Natural Law Institute

The Problem:

Solving Your, Our, Everyone’s Political Conflict: The Crisis of our Age

EXPLANATION
There aren’t that many causes of our conflicts—but there are many conflicts that arise from those few causes. The culmination of these conflicts now threatens to tear us apart, to the detriment of all—past, present, and future.

All human populations, in the Age of Transformation, developed a group strategy: a set of metaphysical presumptions about the world, myths to explain it, and a narrative justifying their strategy within it as ‘good’. They constructed parables and stories to reinforce it, typically a literature or religion to preserve it, and a logic to defend it—whether mythical, religious, philosophical, historical, empirical, or scientific—and often more than one, each with increasing precision. Human populations then adapt to those institutions, and those institutions slowly adapt to the population as its size, complexity, economy, and politics evolve. This group strategy is extremely resistant to change because it is interwoven into every aspect of every individual’s life within that civilization—taken for granted as naturally as gravity.

Like all other peoples, Europeans do not consciously understand the metaphysical presumptions they make about the world and man—presumptions that are now five to eight thousand years old, and formed on the steppes of what are today Ukraine and Russia. But those presumptions begin with one principle: the preservation of sovereignty and autonomy by the prohibition of authority, leaving us to voluntary agreement in markets for cooperation in all walks of life, and individual responsibility for preserving that sovereignty and autonomy. We have done so—more so than any other people—by maximizing individual responsibility for mind, self, kin, the private, and the common, in display, word, and deed, including the high cost of truth before face, regardless of consequence. (This is precisely what the Marxist, feminist, and woke movements have sought to overturn.) We were the first people to put the polity before the family, the first to eliminate tribalism, and the first to eliminate clannishness. As such, we are the only high-trust people capable of producing commons as a competitive advantage—reducing both the opportunity and material costs for all.

Throughout human history, every time humans develop new technology—whether conceptual, physical, behavioral, economic, or institutional—we create opportunity for the exercise of individual agency by a larger portion of the population. This is what we refer to when we speak of ‘raising people from one class to the next.’ But every time this happens, those who ascend—across the entire spectrum of classes—carry with them the presumptions, narratives, values, and traditions of their prior class, a class with less agency and opportunity. Some of these instincts, intuitions, and beliefs are genetic; others are class-based, local, or accidents of historical chaos, superstition, and ignorance. And just as technology advances, so too do the means of deception, fraud, conspiracy, corruption, sedition, and treason. Yet institutions often lag in prohibiting these emergent forms of criminality.

Worse, all human organizations eventually calcify by maximizing discounts (cheating and privileges), free riding, rent-seeking, and corruption. This calcification applies to governments as well as to the policies, legislation, and laws they produce. Expansion continues until some change—whether systemic and gradual or an immediate shock—creates sufficient incentive to reform, or collapse occurs due to the inability to reform. At present, we are in what Professor Peter Turchin describes as an ‘oversupply of elites’—largely in the form of ‘credentialists.’ These are politically palatable labels for people who are costly, contribute no material value, and have achieved positions through speech and credentials rather than demonstrated competency in military, industry, or commerce with real people under adversarial conditions. In our case, these elites occupy the government, academy, media, financial sector, and global corporations—many of which circumvent the legislative expression of the people’s will.

So, the crisis of our age is neither novel nor surprising. We elevated the middle class during the Enlightenment, the working class during the Industrial Revolution, and women during the postwar era. We have also imported millions of people from outside the European tradition in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as we united the world through free trade and the promise of ending poverty. Meanwhile, the ranks of free-riders, rent-seekers, and corruption classes have swelled, burdening a shrinking population of productive people. The worst consequence has been the destruction of the primary institution of civilization: the family—and with it, sufficient reproduction to sustain our high-trust civilization.

But the value of the Anglo model of government is that we can change the law and the people will adapt. In nearly every other form of government, the people—not the rules—must change. In the Anglo tradition, the means of implementing such change, which created both the British and American governments (the oldest surviving governments in the world today), is the Common Law Suit against the state for redress of grievances. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers did against England.

We are repeating the Founders’ demand for reform. And it will work.