The Tyrant Inside, Unleashed
A common classroom activity is to ask students to speak or write about what they would do if they were “king for a day.” I hate that activity, as it fosters the notion that absolute power is desirable; and to my recollection, I have yet to hear of a single child—or adult—giving the proper answer: “I would abolish the monarchy.” Modern civilization desperately needs George Washingtons. It promotes Adolf Eichmanns. (From my The Case Against Public Education, “The Common Sense Case, Section i: A Shot Across the Bow.”)
We all have moments of frustration or anger with the world around us, in which we suddenly imagine how we would like to summarily stop Them in Their tracks from doing whatever They were in the midst of doing that disturbs or offends us, or to crushingly reverse by blunt force the various effects of Their assaults on our beliefs or self-determination. These righteous or vengeful outbursts, which we sometimes utter aloud in indignation before sympathetic or beleaguered loved ones, or even occasionally shout in desperation before those we perceive as passively responsible for the harm being done (to us), may be evoked in us by a legitimate sense of frightened impotence in the face of current trends or policies that seem destructive of important institutions or norms. They may express an acute, feverish eruption of a long-smoldering melancholy at a world drifting thoughtlessly away from, or even aggressively squandering, moral and intellectual standards that once formed the bedrock of everything we identify with our notions of civilization, freedom, beauty, or decency.
In short, these sudden effusions of avenging passion against the ravaging injustices of our age’s progressive totalitarian zeitgeist may well be salutary, and perhaps greatly cathartic — if kept at the level of semi-private and brief emotional expression. And this necessary limitation is typically achieved — I speak here mainly from personal experience — through the immediate effect on the soul of hearing one’s own emotions running ahead of one’s reason. That is, it is usually only a matter of seconds before our bilious spewing of the exhaust fumes of pent-up outrage triggers the release of our own internal cooling agent, rational consideration, and we quickly recognize that what we have just said in our frustrated outburst is in no proper way actionable, but merely a satisfying or clarifying moment of letting off steam or “exaggerating to make a point.”
Such is the case, at least, among those of us whose upbringing, habit-forming experiences, and education have served to develop within us the intellectual and moral filters required to undergo this automatic and almost instantaneous moderating or dampening effect in our moments of unrestrained emotional eruption. To be precise, we have learned to define civilization, freedom, beauty, and decency on rational terms which have the natural effect of subduing those explosions of righteous passion which could only be embodied in practice by violating the very goods in defense of which we find ourselves suddenly lashing out.
For example, one might, in frustration at the ever-intensifying attacks on intellectual openness and freedom of thought in today’s universities, finally release one’s anger in a cathartic kitchen-table outburst to the effect that the universities at the vanguard of this polity-destroying trajectory ought to be shut down, or their faculties subject to censure or expulsion as fomenters of revolution. Quicker than one can say “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” however, one realizes that of course turning academia into a realm of censored thought, hyper-regulated teachers, and intimidated speech by means of political coercion would be no better when carried out in the name of one’s own preferred point of view than when carried out, as it is today, in the name of illiberal ideology and by means of progressive academic gatekeeping and Marxist-style tribunals. For another example, one might, upon reading a typical loaded headline or ire-baiting commentary of the moment suddenly find oneself railing at the four walls against the rampant use of preferential practices in hiring or promotion that are so morally reprehensible and unjustly prejudicial, and crying out to the aether for those engaging in such practices, whether in public or private enterprises, to be brought to heel by force of law. But even as one is spitting out this righteous venom, that little voice of logical deliberation in one’s head, the dialectical instinct, is already noting that forcing people to hire according to principles of reason and merit is, aside from being almost unprovable in practice, also merely a mirroring of the kind of dictatorial methods one is criticizing, not to mention that such directly hostile opposition, which will likely cause a redoubled anger and outrage from the other side, will be far less socially effective in the long run than the kind of serious, protracted educational discussion that gradually changes minds.
Above all else, in these examples and endless analogous cases, what the properly raised and educated person realizes, to his temporary consternation but permanent rectitude, is that however disturbing and objectionable our world’s ideological injustices and ascending oppressions may be, “fixing” these problems by means of brute force, moral intimidation, and the abandonment of the rule of law will in fact correct nothing, but only further weaken those foundations of civil society and rational self-determination the loss of which was (ostensibly and hopefully) precisely the cause of his outrage and despair in the first place. That is to say, by adopting methods equivalent to those we perceive in our oppressors, we only serve to validate those very methods, effectively reinforcing the idea that politics ought to be a game of tit or tat between opponents whose passions have become untethered from any institutional or social norms of regular order, representative government, or the kind of mutual rational restraint that imposes incrementalism, cool deliberation, and resigned circumspection upon all would-be lunges of the authoritarian impulse.
Erase from such a man, however, the aforementioned long-habituated attitudes favoring private self-determination, emotional self-discipline, and rational self-scrutiny, and the indispensable bolt fastening shut the soul’s trap door into the social vortex of competing authoritarian impulses, which is to say chaos, at the nadir of which lies only brutality and irrationalism, is removed. But such a man, as an inevitable corollary of lacking those necessary habits of self-restraint and dialectical self-critique, will necessarily also lack the intellectual understanding of, and preference for, the principles and social norms of liberty which cause the good man to suffer his weak moments of passionate indignation in the first place. That is, the man without the proper rearing and habits for freedom will define his opponents — his version of “Them” — very differently from the way a healthy, liberty-loving soul defines them. Specifically, he will define his opponents not on the standard of any moral or intellectual principles, but cynically, on the basis of immediate material self-interest and practical advantage. And when such a man, whose “friends” will merely be those who appear to him to serve his immediate advantage and whose “enemies” merely those who appear to him to thwart that advantage — or those in the public attack of whom he sees potential advantage — suffers his moment of indignant outrage and conjures up a hyperbolic response to Them, he, bereft of the civilized man’s rational principle or emotional self-control, will, to the extent he is practically able, seek to act on his hyperbolic imagination of revenge, to “fix” the problem by way of immediate and unreflective action oriented towards retribution and the infliction of pain, rather than toward a comprehensive and sustainable solution, i.e., a solution which does not merely exacerbate the (real or perceived) problem by implicitly validating and intensifying precisely the sort of lawless, tyrannical aggression and recklessness that undermine the foundations of a civilized political order.
We are watching such a moment of unclarity and unreason unfolding in real time, which is to say that we are watching the unravelling of everything that makes a properly human social existence possible on this Earth, and that inevitably inclines to the precipitous reduction of all quasi-political existence to the whims of a handful of unhinged self-seekers and their submissive acolytes. This, in the grand cycle of human evolution and devolution, is one of mankind’s “head for the hills” moments, wherein a small minority of individuals, the true friends if you will, cling to one another and to the last remnants of rationality still graspable amid the surrounding savagery, as they salvage what they can of past thought and art, and share whispered conversations with secret souls, wondering when, or whether, reason, restraint, and some life-enhancing shoots of mutual respect might begin to spring from the damaged soil once again.
