The Lie that Everyone Loves
Why Liberalism Unravels
This post is a self-contained reply to an excellent discourse on the rise of identity politics by my friend Holly MathNerd. In that article, she talks about groupishness vs. individualism as a problem of default mental grammar, and at the end she asks if she is missing something.
In my opinion, she is—but it is something that, had she incorporated it, would have made her arguments stronger, rather than weaker. This article is a discussion of that element: the most fundamental divide in human sociality that has created a possibly-terminal wound in the heart of modern civilization.
Given the extent to which liberty, individualism, and civic freedoms have fallen under attack from all quarters, and given the extent to which today’s political factions seem to break down to tribal identity groups, one might be forgiven for believing that they are trying to hurt us.
They could be Muslims. They could be Marx’s intellectual descendants. They could be Christian Nationalists, or Eco-Fascists, or Democratic Socialists, or Conservatives, or Liberals, or Democrats, or Republicans.
And we? Well, we’re the enlightened people, obviously. We believe that individual merit is more important than heritage. We believe that everyone should be free to speak their mind, and to read what they want, and to not be meddled with by them (even if they are holding elected office).
They hate us. And they hate us because they think we are the source of all evil. And they want us dead.
No. Not dead. They want us gone. Erased from existence. No children, no history, no legacy. Genocide, down to the soil, and then salt the soil. They must get rid of us.
You’ve heard all that, I’m sure. You might even believe it, depending on what nouns you put in the They and us places.
On top of that, we in the US have a 2-party system, which means that if you are an individualist, your decision about which team to vote with depends mostly on which particular freedoms or opportunities you value most, or which ones you think are in the most danger.
But here’s the horrible thing:
There is a divide in the world, a fundamental distinction between us and them. What’s more, on the most basic level there is only one such divide.
It’s not the difference between Europeans and non-Europeans.
It’s not the difference between high-IQ and low-IQ.
It’s not even the Ayn-Randian difference between “individualists” and “collectivists.”
It’s deeper. It’s older. It goes back to the beginning of time.
And to understand it, you must first understand that your entire world is based on words that have become a lie.
Self-Evident Untruths
There are few more eloquent and elegant (and, at least for this American, rousingly tear-jerking) extolations of human liberty than the Declaration of Independence.
Its most famous clause reads:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
—Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
That clause is so famous that it’s basically all that most people have even heard of from that document. It’s a cultural totem: inviolate truth, the foundational statement of democracy.
A pity that, at least when stripped of context, it’s a baldfaced lie.
All men are created equal? Ha!
Look around. How many people do you know who are smarter than you? Stupider? An adult with Downs Syndrome who never masters toilet training is not, in any realistic sense, the equal of an able-bodied captain of industry. A corrupt politician is not the moral equivalent of one who isn’t on the take.
These aren’t just differences. They are hierarchical differences—i.e. the sort of differences that make people profoundly unequal.
And besides that, Jefferson owned slaves. Yes, he expressed personal discomfort about it. Yes, he inherited those slaves rather than starting the business himself, but still, a slave owner who wanted all men to be free? Who said that all men were created equal?
That’s not just laughable, that’s a howler on its face.
Unless we have lost something that the people who endorsed that document understood down in their bones.
We have, in fact, lost something—and that something is the difference between us and them, between identity politics and individualism, between freedom and serfdom.
The Egalitarian Impulse
Humans—like all other social animals—don’t like being at the bottom of the heap. We like it so little that, throughout history, our forebears proved themselves willing to literally burn great civilizations to the ground in order to assuage their sense of envy and resentment.
The trouble is, of course, that as a social species we must operate in hierarchies to get anything useful done. Inevitably, this leads to us dividing ourselves into groups:
The rulers, and the ruled.
And, in healthy societies, this creates a pretty stark division in mentality between the two groups.
The ruled are fiercely—even ruthlessly—egalitarian. People who step out of line, who “put on airs,” who act “uppity,” who “think to highly of themselves,” who seek to rise above their station, are destroyed and pulled down—if not immediately, then as soon as they have served whatever purpose that their fellows value. Among the ruled, the way to esteem is humility, quietude, and exemplary social conformity—not in the sense of becoming a drone, but in the sense of serving as an epitome of the values the community champions. The fantasy of the ruled is that all people are basically the same, and that the only substantive difference between them is their sinfulness (defined as their deviation from the standards of the community).
