Can There be Peace?

I am going to explain the problems with democratic politics and what the only reasonable solution is. For the purpose of this writing, a democracy is any system in which the people involved with it believe they have some say in how it operates, and therefore see value in expressing their opinion on that matter. If there were a state ruled absolutely by a council of ten people, then what I write here would apply to those ten people. If there were a state with elections which are only for show and the government acts without regard to what people vote for, then what I write here would still apply. Many love pointing out that the United States is a representative republic, not a democracy, but it is a democracy for my purposes.

In a democracy, various factions attempt to gain public support in order to put certain people in power so that they may use government to pursue various ends. The kinds of ends which are pursued by democratic governments can generally be described as matters of justice and the common good, while the ends pursued by private actors are matters of personal preference. Private security exists, but government police and courts are needed to enact justice against wrongdoers. Private charity exists, but government welfare is needed to ensure that the poor have enough. At least, this is how such things are justified. It is possible to imagine a society with no government in which private actors do everything a government would. All moral objections to this idea are essentially the same; there would be no singular institution which guarantees justice and the common good. Once it is understood that this is the presumed purpose of government, it becomes possible to understand why governments fail to achieve this purpose and to understand political disagreements. When someone states his opinion of what his government ought to do, he is stating what he believes to be just and vice versa. All political conflicts among honest people are disagreements over what ends are most just and good and disagreements over the means by which they are best achieved.

               Much of the division and fruitlessness in political debates results from a conflation of these two kinds of disagreements. Very often people agree on what ends should be achieved, but disagree on what means should be used to achieve them. As an example, people generally agree that it is bad when people get addicted to harmful drugs, but prohibitions have been ineffective, costly, and destructive. Someone who says the prohibitions should be ended is not necessarily saying that stopping drug use is not an end which should be pursued; he is saying that the particular means being employed are wrong. The problem is that, unless those opposing the prohibition propose an alternative means of discouraging people from using drugs, they end up being seen as being on the same side of the debate as those who believe there is nothing wrong with using drugs. If the majority of people believe that drugs are bad, then the prohibitionist faction will win because they will be seen as the ones who are serious about solving the problem, no matter how much their opponents say that the solution being used is wrong.

               This is the problem with any political movement which argues that the role of government should be limited to a few specific areas. Such an idea will always be unpopular because people’s beliefs of justice and the common good are not limited to a few specific areas, meaning the institution whose purpose is to achieve these ends should not be so limited. To say that a government should only protect people from violence and prosecute those who are guilty of such crimes is to say that other problems such as drug addiction are not matters of the common good. To say that these kinds of problems should be solved by people outside the government is to say that wanting these problems solved is nothing more than a matter of personal preference. The only way to successfully promote the idea of limited government is to change people’s idea of what government is and its purpose, but that is not my purpose in writing this. I want to explain why governments fail to achieve this purpose. If this were not the case, then so many people would not be so dissatisfied by the government and so invested in politics. I will try to explain what the only solution might be.

               When a government decides to pursue a certain end, that end does not simply become reality. Drug prohibitions do not simply eliminate drugs. Government actions are not abstractions. They involve real people’s actions which make use of scarce resources and have both benefits, costs, and unintended consequences. There are innumerable ways to attempt to solve any particular problem, each with different benefits and costs. Choosing one solution means not choosing any of the many different ones. One solution may work well under one set of conditions, but not under others. The solutions governments attempt to employ can be extremely costly and ineffective. If this were not true, no one would believe that government should be limited. Far more absurd than believing government should be limited is being deeply ideologically committed to a certain government policy. The best solution may be one which no one has thought of, just as the technologies of today were unknown to those who lived in the past. Discovering the most effective and least costly solution requires more work than just deciding that the problem should be solved; deciding the best government policy for accomplishing a particular end is an engineering question not fundamentally different from any other. As such, it requires expertise which the average person does not have. If two opposing candidates propose different ideas for stopping people from using addictive drugs, the average voter does not know which proposal is better. Few people are willing and able to put forth the effort needed to discover the best solution to this kind of problem. It is not that people are stupid, it is that most specialize in fields other than those which are relevant to deciding the best means for a government to use in order to reach a particular end. Being able to design cars does not make someone a good surgeon. A surgeon should not be consulted when designing cars, nor should the average person necessarily be consulted when designing government policy. The question of how the government should solve a problem should not be decided by vote nor subject to public debate any more than the best way to design a car or the best way to perform a surgery. The problem, then, is ensuring that those, who do know the most effective and least costly way for a government to achieve a particular end, are the ones put in the position of making these decisions and then ensuring that they do the best job possible. I am not sure what the answer to this problem is, except that it may be worth examining why competent people are usually chosen for important tasks outside government, and that this problem will be easier to deal with if the much greater problem presented by the other kind of political disagreement can be overcome.

