failure. By banning most enforceable legal relationships that smack of hierarchy, we consign countless people to dull, unsatisfying, and increasingly insecure lives.

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