The rulers are of a different sort. They know that they are unequal—not just because they have a higher station than those they rule, but because among the ruling class the differences in aptitudes, talents, abilities, intelligence, integrity, and character are stark and obvious. The rulers thus have a game-theoretical problem that they must solve:
They are surrounded by other capable people who have social clout, political power, and esteem, and those people are always dangerous. They’re well-armed. They have good lawyers. They’re smart and educated. They have money. And they are usually capable of being quite ruthless. In such an environment, ruthless egalitarianism is a recipe for perpetual civil war.1 For a ruling class to exist in a state other that perpetual civil war, another ethic must come to dominate their interactions.
And, historically, there are only two:
The strongest man imposes order by force.
The individual—not the family, or the clan, or the class—becomes the moral center of value.
And, often, the first leads to the second if the first is done by a particularly wise and canny overlord.
In the world of the ruler, the individual may ascend—even from the peasantry—to positions of honor based on his deeds. He is allowed to reap the benefits of the risks he takes, he is obligated to pay—personally—for his transgressions against others of equal rank, he is held in lower esteem if he abuses people of lower rank (this marks him out as being a man of low character, not to be trusted with more power).
All men are not created equal, but in the world of the individual men are afforded equal stature in a formal and fictive sense, because only those of equal formal rank have the standing to settle their disputes “like men.”
With words, fists, swords, or guns.
And they are entitled to do so on terms of mutual agreement, without the interference of their fellows—and without interference from the king.
The king might appeal to their better natures. Entreat them to de-escalate a feud. He might enter the dispute as a third party, bringing superior force to bear. He might appeal to the rest of the aristocracy to consent to stripping the disputants of their titles and position. But he does not have the right to prevent them from fighting simply by saying “no.”
When a member of the ruled strikes a ruler—even in self defense—he (historically speaking) commits treason.
When a member of the ruling class strikes another member of the ruling class in self-defense (or in defense of his honor), he is acting within his rights, because those men are peers. “Peers” are formal (and fictive) social equals.
In other words, being an aristocrat doesn’t guarantee your dignity, your character, your finances, or your security. It guarantees only that you have the political standing to fight for your social position among equals who are compelled by custom to respect that right.
The Barbarian and the Carpenter
When Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence, he wrote in the language of aristocracy. “All men are created equal” means that “we who are speaking are also aristocrats, and we address you in the language of aristocracy. Because we are aristocrats, we have the right to seek redress of grievances for wrongs we have suffered at the hands of other aristocrats.”
He was, to use contemporary terminology, invoking something like “the bro code.” And then, for the entire document, he proceeds to behave according to that code as defined by the precedents and history of the aristocrats to whom he is speaking.
And in doing so, he set the groundwork for a nation populated solely by aristocrats.
Every guarantee in the Bill of Rights is not a declaration of a human universal, it’s an assertion that the aristocratic privileges—and obligations—that were traditional to the English landed gentry would apply to all citizens of the United States of America.
The difference between a citizen and a resident is that between an aristocrat and a visiting student. The difference between a citizen and a subject is the difference between an aristocrat and a serf.
Which raises a really weird question:
How in the hell did a populations of criminals, refugees, religious nuts, bankrupt expatriates, indentured servants, freeholders, and adventuring plantation owners—the pedigree of those who settled the original thirteen colonies—wind up thinking of themselves as the aristocrats?
The answer has to do with a cousin species of the aristocrat:
The raider.
Raiders are warriors. Their livelihood depends on their ability to assert their will on demand, and to stand alone when necessary. In ancient world, raiders came in two flavors:
There were those who razed and burned as they plundered—they consumed their booty as quickly as they captured it. The gangsters of the Mexican drug cartels are largely of this sort, as were notorious pirates such as Black Bart Roberts (who was the direct inspiration for the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride) and roving raiders of the horde lands of Europe (the Tartars, the Huns) and North America (the Comanches).