               People also disagree over the ends a government should seek to achieve. Most people think it is bad to use harmful and addictive drugs, but some might think it is not such a bad thing. Moreover, there drugs which are not physically harmful, but many believe have effects which are bad for society, while others do not and believe that no actions should be taken to discourage their use. If all political debates were about what ends are most just and good instead of the best means to achieve them, then we would probably find that most people agree on many things, but not everything. People have different ideas of what is just and good. Unlike the questions of what means are most effective and least costly, the question of what ends are most just and good is not a matter of objective fact. No one can be an expert in the field of knowing what is good. Even if one could, people would still disagree with him. It seems rather absurd to think that everyone will eventually discover what is most good and just and agree on that after having enough debates. If this were possible, why has it not happened yet? Nearly everyone in the United States believes racism is bad when they did not in the past, but people have since found other things to disagree over, such as the question of what racism is. If it is not possible to discover what is definitively most right and then get everyone to agree, then there needs to be a way to deal with the fact that people will always have different ideas of what is just and good.

The members of any political faction believe their particular view of what is good and just to be right and other views to be wrong, or else they would not hold that view and reject the others. They necessarily believe that their opponents do not just have different personal preferences but are evil. With such beliefs, it might not be unreasonable for them to just kill everyone who opposes their efforts to achieve justice and the common good. This has certainly happened throughout history, but it usually does not happen in western democracies. People with different beliefs are not at war with each other. They are instead able to engage in argumentation and honest debate. The only reason anyone would do this is if he does not believe he should conquer and kill those who believe differently, but is instead able to tolerate other people having different beliefs of the way things should be. Everything I have written here has been under the assumption that anyone reading it is among those who believe in peaceful and honest argumentation and, therefore, presuppose that it is wrong to act violently toward each other. If people have honest debates, that means they are willing to treat their differences in political opinion as differences in personal preference to an extent and believe that only peaceful means should be used to persuade others to accept their beliefs.

If differences of political opinion can be treated as differences in personal preferences, then it should be possible for people to satisfy these different preferences without conflict just as they do in all other areas. If one person wants to have a blue car and another person wants a red car, they can both seek these different ends. There is only conflict when people seek incompatible ends, such as two or more people wanting exclusive ownership of the same car. In matters of politics, the same thing is true. There is only conflict when people seek to control the same government. The way people with different political goals to all get what they want is for them to have different governments, so that those under one government are neither harmed by nor benefit from the actions of other governments. Most people in the United States are not worried about the policies of the government of Canada.

In democratic states, people do not just tolerate other people having different beliefs of what is just and good; they tolerate them trying to take control of the government and impose those beliefs on them. If someone believes his preferred policies absolutely must be imposed on every person currently living a particular state, then he should be asked two questions. How can he tolerate foreign states having different policies? Why isn’t he planning to kill all his political opponents? For those who can tolerate different places and people being governed differently and do not want to destroy their opposition, surely it would be preferable if those who find their government intolerable and their differences with their opponents irreconcilable could instead peacefully separate from them and form their own government and society which pursues those people’s vision of what is good and just in a way which neither interferes with nor is interfered with by the people and government they separated from?

Obviously, this is not what happens in reality. In the United States of America, two major parties struggle for control of one government. The two parties represent different visions of justice and the common good and favor different means of achieving them. No matter who gets elected and what legislation they pass, the citizens are forced to obey the government and pay for its activities through taxation under threat of violence and imprisonment. In a situation such as this, the political process is not a series of honest debates; it is a struggle for domination. The process of deciding who runs the government and what agenda it pursues is the process of deciding who exploits whom and for what purpose. This is a cold civil war, which seems to be heating up, as should be expected. As I explained, when there are factions with different beliefs of the way things ought to be, the only reasonable things for them to do are either attempt to violently dominate each other until one side wins or find a way for them to pursue their different goals separately. Most people do not want the former, which is a hot civil war, so why aren’t more people trying to achieve the latter outcome? Why aren’t more people proposing something as moderate as restraining the powers of the federal government to those listed in the constitution and leaving all other matters to the state governments, so that different places and different people can be governed differently?

