The Cult of the State

[dblack]

Many years ago I read an essay by Joseph Sobran that really stuck with me. So much so, that I still periodically search for it online. Until now, I've never been able to find it. But this morning I did! To my great delight, I found a photocopy of it in the Google newspaper archives (link to original). I took the liberty of transcribing it so I could post it in a more readable format. Please let me know if you see any discrepancies or typos.

The Cult of the State Is Today's Faith

By Joseph Sobran (Dec 17th, 1990)

"The style of your own time," the critic Hugh Kenner has written, "is always invisible." If he is right, the distinguishing feature of our age is likely to be not something we are proud of, ashamed of or even aware of, but something we take for granted.

What would that be? Maybe nobody can really know. But my guess would be the cult of the state.

Twentieth-century man believes in the state as firmly and implicitly as medieval man believed in the church: as an institution whose authority can't be questioned. I don't mean that people never complain about government; obviously they complain about it all the time. But they rarely challenge it in principle, by asking where it gets its right to exist in the first place. More often than not, even their complaints are really demands that it do more than it is already doing.

A recent essay by Barbara Ehrenreich in Time, for instance, called for national health insurance. She thought it was a good idea for everyone. But it never occurred to her to explain where the state gets the rightful power to compel everyone to belong to such a program.

I'm often struck by how meekly most people obey even the pettiest government officials in their most intrusive functions. Elected officials treat their constituents with respect. Unelected ones don't. And the unelected ones are far more numerous, and the source and ground of their authority is far less clear.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson concisely stated the classic republican rationale for government: to secure our God-given rights. This also implies a strict limitation: Government must not violate those rights. It must not exceed that purpose.

But the state has a way of growing beyond its proper bounds. The servant becomes the master by gradual and cunning steps, usually on humanitarian pretexts. Instead of protecting our independent pursuit of happiness, it promises to deliver happiness itself. And it can do this only by diminishing the very freedom it's supposed to be assuring, as by taxing Peter to subsidize Paul.

If Paul took Peter's money himself, we would recognize his behaviour as criminal. But if the state does it for him, we accept the transaction as legitimate.

How can this be? The few people who try to justify such practices usually argue that they are sanctioned by "democratic process." But if a practice is inherently unjust, no mere procedure can make it right. We may delegate to the state our right to self-defense because we all have a right to defend ourselves in the first place. But we can't delegate our right to rob our neighbors, because we have no such right. Robbery doesn't cease to be robbery merely because the beneficiary uses a vote instead of a gun.

Of course, most people have long since stopped thinking about such things analytically; they simply assume that the state may do as it pleases. Its functions are legitimized not by any theory but by their confusing complexity and the sheer power that makes it futile to resist them. So most people have obeyed the state with equal servility whether it was communist, fascist or democratic.

You might think that the 20th century would have made us all anarchists. The modern state has to its credit two world wars, mass murder on a scale never imagined, enslavement, terror, oppression and a steady level of confiscation, corruption and fraud that ought to enrage us. How can the monstrosity in Washington, D.C., claim to derive from the carefully limited federal republic bequeathed by Jefferson's generation?

And yet we still award the state our sheeplike submission. After all the horrors we have seen, we still talk as if the greatest danger we face were a return of the 19th century's "robber baron" capitalists. How many people did John D. Rockefeller kill?

Worse than our loss is our blindness to that loss. Ages to come will marvel that we thought we were free.

 

[hazlnut]

It's not every well written, whining about imperfect governance run by imperfect man.

The state is not "the other" -- the state is human beings, mostly chosen via elections, to make decisions for other human beings. I say mostly because I'm taking about industrialized Europe, Asia, and North America. But the state is us and we are the state. The state is an extension of our will. Donald Trump is an extension of the uneducated, angry, and afraid masses who have lost their jobs because they elected people who allowed the manufacturing base to be gutted. We wanted cheaper products at Walmart and we got them. Now we pay the price.

 

[dblack]

It's not every well written, whining about imperfect governance run by imperfect man.

The state is not "the other" -- the state is human beings, mostly chosen via elections, to make decisions for other human beings. I say mostly because I'm taking about industrialized Europe, Asia, and North America. But the state is us and we are the state. The state is an extension of our will. Donald Trump is an extension of the uneducated, angry, and afraid masses who have lost their jobs because they elected people who allowed the manufacturing base to be gutted. We wanted cheaper products at Walmart and we got them. Now we pay the price.

"...the state is us and we are the state."

This is exactly where I think you're wrong. At best, government is an agent of society, not its ultimate expression.