Then there were those who raid and return to their homelands, and gradually build civilizations. The Vikings are the classic example of this sort (founding, as they did, Iceland, Vineland, Greenland, and Russia, as well as other more transient colonies in Britain and across Northern Europe that wound up melding in with the locals after a couple generations).
In either case, you have traditions of individual warriors who aren’t fighting primarily to defend their homeland, or even to provision it. They’re fighting for fun and profit.
And they wound up spreading a political cancer wherever they went.
Consider, for a moment:
How do you keep discipline in a horde, or on a pirate ship? How do you get a band of professional (literal) cut-throats to behave themselves and get along when you’re operating outside of all law and government?
The individuals involved must be bound by honor and contract, and be willing, voluntarily, to submit to the authority of their leader.
Their elected leader.
These groups operated according to constitutions (in the case of pirate ships, written constitutions),2 bound by customs, in a world of equals—not equals in quality, not equals in rank, but equals in that same fictive sense that aristocrats are equal to one another:
We are social equals because we have agreed to be, and because we can back up our claim to equality with violence. I wear my weapons in the open to show you I am of that class, and that I am willing to enforce my claim. I will deal fairly with you, if you deal fairly with me.
In Western history, this aristocratic individualism occurs only among formal aristocrats (who are, among other things, obligated to lead armies into battle should their king or country call on them for service) and among brigands (who are, among other things, obligated to share the risk with and defend their fellows in battles and raids lest they lose their share of the booty or be executed for cowardice).
And, also, in one other place:
In religious cults.
But not just any kind of cult.
A very special kind of cult that arose as a fad among aristocrats in the ancient world and spread far and wide when it found the right audience:
The mystery cult.
Mystery cults were products of the ancient world whereby the heroes of old (the children that the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek gods sired by human women) were re-imagined to be not just doers of great deeds, but revealers of great truths who suffered the wrath of the gods to bring them to the public.
By undergoing the initiation rites that imitated the actions of the great hero, the faithful were inducted into spiritual communion with him, and entered into a personal relationship with him.
An individual relationship with divinity, unmediated by family, heritage, social class, or priesthoods. A durable covenant that bound the individual soul to the divine.
Dionysis, Attis, a sideways reinvention of the Persian Mithras, Zalmoxes, and dozens of other heroes, gods-made-men, and men-made-gods were popular at one point or another in the final two centuries BC and the first two centuries AD. But the version you know is centered around a Galilean carpenter who, with his crowd of loyal fisherman, is said to have wandered the Levant teaching the great secrets of communion with God during the reign of Tiberius. His name was Joshua bar-Joseph, but he is better known by his Hellenized name and the title his followers conferred upon him:
Jesus, the Christ.
Christianity didn’t long maintain its highly individualistic cultic character—once it caught on at scale, the church fathers discovered that theological discipline was necessary to keep the religion coherent, and from the third-through-fifth centuries a great project of catholicization (that is, the promulgation of a universal common doctrine) was undertaken.
In southern Europe, Christianity became a very priestly religion indeed, and the people of Rome practiced it largely in the way they had done in the days of the old gods and the cults of the emperors: they attended to their religious duties as matters of practice, but not necessarily as matters of individual faith or relationship.
In Northern Europe, Christianity adapted itself to the ways of the independent hordesmen, horse-masters, Norsemen, freeholders, and other raiders and their descendants. The churches still existed, the priests still preached and delivered sacraments and took confession, but the people practiced their new religion in much the same way they practiced their old religion: with less respect for formal signals of devotion and more attendance to the incidental prayer, the small personal sacrifice, and the honoring of the deities in the smithee, in the field, on the raid, and at the family table. It is no coincidence that the Reformation emerged in Northern and Central Europe, where the ancient culture was more attuned to personal devotion than to formal practice.
The Reformation cults (the Quakers, the Puritans, etc.) who settled the United States were all radically theologically individualistic despite the intense community-oriented groupishness of their customs. These same traditions took root among the Scots, who settled Appalachia and whose culture collided with the Catholicisms of the Southern American gentry to produce the strange blend of radical individualism, folk religion, and radical anti-intellectual egalitarianism that makes up the cultural fabric of the Rebel South.3
Christianity did not build America, but it did something arguably more important:
It gave the peasants in America access to the Aristocratic mentality, which is an un-expendable necessity for the maintenance of a Republic characterized by liberty.