 The situation is rather more complicated than the way things appear. I would say that the cold civil war has already been won, but not by only one of the two parties. The common people have their various political beliefs and they vote for the candidates most aligned with them, but the people in power have their own interests. Governments are often not effective at efficiently achieving the stated ends of their policies because doing so is secondary to the purpose of advancing the power of the elites. The unelected government bureaucrats, the elected politicians of both parties, big business, and the corporate media all prefer to maintain their own power and they would prefer that hundreds of millions of people are ruled and trillions of dollars are spent by one government. They would prefer that power continue to be centralized in the federal government and that everyone see it as the one institution which will solve all societal problems. They all would prefer that people believe their elected officials represent their interests and beliefs and they just need to vote for the right candidates instead of the wrong ones. They would prefer that the common people see their fellow citizens, who disagree with them, as the obstacle to having a society they want instead of them, the people in power who will not allow those with different beliefs to peacefully separate, but instead tells them they need to struggle to control the same government.

With these conclusions, I have some ideas of what could be done. Many people in the United States are very dissatisfied with the status quo and hate the elites who maintain and benefit from it. The problem is that It is impossible to unite these various dissidents because they have different ideas of how this situation should be changed, and they are as opposed to each other as much as they are opposed to those in power. The supporters of Donald Trump and the supporters Bernie Sanders will never be able to agree on a unified populist platform. Any “big tent” coalition, even one among those considered to be on the same “side,” will not be to equally represent all the factions composing it and will instead serve one set of interests more than all others, and those interests will probably be those most aligned with those in power. The coalition I would propose would not unite anyone except for the purpose of disunion: a coalition built on the principle that those with different beliefs and goals should only be united in opposition to that which causes them to be in conflict. There is only conflict when different people try to take control of the same resource, therefore, different political factions can only cooperate if they do not seek control of the same government.

The various factions within this coalition would continue to pursue their respective goals, but the one thing they would agree on is a policy platform consisting of a simple proposal that the government allow people to form separate societies and governments, but more generally, it should be a proposal that the government obey the same rules which all other people are expected to obey in order for them to interact without conflict, which is to say that the government ideally must be forbidden from stealing, murdering, or otherwise acting aggressively towards any person and may only use violence for the purpose of prosecuting aggressive crimes. This proposal would not require any large changes, except in foreign policy, nor would it require removing anyone from power; it is simply that the government only use non-aggressive means. The people in power may continue doing what they want, but no one should be forced to pay for any of it through taxation nor forced to obey any of their arbitrary regulations or prohibitions. This is not to say that people should simply be free to defy the government. The government may use any means short of aggression to collect taxes and enforce its arbitrary dictates. If someone does not pay taxes, the government may exclude him from receiving the benefits of the things the taxes pay for. He would not be able to vote, receive welfare, use public schools and other services, he may be excluded from government property including roads, and “private” companies deeply involved with the government would not serve or hire him, meaning he would not get electricity and water. He would otherwise be treated as a non-citizen. If people were allowed to disobey the government, but at the cost of losing all these benefits, very few people would do it, unless they are joined by many other people, so that they may support each other and form a separate society which neither benefits from nor contributes to the society they separated from, except through trade agreed to by everyone involved. Those seeking separation could win control of an administrative unit, such as a city, county, or state in the United States, and that unit would then become an independent state separate from the one it had been part of.

This is not a proposal that a nation-state be dissolved, but rather that it should be maintained by ensuring that it is tolerable for all who are part of it. People do not quit their jobs simply because they are allowed to. However, separation is the only peaceful option when various political factions have incompatible goals. This is the only way to truly protect the interests of minorities in a democracy. They must have the ability to threaten to leave if the costs imposed by the government are greater than the benefits. Every nation-state has and will undergo changes over time. They all gain and lose territory. Old ones collapse and new ones are formed. When factions within a state are committed to pursuing incompatible ends, that is a good time to consider whether and how such changes should occur. To believe that any state is so divinely sacred that it ought to be preserved for its own sake at all costs is pure idolatry. Indeed, many graven images in temples can be found in the capital of the United States. Of course, the United States already has a federal system which was intended to allow for different people and places to be governed differently. There would be no need to dissolve the union in order to achieve the goal of this proposal, and if that were to happen, it would be perfectly consistent with the founding principles.

