"Evasion Is Not Resolution"

The following exchange took place in e-mail. The original note dropped on me Sunday afternoon. It is presented here with my remarks, sent out just now. In that reply, I snipped certain things straight to the bone, in my interlocutor's text. This is all of it, with my thoughts interjected about where they were in my reply. (Actually, they are considerably extended here.)

"I read the latest exchange you referenced over at SOLO. Now, I've always been interested in the notion of civil disobedience and I always thought it kind of...innovative...that you went and did a study of MLK. I had never read of a libertarian of any stripe invoking him in any way. They take note of his Statism, if they take any note at all, and move on."

They're being myopic. And so are you, but I'll get to that in a minute.

There are three great threads of civil disobedience in Western thought in the past two hundred years, and they run in a pretty straight line:

• Henry David Thoreau. As far as I know the history, this is the beginning.
  
  
• Mahatma Ghandi. Yes, I include him in a "Western" tradition because of his Oxford education, where he was introduced to Thoreau. He elaborated Thoreau's principles to the point of practical politics and ended British rule over his homeland. Yes; it was succeeded by an Indian state, but there were others involved in that, and it really only means that the initial thrust was misguided: it's not evidence of anything wrong with the original principles, which obviously worked, so far as they were applied.
  
  
• Martin Luther King. He put the intellectual initiative of Thoreau and the practical initiative of Ghandi to work in America, to the limited end of overturning the selective government oppression of black people.

I don't know why on earth libertarians would want to ignore this stuff. The essential thing of importance here is not the socialist principles of either Ghandi or King. The thing is how to fight a government to its knees, without resort to outright civil war, and these three men point the way.

It is very interesting, noteworthy, and not a little ironic to me that the first one is an American.

"So here's the monkey wrench I have for you and let's see how you might sort it out.

I was reading your exchange and I had a flash of thought: what about the drug war, and specifically, weed? There are tens of millions who disregard the law on that, and there are, what, tens of thousands sitting in jail cells for their disobedience?"

{sigh}

"Yet almost nothing changes."

There is a very good reason for that. To begin with, you mis-attribute why "tens of thousands" are sitting in cells. They are not in there for anything like what Thoreau, Ghandi, or King had in mind. They are in prison for no other reason than that they got caught. This is an extremely important point.

"I can see a slow evolution towards it eventually being 'legalized,' but certainly nothing of the dramatic and immediate swell of change we saw with race relations and as a direct and linkable consequence of civil disobedience.

So, in effect, isn't civil disobedience with respect to pot already going on, on a pretty massive scale?"

No.

Look: almost none of those tens of thousands of people in jail went there on an explicit moral challenge against the drug laws. Those that have are so infinitesimally few that the moral discussion hasn't even really begun.

As for "effect": again -- you're not talking about a moral challenge. You're pointing out mass evasion, and that is a very different thing, which can never approach a point of moral resolution of the thing.

I don't think you clearly understand King's strategy of "flooding the courts and embracing the prisons". It was never the point to just get away with anything; like a thief making off with something that wasn't his to begin with. The point was to make the moral case so that evasion would not be necessary: people could stand straight up and live their lives without all the political bookkeeping necessary to evading the state. This probably would have been impossible, anyway, in the case of race laws. It is, however, unquestionably the case in the matter of pot smokers. That's what they're doing. They spend enormous amounts of mental and emotional -- hell; life -- energy sneaking around under the state, and there is not one good moral reason on earth why they should have to.

Can you see the difference?

Evasion is not resolution.

"And isn't it not really having much of an effect? I guess people simply value prohibition more than they value any tinge of 'remorse' in locking up peaceful people. With regard to taxation, I think it's even worse. People value the 'services' they think they're getting from government, think paying taxes (being stolen from) is a 'patriotic duty' and most of them chortle with malevolent glee when a tax 'evader' goes down."

That is unquestionably true. That's what they think.

...to the extent that they do think about it.

