This column is a marginal note on the numerous discussions about our future. It’s no secret that many people today believe the current state of affairs is unacceptable and that things should be different. Various discussions are being held on this subject.
The author of these lines sees as his “image of the future” a society without the state—that is, without a group of people possessing a monopoly on coercion within a certain territory. I believe that if this institution is gone, everything will be significantly better than now. And here is the detail I want to discuss, and it arises with enviable regularity and is voiced by people whom one cannot always suspect of ignorance.
This detail consists in the counterargument: “Well, then you will first have to raise a new human who would not be inclined to violence (would profess libertarian ethics, etc., etc.).” I repeat—I encounter this opinion regularly and hear it from people of the most varied stripes, and this very circumstance is precisely why I’m writing this column.
There is no logical connection between the absence of the state and the need for a “new human” or for the mass professing of some ethics (even the most progressive one) as a preliminary condition. Of course, ethical principles play a paramount role, but the exchange through which society arose and exists does not require us to be “good,” “humane,” or anything else. Exchange improves our condition, and makes it possible to achieve goals that are unthinkable to achieve alone. Rather, one can assert that moral norms and ethical principles are an attempt to describe and even translate into normative status the practices caused by exchange, division of labor, and other delights of human cohabitation. Being honest, keeping contracts (keeping one’s word), respecting others’ property, not showing aggression toward “others”—behavior of this kind supports exchange and improves its results.
The principle on which human society is based—in order to get something useful for yourself, you need to do something useful for others. This principle does not at all require that absolutely all people be “good,” believe in “thou shalt not kill,” and similar maxims. For instance, a certain chocolate bar manufacturer may be a terrible misanthrope who visits Satanic cults. But none of this will prevent him from producing a product that brings joy to little children and greatly eases the task of suitors courting young women. Another manufacturer may suffer from an excess of humaneness, but at the same time make bad chocolate bars, and the consumer will punish him for it, despite all his high moral qualities.
The state has absolutely nothing to do with this process (it may interfere with it, but it is not the cause of it). Whether there is a state or not, there will be people professing different morals. There will be people who want to appropriate others’ property through fraud or violence. Whether there is a state or not, other people will oppose these individuals, for whom this activity is a source of income. The removal of the state is the removal of a parasite, not the removal of those social functions that the parasite has appropriated for itself. The removal of the state requires a “new human” no more than the production of chocolate or the privatization of railways requires it.
But where then does the idea of a “new human” and the obligatory mass transition to libertarian ethics come from? I have a hypothesis on this matter. I have noticed that Westerners in discussions about the removal of the state do not particularly struggle with the idea of a new human (although, of course, I may be wrong about this). Be that as it may, it seems to me that “new human” as a counterargument to the removal of the state is a product of archaic consciousness—consciousness in which only interpersonal relationships exist and in which, accordingly, the intentions and morals of participants have decisive significance. An advanced bearer of such consciousness acknowledges that buns can be baked by private bakeries, and he may even accept the idea of private roads, usually discussing the technical difficulties associated with it. But the removal of the state is incomprehensible to him, and this reveals him completely. In his world, there is only “you” and “I” and the desert around. In this world, other people and their decisions do not exist, society and the practices it has developed do not exist. Humans have no other choices available to them. The state in this consciousness is seen as an external force that alone restrains “you” from attacking “I.” And if this force disappears, the attack will certainly happen.
This is the same consciousness that considers merchants to be swindlers trying by any means to shove their goods down your throat. This is the same consciousness that considers the buyer to be the losing side and the seller to be the winning one. This is the same consciousness that envies wealth and considers the rich to be thieves. For such consciousness, ethics (note, of a quite definite sort) indeed has determining significance in human relations. For these people, the world would be wonderful if “merchants” didn’t try to “profit” from them, if the rich “shared” with the poor. And, of course, if there is no overseer, then only ethics is capable of holding people back from tearing each other’s throats.
And what is interesting is: the type of consciousness I have briefly described dominates in Ukraine. People here hate their neighbor, consider him a swindler and a scoundrel. Ukrainians evaluate each other’s ethical qualities extremely pessimistically. And despite this, we do not die of hunger. Everything somehow works. Moreover, where Uncle Bureaucrat doesn’t interfere, it works very well indeed. As I see it, this is the best illustration of the absurdity of the idea about the necessity of a new human.
P.S. Totalitarianism made enormous efforts to make subjects believe that everything was correct and to prevent them from seeing that in reality things were not so. Mass repressions were very helpful in this. However, where there was no totalitarianism, some version of the “new human” was also grown. Only the “new human” is capable of sincerely answering “Yeah!” to the question “It tells you what to do, and it punishes you with violence if you disobey it, yet you’re the boss?”