Rank Hath its Duties
The key to the individual spirit, which has bled away from our culture over the past few generations, is duty. The individualist, being equal in violence to his peers and not forced to submit his identity to the group in the name of survival, is a figure whose strength confers upon him a duty in every place where the individual has ever existed.
The specifics of that duty varies, as do the parties to whom he owes that duty, but the nature of that duty is the same:
The individual has a duty to put his ass on the line for others.
Those “others” could be the members of his crew on a pirate ship or a military vessel, who all depend on him for their lives (and whom he depends on in turn).
Those “others” could be his aristocratic peers, whose lands and titles he must defend with his life if he is called upon to do so, and whose legitimacy he must defend with his behavior.
Those “others” could be his nation-state, for whom he volunteers for war whether the war is just or unjust, because he benefits from the order that the state brings.
Those “others” could be his fellow citizens, whom he protects by joining posses, or by stepping up and taking down/out an criminal who is terrorizing the public.
Those “others” could be members of an engineering team or a startup company.
But, whomever they be, those others have a claim on him, and it’s one that cannot be shirked without also trading away the benefits of his status.
Rank has its duties—rank also has its privileges.
And privileges are enviable. They are, in the mind of the serf, grounds for eliminating the individual.
Liberty’s Achilles’ Heel
The applications of this analysis to the political left are obvious, and have been hashed and rehashed over the past two centuries by thinkers left, right, and center, so I won’t bore you with it here except to point out that every successful left-wing political movement in history is based on the logic of the peasant revolt:
“We are weak, but we are many, so if we band together and become one people with one mind, we will beat our enemies.”
Identity politics is the envy of the peasant weaponized into an inchoate political weapon that can be hijacked by any operator smart enough to stand in front of the parade and pretend to be its leader. This is why left-wing revolutions4 always neutralize5 their supporters as soon as they gain power—to do otherwise would be to leave oneself vulnerable to the whims of the mob.
Peasant revolts have always been a left-wing phenomenon, because until very recently the right wing was the aristocracy (the original “right wing” were the aristocrats who sat on the right side of the hall in the Estates General in the run-up to the French Revolution).
But recent years have seen something new: the rise of actually-consequential right-wing identity politics.6 In a game theoretical sense, it seems an obvious move. “Individualism,” as the story goes, has eroded the bonds of community and duty that makes a nation strong, and as a consequence the leaders of the various Western nations have gone to war with their own people (exemplified in the US by NAFTA, the War on Drugs, the PATRIOT Act, etc.) and further have begun importing foreigners, at scale, who are culturally incompatible with the tradition of liberty.
The obvious solution is to push for ethnic purity—filter people by ancestry, fight for the rights of white people, make a common identity strong enough that you win the war against subversives, Islamists, and communists. White Christians must unite against the Jews, the Muslims, the socialists, and re-take the West to make it what it once was.
Seems straightforward enough…until you remember how the West rose.
It didn’t rise because the downtrodden rose up as an ethnic or religious identity group. It rose because individuals were expected to be heroes.
The Protestant Reformation didn’t start because the people revolted against the Catholic Church. It started because a single man—an insufferable, arrogant, self-righteous, and abusive twit—stood before the Pope and risked his life with this defense when offered the opportunity to recant his heresy:
“Here I stand. God help me, I can do no other.”
Luther, Washington, Jefferson, Napoleon, Elizabeth I, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and an impossibly large number of other ruthless assholes, honorable dip shits, ambitious tyrants, and subtle motherfuckers built the West, for good and ill, because they stood up as aristocrats and put their asses on the line—risking their reputations and their freedom, giving their lives to their duties, and sometimes being killed by their enemies or their friends for their troubles—to do their duty to their peers and their subordinates.
It may well be that the West requires radical measures to defend itself from invasion—that argument is well beyond the scope of this historical survey—but if that be so, it would be well to call not upon grievances and resentments, ethnicity and religion, or to speak in the language of the peasantry. It would be far better to call upon the nobility of the citizen, the duty of sacrifice in exchange for the privileges of citizenship, and to promote activism that champions a restoration of both duties and privileges to the citizens.