Once such dogmatic beliefs are overcome, the only reasons for someone, who believes in peace and can tolerate different people in different places being governed differently, to be skeptical of this proposal are the practical challenges of putting it into effect. A system of non-aggressive enforcement may be difficult to create and may actually be more intrusive into people’s lives. There may be all kinds of problematic consequences resulting from a state splitting into smaller ones. However, what is important is that the underlying principle be accepted, even if it cannot be applied perfectly. If there is to be peace, then there needs to be a way for people with different goals to pursue their respective ends without conflict. Such a proposal is nothing more than an offering of peace. To reject it is nothing less than a declaration of war. If this hypothetical coalition were to publicly present this simple proposal in a way which cannot be ignored, they would force the people in power to openly say whether the political process is one consisting of honest debates or if it is a struggle for domination. Anyone, who does not agree with the principle underlying the proposal and at least discusses means by which it could be put into effect, would reveal that his apparently benevolent political platform is a deceptive attempt to gain the support of useful idiots in order to take power for the purpose of controlling people and extracting wealth from them.

This coalition does not exist, and this proposal has not been presented. There is at least one political faction in the United States with a platform which includes something similar to this proposal, but they have no great influence and they do not present their platform in such a simple way, free from partisanship and ideological baggage, which might unite various dissidents. Until this proposal is publicly presented and debated, one should regard the political process as war. Not war by other means, as the saying goes, but war by the same means of violence and deception. All political messaging is deceptive propaganda with the purpose of acquiring the power to use the violence of the state. The stated intentions of any policy should be regarded as lies, even if they are believed by the people telling them. One should not reject the possibility that his political opponents would kill him if it became convenient. A democracy cannot be what it supposedly is if it does not allow people to separate from it. It is not a system of government which serves and is accountable to its citizens, but rather it is a system which empowers a ruling class by creating such an illusion and pitting various factions of citizens against each other. An undemocratic government is perfectly honest. The common people have no say in what the ruling class decides, and they know it. They would not look to the government for achieving their desired ends. They would not see the government as the institution whose purpose is to ensure every aspect of justice and the common good. Instead, they would attempt to pursue their desired ends by themselves with whatever freedom the government lets them have. If some people aggress against others in pursuing their ends, their victims would know it.

When considering all this, one should wonder what would actually happen if the coalition I describe were to form and present this proposal. What would happen if democratic politics were exposed as an endless cold civil war and a realistic resolution were proposed? How would the elites respond when the mechanism maintaining their power is challenged? It may be helpful to consider what happened the one time a region within the United States tried to separate from it in the 1860s. The federal government waged a war on that region which got 2.5 percent of the population killed. If this were nothing other than a righteous crusade to end slavery, then it has no relevance to this question. If the people in power are so virtuous that they would never engage in such brutality except for such a noble purpose, then they should have no problem with a proposal that affirms universal personhood and calls for conflict-free governance, meaning an end to the slavery the government holds all people in, but of course, that is not the case. The elites are most certainly willing to go to great lengths to hold onto power. One should not expect to stop his abuser by appealing to his logic and morality. No one supports slavery today, at least not the kind ended by the 13th amendment, but an increasingly dominant political faction slanders people as if they do. The regime’s propaganda machine will certainly use such language to demonize this coalition and justify taking whatever actions are needed to destroy it. The only way to overcome this is if the coalition’s message is enough to delegitimize the way the government currently operates and show what the alternative is. Until this happens, those, who believe in peace and honest debate and argumentation, should not expect anything good to come from politics, not even from the factions they are inclined to agree with. If they do manage to be successful in gaining political power, but are not able to expose the lie underlying the political process, then they should be ready to use whatever Machiavellian strategies necessary to defend their interests. All warfare is based on deception. It would be a mistake to tell one’s enemies his true beliefs and goals. Otherwise, they should only try to protect themselves from the government and pursue their desired ends outside of politics. Perhaps if they are successful, they will show how much better apolitical means are for creating a good society and show that politics is only suited for power-hungry liars and useful idiots.