My friends, all of our interests do not match those of The State
Conservatives shouldn’t be about grand schemes of a planned future. We are about you and yours, the idea of community and that given enough freedom good people will make a better place
The two terrible ideologies of the 20th century - socialism and nationalism - both have at their core the idea that most of what constitutes people’s lives should be conducted under the watchful eye, if not direct control, of an entity they call The State. Tim Worstall, in a critique of Mariana Mazzucato’s economics refers us back to Mussolini’s defining of his Fascism:
“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato”
Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. Mussolini saw The State - in his case Italy - as a real thing, an entity with spirit, identity and importance beyond merely being an accepted and convenient collection of people and places:
“...the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.”
The idea that the individual’s choices only remain tolerable if they coincide with the interests of The State continues - despite its origins with Marx and Gentile - to be a powerful political idea. We see this in the rejection of bodily autonomy by advocates of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) in particular from those charged by the British government with a function described as ‘public health’.
People should be prevented from certain activities because they cause that person harm and, in doing so, place a burden on the NHS. The denial of bodily autonomy (“my body, my choice” as pro-choice campaigners are wont to cry when speaking of abortion) applies most obviously to the use of proscribed - ‘hard’ - drugs but public health campaigners increasingly extend their calls for prohibition to other individual choices they deem unacceptable including drinking, smoking, gambling, sugar, hamburgers and fried chicken.
This, the ‘Nanny State’ as we call it, is merely the most obvious manifestation of a state that seeks to direct individual behaviour. The ubiquity of surveillance cameras, the increasing demand for ‘Photo ID’ and the use of modest increases in convenience to justify the extension of data collection. Ian Leslie refers to this process as one of making us (the citizen) legible to the government (The State):
“James C. Scott, the great critic of top-down social planning, describes the evolution of the modern state as a process of making a country legible to those who rule it. You take the blind chaos of forests, villages, farms and people, and you turn it into information about landholdings, property, yields, identity. Legibility is good: only when a society is made legible to its rulers can it be governed and improved.”
This might be called the Domesday Principle - to govern a people (so the Conqueror thought at least) you need to know how many there are of those people, what they own and where they live. As fans of the nativity story know, the real reason for needing to know this isn’t to govern you better but rather to make the extraction of money - tax - more effective and efficient:
“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.”
Technology (as writers like Vladimir Zamyatin, Philip K Dick and William Gibson tell us) presents The State with the potential and capability to exercise far more control than Caesar Augustus could ever have dreamed. And the state doesn’t need to be especially good or consistent in how it collects this information in order to exercise control. It matters little to The State that the facial recognition system has an error rate of 20% ( or !%, the rate doesn’t matter) because what matters to the citizen is the process. Yet error rates result in the disruption of people’s lives even if, eventually, that error is accepted. We should remember that an error rate of 5% means that one out of twenty people identified are not who the system claims.
All of these systems, all the data collection, and all the assurances that you have nothing to fear represent that idea of Mussolini’s - The State is everything and without it you, the citizen, are diminished and weakened. Your purpose as a citizen is not to live your life independently fussing over your friends, family and personal concerns. Rather, your purpose is to contribute , to be a ‘good citizen’ and to cooperate with the greater interests of The State. You will suffer waiting your turn for an appointment to see a doctor, you will bow to the school’s ideological indoctrination of your children, and you will take part in public celebrations of the NHS, education and a faux community of paid social workers.
Today people who call themselves ‘conservatives’ argue that (for reasons of opinion polling) people like this controlling, directing, nanny state. We are told that the popular position is to reject freedom in preference for ‘security’, the the ordinary voter doesn’t want cheaper food and cheaper energy but prefer to pay more for these things so Britain - The State - can look good at international boondoggles while protecting vocal and organised lobbyists for farming, electricity generation and, of course, employees of The State.
I’m here to tell you that The State is a fiction, once a convenience for rulers, and now a monster. We pretend that those gross totalitarian governments of the 20th century are a matter of history, that we have learned from those great sins and, instead of oppression, have a benign government that only cares for its citizens' welfare. Yet we were barricaded in our homes to protect that benign government, we accept surveillance without accountability, and we are told every day by that government that the actions of the private, unregulated world are dangerous, exploitative and rapacious. And that those things - owning football clubs, selling alcohol, making cheap food - need the intervention and oversight of The State.