One cannot build—or restore—with identity politics a cultural or political system that precludes it.
And, as Franklin and Madison understood from their study of Greece and Rome, plebian7 democracy makes mob rule inevitable.
America’s Founding Mythology
So if “individualism” is the driver of what was once a civilization characterized by strong social bonds and common identity, then why do various populists on the left and the right decry it as the reason for social decay?
Because it’s politically convenient, and because most people don’t realize that “individualism” is the polar opposite of what we now have, which is better characterized as “autonomy” or “atomization.” The separation of people from their liberties and their duties is the same project, and the fraying of the social fabric is the result. And it is all driven, not by individualism, but by envy.
Envy is the engine of the modern world. It’s the stuff and substance of consumerist materialism—the desire to “keep up with the Jonses,” to demonstrate one’s social position through consumption and parenting styles and prove you’re just as good as your neighbors.
Not through character. Not through achievement. Not through leadership or virtuosity. Through conformity and competition to exemplify the values of your community.
When conditions are sufficiently peaceful for long enough, the mentality of the ruled re-asserts itself over the aristocratic mentality. In a democracy, this manifests in an intolerance for greatness in the leaders of our civilization. The personal sins of the great are more interesting than their accomplishments or their crimes—because if the President or a captain of industry fucks and shits and stumbles just like you and me in our worst moments, then we don’t have to recognize their rank, and we can take their privileges and prestige for ourselves.
The quality of leadership decays because the peasant mind cannot abide the presence of a leader. But it loves a preacher.
A leader speaks to his subordinates with words that say “I know you have it within you to rise to the occasion, and the occasion now demands it.”
A preacher stands on the stage and says “God understands. I understand. I’m just like you, and I know you deserve all the things you want. I’ll give it to you, because I’m one of you. We are the same.”
Because the ruled operate on the principle of ruthless egalitarianism (i.e. anyone who rises will be pulled down), they do not value the fictive equality of dignity, they value true equality of substance. “All men are created equal” becomes, in the ears of the peasantry, “I am just as good, just as worthy, as you, and if you make me feel otherwise, I will ruin you.”8
What to our modern ears is a perverse irony is, to anyone else in history, a simple fact:
You cannot be both an individualist and an egalitarian.
Equality is a lie—and it always has been. There are no equals among individuals.
If you want a society where the individual is sovereign, free, and imbued with dignity apart from his heritage and beliefs, you must not only accept that some of those individuals will do things you don’t approve of, would not countenance, and wish you could eliminate. You must also accept that that some of those individuals will prove themselves, through their actions, to be better, smarter, faster, greater, and more worthy of admiration than you…
…while others will prove themselves unworthy of liberty, of property, or of life itself.
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Those of you who watched Game of Thrones or who are aficionados of other sorts of historical fiction based around the soap-opera of social positioning have a pretty good picture of what perpetual civil war looks like.
See The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson
This blend, by the way, is why the lower-class whites and blacks in the South are both so incredibly individualistic and so fiercely egalitarian—they have inherited aristocratic individualism from the Scots and peasant egalitarianism from the Catholic culture of the plantation era.
Pol Pot, Mao, the Soviets, the French Revolutionaries, the Cuban revolution, etc. etc. etc.
In the best cases this means performative but useless gestures in the direction of their supporters. In the worst case it means the wholesale elimination of them. There is a broad gradient in between, but in every case the political potency of the movement is neutered.
And no, the Nazis were not right-wing. They were a peasant revolutionary movement that broke with the socialists. Their posture as “nationalists”—adopted because they hated the “internationalism” of both the Soviet communists and the international liberal-aristocratic trade networks that they blamed for their country’s immiseration—aligned them pragmatically with the German nationalists, who supported the Kaiser and the aristocracy, but their underlying ideology is classically Rousseauean and a thoroughgoing product of the left-wing French revolutionary philosophers.
The Roman peasant class were the “Plebians.” The aristocracy was the “Patricians.”
For a full and rather serrated treatment of this mentality sleight-of-hand, see Screwtape Proposes a Toast by C.S. Lewis