"So, I could see, perhaps, that if civil disobedience with regard to pot was more out in the open and in our faces (mass smoke ins, or whatever -- hey: like Dead concerts times ten {g}) that it could motivate a rapid sea change. But taxes? Wow, now that's a tough one.

Look, man: nobody ever heard me say that any of this is going to be easy. Take a good long look at this. That's an article at the American Enterprise Institute, by a woman who's written "A New History of the Great Depression". There is a good deal of value in it. The general tack in it is important. However, I see all kinds of crucial problems with it. Consider this:

"In the Cold War, there was also the assumption that Europe certainly, or even the U.S., might conceivably go communist. The premise therefore was that safety nets--from Social Security in the U.S. to codetermination in German boardrooms--were necessary to prevent such an event. Bismarck's social democracy and Roosevelt's New Deal were therefore glorified as justified."

Two paragraphs later, we get this:

"After all, the argument of markets has its own powerful morality. It is immoral to cause unemployment by pretending that a big government policy is morally necessary. When Andrew Mellon and Calvin Coolidge put through their tax cuts in the 1920s, they made the efficiency argument that supply-siders make today: lower rates could yield, they posited, higher revenues. But they also had a moral argument: high taxes were wrong, confiscatory and illiberal, in the classical sense. You can acknowledge this without being a Roosevelt-hater."

Well, I say, "No, you can't." That's because I hate thieves, and most especially: thieves who tell me that they're stealing from me for my own good.

So. Look at that matter of "safety nets". What I see is a rationale for bribery. "If we don't steal some peoples' money in order to give to others, then the others will go communist."

My jaw drops open and I stand stark-staring at logic like that. And nobody analyzes it to the root of it. I haven't read her book -- which I ought to -- but I don't have a reason in the world to believe that she's going to cut to the chase like that. This is sort of peripheral: when she talks about "incredible rightness of FDR's war policy", I take her precisely at her word and think, "That's exactly right, you bloody dipshit: FDR's sweet indulgence of goddamned Stalin is fucking 'incredible', and I can point to almost half a century of Cold War as well as half a continent enslaved to prove it."

I look at the intellectual dullness everywhere around me -- like someone selling tax cuts on the principle of "higher revenues", for Christ's goddamned sake -- and nobody knows better than I do exactly what the challenge looks like.

"The withholding issue makes it so integrated and intertwined with people's real need to support themselves and loved ones (most living paycheck to paycheck) I don't see how you could even get a mass revolt off the ground even if people's values did swing towards valuing freedom more than safety at the expense of theft."

Go read what I wrote at SOLO again.

Now, look: I could be dead wrong about this. But even if I am, I want to know whether we really live in a culture of individuals who would explicitly endorse outright thievery on a bloody third-world scale if they could actually see that that's what it is. I don't think so. And I'm not about to put up with any sneering fucking John Kennedys (you know the one I'm talking about), or propeller-beanied Catallarchy-types when it comes to this. What I have in mind is to -- as I said at SOLO -- raise the abstraction to the level of perceptual concretes in front of people no longer accustomed to large-scale abstractions, and putting it to them very explicitly what they're involved with. I think that can be done with what I have in mind.

And I could be wrong: it might very well be that they would all shrug their shoulders and say, "Yup. That's how we want to live: at each others' expense." But I don't think you know that any better than anyone else, for the simple reason that almost none of them -- in general -- analyzes the thing to that fundamental contradiction.

Essentially, that's what I have it in mind to find out. What Martin Luther King did was to hold a similar ethical challenge up in front of American racism at law: "Is this what you really have in mind?" The fundamental goodness of Americans was chastened before that.

It might not be so in the case of this government living on what Americans give it so that it can go on to destroy other Americans (always remember Bastiat). They might just try to live that way, with explicit deliberation.

You know what?

Even if that were the case, rational people would have time to start preparing themselves for the utter disaster inevitable in such a case.

I'm talking about resolving the issue. Not evading it.