Michael S. Rozeff is a retired Professor of Finance
living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book
Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book
The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline. His articles are posted at the websites
'Christian and State,' and
'Lew Rockwell.'
The following article was posted in March, 2011.
Leapfrog the West
by Michael S. Rozeff
Tunisians, Egyptians, Bahrainians, Omanians, Libyans, Saudi Arabians,
Yemenis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and all the other many peoples of
the world who are striving for better forms of government that will lead
to real improvements in your lives, I wish you well. You are engaged in
a difficult enterprise. Many of you are risking much to achieve it. May
God be with you.
If I were to sit down with one of you in your country as your guest,
after the exchanges and pleasantries of friendship, the conversation
might turn to the ways of life that you wish to bring into being. That
is my subject.
Your desire to imagine and create new ways of life, to cause to be
where nothing was before, is the central human capacity, one that is
given by God and one that is shared by all human beings. This creative
power is freedom.
To love God I take to be man’s mission and God’s desire. We are in
this together. To love God is to love his creation, which includes other
people. To love one’s neighbor implies, at a minimum, tolerance of his
freedom and the ways of life that he creates. Be slow in judging him. Be
slower still in using force to hinder and dominate him. If, in your
eyes, his ways are strange or evil, tolerate them. I am not speaking of
the crimes such as murder, theft, arson, and rape of which we all know,
but of the myriad of other behaviors on which human beings are prone to
disagree.
If you desire a good society, you should not pursue it as an abstract
goal, nor should you pursue it as a general goal obtained by the
State’s uniform laws or by customs dictated to all or enforced on all by
social means as supposed ways to make people good. Focus instead on the
person, on each and every person. Each person has the highest value,
over society and over state. These are not persons. They are merely
organizations and tools to achieve other purposes and they are always
seriously flawed. The good society is good when its people are able to
be persons, which means they are in possession of the unhampered freedom
to create.
My advice to you who are now involved in various revolutions and
protests is something like the following, in very brief outline.
Leapfrog the West. Learn from the mistakes of the West. Don’t imitate
the West blindly in the heat of the moment of attaining new
governments. Opportunities like this do not arise often. Make the most
of them.
Do not immediately or quickly fasten upon some more or less standard
political agenda. They are all deeply flawed. They reflect the sins and
mistakes of the West, which the West has not overcome. Seek instead to
understand the fundamentals of human life and the human being as a basic
guide to social, ethical, and political life.
If your educated class is promoting grandiose social schemes and
promising grand results, don’t believe them and don’t approve their
agenda. Such promises have been made in the West for several
generations. These social engineering and wealth redistribution schemes
all are coming to a bad end here. Don’t be enticed into repeating the
Western follies.
My view is that the essence of the human being while on this earth is
the free human personality. Our being is tied up with freedom at its
very root. Every sacrifice of freedom that arises from the pressures,
domination, and coercions of family, friends, business, church, society,
and state, or from our own personal sacrifice and enslavement by
ourselves, destroys a portion of that being or suppresses it, thereby
causing a degree of non-being. As I understand the human condition, God
created us as free persons. We are free to choose good or evil.
Non-being is evil. Being, which presumes freedom and actualizes freedom,
is good. The free human personality, as God’s creation, is good. It is a
value that is above family, friends, society, organizations, and
states. Its worth is above any of these.
Therefore, nurture freedom of the person. Nurture freedom of
conscience. Nurture freedom of creativity. Nurture freedom of thought,
expression, speech, and action. Nurture all of these at the level of
each single person. Do not nurture domination by society, religion,
state, family, business, or any other institutions. That which is good
is the free spirit in each person.
Make no attempt whatsoever to create the “good life” or happiness or
welfare of citizens (or subjects or individuals or voters) by means of
the state or any institution or association that dominates and
suppresses the person. That approach is godless and wrong. It invariably
leads to a confusion of means and ends. The state uses violence as a
means. If you allow the state to use violent means in the hope of
achieving the ends of happiness or general welfare, you will destroy the
freedom of the person. But freedom of the person is the good. It is
what God brought into being.
Do away with notions of sovereignty by any person or group or
institution. The U.S. Constitution is deeply flawed from the outset in
its assumption that We the People are sovereign. Sovereignty is a
godless concept. It is entirely at odds with the idea of a free person.
God is not sovereign over human beings either. He does not determine
what we do with our freedom. Even being sovereign over oneself distorts
the idea of a free and creative spirit. In the same vein, the
libertarian notion of “owning oneself,” although consistent with and
correctly emphasizing the idea of freedom, is essentially a cold and
bloodless view of a human being. The human being has a more fiery,
passionate, hotter, and loving core in its free and creative spirit. The
attempt to justify freedom by beginning with a natural right or
self-ownership derives from an agnostic or atheistic view of human life.
It doesn’t ground freedom in God and his creation. It treats the human
being as matter or as a socially-derived institution of property. It
doesn’t make us all brothers and children of God. It isolates the
personality and thrusts the human being toward egoistic individualism.
This is not an entirely false depiction of fallen human nature, of
course. And yet the human spirit naturally reaches out to other similar
spirits and to God. It reaches backward to creation and forward to the
last days and the Kingdom of God. Purely rationalistic concepts of the
human being that were born in the Enlightenment and have carried through
in different forms to modern day democratic, social-democratic,
socialist, and communist governments are insufficient to understand
human nature and insufficient to move firmly away from the many
varieties of slavery, overt and covert, and toward freedom. These old
Western ideas have resulted in Western governments that suffocate and
suppress persons. They culminate in efforts to spread the same kind of
governments worldwide and to have one worldwide government.