Back in 1944, JRR Tolkien wrote to his son making the case for conservative anarchism:
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men.”
Those like me who are, by instinct, conservative need to take note of what’s being said here. Tolkien isn’t calling for the wholesale destruction of institutions but rather, for us to remember that people are people, not as the socialists and nationalists prefer numbers of a spreadsheet, peons in a field, or servants of The State’s future. It has become popular, among a certain set of nationalists (who frankly owe more to Mussolini - a socialist - than to the tradition of conservatism), to decry free markets and claim that their interventionist policies are in everyone’s interests despite them having the effect of making us poorer. This is, to return to where we started, the concept of Fascism - that ordinary citizens (not the great and good, never the great and good) should make sacrifices in the interests of The State. We should pay more for food, cars, buses, broadband and the telly because the noble workers who produce those things in England (quite often badly) need that sacrifice.
My Dad, on occasion, called himself a ‘conservative anarchist’ and I’ve a feeling that he was right. Too many conservatives tip over into wanting to control and direct other people’s lives rather than allowing the good sense and essential conservatism of regular folk to win out. Tolkien’s point - that even saint’s shouldn’t be bossing us around - should be where conservatism starts and finishes. With what’s outside our front door, with things we can do something about. Conservatives shouldn’t be about industrial strategy, economic intervention or grand schemes of a planned future. We are about you and yours, the idea of community and that given enough freedom good people will make a better place.
It is a rare politician who believes that a good politician is someone who does as little as possible. It is the consequential downside of making the role of MP a paid job rather than something people do as a calling to service in addition to their real job. Once you have a job with a salary you feel you need to look busy and do stuff to justify your existence to your paymasters, in this case the electorate. And unfortunately the electorate seems to see it this way with their complaints about the length of parliamentary recesses (the longer the better in my view), absence from the chamber when parliament is sitting and the level of MPs’ pay. It is no wonder there is a compulsive urge to pass laws and to spout vacuous drivel in the House of Commons to provide a video to clip for social media to show that the salary is being “earned”. No matter that the legislation passed is often a knee jerk response to the latest scandal to make something illegal which is already illegal if only antibody could be bothered to enforce the existing law. Or doing something that signals virtue but will have a myriad of unintended consequences, that will then provide the excuse for further legislation to address.
It is hard to believe that only 40 years ago we had a government that was led by someone who actively believed that the state should be rolled back, that the people nor the government knows best and which abolished taxes and transferred back to private ownership businesses that were for no good reason owned by the state. But that leader was a rare animal indeed, the like of whom we probably won’t see again. Alas, it was in retrospect but a brief interlude in the otherwise inexorable growth of the state’s tentacles into every aspect of our lives.
The problem is compounded by the growth of the quango state. While ostensibly presented as a sensible step to take managerial and administrative affairs out of the grubby hands of politicians and put them into the hands of professional experts, the same problem of justifying one’s salary by being busy doing stuff exists on a even greater scale. So the “public” health bodies you decry keep finding more dragons to slay after each kill, the FCA (one of the most grotesque creations of New Labour) extends its initial remit, off its own bat and with no legislative authority, of customer protection into telling financial institutions to have diverse workforces and combat climate change.
We are truly in a terrible pickle and it’s not clear there’s any way out of it.
Refreshing to see Fascism explained and exposed for what it is, Socialism disguised in bad drag, and not just an insult to hurl at ‘racists’. Democracy - demos kratos/ the people the power - is the fundamental principle that each member of the demos has an equal measure of (political) power in order to prevent power being concentrated and used by one or a few to impose their will on others. This is tyranny which inevitable involves bribery, corruption and abuse of power. Under democracy, Government and State cannot exist - that’s the purpose of democracy; true anarchy. Without Government there would be mob rule, we are told, but we have mob rule: the woke, the social justice, the technocrats, BLM, the Corporate, the NGO, technocrat, the immigrant, the billionaire - mobs.
Under democracy, spontaneous order will emerge in society determined and shaped by a common culture of shared, language, morals, values, manners, Common Law.
We live within a body politic wherein members of the demos are bribed to sell their kratos to self-selecting wannabe tyrants, and have been conditioned since the end of WWII to accept serfdom, in bondage to the State, and to be abused as our culture which gives social cohesion, increasingly is debauched and fragmented - divide and rule.
Voting won’t change this, it is just part of the system to perpetuate serfdom.