The U.S. Constitution gets off on the wrong foot by making the
general welfare an end. This leads only to the sacrifice of the person.
Utilitarianism, which is the philosophy that sets happiness as the
ultimate human value, is deeply flawed. It is basically another godless
concept and one that leads to the adoption of violent means to create
the end of happiness, thereby sacrificing the free person, which is the
actual value.
Do not attempt to eliminate the everyday human failings and
limitations by using force or the powers of society and state. Human
beings must be free to choose between good and evil things. They must be
free to make mistakes. Human beings cannot be moral beings without
making choices for and by themselves. They cannot share in God’s grace
without such freedom. Do not be legislating personal morals. Do not be
imposing societal sanctions on beliefs, speech, clothing, art, sexual
behavior, and discovery. Do not be attempting with such broad powers to
create earthly utopias. This is not only impossible, but attempts to
accomplish this go directly against the free and creative human
personality, which is God’s creation.
Don’t bother catching up to the flawed Western ideas of politics.
Surpass these ideas. They are not rooted in God, despite the rhetoric to
that effect that attempts to fuse God, country, nation, and State. As
such, the Western ideas lead to godless behavior. This was evident early
on in America and is becoming increasingly marked over time.
Do not create theocratic states, however. They too are inimical to
human freedom of thought, conscience and action. Power over the human
person cannot be turned over to priests, clerics, and ayatollahs any
more than to secular politicians. The combination of a powerful church
and a powerful state is a recipe for suppression of the person.
Separation of church and state is a good idea. In practice, however,
the State makes itself the new God. It tries to surround its immoral
activities with an aura of high morality. In the U.S., there are many
religious denominations. Somehow, though, the churches either make very
little noise about the welfare-warfare State or else support it
outright. The State has managed to get organized religion on its side,
by and large.
Revolutions usually go about constructing a new State that is in no
essential way much different from the old one. Avoid this at all costs.
Otherwise, the people are doomed to another 50 or 60 years until the
next revolution breaks out.
You simply must understand the nature of the State if you are to
leapfrog the Western political structures. If you understand it
thoroughly, then you will wish to minimize the State.
The State is the sword, that is, power. Its essence is power: holding
power, increasing power, and administering power. This has been evident
for several thousand years if one examines the rise and fall of empires
throughout the entire world as well as their conquests, wars, and
legalities. The state has no central interest in justice, righteousness,
rights, or the freedom of people, its own or others. It would just as
soon enslave everyone if people did not resist. It would make war
continually against others or against its own citizens if it could. It
makes war to prevent peaceful secessions. It claims territory through
war and dictate, through ruse and stratagem, through conquest, blood and
violence. It claims all within its boundaries.
The totalitarian states of the twentieth century provide clear
examples of the demonic nature of the State. The worst of them under
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot butchered untold millions of persons.
They sought meticulous control over economy, press, thought, money, and
travel. The Western social democracies are not far behind in these
respects, and they are already past masters at making war. Reject them
as a model of government. Jesus rejected “all the kingdoms of the world,
and the glory of them.” Follow his example.
If it were not for man’s craving for a universal kingdom, his craving
for power, his fears and desire for security, and his susceptibility to
the hypnotic temptations that the State generates, this evil
institution would not exist. It exists now only to be overcome and
bypassed by humanity. Do your part in this endeavor.
The State promises order. Its order is a superficial pastiche of
arbitrary laws and measures that typically discriminate unjustly while
also imposing uniformity on those affected. The State promises to remedy
chaos, but it creates chaos and non-being by suppressing the creative
spirit of persons.
The idea of the State as a thing to win is an incentive to warfare
and chaos. When a state loses control over the people, warfare often
erupts among groups that cannot tolerate one another as all strive to
gain control over a new state and impose their agenda on everyone.
One of the worst features of the State is that whatever is immoral
for a person is made out to be moral for the State. The State uses its
people to kill and maim, to torture and spy, to inform and rat on
others, and to assault and destroy, and all of this is approved of and
applauded as if nothing were wrong. Brutality becomes something that
wins medals and is glorified in motion pictures. The most corrupt and
lying politicians gain the most respect.
Putting in place a Western-style democracy is not going to create
prosperity. It only introduces a source of friction at the heart of a
society. It will be an institution that endangers property rights, seeks
greater power, won’t allow secession, won’t tolerate any serious
challenge, manipulates the public, caters to special interests, wastes
resources, taxes onerously, corrupts the money, and takes every
opportunity to control the people.
Taking foreign aid from the West is one of the worst things you can
possibly do. You will simply doom yourself to being a satellite of the
West and part of its machinations. You may well end up at the mercy of
its bankers.
Rather than thinking about a new government, think instead about how
to build a vibrant society in which persons can exercise their creative
spirits freely, for that is the basis of a good society. Think about
generating tolerance. Think about generating trust. Think about
well-defined property rights. Think about free markets. Think about
incorruptible money. Think about a variety of institutions of justice
and defense. Think about justice itself.
The West is strangling in its own debt, its own corruption, its web
of lies and deceits, its fearful peoples, and its overly large
governments. Why look to the West? Why go backwards when you have a
chance to go forwards? In short, leapfrog the West.
March 11, 2011
Michael S. Rozeff is a retired Professor of Finance
living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book
Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book
The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.
Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted,
provided full credit is given.
